October 11, 2022 • 27 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, John Feinstein is a sportswriter of 42 books, 23 of them New York Times bestsellers. His first book, A Season on the Brink (about Indiana coach Bobby Knight), is the bestselling sports book of all time. He is also the friend of Duke University’s legendary basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski (also known as “Coach K”). John is here to tell the story of how Coach K’s five national titles at Duke as well as three consecutive gold medals as the head coach of the men’s U.S. Olympic basketball team almost never happened.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. John
Feinstein is a sportswriter of forty two books, twenty three
of them New York Times bestsellers. His first book, about
(00:33):
Bobby Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers, A Season on the Brink,
is the best selling sports book of all time. He's
also the friend of Duke University's legendary basketball coach Mike Shashevski,
otherwise known as Coach Ka, who won five national titles
at Duke and three consecutive gold medals as the head
(00:54):
coach of the US men's Olympic basketball team. John's here
to tell the story of how that most didn't happen.
I actually first met Mike Shashevsky and Jim Valvano on
the same day when I was a senior in college.
Duke was playing Connecticut in New York City at Madison
Square Garden. Duke was bad. In those days. People refused
(01:16):
to believe that Duke was ever bad in basketball, but
they were bad. In fact, that Duke Yukon game was
the first game of the Garden Double Headed. The feature
game was Fordham in Rutgers. That's how different times were.
And I flew into New York, which was my hometown,
with Bill Foster, who was then Duke's coach, Tom Michel,
who was Duke's sports information director, and Kad Armstrong who
(01:37):
was the star of the team who had played on
the nineteen seventy six Olympic team for Dean Smith. And
there was a media lunch every Tuesday in those days
in New York for the New York basketball coaches, and
Jim Valvano was coaching at Iona and Mike Schevsky was
coaching at Army, his alma mater where he had played
for Bob Knight. And when the lunch was over, Valvano
(02:00):
came over to see Bill Foster because he played for
him at Rutgers, and he brought along with him Shishevsky
and Tom Penders, who was then the coach at Columbia
who would go on to win six hundred and forty
eight games in his career. And as we were talking,
I mentioned to Shishevsky that I had seen his greatest
game in the nineteen sixty nine and ninety when I
(02:22):
was a kid in New York, when Army had upset
South Carolina and he had guarded John Roach, South Carolina's
All American the whole game and held him to eleven points.
So that sort of got us off to a good start,
although we did vehemently disagree on the subject of the
Cubs and Mets. He's a Chicago kid Cubs fan. I
obviously New York kid Mets fan. But after I got
(02:44):
to the Washington Post a year later, I kept in
touch with both Shashevsky and delven Him So I knew
them both when they were hired, respectively at Duke and
at North Carolina State in nineteen eighty and by then
I was covering acc basketball for the Washington Post, and
so I dealt with them a lot, and I think
it's fair to say I became close to both of them.
(03:06):
I later years and years later, I wrote a book
called The Legends Club, which was about Shshevsky, Valvano and
Dean Smith, all of whom I was fortunate enough to
deal with quite a bit in the nineteen eighties when
they were coaching against each other in the research Triangle
in North Carolina, and Valvano, of course, was a rocket.
(03:26):
His team won the national championship in nineteen eighty three,
the famous Survive and Advanced team, the championship ending with
Lorenzo Charles's dunk off of what Derek Whittenberg still insists
was a past and so Valvano, because of his personality,
because of his success, was a huge star. Shashevski not
so much. He used to joke about how he had
(03:47):
to follow Valvano at ACC media days. Jim would get up,
do twenty minutes of stand up, leave everybody on the floor,
and then Mike would follow and talk about the battle
for the center position between Mike Tissau and Alan Williams,
which didn't exactly rock the room. So Shashevsky's first recruiting
class was the bust. They finished second for a bunch
of very good players, the most notable being Chris Mullen
(04:09):
who went to Saint John's. But then the second year
they had a better recruiting class, a very good recruiting
class in fact, but that in Mike's third season nineteen
eighty three, the team was divided seniors and freshmen resenting
one another. They lost a game early in the season
to Wagner at home, and the drumbeats were getting louder
(04:32):
that the alumni thought that Shashevsky was a bad hire
and he had to go back. The two real heroes
of this story, other than Mike are Tom Butters, the
athletic director, and Steve Vissendak, who was the number two
guy in the athletic department, who had been a star
at Duke in the nineteen sixties under Vic Bubis played
on final four teams there, and it was Visendak who
(04:54):
first brought Shashevsky to Butter's attention. Butters knew that Bill
Foster was going to leave for South Carolina end of
the nineteen eighty season, and he put the Sendeck in
charge of the coaching search because the Sendeck was a
basketball player and there were a bunch of names that
were out there. Bob Weltlick was at Mississippi. Bob Knight
was pushing him hard. Weltlick had played coached under under Knight,
(05:15):
as had Shashevsky. Of course, Bob Wenzel was Bill Foster's
number one assistant and helped build the program. People forget
that the year Foster left Dude glossed in the Elite eight.
They were good, but most of their key players graduated
off that team. Not all, but most. And there was
a guy named Paul Webb who had had great success
at All Dominion. In fact, the day that Duke hired
(05:36):
its new coach, that Durham Mulling Harold had a story
saying that the new Duke coach's last name would start
with a w Wenzel, Webb or Weltlick. But the Sendak
had met Shashevsky when Shashevsky was coaching an army he
was living in Annapolis, went and spent some time with
him as he was preparing for a Navy game Army
(05:56):
Navy game, and was blown away by him. He was
very young, but very much in command of his team
and was clearly, in Steve's opinion, a great defensive coach.
So he brought Shashevsky's name to Butters. Butters had never
heard of him, literally had never heard of him. And
he said, okay, what was his record an army this year?
And the Sendek went nine and seventeen, And but I
(06:18):
can't hire a coach at Duke who was just nine
and seventeen an Army. Vs Sendek convinced him to meet Shashevsky,
and he did twice and was blown away by him
and said to Viscendek at one point, I think this
is the next great coach. And Steve said, good hire him.
I can't hire a coach from Army with a nine
and seventeen record, and that is indeed true. Nine and
(06:42):
seventeen at Army isn't exactly what you want to bring
to an ACC program that had just gotten to the
Elite eight. True, they were losing many of those star
players who got him to the Elite eight. But my goodness,
nine and seventeen from Army no powerhouse when it comes
to NCAA basketball, that's for sure. When we come back,
(07:02):
more of this remarkable story of how coach Kay's career
almost didn't come to be here on our American Stories.
(07:30):
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great American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com.
And we continue with our American stories. We last left
(08:13):
off learning the Duke. Athletic director Tom Butters saw Coach
K as the next great basketball coach. Talk about some vision,
but he couldn't bring himself to pull the trigger. And
a coach from Army with a nine and seventeen record,
Let's return to a friend of Coach K's and sportswriter
of twenty three New York Times bestsellers, including the one
(08:35):
he wrote about Coach K, The Legends Club, Here's John Feinstein.
Butters did hire Showsky, and in fact he shocked the
basketball world. It was completely unexpected. As I said, he'd
been nine and seventeen at Army, and Night interestingly was
pushing Weltlick for the job. Butters had spoken to Night
(08:55):
about who we should hire, and Night had told him Weltlick,
and Butters said, well, what about Mike Shashevsky Because Steve A.
Sendek had brought him up and Knight said, well, I
don't think this is the time for Mike, but he's
got all of my good qualities and none of my bad,
which was a very accurate statement as it turned out.
But the other thing is that when Shishevsky got the job,
(09:20):
he literally had to spell his name for the media
at his opening press conference, and he said that one
of his goals as a coach was for his players
to be able to spell his name by the time
they graduated. Of course, this is in the days when
players did actually graduate. The next day, the student newspaper
at Duke, the Chronicle, which is where I started my career,
had a headline that said not a typo Shishevsky, and
(09:45):
most people had not heard of the guy. I mean,
basketball junkies like me had heard of him and knew him,
but nobody in the acc had any idea who he was.
And again, he took a lot of guts for Tom
Butters to hi fire him at that moment, and in fact,
after Shashevsky's third year, when Butters didn't fire him, he
(10:06):
got death threats literally from boosters. And in fact I
met with him Tom Butters when I was working on
my book The Legends club on Shashevsky, Jim Belvano and
Dean Smith, and he brought with him a box, and
in the box were letters, and one stack of the
letters were from boosters in nineteen eighties, written in nineteen
eight three, nineteen eighty four, saying fire him or I
(10:28):
will never give another dollar to Duke. In the second
stack of the letters were letters sent in nineteen ninety
after Duke had turned it around and Shashevsky had income
a star and he was offered the Boston Celtics job
by none other than Red hour Back, and the letters
were from essentially the same group who had written in
nineteen eighty three eighty four saying get rid of this guy,
(10:49):
saying whatever you have to do, whatever you have to
pay him, do not let him leave. And fortunately for Duke,
it wasn't about the money. Mike felt that he hadn't
won a national championship yet, and so even though he'd
grown up as a Celtics fan and worshiped at hour Back,
he said, the job's not done yet and turned it down,
and of course won his first national title the next year.
(11:10):
And that's how much it turned around. When Mike was
offered the Laker's job in two thousand and four, he
was offered forty million dollars for five years, and he
wasn't going to take it, but he had to give
it some thought given the money, and it was the Lakers,
and he called Butters and he said, what do you think, Tom?
And he said, I think you should give me a
ten percent finders fee if you take the job. And
(11:30):
Mike said, okay, I'll send you four thousand dollars because
his first year salary was forty thousand dollars. And so
they flailed for three years, and in nineteen eighty three,
Mike's third year, they lost their last game of the
season one hundred nine sixty six to Virginia in the
ACC Tournament. Ralph Sampson, if you walk up to Mike
(11:52):
Schefsky right now and say what was the score of
the game against Virginia in the ACC Tournament in nineteen
eighty three, he can tell tell you what it was
in an instant. He's never forgotten. And the fourth game
that night, first night of the ACC Tournament was Georgia
Tech in Maryland, and I was the Maryland beat writer
for the Post and Bobby Dwyer, who was Mike's number
(12:17):
one assistant at the time who'd come with him from Army,
came into the Omni, the old arena there which is
now long gone, and found me and Keith Drum who
was the sports editor of Durham Morning Herald at the
time and was probably the only member of the North
Carolina media who hadn't attacked Shashevsky and hadn't called for
(12:37):
him to be fired. North Carolina media then as now,
is made up largely of North Carolina graduates. School has
a great journalism school, and many, if not most, stay
in the state. Keith had also gone to North Carolina,
but he liked Shashevsky, liked and respected Dean Smith too,
but he likes Shashevsky and thought he was going to
be a great coach someday. Keith ended up being an
(13:00):
NBA scout, so his level of understanding of basketball was
different than most sports writers. So Dwyer came to the
press table where Keith and I were sitting and said,
when this game is over, you both need to come
with me back to our hotel. And we said why,
and he said, because Mickey, Mike's wife is in the
(13:20):
room crying because she's convinced they're going to get fired.
All the alumni and boosters have Tom Butters backed up
against a wall in the lobby, demanding that he fires
Sheshevsky immediately, and Mike is pacing around trying to figure
out who to kill first because he's so angry with everybody.
And so when the game was over, Keith and I
(13:43):
it was after midnight by then, got in a car
with Bobby and we drove to the perimeter of Atlanta
where Duke was staying and went to the hotel and
it was pouring down rain and we drove to a
Denny's nearby. It was Mike, it was Bobby, Keith, me,
Tom Mickle, the sports and information director, Keith's wife, Barbie,
(14:03):
and Johnny Moore, who was Tom Michel's assistant, and we
walked into the Dennys. We sat down and they gave
us water. And by now it's two in the morning
and Tom mikeel held up his glass and said, here's
two forgetting tonight, and Sheshevsky held up his glass and said,
here's to never blanking forgetting tonight. Blanking is one of
(14:26):
his favorite words for the record, and so we all
we didn't laugh because he was dead serious. And then
the discussion went on and Dwyer mentioned that Tom Sheehy,
who had verbally committed to Virginia very good player, might
be thinking twice about that commitment and maybe they could
get back involved and try to recruit Sheehy, and Sheshevsky
(14:50):
shook his head and said, no, no, First of all,
we don't do that. Second of all, if we can't
win next year with these four freshmen Alleri Billis Dawkins
and David Henderson and Tommy Amaker who was coming in
as the point guard, then we should get fired. And
in many ways that statement to me, having known Mike
(15:11):
for as long as I have, that's who Mike Chevski is.
It's never someone else's fault. Mike Chewski has always taken
the approach what did I do wrong? How do I
get better now? Some of that is his West Point training,
because when you're a plead at West Point and an
upperclassman speaks to you, you're allowed three answers, yes sir,
(15:32):
no sir, no excuse sir. And Shashevsky's life has been
built on no excuse sir, I've never met a coach
who uses failure to his advantage more than Sischevski, and
that night was a perfect example. So the next year,
of course, with those five guys I mentioned, they went
twenty four and ten. They beat North Carolina with Michael
(15:55):
Jordan in the ACC Tournament, and that was the turnaround.
And you've been listen seeing to John Feinstein tell a
heck of a story about how coach Ka's career at
Duke almost didn't happen. After year three, still not winning.
At the heart of Tobacco Road, the heart of ACC
basketball country, Coach K loses to the University of Virginia
(16:18):
and Ralph Sampson's team by an epic, epic blowout one
O nine to sixty six. It does not get worse
than that. And losing it in of all places in
the ACC Tournament, everyone was sure that was it. The
boosters were coming after Coach K. Everyone was. The wife
was crying, and he was just mad. And who was
(16:38):
he mad at? He was mad at Coach K in
the end, and he was taking responsibility in ownership for
that loss as he was taught to do at West
Point three. Answers to a question at West Point by
an older person, and that is an older student. Folks,
when you're a freshman, a senior has to be addressed
(16:59):
as yes, sir, no sir, or no excuse sir. And
as John Feinstein said, no excuse sir, those were the
words that Coach K lived by. And by the way,
I love that scene in that Dennis. It's pouring rain
and there's one coach toasting to forgetting the game. And
what does coach K say, reflecting his true character, his
(17:20):
competitive nature and a little bit of his Irish Catholic well,
let us just say fanciful nature. With some swear words,
he says, here's to never blanking forgetting tonight, never forgetting,
and that's what animated coach K. That loss, that failure
drove so much of his life. When we come back
(17:40):
more of this remarkable piece of storytelling by the great
American sportswriter John Feinstein. Here on our American story and
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories and with John Feinstein.
Duke's head basketball coach KA was almost fired in nineteen
eighty three, as we learned, but the following year he
went twenty four and ten. This was the turnaround season.
For coach k Let's return to his friend and sportswriter
of twenty three New York Times bestsellers, including the one
(18:30):
he wrote about coach Kay the Legends club Let's return
to John Feinstein. From there again, they made the tournament
the next year, and in nineteen eighty six they went
thirty seven and three, went to the national championship game lost,
I will say on a bad call. Schevski would never
say that, but I will, and became college basketball's next
(18:52):
great dynasty. It's my opinion that the only coach who
you can put ahead of Shashefsky Mount Rushmore is John Wooden.
But five national championships, thirteen Final four is more than
Wooden even and ACC championships. And I mean he went
to twenty three sweet sixteens. That's just stupid, twenty three
(19:16):
and in every one of them because in the old days,
of course, you know, before they expanded the tournament, conference
champions went straight to the sweet sixteen. But starting in
nineteen eighty five, you had to win two games to
get to the sweet sixteen and six to win the championships.
So twenty three sweet sixteen. So are you, I mean,
Dean Smith great coach longevity. All that went to eighteen,
(19:39):
which is a great number, but the first three he
didn't have to win a game to get there because
they once they won the ACC they were in the
sweet sixteen. So his numbers are just ridiculous. Twelve hundred
and five wins. I mean, the numbers just go on
and on and but to me, the one thing about
Sichevski that shouldn't be forgotten. He went to his first
(20:00):
Final four in nineteen eighty six. He went to his
last Final four thirty six years later, in twenty twenty two.
And think about how much college basketball changed during those
thirty six years. There was a forty five second clock
for the first year in nineteen eighty six. There was
no three point shot in nineteen eighty six, there was
no one had ever heard the phrase one and done
(20:22):
in nineteen eighty six. And the game, the way the
game was played, has changed so much since Mike first
started coaching, which was an army in nineteen seventy six,
and he adapted. He kept saying, if I want to
continue to coach, I have to change. Not I'm going
to sit here and say it's terrible. The change has
taken place I'm like that myself. But twenty twenty two
(20:46):
is last year he goes to a Final four with
the youngest team he ever coached. So I could see
that in him. Very early on. I really believed if
Duke gave him the time, he was going to become
a great coach. That night at Denny's was sort of
a key moment. In fact, so in nineteen ninety one
(21:08):
when they won the national championship for the first time,
I walked on the court after the game and I
walked up to Mike and I put out my hand
and I said, hey, congratulations, I'm so happy for you.
And he pulled me in and he said, who'd come
a long way from the blanking Denny's, havn't it? And
twenty years after that, I was working on a book
(21:28):
called One on One, which was sort of about my
experiences with the people I dealt with in my first
ten books. It was a professional semi memoir, and one
of the people, obviously I wanted to talk to was
Mike and I called him and I said, look, next week,
when you play at UNC Greensboro, you're going to go
past Dean Smith on the all time wins list, and
(21:49):
if you go back to those early days at Duke,
There's no way we would have ever thought about you
and Dean Smith in the same sentence much unless you're
going past Dean Smith. And I'd like to come down
and just hang out with you and talk to you
about those early days and things like that. And he said, sure,
come on down, meet me in my office at two thirty.
You can ride the bus to Greensboro with us. We'll
talk then, and once we get there, we'll have time
(22:12):
in the locker room before the game starts. Does is
that okay for you? And I said great. So I
drove down to Durham and met two friends for lunch.
One was Bill Brill, who was also a Dude graduate,
and the other was Mike Craig, who's now the athletic
director at Saint John's, but back then he was kind
of a Shishevsky's man Friday. He was his chief fundraiser,
and if you watched Mike walk off a court after
(22:35):
a game, two feet behind him was Mike Craig at
all times. And so we went to lunch and Mike
Craig said, so, when are you going to talk to
Coach K And I said, Will on the bus going
to Greensboro, and he said, you came all the way
down here just to talk to him on a cell phone.
And I said, no, I'm gonna talk to him from
the next seat. And he said, no, no, no, no,
(22:57):
you misunderstood something. Nobody who's not part of the team
rides that bus except for Mickey. He said, I don't
even ride that bus, so you misunderstood something. So I
walked him through what Mike had said. I said, what
did I misunderstand? And he Mike Crick's shaking his head
and he goes, I don't understand it. Why would he
let you do that? Why would he let you do that?
And I said, because I was in the blanket Dennis
(23:18):
and that. And to this day, Mike will bring that
up to me when we're, you know, just talking about
how important that night was in his life. Mike will
tell you. And Dean Smith said the same thing about
his first three years at North Carolina that in today's world,
with social media, with the internet, with sports talk radio,
(23:39):
with twenty four hours sports networks, he probably would have
been fired by the end of his third year. That
you know, I got emails and tweets from North Carolina
fans during this past season when North Carolina was sixteen
and sixteen and seven, but they had just lost a
duke by twenty at home, saying, Hubert Davis can't do this,
Hubert Davis is was the wrong guy. We got to
(24:01):
get rid of Hubert Davis. Well, they ended up in
the National Championship Game and be twice too long the
way to get there. So that's the way the world
is today. It's knee jerk reactions. It wasn't that way.
There weren't nearly as many games on television in those days.
Sports talk radio hadn't started yet. In nineteen eighty seven,
w f AN was the first all sports talk station
(24:22):
in New York City. There was no social media, there
was no internet, so Mike was able to fly pretty
much under the radar other than with duke people during
that time. And even then, it took a lot of
guts for Tom Butters to stand by him throughout that period.
And like I always, I always say this to people
(24:42):
that he's a better guy than he was a coach.
And that's a hell of a statement if you think
about it. But he's still digging out right now from
all the emails and cards and letters and that he's
gotten from people. He said he had three thousand of
them after the season and he wants to answer every
one of them. And the things that he's done for
(25:07):
people that nobody knows about. It goes on. The list
goes on and on and on and on. My brother
had cancer twenty one years ago, and he's also a
dude graduate. And I called Mike and I said, listen,
would you mind giving my brother a call, you know,
because it would cheer him up just to hear from
you right now. Mike said sure, So we called them
(25:27):
and they were on the phone for about an hour.
And my brother is a typical fan, you know, he
knows better than the coach. So he said, Coach, can
I give you some advice? And Mike said, yeah, sure, Bobby,
and he said, you need to play Casey Sanders more.
Casey Sanders was the backup center, and Mike said, okay,
I'll give that some thought. Well, in February, Carlos Boozer
(25:49):
got hurt, so Sanders became a starter while Boozer was out,
and then when Boozer came back, because they've been playing well,
Sanders continued to art although Boozer still got the bulk
of the minutes. And when they won the national championship
that year and to this day, my brother takes credit
to that national championship, and every once in a whildhood
(26:11):
Columnistae Sheshevsky should do this, and I'll say, here's his
cell number, you give McCall and tell him that. And
a terrific job on the production and the editing by
Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to John Feinstein for
sharing this remarkable story about his friend. And what a
thing to be able to say after years of writing
(26:31):
sports is that these weren't mere subjects you were writing about,
but friends. And that shows the character and nature of
John's work and his commitment to telling the story of
American sports and the people who make it hum And
it's a business, but it's more than a business, my goodness.
We learned that from the passion from the fans, their
knee jerk reactions to losses. It's overwhelming. I listened to
(26:52):
sports talk radio sometimes and I just pity any head
coach of anything. The relentless criticism and the desire for
immediate ratification is almost unrelenting. And how to manage it
in today's environment. Will kudos to the people who do,
and that night at Denny's that stuck with Coach K
all the way through. He never did forget. John Feinstein,
(27:14):
the story of Coach K and how his career almost
didn't happen here on our American Story
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. John
Feinstein is a sportswriter of forty two books, twenty three
of them New York Times bestsellers. His first book, about
(00:33):
Bobby Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers, A Season on the Brink,
is the best selling sports book of all time. He's
also the friend of Duke University's legendary basketball coach Mike Shashevski,
otherwise known as Coach Ka, who won five national titles
at Duke and three consecutive gold medals as the head
(00:54):
coach of the US men's Olympic basketball team. John's here
to tell the story of how that most didn't happen.
I actually first met Mike Shashevsky and Jim Valvano on
the same day when I was a senior in college.
Duke was playing Connecticut in New York City at Madison
Square Garden. Duke was bad. In those days. People refused
(01:16):
to believe that Duke was ever bad in basketball, but
they were bad. In fact, that Duke Yukon game was
the first game of the Garden Double Headed. The feature
game was Fordham in Rutgers. That's how different times were.
And I flew into New York, which was my hometown,
with Bill Foster, who was then Duke's coach, Tom Michel,
who was Duke's sports information director, and Kad Armstrong who
(01:37):
was the star of the team who had played on
the nineteen seventy six Olympic team for Dean Smith. And
there was a media lunch every Tuesday in those days
in New York for the New York basketball coaches, and
Jim Valvano was coaching at Iona and Mike Schevsky was
coaching at Army, his alma mater where he had played
for Bob Knight. And when the lunch was over, Valvano
(02:00):
came over to see Bill Foster because he played for
him at Rutgers, and he brought along with him Shishevsky
and Tom Penders, who was then the coach at Columbia
who would go on to win six hundred and forty
eight games in his career. And as we were talking,
I mentioned to Shishevsky that I had seen his greatest
game in the nineteen sixty nine and ninety when I
(02:22):
was a kid in New York, when Army had upset
South Carolina and he had guarded John Roach, South Carolina's
All American the whole game and held him to eleven points.
So that sort of got us off to a good start,
although we did vehemently disagree on the subject of the
Cubs and Mets. He's a Chicago kid Cubs fan. I
obviously New York kid Mets fan. But after I got
(02:44):
to the Washington Post a year later, I kept in
touch with both Shashevsky and delven Him So I knew
them both when they were hired, respectively at Duke and
at North Carolina State in nineteen eighty and by then
I was covering acc basketball for the Washington Post, and
so I dealt with them a lot, and I think
it's fair to say I became close to both of them.
(03:06):
I later years and years later, I wrote a book
called The Legends Club, which was about Shshevsky, Valvano and
Dean Smith, all of whom I was fortunate enough to
deal with quite a bit in the nineteen eighties when
they were coaching against each other in the research Triangle
in North Carolina, and Valvano, of course, was a rocket.
(03:26):
His team won the national championship in nineteen eighty three,
the famous Survive and Advanced team, the championship ending with
Lorenzo Charles's dunk off of what Derek Whittenberg still insists
was a past and so Valvano, because of his personality,
because of his success, was a huge star. Shashevski not
so much. He used to joke about how he had
(03:47):
to follow Valvano at ACC media days. Jim would get up,
do twenty minutes of stand up, leave everybody on the floor,
and then Mike would follow and talk about the battle
for the center position between Mike Tissau and Alan Williams,
which didn't exactly rock the room. So Shashevsky's first recruiting
class was the bust. They finished second for a bunch
of very good players, the most notable being Chris Mullen
(04:09):
who went to Saint John's. But then the second year
they had a better recruiting class, a very good recruiting
class in fact, but that in Mike's third season nineteen
eighty three, the team was divided seniors and freshmen resenting
one another. They lost a game early in the season
to Wagner at home, and the drumbeats were getting louder
(04:32):
that the alumni thought that Shashevsky was a bad hire
and he had to go back. The two real heroes
of this story, other than Mike are Tom Butters, the
athletic director, and Steve Vissendak, who was the number two
guy in the athletic department, who had been a star
at Duke in the nineteen sixties under Vic Bubis played
on final four teams there, and it was Visendak who
(04:54):
first brought Shashevsky to Butter's attention. Butters knew that Bill
Foster was going to leave for South Carolina end of
the nineteen eighty season, and he put the Sendeck in
charge of the coaching search because the Sendeck was a
basketball player and there were a bunch of names that
were out there. Bob Weltlick was at Mississippi. Bob Knight
was pushing him hard. Weltlick had played coached under under Knight,
(05:15):
as had Shashevsky. Of course, Bob Wenzel was Bill Foster's
number one assistant and helped build the program. People forget
that the year Foster left Dude glossed in the Elite eight.
They were good, but most of their key players graduated
off that team. Not all, but most. And there was
a guy named Paul Webb who had had great success
at All Dominion. In fact, the day that Duke hired
(05:36):
its new coach, that Durham Mulling Harold had a story
saying that the new Duke coach's last name would start
with a w Wenzel, Webb or Weltlick. But the Sendak
had met Shashevsky when Shashevsky was coaching an army he
was living in Annapolis, went and spent some time with
him as he was preparing for a Navy game Army
(05:56):
Navy game, and was blown away by him. He was
very young, but very much in command of his team
and was clearly, in Steve's opinion, a great defensive coach.
So he brought Shashevsky's name to Butters. Butters had never
heard of him, literally had never heard of him. And
he said, okay, what was his record an army this year?
And the Sendek went nine and seventeen, And but I
(06:18):
can't hire a coach at Duke who was just nine
and seventeen an Army. Vs Sendek convinced him to meet Shashevsky,
and he did twice and was blown away by him
and said to Viscendek at one point, I think this
is the next great coach. And Steve said, good hire him.
I can't hire a coach from Army with a nine
and seventeen record, and that is indeed true. Nine and
(06:42):
seventeen at Army isn't exactly what you want to bring
to an ACC program that had just gotten to the
Elite eight. True, they were losing many of those star
players who got him to the Elite eight. But my goodness,
nine and seventeen from Army no powerhouse when it comes
to NCAA basketball, that's for sure. When we come back,
(07:02):
more of this remarkable story of how coach Kay's career
almost didn't come to be here on our American Stories.
(07:30):
Here are our American Stories. We bring you inspiring stories
of history, sports, business, faith and love. Stories from a
great and beautiful country that need to be told. We
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(07:52):
Give a little, give a lot, help us keep the
great American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com.
And we continue with our American stories. We last left
(08:13):
off learning the Duke. Athletic director Tom Butters saw Coach
K as the next great basketball coach. Talk about some vision,
but he couldn't bring himself to pull the trigger. And
a coach from Army with a nine and seventeen record,
Let's return to a friend of Coach K's and sportswriter
of twenty three New York Times bestsellers, including the one
(08:35):
he wrote about Coach K, The Legends Club, Here's John Feinstein.
Butters did hire Showsky, and in fact he shocked the
basketball world. It was completely unexpected. As I said, he'd
been nine and seventeen at Army, and Night interestingly was
pushing Weltlick for the job. Butters had spoken to Night
(08:55):
about who we should hire, and Night had told him Weltlick,
and Butters said, well, what about Mike Shashevsky Because Steve A.
Sendek had brought him up and Knight said, well, I
don't think this is the time for Mike, but he's
got all of my good qualities and none of my bad,
which was a very accurate statement as it turned out.
But the other thing is that when Shishevsky got the job,
(09:20):
he literally had to spell his name for the media
at his opening press conference, and he said that one
of his goals as a coach was for his players
to be able to spell his name by the time
they graduated. Of course, this is in the days when
players did actually graduate. The next day, the student newspaper
at Duke, the Chronicle, which is where I started my career,
had a headline that said not a typo Shishevsky, and
(09:45):
most people had not heard of the guy. I mean,
basketball junkies like me had heard of him and knew him,
but nobody in the acc had any idea who he was.
And again, he took a lot of guts for Tom
Butters to hi fire him at that moment, and in fact,
after Shashevsky's third year, when Butters didn't fire him, he
(10:06):
got death threats literally from boosters. And in fact I
met with him Tom Butters when I was working on
my book The Legends club on Shashevsky, Jim Belvano and
Dean Smith, and he brought with him a box, and
in the box were letters, and one stack of the
letters were from boosters in nineteen eighties, written in nineteen
eight three, nineteen eighty four, saying fire him or I
(10:28):
will never give another dollar to Duke. In the second
stack of the letters were letters sent in nineteen ninety
after Duke had turned it around and Shashevsky had income
a star and he was offered the Boston Celtics job
by none other than Red hour Back, and the letters
were from essentially the same group who had written in
nineteen eighty three eighty four saying get rid of this guy,
(10:49):
saying whatever you have to do, whatever you have to
pay him, do not let him leave. And fortunately for Duke,
it wasn't about the money. Mike felt that he hadn't
won a national championship yet, and so even though he'd
grown up as a Celtics fan and worshiped at hour Back,
he said, the job's not done yet and turned it down,
and of course won his first national title the next year.
(11:10):
And that's how much it turned around. When Mike was
offered the Laker's job in two thousand and four, he
was offered forty million dollars for five years, and he
wasn't going to take it, but he had to give
it some thought given the money, and it was the Lakers,
and he called Butters and he said, what do you think, Tom?
And he said, I think you should give me a
ten percent finders fee if you take the job. And
(11:30):
Mike said, okay, I'll send you four thousand dollars because
his first year salary was forty thousand dollars. And so
they flailed for three years, and in nineteen eighty three,
Mike's third year, they lost their last game of the
season one hundred nine sixty six to Virginia in the
ACC Tournament. Ralph Sampson, if you walk up to Mike
(11:52):
Schefsky right now and say what was the score of
the game against Virginia in the ACC Tournament in nineteen
eighty three, he can tell tell you what it was
in an instant. He's never forgotten. And the fourth game
that night, first night of the ACC Tournament was Georgia
Tech in Maryland, and I was the Maryland beat writer
for the Post and Bobby Dwyer, who was Mike's number
(12:17):
one assistant at the time who'd come with him from Army,
came into the Omni, the old arena there which is
now long gone, and found me and Keith Drum who
was the sports editor of Durham Morning Herald at the
time and was probably the only member of the North
Carolina media who hadn't attacked Shashevsky and hadn't called for
(12:37):
him to be fired. North Carolina media then as now,
is made up largely of North Carolina graduates. School has
a great journalism school, and many, if not most, stay
in the state. Keith had also gone to North Carolina,
but he liked Shashevsky, liked and respected Dean Smith too,
but he likes Shashevsky and thought he was going to
be a great coach someday. Keith ended up being an
(13:00):
NBA scout, so his level of understanding of basketball was
different than most sports writers. So Dwyer came to the
press table where Keith and I were sitting and said,
when this game is over, you both need to come
with me back to our hotel. And we said why,
and he said, because Mickey, Mike's wife is in the
(13:20):
room crying because she's convinced they're going to get fired.
All the alumni and boosters have Tom Butters backed up
against a wall in the lobby, demanding that he fires
Sheshevsky immediately, and Mike is pacing around trying to figure
out who to kill first because he's so angry with everybody.
And so when the game was over, Keith and I
(13:43):
it was after midnight by then, got in a car
with Bobby and we drove to the perimeter of Atlanta
where Duke was staying and went to the hotel and
it was pouring down rain and we drove to a
Denny's nearby. It was Mike, it was Bobby, Keith, me,
Tom Mickle, the sports and information director, Keith's wife, Barbie,
(14:03):
and Johnny Moore, who was Tom Michel's assistant, and we
walked into the Dennys. We sat down and they gave
us water. And by now it's two in the morning
and Tom mikeel held up his glass and said, here's
two forgetting tonight, and Sheshevsky held up his glass and said,
here's to never blanking forgetting tonight. Blanking is one of
(14:26):
his favorite words for the record, and so we all
we didn't laugh because he was dead serious. And then
the discussion went on and Dwyer mentioned that Tom Sheehy,
who had verbally committed to Virginia very good player, might
be thinking twice about that commitment and maybe they could
get back involved and try to recruit Sheehy, and Sheshevsky
(14:50):
shook his head and said, no, no, First of all,
we don't do that. Second of all, if we can't
win next year with these four freshmen Alleri Billis Dawkins
and David Henderson and Tommy Amaker who was coming in
as the point guard, then we should get fired. And
in many ways that statement to me, having known Mike
(15:11):
for as long as I have, that's who Mike Chevski is.
It's never someone else's fault. Mike Chewski has always taken
the approach what did I do wrong? How do I
get better now? Some of that is his West Point training,
because when you're a plead at West Point and an
upperclassman speaks to you, you're allowed three answers, yes sir,
(15:32):
no sir, no excuse sir. And Shashevsky's life has been
built on no excuse sir, I've never met a coach
who uses failure to his advantage more than Sischevski, and
that night was a perfect example. So the next year,
of course, with those five guys I mentioned, they went
twenty four and ten. They beat North Carolina with Michael
(15:55):
Jordan in the ACC Tournament, and that was the turnaround.
And you've been listen seeing to John Feinstein tell a
heck of a story about how coach Ka's career at
Duke almost didn't happen. After year three, still not winning.
At the heart of Tobacco Road, the heart of ACC
basketball country, Coach K loses to the University of Virginia
(16:18):
and Ralph Sampson's team by an epic, epic blowout one
O nine to sixty six. It does not get worse
than that. And losing it in of all places in
the ACC Tournament, everyone was sure that was it. The
boosters were coming after Coach K. Everyone was. The wife
was crying, and he was just mad. And who was
(16:38):
he mad at? He was mad at Coach K in
the end, and he was taking responsibility in ownership for
that loss as he was taught to do at West
Point three. Answers to a question at West Point by
an older person, and that is an older student. Folks,
when you're a freshman, a senior has to be addressed
(16:59):
as yes, sir, no sir, or no excuse sir. And
as John Feinstein said, no excuse sir, those were the
words that Coach K lived by. And by the way,
I love that scene in that Dennis. It's pouring rain
and there's one coach toasting to forgetting the game. And
what does coach K say, reflecting his true character, his
(17:20):
competitive nature and a little bit of his Irish Catholic well,
let us just say fanciful nature. With some swear words,
he says, here's to never blanking forgetting tonight, never forgetting,
and that's what animated coach K. That loss, that failure
drove so much of his life. When we come back
(17:40):
more of this remarkable piece of storytelling by the great
American sportswriter John Feinstein. Here on our American story and
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories and with John Feinstein.
Duke's head basketball coach KA was almost fired in nineteen
eighty three, as we learned, but the following year he
went twenty four and ten. This was the turnaround season.
For coach k Let's return to his friend and sportswriter
of twenty three New York Times bestsellers, including the one
(18:30):
he wrote about coach Kay the Legends club Let's return
to John Feinstein. From there again, they made the tournament
the next year, and in nineteen eighty six they went
thirty seven and three, went to the national championship game lost,
I will say on a bad call. Schevski would never
say that, but I will, and became college basketball's next
(18:52):
great dynasty. It's my opinion that the only coach who
you can put ahead of Shashefsky Mount Rushmore is John Wooden.
But five national championships, thirteen Final four is more than
Wooden even and ACC championships. And I mean he went
to twenty three sweet sixteens. That's just stupid, twenty three
(19:16):
and in every one of them because in the old days,
of course, you know, before they expanded the tournament, conference
champions went straight to the sweet sixteen. But starting in
nineteen eighty five, you had to win two games to
get to the sweet sixteen and six to win the championships.
So twenty three sweet sixteen. So are you, I mean,
Dean Smith great coach longevity. All that went to eighteen,
(19:39):
which is a great number, but the first three he
didn't have to win a game to get there because
they once they won the ACC they were in the
sweet sixteen. So his numbers are just ridiculous. Twelve hundred
and five wins. I mean, the numbers just go on
and on and but to me, the one thing about
Sichevski that shouldn't be forgotten. He went to his first
(20:00):
Final four in nineteen eighty six. He went to his
last Final four thirty six years later, in twenty twenty two.
And think about how much college basketball changed during those
thirty six years. There was a forty five second clock
for the first year in nineteen eighty six. There was
no three point shot in nineteen eighty six, there was
no one had ever heard the phrase one and done
(20:22):
in nineteen eighty six. And the game, the way the
game was played, has changed so much since Mike first
started coaching, which was an army in nineteen seventy six,
and he adapted. He kept saying, if I want to
continue to coach, I have to change. Not I'm going
to sit here and say it's terrible. The change has
taken place I'm like that myself. But twenty twenty two
(20:46):
is last year he goes to a Final four with
the youngest team he ever coached. So I could see
that in him. Very early on. I really believed if
Duke gave him the time, he was going to become
a great coach. That night at Denny's was sort of
a key moment. In fact, so in nineteen ninety one
(21:08):
when they won the national championship for the first time,
I walked on the court after the game and I
walked up to Mike and I put out my hand
and I said, hey, congratulations, I'm so happy for you.
And he pulled me in and he said, who'd come
a long way from the blanking Denny's, havn't it? And
twenty years after that, I was working on a book
(21:28):
called One on One, which was sort of about my
experiences with the people I dealt with in my first
ten books. It was a professional semi memoir, and one
of the people, obviously I wanted to talk to was
Mike and I called him and I said, look, next week,
when you play at UNC Greensboro, you're going to go
past Dean Smith on the all time wins list, and
(21:49):
if you go back to those early days at Duke,
There's no way we would have ever thought about you
and Dean Smith in the same sentence much unless you're
going past Dean Smith. And I'd like to come down
and just hang out with you and talk to you
about those early days and things like that. And he said, sure,
come on down, meet me in my office at two thirty.
You can ride the bus to Greensboro with us. We'll
talk then, and once we get there, we'll have time
(22:12):
in the locker room before the game starts. Does is
that okay for you? And I said great. So I
drove down to Durham and met two friends for lunch.
One was Bill Brill, who was also a Dude graduate,
and the other was Mike Craig, who's now the athletic
director at Saint John's, but back then he was kind
of a Shishevsky's man Friday. He was his chief fundraiser,
and if you watched Mike walk off a court after
(22:35):
a game, two feet behind him was Mike Craig at
all times. And so we went to lunch and Mike
Craig said, so, when are you going to talk to
Coach K And I said, Will on the bus going
to Greensboro, and he said, you came all the way
down here just to talk to him on a cell phone.
And I said, no, I'm gonna talk to him from
the next seat. And he said, no, no, no, no,
(22:57):
you misunderstood something. Nobody who's not part of the team
rides that bus except for Mickey. He said, I don't
even ride that bus, so you misunderstood something. So I
walked him through what Mike had said. I said, what
did I misunderstand? And he Mike Crick's shaking his head
and he goes, I don't understand it. Why would he
let you do that? Why would he let you do that?
And I said, because I was in the blanket Dennis
(23:18):
and that. And to this day, Mike will bring that
up to me when we're, you know, just talking about
how important that night was in his life. Mike will
tell you. And Dean Smith said the same thing about
his first three years at North Carolina that in today's world,
with social media, with the internet, with sports talk radio,
(23:39):
with twenty four hours sports networks, he probably would have
been fired by the end of his third year. That
you know, I got emails and tweets from North Carolina
fans during this past season when North Carolina was sixteen
and sixteen and seven, but they had just lost a
duke by twenty at home, saying, Hubert Davis can't do this,
Hubert Davis is was the wrong guy. We got to
(24:01):
get rid of Hubert Davis. Well, they ended up in
the National Championship Game and be twice too long the
way to get there. So that's the way the world
is today. It's knee jerk reactions. It wasn't that way.
There weren't nearly as many games on television in those days.
Sports talk radio hadn't started yet. In nineteen eighty seven,
w f AN was the first all sports talk station
(24:22):
in New York City. There was no social media, there
was no internet, so Mike was able to fly pretty
much under the radar other than with duke people during
that time. And even then, it took a lot of
guts for Tom Butters to stand by him throughout that period.
And like I always, I always say this to people
(24:42):
that he's a better guy than he was a coach.
And that's a hell of a statement if you think
about it. But he's still digging out right now from
all the emails and cards and letters and that he's
gotten from people. He said he had three thousand of
them after the season and he wants to answer every
one of them. And the things that he's done for
(25:07):
people that nobody knows about. It goes on. The list
goes on and on and on and on. My brother
had cancer twenty one years ago, and he's also a
dude graduate. And I called Mike and I said, listen,
would you mind giving my brother a call, you know,
because it would cheer him up just to hear from
you right now. Mike said sure, So we called them
(25:27):
and they were on the phone for about an hour.
And my brother is a typical fan, you know, he
knows better than the coach. So he said, Coach, can
I give you some advice? And Mike said, yeah, sure, Bobby,
and he said, you need to play Casey Sanders more.
Casey Sanders was the backup center, and Mike said, okay,
I'll give that some thought. Well, in February, Carlos Boozer
(25:49):
got hurt, so Sanders became a starter while Boozer was out,
and then when Boozer came back, because they've been playing well,
Sanders continued to art although Boozer still got the bulk
of the minutes. And when they won the national championship
that year and to this day, my brother takes credit
to that national championship, and every once in a whildhood
(26:11):
Columnistae Sheshevsky should do this, and I'll say, here's his
cell number, you give McCall and tell him that. And
a terrific job on the production and the editing by
Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to John Feinstein for
sharing this remarkable story about his friend. And what a
thing to be able to say after years of writing
(26:31):
sports is that these weren't mere subjects you were writing about,
but friends. And that shows the character and nature of
John's work and his commitment to telling the story of
American sports and the people who make it hum And
it's a business, but it's more than a business, my goodness.
We learned that from the passion from the fans, their
knee jerk reactions to losses. It's overwhelming. I listened to
(26:52):
sports talk radio sometimes and I just pity any head
coach of anything. The relentless criticism and the desire for
immediate ratification is almost unrelenting. And how to manage it
in today's environment. Will kudos to the people who do,
and that night at Denny's that stuck with Coach K
all the way through. He never did forget. John Feinstein,
(27:14):
the story of Coach K and how his career almost
didn't happen here on our American Story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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