MIAMI — March is here! The greatest sports month in America, bar none.
Super Bowls give us spectacular halftime shows, cool commercials and a reason to throw parties and eat French onion dip. World Series, NBA Finals, Stanley Cups and MLS Cups can be fun, especially if your team is in them. Same goes for the college football playoffs.
But nothing in American sports is as dramatic, electrifying, or impassioned as March Madness, the wide-open, one-and-done NCAA college basketball tournament. Sixty-eight teams. One loss, you go home. Selection Sunday is fewer than two weeks away and bracketology debates are already raging across the nation.
This March, every true sports fan should take a moment to appreciate Duke’s iconic coach Mike Krzyzewski, who is retiring at the end of this season at age 75 after 42 years at the school. Read the end of that sentence again, slowly. Forty-two years at the school.
His last home game is Saturday at Cameron Indoor Stadium against archrival North Carolina. More than 700 Duke students have been living in 70 tents outside the arena for five weeks in anticipation of the game. One super fan paid $1 million for four tickets to the game at a charity auction. As of Tuesday, the going rate for a ticket to Saturday’s game ranged from $3,000 to $10,000 on StubHub and SeatGeek.
Although those are crazy prices, the reason Coach K’s last game is such a big deal is because this kind of tenure just doesn’t happen anymore.
The only active Division I coach with a longer tenure is Krzyzewski’s 77-year-old close friend and ACC rival Jim Boeheim, in his 46th year at Syracuse.
Last week, prior to Duke’s 97-72 win at Syracuse, Boeheim and Syracuse athletic director John Wildhack presented Coach K with a framed photo of he and Boeheim together. They also announced a new scholarship award in Krzyzewski’s name that will be given to a Syracuse student with military involvement in honor of Coach K’s military service and graduation from West Point.
No matter where your college allegiances lie, it was hard not to get teary-eyed seeing those two legends, both in their 70s, both coaching the same team for more than 40 years, hugging at midcourt. It was especially poignant coming just six days after Michigan coach Juwan Howard slapped a Wisconsin assistant coach in the face in the postgame handshake line.
In this age of Instagram and Instacart and college sports transfer portals, nobody has the patience or attention span to stick with a coach through thick and thin for 40-plus years. College coaching has become a revolving door. It is hard to imagine any two 30-something coaches now still being around in 40 years to honor each other at midcourt.
When he was hired by Duke on May 4, 1980, the headline in the student newspaper read: “Krzyzewski: this is not a typo.” Three years into his tenure, the Blue Devils suffered back-to-back 17-loss seasons, including a 43-point drubbing by Virginia in the 1983 ACC tournament quarterfinals. Some Duke fans started calling for the school to fire Krzyzewski. Instead, then-athletic director Tom Butters pledged full support and signed him to a five-year contract extension.
Four decades later, Coach K leaves the sport as a legend and the all-time winningest coach, 12 Final Fours, five national titles and three gold medals won while coaching the U.S. men’s basketball team at the Olympics. More importantly, he educated and helped mold the lives of hundreds of young men.
In addition to the tribute at Syracuse, Krzyzewski was honored this season before games at FSU, Clemson, Boston College, Louisville and Notre Dame. Georgia Tech coach Josh Pastner, 44, recalled being a 15-year-old at a Nike camp taking a photo with Coach K and how honored he felt to be able to coach against him in recent years.
Krzyzewski is one of four septuagenarians coaching in the ACC this season, along with Boeheim (77), FSU coach Leonard Hamilton (73) and the University of Miami’s Jim Larranaga (72). They are the four oldest coaches in ACC history, and once they depart, whenever that might be, it will be the end of a golden era of college basketball.
Those four, along with peers such as Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, who has been on the Spartans’ sideline for 39 years (12 as an assistant, 27 as head coach) represent the end of a dying breed, coaching deities who transcend their sport.
North Carolina’s Roy Williams called it quits last year after a 48-year career. He always called himself “an old-timer” and the seismic changes in the game — players bolting to the pros earlier, the exploding transfer portal, the social media-driven culture of self-promotion over team promotion — were not easy for him to adapt to. He decided he “wasn’t the best man for the job” anymore.
Hamilton and Larranaga have both said they are in no hurry to retire.
“Don’t expect me to hang up my whistle anytime soon,” Hamilton said last year, when Krzyzewski announced his retirement. “I’m having more fun now than ever. I feel good. I enjoy coming to work every day. I love what I do. As long as I can see the scoreboard and read the names on the back of the jerseys, as long as they can roll me out of the tunnel and I don’t accidentally go sit on the other team’s bench, I’m hanging around.”
Larranaga feels the same way.
“When you’ve been at it this long the one thing you can look back and realize is that you’re very lucky to be able to do the thing you set out to do and keep doing it for 50 years,” Larranaga said. “Most guys don’t get that opportunity. Their careers are cut short. Either they get burnt out or they can’t sustain the success.”
College basketball will go on someday without these legends. It is inevitable. In the meantime, this March, let’s not take them for granted.
