Caleb Love’s three-pointer for UNC with just under 30 seconds left put a dagger into Duke’s NCAA tournament run in New Orleans last night. Ending with it was Mike Krzyzewski’s legendary coaching career.
Krzyzewski announced he’d be retiring at the end of this season, and in college basketball, the end of your season is defined by your opponents. In this case, it was defined by UNC, Duke’s archrival, in the first-ever meeting of those storied programs in March Madness.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am neither a Duke fan nor a UNC fan. I’m a George Mason alum (we went to the Final Four in 2006, you know), so I prefer cheering for a solid mid-major (other than VCU), not the blue bloods of college basketball.
Duke fans are spoiled, and I don’t get the “Cameron Crazies” phenomenon. The term refers, roughly, to Duke fans being obnoxious at their home court, Cameron Indoor Stadium (an “indoor stadium” being what everyone else on the planet calls an “arena”). Obnoxious sports fans are annoying, and Cameron is a cramped, outdated gym totally unfit for a major college-basketball program.
So now that I’ve guaranteed myself angry emails from Duke fans (behave yourselves, and build a proper arena — we all know you have the money!), I will turn my attention to the other end of the spectrum: the Duke haters. “Anybody but Duke” has been a unifying force in college basketball fandom for decades.
But why is it unifying? Because after your team is eliminated every year (if it even made the tournament at all), Duke is usually still playing. And on the sideline, usually with a scowl on his face no matter how his team is playing, sits Coach K, Mike Krzyzewski.
He’s the winningest men’s college-basketball coach of all time, with 1,202 victories between his five years as the head coach at West Point and his 42 years at Duke. His Duke teams have made the NCAA tournament every year but two since 1984, and they’ve won the tournament five times. Only John Wooden has more championships, and nobody has more Final Four appearances than Krzyzewski’s 13.
Krzyzewski takes the expression “student of the game” to another level. A reviewer of a recent biography of Coach K found it disappointing because the subject turns out to be boring outside the context of basketball and coaching. “It is not that there is a better, more interesting biography of Krzyzewski waiting to be written, but that his personality seems to inherently resist any such treatment,” he wrote. Krzyzewski went on David Letterman after winning the championship in 2011 and just talked about basketball for ten minutes straight.
Progressives have tried to pressure Krzyzewski into political statements in the past, and he has largely refused to do so. In 2016, of North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” he said, “It’s an embarrassing bill. That’s all I’m going to say about it.” He triggered The Nation in 2015 when he refused to ritually denounce Mike Pence for Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act when the Final Four was held in Indianapolis that year. (The piece also notes, “The man is a longtime Republican donor” — truly despicable.) Instead, Krzyzewski said, “I’m just going to talk about this Duke basketball team.”
And he loves to do that. Even and perhaps especially in this, his final season, Krzyzewski’s joy when talking about his guys is obvious. Every interview, it seems, he deflects praise for his coaching back towards his players, specifically and by first name.
His players love him in return. TBS put together a remarkable tribute video to Krzyzewski’s career that included a lengthy montage of former players, both at Duke and from Team USA (Krzyzewski has three Olympic gold medals as a head coach as well), telling him what he meant to them. One player notes that he grew up without a father, to give you an idea of the kind of impact Krzyzewski has on those who play for him.
Yes, he let his temper get the best of him at times. He once berated the staff of Duke’s student newspaper, for example. But one of the most remarkable aspects of Krzyzewski’s nearly 1,600-game career is that he was never ejected from a game. All those hyper-competitive moments over all those years, and he never crossed the line to be removed from a game. He knew how to compete and bring the intensity at the highest level without the destructive excesses of his mentor, Bob Knight.
And he did it all while being married to the same woman he said “I do” to on the day of his graduation from West Point in 1969.
Krzyzewski devoted his life to being the best basketball coach in the world, and by just about any measure, he succeeded. That, ultimately, is what draws the haters. As Jim Antle has written before about Tom Brady, another sports figure with unparalleled achievements, “You hate him because he wins.” We don’t hate success in this country, or at least we shouldn’t. You don’t have to be a Duke fan to recognize Coach K’s greatness, and I invite you to join me in wishing a happy retirement to a true legend of American athletics.