The tale of how Tom Butters ended up trusting his gut and hiring an Army coach with a losing record, knowing the mockery and derision that would follow, has often been told over the intervening four decades. So has the role of Steve Vacendak, Butters’ trusted aide, the man who first suggested Mike Krzyzewski to Butters in 1980 and would later race to RDU to stop Krzyzewski and his wife from leaving town after their on-campus interview.
Forty-two years later, there’s very little mystery left in how Krzyzewski ended up at Duke. Or how Bobby Knight actually pushed a different former assistant, Mississippi coach Bob Weltlich, for the job. Or how Iowa State was ready to hire Krzyzewski if Duke didn’t.
As Krzyzewski arrives at his last game on Duke’s campus Saturday, the story of how he arrived on that campus retains little mystery.
Except for this: What if Butters hadn’t trusted his instincts to hire the coach he secretly interviewed twice on the road during the NCAA Tournament and was considered the outsider among five finalists?
Butters died in 2016, but Vacendak thinks he knows. And it wasn’t Weltlich, even with Knight’s support.
“Tom once confided to me, and I don’t know that I ever really mentioned it before, but there was another really good personal friend of mine he really liked: Paul Webb, who was at Old Dominion,” Vacendak told the News & Observer. “He really, really liked Paul. He would have hired Paul Webb. Without a doubt, I agreed with him. I had brought Paul to the table.”
Now 92, Webb said Butters told him the same thing six or seven years later, after he retired at Old Dominion in 1985.
“I happened to be in Durham, in Cameron one day, in fact it was in the summer,” Webb told the N&O. “I ran into Tom and we were talking, and he told me, ‘You know, if I hadn’t decided to hire Mike, I was going to offer you the job.’ I said, ‘Tom, you made a pretty good decision, you know that, don’t you?’ ”
There were five finalists to replace Bill Foster after he left Duke for South Carolina, and among them Webb, who was 84-31 in five seasons at ODU at that point, was probably ahead of only Krzyzewski in terms of public perception and profile. That group also included Weltlich, Foster assistant Bob Wenzel and Boston College coach Tom Davis, all of whom also interviewed on campus.
But even among those more familiar and higher-profile names, and despite Knight’s push for Weltlich, Butters kept circling back to Krzyzewski.
“He was the right guy in the right place at the right time, to his credit,” Weltlich told the N&O. He worked closely with Krzyzewski at Indiana in 1975, when Krzyzewski was a graduate assistant and Weltlich was an assistant coach. “I sensed when I did my interview they had pretty much settled in on Mike. I just knew Mike had really done a good job in preparation for wanting the job. I sensed that they were moving in that direction. You just get a feel sometimes for things.”
Webb was a finalist thanks to Vacendak, who after going to two Final Fours playing for Vic Bubas at Duke and a brief pro career, worked for Converse before Butters enticed him back to campus. In his days as a shoe salesman, Vacendak attended Webb’s summer camps at Randolph-Macon — they’re still running, more than 50 years later — and came to admire him. Webb spent 19 years at Randolph-Macon before he took the Old Dominion job in 1975, in the Monarchs’ first year of Division I basketball.
“He was a true Virginia gentleman,” Vacendak said. “He would have fit in at UVa, in my judgment, or a lot of places like that. He was a really outstanding individual person and he and his wife Charlotte made a great team, just like Mickie and Mike. He knew basketball and was successful. He would have been fine. I would have had no problem with that. As it turned out, I probably pushed Mike a lot more than I did Paul.”
Things worked out for Duke, but Webb never looked back. He retired from coaching only a few years later at age 56 and worked as an administrator at Old Dominion before enjoying a long and happy retirement in Virginia Beach. He and Charlotte celebrated their 72nd anniversary this summer; she passed away in December.
“I have no regrets at all the way things turned out with Duke,” Webb said. “Mike’s done a great job with class and integrity. I’ve been very happy with my life.”
Hiring a proven, veteran coach like Webb might have gone over better with Duke fans and the local media than the 33-year-old coach with the unpronounceable, unspellable name, but Butters never doubted his decision — not then, and not three years later when he extended Krzyzewski’s contract over the objections of disgruntled alumni.
Vacendak still remembers going through the papers the day after Krzyzewski’s introductory press conference, when even the most positive reviews included a healthy dose of skepticism.
“First of all, Tom loved it,” Vacendak said. “He thought it was wonderful and so did I because I turned to Tom and said, ‘Do you really think they know more than we do about Mike Krzyzewski?’ It was kind of funny the way it came about.”
Webb, who knew Krzyzewski a little bit at the time, understood what Butters saw in the Army coach, even if he nor anyone else could predict what would happen over the next 42 years. Webb never begrudged Butters his decision, then or now.
“I think everybody, everybody,” Webb said, “will agree he made a pretty good choice.”
