DURHAM, N.C. — If Chuck Swenson goes back in time far enough he can still hear the jeers and the insults, the slurs he said some shouted from the stands during one of the longest nights of Mike Krzyzewski’s coaching career, and perhaps the longest of them all. It has been almost 40 years now and Swenson has still not forgotten the things he heard that night at The Omni in Atlanta.
Usually, Swenson, who was Krzyzewski’s first assistant coach at Duke, blocked it all out. That night was different. He can still hear angry Duke supporters shouting at Krzyzewski — “You’re out of here; you don’t know what you’re doing.”
That night, he thought Mike Krzyzewski might be fired.
“People were calling him ‘dumb Polack,’ ” Swenson said during a recent phone interview. “About any name that you can think of, happened. ... Any insult or slur. There were quite a few.”
It was March 11, 1983. A Friday night. The quarterfinals of the ACC tournament. Duke arrived in Atlanta a worn, beaten team in its third season under Krzyzewski. The Blue Devils had finished 3-11 in conference play, good enough for seventh place in what was then an eight-team league. Duke’s prize for laboring to the end of a miserable regular season: Opening the ACC tournament against Virginia and Ralph Sampson, the Cavaliers’ domineering All-American center.
It was close for a while. More than close, even. Duke held a five-point lead at one point in the first half and trailed by a manageable nine points at halftime. And then, as Swenson described it more than once recently, “the wheels came off.” He could still see it in his mind all these years later, a competitive game turning into a debacle.
It ended with the most one-sided final score in ACC tournament history: Virginia 109, Duke 66.
Thirty-nine years later, it’s still the most one-sided game in ACC tournament history. It was the worst loss of Krzyzewski’s young career then. It’s the worst loss of his Hall of Fame career now.
“The second half was ridiculous,” he said afterward, according to an account the next day in the Durham Morning Herald, and in the moment he could not be sure if he’d coached his final game at Duke. At the end of his third season there, Krzyzewski was 21-34. His teams had won seven ACC games in two years. Duke reached the NCAA tournament in three consecutive seasons before his arrival, and advanced to the national championship game in 1978 and a regional final in ‘80.
Three years later, the Blue Devils had reached a crossroads with a young coach. It was a time long before Internet message boards and social media — places where, had they existed, Duke supporters undoubtedly would have gathered to spread vitriol, and where fans of rival schools would have joined the pile-on. Imagine the memes. The GIFs. Duke fans saying Coach K should be gone; UNC and N.C. State fans saying, no — please keep him. Disgruntled Duke fans, some of them members of the Iron Dukes, the school’s athletic booster club, voiced their displeasure in other ways.
They heckled Krzyzewski throughout that dreadful night in The Omni. They shunned him when Duke made its way back to the team hotel after the game. They attempted to convince Tom Butters, the Duke athletic director and the man who’d hired Krzyzewski, that he’d made a bad decision with that hire; that Butters should correct it sooner than later. They tried to pressure Duke to make a change, lest it fall further behind North Carolina, which won the 1982 national championship, and N.C. State, which went on to win the ‘83 national championship.
Swenson believed in the future. Four of Duke’s top five players that season were freshmen: Johnny Dawkins and Mark Alarie; Jay Bilas and Dave Henderson. If Krzyzewski and the Blue Devils could just make it to next season, “We’re going to be a lot better, I knew that,” Swenson said. The pressure was building, though, along with the impatience.”
“It takes a magnifying glass to find progress,” one local columnist wrote in the Durham Sun the morning after that defeat against Virginia, adding that for Duke it was “shattering, depressing and nightmarish.” And that was nothing compared to what Swenson heard while he sat on the bench in The Omni, the minutes winding down in an ugly defeat, and perhaps in his time at Duke.
Sitting there, Swenson said, “I said, ‘Crap.’ That’s the first time I thought we might not make it to next year. And that’s the first time it really hit me.”
Duke AD was patient with Krzyzewski
There’s an alternate universe out there where Krzyzewski doesn’t last at Duke beyond 1983. One where some big-money Iron Duke, or maybe a few of them, come up with a lot of money to turn their displeasure into action. One where Butters, the athletic director, has no choice but to relent to the pressure. It didn’t happen that way but the question is worth considering nonetheless:
What if Coach K didn’t make it to a fourth season?
It seems like a preposterous question now and in a way it was then, too, given Butters’ unwavering support. Krzyzewski has talked about that a lot recently, how Butters stood by him when few others did. It came up again last week, in the days before Krzyzewski’s final game at Cameron Indoor Stadium, and undoubtedly it will resurface throughout his last March — the story of how Krzyzewski wondered if he’d make it to 1984 at Duke, let alone 39 more years there.
During a long interview in his office before the season began, Krzyzewski went back to that night in The Omni. Along with missing most of the 1994-95 season due to back surgery and mental exhaustion, he considered that loss against Virginia to be “one of the two lowest points of my 42 years” at Duke.
“Walking off the court in Atlanta,” he said, “with a lot of the Iron Dukes wanting me fired. And again, I never felt I would be. Because of my relationship (with Butters). But, one, we had these good young players, but then obviously you’re very naive, too.
“I always believed we were going to win. But we hadn’t.”
He was sitting in a six-story tower built in 1999, one whose very existence was a testament to all the winning he’d done over the past 39 years. In that setting, then, it was easier to imagine a world at Duke without Krzyzewski, one in which he’d been told to leave in 1983. Imagine the photos along the walls of his office, those capturing celebratory moments after championships, fading away like a special effect in Back to the Future. Imagine a Duke campus without this office tower at all.
No Coach K Court at Cameron. No Krzyzewskiville, or perhaps it exists somewhere else.
When he looked out onto Krzyzewskiville on Saturday, before his final home, Krzyzewski took a moment to store the memory away in his mind. The rectangular lawn was filled to capacity, a Duke blue sea of humanity that danced and drank and gathered to see him work one last time. Hours later, when Krzyzewski appeared on the court before his final game, it was almost like a religious experience for the people who’d come to send him off. All that for a man some were so sure should be fired after that 43-point loss against Virginia in 1983.
“And how do you think they feel now?” Bilas said of those doubters.
These days Bilas is an ESPN college basketball analyst, one of the leading voices of the sport. Back then, after his freshman year, he wondered if the coach who convinced him to come to Duke might be gone. Bilas had moved across the country to Durham, from outside of Los Angeles, because he believed in the vision that Krzyzewski had sold him on the future.
Now that future was in doubt.
“There’s more than a couple times where I called home and said ‘What do I do if they fire him?’ ” Bilas said recently. “ ’I’m not staying here if they fire the coach. I’m leaving.’ And my dad had to tell me, ‘Just play. There’s nothing you can do about it — just play.’
“But I do remember the following year, when he signed an extension. He came in the locker room and said, ‘I just signed an extension, so everything’s good.’ And we just went out practiced and that was the end of it. But it took until then.”
The extension arrived in late January of 1984. The Blue Devils, who’d spent the previous two seasons near the bottom of the ACC standings, were starting to show signs of improvement, though they’d just endured a 31-point loss at Wake Forest. Still, Duke was 14-4 when the school announced Krzyzewski’s new deal, a five-year contract through the 1988-89 season.
“He deserved it, he’s earned it,” Butters said then, according to the Durham Morning Herald.
The extension ended speculation about Krzyzewski’s short-term future. Soon enough, there’d be no doubts at all. Still, Bilas said, for a while “there was an air around here. And the truth is, we didn’t care too much for our fan base at that time. Because they weren’t supportive of him.”
How Krzyzewski defines himself
Krzyzewski’s coaching legacy has been defined by victories and memorable triumphs, the years and years of sustained success. The five national championships. The 12 Final Fours. The 15 ACC tournament titles. He has won nearly 1,200 games, and become as synonymous with Duke as any figure ever has with any particular institution.
Krzyzewski the man, though, has been most defined by more difficult times.
“Reference points,” he called them. Those moments in which people can go in one direction or another. When the future is less certain than it is in the good times. In the early 1980s, there weren’t a lot of good times for Krzyzewski at Duke. The victory against North Carolina at home during his first season was the high point, and then came 34 defeats over the next two seasons.
“To me, reference points are not as much victories as they are setbacks,” Krzyzewski said.
Back then, in the years after he arrived at Duke in 1980, Krzyzewski spent a lot of time, in his words, “learning about the neighborhood.” It was his way of describing the dynamic then among UNC, Duke and N.C. State, three schools within about 30 miles of one another.
At UNC, Dean Smith had already become one of the country’s great coaches, and he won the first of his two national championships in 1982. At N.C. State, Jim Valvano arrived the same year that Krzyzewski did at Duke. The Wolfpack’s national championship in 1983, as improbable as it was, was its second in school history. The Blue Devils had yet to win one.
The UNC-N.C. State basketball rivalry, and not the one between UNC and Duke, was the fiercest in the state. It was a different time — and though success has long become the norm at Duke, it wasn’t so much back then, especially after the Blue Devils faltered in Krzyzewski’s earliest seasons. Part of those struggles were attributable to a young coach learning how to figure it out. Part of them could be explained by the competition.
“The ACC was unbelievable,” Krzyzewski said. “It’s not like there were bad teams — there were great teams.”
The league’s collection of coaches in those days was arguably as strong as it has ever been, too. Smith at UNC. Valvano at N.C. State. Terry Holland at Virginia. Lefty Driesell at Maryland.
And then, at Duke, the young guy from Army with the difficult-to-pronounce name.
“I think I’ve always been trying to prove myself,” Krzyzewski said. “And so I really needed to at that time.”
Krzyzewski never forgot
Back in The Omni that night in 1983, Virginia proved relentless in the second half. The Cavaliers played as if they were angry. Perhaps they were. Afterward, Sampson accused the Blue Devils, and Bilas in particular, of playing dirty in the first half, an assertion Bilas denied. There was no arguing the scoreboard, though.
After halftime, Virginia outscored Duke 59-25.
John Feinstein, then a young reporter with The Washington Post, began his game story like this:
“It does not pay to tug on Superman’s cape. Or on Ralph Sampson’s jersey.”
As its margin increased, from a 20-point lead, to 30 and beyond, Virginia showed no mercy.
“I felt they rubbed our noses in it, to be quite honest,” Swenson said, and then came all the angst from Duke supporters. It wasn’t so much the university’s administration that Swenson feared but “the alumni, the money givers that scared me.”
He could remember that Krzyzewski was “solemn” afterward, that he was “compassionate” toward his players, who’d just been humiliated. In the moment, Swenson said, Krzyzewski was “ready to move on,” and yet it was a defeat, too, that lingered in a variety of ways.
Krzyzewski has coached almost 1,600 games. Few take him back more vividly to a certain moment in time than that one on March 11, 1983, so that he can feel what he felt then, and relive it in a way that allows him to contextualize how that loss helped fuel him, and the rise of his program.
“Our guys never forgot that,” said Swenson, who remained an assistant at Duke through 1987. “And K’s really good about reminding people about what happens, and when they didn’t play hard enough or they were embarrassed, or whatever positive or negative, he’s good at remembering.
“And I can’t remember the number, but it took a long time for Virginia to beat us after that.”
It didn’t happen again for the rest of the 1980s. Krzyzewski lost his first seven games against Virginia, a run of futility that ended with the worst defeat of his career. Then he led Duke to 16 consecutive victories against the Cavaliers, who didn’t beat Duke again until February 1990.
By then Duke was on its way. The Blue Devils’ first national championship came a little more than a year later. Then their second, the year after that. Krzyzewski became one of the most successful and recognizable figures in his sport, and gradually became one of the leading faces of it, the defining personality of an internationally known university.
Krzyzewski’s influence is all over Duke’s campus in Durham. The things that are named after him. The buildings that might not exist if not for what he became. And all after everything appeared so tenuous after one particular game in 1983. That defeat against Virginia represented the end point of a difficult season and, in a way, to an era of sustained struggle early in Krzyzewski’s career.
“That score was brought up a lot by Coach K,” Bilas said. “It was on the scoreboard at the first practice the next year, on Oct. 15. It said 109-66 on the scoreboard.
“So it wasn’t something we were inclined to forget.”
Krzyzewski never did. Not then. Not now.
In the rubble of the worst loss of his career, he laid a foundation for what was to come.
