Former Duke Men’s Basketball Players Recall Coach Mike Krzyzewski’s Early Days

On March 2, 1980, one day after Duke won the ACC men’s basketball tournament, Bill Foster resigned as the team’s coach, effective the end of that season. The next day, Foster accepted the job as South Carolina’s coach, signing a five-year contract for $50,000 per year.

The news was surprising to outsiders considering Foster had turned around the Duke program since taking over six years earlier, including leading the Blue Devils to the national title game in 1978 where they lost to Kentucky.

Shortly after Duke’s 1980 season ended with a loss in the NCAA tournament’s Elite Eight, then-Blue Devils athletics director Tom Butters hired Foster’s successor: Mike Krzyzewski, who had just turned 33 years old a month earlier.

Today, Krzyzewski, who is retiring at the end of the season, is the winningest coach in Division 1 history with 1,202 victories. And he has a chance this weekend to culminate his career with his sixth national title at Duke. The Blue Devils face rival North Carolina on Saturday in the Final Four, the first time the schools have faced each other in the NCAA tournament. The winner advances to play Villanova or Kansas for the championship on Monday.

Still, 42 years ago, Krzyzewski was anything but a sure bet. Krzyzewski arrived at Duke having spent the previous five seasons as the head coach at Army, his alma mater. During his last season at the school, Army went 9-17.

“It was a bold move by Tom Butters,” said Kenny Dennard, a senior captain on Krzyzewski’s first team at Duke. “He felt like it was the right move. And he got proven right.”

And yet, Krzyzewski was no overnight sensation. He took over a Blue Devils team that had lost 6-foot-11 center Mike Gminski to graduation. Gminski had been an All-American and first round selection in the 1980 NBA draft.

That first season, Duke went 17-13 and missed the NCAA tournament. It was a far cry from the previous three seasons when the Blue Devils appeared in three NCAA tournaments, advancing to the 1978 title game, making the second round in 1979 and losing in the Mideast Regional final in 1980. The Blue Devils had been ranked as high as first in the Associated Press poll during the 1978-79 and 1979-80 regular seasons.

“We took the nation by storm,” said Dennard, a 6-foot-8 forward. “We were a bunch of fun-loving kids. We had great chemistry. We didn’t have a shot clock or a three-point shot but we scored a lot of points. We played multiple defenses. It was just a fun time.”

Under Krzyzewski, Duke played a man-to-man defense, a change from the zone defense that Foster had implemented. Krzyzewski was adamant that the Blue Devils would be known as a defensive team first.

“Mike placed a pretty heavy emphasis on picking up charges,” said Mike Tissaw, who played for Foster for one season and Krzyzewski for three seasons. “At the time he told us that picking up a defensive charge is the best play in basketball. You get a turnover, you get a foul on the other team and you tell the other team that they are not just going to be flying towards the basket.”

Still, Tissaw recalls fans at Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium imploring the Blue Devils to mix in some zone defense and growing frustrated with Krzyzewski’s progress. Duke went 10-17 in Krzyzewski’s second season in 1981-82. That same season, rival North Carolina won the national title thanks to freshman guard Michael Jordan’s game-winning jumper with 15 seconds remaining.

“There came a point where we could hear some boos from our home fans,” said Tissaw, who was a junior on that team and is now a psychology professor at SUNY Potsdam in New York. “There were some rumors swirling around that Coach K might not last for very long at Duke.”

Tissaw added: “I got the impression sometime during my junior year that Coach K just didn’t have the players that he wanted. It’s a very natural thing. A new coach comes to a fairly major basketball program and they want to go out and recruit and get the guys they want that will work well with their system.”

In the fall of 1982, Krzyzewski brought in a freshman class that was arguably the nation’s best. Four of those freshmen started: guards Johnny Dawkins and David Henderson and forwards Mark Alarie and Jay Bilas. But the Blue Devils continued to struggle, finishing with an 11-17 record and losing six of their last seven games.

The next season, Duke was unranked again in the preseason Associated Press poll, but it won 14 of its first 15 games. The Blue Devils then lost three in a row, including a 78-73 defeat at home against No. 1 North Carolina. Three days later, to the surprise of many, Butters extended Krzyzewski’s contract by five years.

“That gave Coach K the security to know that Tom was behind him,” said Dennard, who runs his own investor relations firm in Houston. “That paid off big time.”

As seniors, Dawkins, Henderson, Alarie and Bilas led Duke to a 37-3 record, a No. 1 national ranking at the end of the regular season and a berth in the 1986 national championship game, where the Blue Devils lost to Louisville. Since then, no one has questioned Krzyzewski’s job security.

During the past 39 seasons, Krzyzewski has led Duke to 36 NCAA tournament appearances, the lone exceptions being in 1995 when Krzyzewski missed nearly all of the season due to complications from back surgery; in 2020 when the tournament was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic; and last season when the Blue Devils went 13-11, their worst winning percentage since the 1982-83 season.

This season, with five potential first round picks in the 2022 draft on its roster, Duke has rebounded and made the Final Four for the first time since 2015 and the 13th time since Krzyzewski arrived.

Douglas McNeely was the first player Krzyzewski recruited at Duke and played for the Blue Devils for the coach’s first four seasons back when no one could have predicted Duke’s enduring success. But McNeely credits Butters and the Duke administration for sticking with their plan and showing faith in Krzyzewski.

“Whenever there’s a coaching change, there’s always a transition period,” said McNeely, who is now a managing director with BlackRock, Inc., the world’s largest asset manager with more than $10 trillion of assets under management. “But at Duke what you saw in Coach K’s early days was he was building a foundation. Just like you’re building any strong business or any strong structure, it takes time to get the right pieces, to get the muscle memory, to get the right cadence From early on, Coach K was showing that.”

McNeely added: “I think it was a perfect marriage between him and Duke University. Duke at the time wanted someone to approach it that way, to build an enduring program.”