Love Duke Basketball or Hate It, Coach K Stands Among the Greatest

End of an era: Krzyzewski, who has always seemed to do things the right way, is going out with style.

In America, we love winners. And even when we hate winners like the New England Patriots, the New York Yankees, Alabama, Notre Dame and yes, Duke basketball, that’s a reverse form of love, an unacknowledged envy.

We grind our teeth especially hard when the winners we hate win with panache—by doing it the right way, by making it look easy, by being so darned likeable. Because we don’t want to admit things like that about winners we don’t like.

That’s why the retirement of Mike Krzyzewski is striking such a vibrant chord among people who follow college basketball.

For people who are in that camp that adores and appreciates the accomplishments that put Coach K on the Mount Rushmore of college basketball coaches, this is the end of an amazing era. (Off the top of my head, the other three would be John Wooden, Dean Smith and Bob Knight.)

Coach K not only won five national championships, won 1,097 games while losing only 302 at Duke, where began coaching in 1980. He was 1,170–361 overall, including five years at Army, where he also had played for Knight, his mentor. (Lucky for us, Krzyzewski didn't adopt Knight's demeanor.)

Except for last season, which was a pandemic mess, he kept the Blue Devils as a perennial power for virtually all of those four decades. And he didn’t do it with recruiting tricks. No doubt, he reeled in incredible talent. But that was more a measure of the way players believed in him and Duke as a place to improve and win than the one-and-done gimmick best exploited by John Calipari at Kentucky.

At press conferences, Krzyzewski not only was exceedingly gracious to upcoming opponents. He had a gift for praising vanquished opponents. He also was classy to the extreme on the rare occasions when his Blue Devils lost.

And yet, under that surface, he was a master manipulator who, like so many athletic geniuses, did not miss any tricks.

In the mid-90s, when he had back troubles, a team that was not up to his usual standards and a new athletic director, rumors were flying that he wanted to succeed Lou Henson at Illinois, to be closer to his mother in Chicago, to have a new challenge and yada yada. He supposedly had even bought farmland in Champaign County.

I didn’t for one second believe those rumors. And yet, as the Illini basketball writer, I found myself checking them out. As it turned out, they were more about Coach K breaking in a new athletic director than wanting to leave his beloved Duke.

In a 1999 Elite Eight game, Rick Telander and I were surprised by the colorful language coming from Krzyzewski’s wife and other family members when Temple briefly gave Duke some trouble before succumbing by 21 points. Let’s just say they put the blue in the Blue Devils.

And all credit to Coach K, but I’ll always wonder how much his ability to work the refs in the 2015 national championship game against Wisconsin contributed to the Badgers’ second-half woes.

And after he had done all of his frenetic paddling beneath the surface, Krzyzewski was always there, placidly saying the perfect humble and on-point things.

It has been a basketball life filled with accomplishment and honor—truly amazing and admirable, especially for a Polish son of the West Side of Chicago who grew up not far from where I lived. I used to think about that when I passed the neighborhood of his youth.

And now the torch will be passed to another Chicagoan, Jon Scheyer, who starred at suburban Glenbrook North for Dave Weber, the brother of then-Illinois coach Bruce Weber. (And yes, while Scheyer played for a Weber, Krzyzewski played at Weber High School—no relation—in Chicago, if you’re into that kind of word play.)

The announcement that former Duke star Scheyer will take over after Krzyzewski coaches one more victory-lap season spares new Duke athletic director Nina King the pressure of hiring the replacement for college basketball's all-time winningest coach.

For the longest time, Scheyer would not rule out going to Illinois, but Bruce Weber wasn’t fooled. Brother or not, Bruce would tell me—off the record, of course—that he knew Scheyer would not be coming to Champaign.

Scheyer, 33, is breaking a cardinal rule of coaching: You do not want to be the guy who follows the legend.

And yet, how could he pass up such a monumental opportunity?

We’ll see how that goes. By all accounts, Scheyer looks ready. He’s even the same age as Krzyzewski when he became Duke coach.

But that’s a story for future seasons.

What we can expect now is an amazing final tour of a season, one in which Mike Krzyzewski will be plied with rocking chairs and myriad other clever gifts of merchandise and verbal tribute.

Which will bring an abundance of warm feelings and pride among those who love Duke basketball. And which will really rub those who hate Duke basketball the wrong way.

In America, we love and hate our winners. And there’s no doubt that Coach K is among our most accomplished winners.