Coach K Read online

  Dedication

  To my world-class big brother Dan, who left us far too soon

  Thanks for always having my back

  Until I see you again

  To the great Mrs. O

  Thanks for being a mom to us all

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1: Columbo

  2: Coach Knight

  3: Hoosiers

  4: Coach K

  5: Loser

  6: Saving Coach K

  7: Can’t Win the Big One

  8: Conquest

  9: Duke-Kentucky

  10: Breakdown

  11: Agony

  12: Ecstasy

  13: Gold

  14: Leaving Knight Behind

  15: Last Stand

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  HOSPICE WAS ALREADY IN, and Joe McGuinness needed to tell Mike Krzyzewski something important before he died.

  I did not quit.

  In his final week, as nasopharyngeal cancer was killing him, the fifty-five-year-old McGuinness repeatedly told his older brother Ed that he badly wanted Coach K to hear those words. Joe had been a small but rugged point guard on Krzyzewski’s last West Point team. Coach K would often say that he should have taken McGuinness with him to Duke University, that Joe’s defensive tenacity would have made life in Durham, North Carolina, a little easier in the early 1980s.

  Their relationship started in 1977 inside the McGuinness home in Nanuet, New York, where Krzyzewski arrived for a recruiting visit like few before it. “We were the traditional Irish family,” said Joe’s brother Ed. “We always had a million people over.”

  Joe’s grandmother Anne was among those who sat in on the visit — across the table from Krzyzewski — and she was overwhelmed by the fact that the head coach at West Point wanted her grandson. Anne had two boys who served in the South Pacific during World War II, including Joe’s father Jack, who spent two years on a PT boat and fought the Japanese in the decisive Battle of Leyte Gulf.

  Joe, the middle of his three boys, earned Division I offers from Wagner College and the United States Military Academy while starring at Clarkstown South High School. During Krzyzewski’s visit to Nanuet, Joe interrupted the dinnertime conversation by digging a couple of fingers into the cream cake his mother Florence had baked and scooping a divot into his mouth.

  Joe was Florence’s personal golden boy, so she would have likely let this misdemeanor go. But Coach K? “You’re not going to be doing that at West Point,” he assured his recruit.

  The family’s German Shepherd, Luke, nearly knocked a full drink all over the visiting coach. The McGuinnesses had a silly post-dinner tradition of trying to scorch each other with the spoons used to stir their hot tea, and in Krzyzewski’s presence Joe playfully burned his grandmother. “Coach K was like, ‘These people are crazy,’” recalled Ed McGuinness.

  But when Krzyzewski walked out the door that night, there was no doubt Joe was going to play for him. All the McGuinnesses from Grandma Anne on down fell hard for the Army coach, and the Army coach fell hard for them. Grandma Anne would bake and send cookies to Coach K at West Point, and again in his early years at Duke, and when she called his office once to congratulate him on a big victory, Krzyzewski dropped everything to take the call. When he made a recruiting visit to New York City in an attempt to sign Brooklyn high school sensation Chris Mullin for the Blue Devils, Krzyzewski asked Jack McGuinness to join their dinner so he could explain to Mullin’s parents what it was like to have a son play for Coach K.

  Truth was, Joe McGuinness had been something of a hellion at West Point. He failed a couple of courses as a plebe and struggled to accept the sanctioned hazing from upperclassmen, who screamed in his face when he did not properly square off a corner while walking to class. “They mess with your mind,” Joe had said. Asked by his local paper how much he liked military life, Joe responded, “I like to play basketball.”

  But as a college ballplayer, Joe was exactly what Coach K had envisioned he would be — a pass-first point guard who played the game the way Krzyzewski played it at Army. Reddish and pale, the map of Ireland all over his face, McGuinness was a relentless disruptor when guarding the opponent’s most skilled backcourt scorer. In one game against tenth-ranked and unbeaten LSU at Madison Square Garden, “little Joe McGuinness,” as the Daily News described him, made his mark off the bench. He threw some pretty passes, shut down the Tigers’ high-scoring guard from the Bronx, Al Green, and helped Army rally from a huge deficit to lose by only six.

  McGuinness made a less favorable impression in a lower-profile matchup with Manhattan. Joe was enjoying a good game when Jim Ward, a guard for the Jaspers, decided to start using his elbows to rattle his opponent. It didn’t take much to get Joe’s Irish up, and sure enough, McGuinness wheeled on Ward and punched him, earning an ejection. Joe was shampooing his hair in the shower after the game when he suddenly turned to find an enraged Coach K two inches from his face, his jacket and tie taking on water while he started ripping into his point guard.

  “You motherfucker,” Krzyzewski screamed. “Don’t you ever fuckin’ put yourself ahead of my team again.”

  Joe was crushed when Duke hired away Coach K after his sophomore season; he finished his college career at Manhattan, of all places, as a buddy of Jim Ward’s, of all people. He played and coached professionally in Ireland and became a college and high school coach back in the States. He won sectional state titles for the varsity boys’ and girls’ basketball teams at a high school ten minutes from his boyhood home in Nanuet, Albertus Magnus, where he was also the athletic director. Joe never stopped talking about Coach K, never stopped acting like him on the sidelines. Joe’s sons Patrick and Conor would watch Duke games and notice disapproving looks on Krzyzewski’s face that mirrored expressions on their father’s.

  “Joe was probably a little crazier on the sideline,” said his younger brother, Jack Jr., who would also play for Army. “It takes Coach K a little while to get crazy, but Joe was out of his mind the whole game, pulling his hair out.”

  Just as Coach K heavily involved his wife Mickie and three daughters in his basketball program, Joe made sure his wife Cynthia and daughter Megan were a constant part of the conversation about his teams. McGuinness learned from Coach K to value end-of-bench reserves and team managers, and he encouraged earnest students who struggled with their studies. “My father brought that to each and every team and class he taught,” Megan said.

  So it was a devastating blow to the Rockland athletics community when McGuinness received his diagnosis. Krzyzewski was immediately on the phone with a contact he had at Memorial Sloan Kettering in the city — they came to know Joe in the hospital as Coach K’s guy — and he put Joe’s wife in touch with an oncologist at Duke. Krzyzewski got involved in ensuring that McGuinness had access to the latest trial treatments. He regularly called and texted his former player with words of support, telling him, “You can beat this. Go after it. Never give it an inch.”

  One day Joe’s sister Kate was in the car with him, stuck in Manhattan traffic after treatment, when Coach K called to ask if he could do more to help. The calls and texts helped sustain Joe as his condition deteriorated.

  Joe’s son Patrick would hand his father his phone with long text messages from Krzyzewski expressing his love for his old point guard. “You could see that after he received a text from Coach K his energy level went up and he was able to get through the day a little better,” Megan said.

  Krzyzewski was the last man on
earth McGuinness wanted to disappoint, so Joe was concerned that he was letting him down when the endgame became clear. Joe fought the cancer so relentlessly that, years later, his siblings would say that they wished he had let go earlier. The chemo wasn’t working, and the radiation left Joe unable to speak clearly, or to swallow, or to rest comfortably. “His last few months were absolute torture,” Jack Jr. said.

  Joe spent his final days inside his home in New City, New York, where he once ran his three kids through basketball drills on the court outside his door. Patrick and Conor grew into accomplished high school and college players and followed their old man into coaching, just as Joe had followed Coach K.

  When Krzyzewski’s last call came in, Patrick was holding his father’s hand. Joe could barely speak. Krzyzewski reminded him how much he loved him, how much he respected him. The coach could not make out a lot of what Joe was trying to tell him, and Joe figured as much. He communicated to his older brother what he needed to share with Krzyzewski.

  Ed took the phone and told Coach K that his brother wanted to make sure he knew that he did not give up. “I never doubted that,” Krzyzewski responded.

  Shortly after that conversation, McGuinness gathered his brother, wife, and children in his living room. Joe was out of his hospital bed and in his recliner when he had his family members huddle like a basketball team would around its coach. They locked their eyes on Joe’s and leaned in close to make out what he was trying to say. This would be his final pep talk.

  “He still had that Coach K phone call in his head,” Megan said. “The principles and values of hard work and of being a good teammate that Coach K instilled in him is the way my father lived. He told us in that last huddle, ‘This is what matters most in life. This is our team. We need to always look out for each other.’”

  Joe McGuinness died on February 12, 2016, two weeks after Krzyzewski wrote a letter nominating him for induction into the Rockland County Sports Hall of Fame. Coach K cited Joe’s on-court leadership and called Joe as good a defensive guard as he had in his five seasons at Army.

  When Duke beat Virginia by one point the day after McGuinness died, Krzyzewski dedicated the victory to him, talked to his team about Joe, and had his players sign a game ball that carried the words “In Honor of Joe McGuinness. Duke 63 Virginia 62.” Coach K signed the ball and wrote, “For my point guard,” and sent it along with boxes of Duke gear to Joe’s wife.

  More than 5,000 mourners attended Joe’s wake and funeral services, including many of his former high school and college players, some of whom served as pallbearers. Just like their father, Joe’s two sons would work as counselors at Krzyzewski’s summer camp. Coach K met with Patrick and Conor and recounted that last conversation he had with Joe, admitting to the boys that he could not understand much of what their father was saying on the phone. “But I still knew exactly what he was saying,” Coach K assured them as he pounded his chest.

  Three years later, Krzyzewski was vouching for Conor as he became Army’s director of basketball operations. The following year he was calling Joe McGuinness’s son the day before Conor was scheduled to undergo surgery for testicular cancer, just to let him know he was praying for him. After the successful surgery, Coach K reached out again to offer encouragement as Conor started two rounds of chemotherapy.

  “I’m just the son of a player he coached a long time ago,” Conor said. “The fact that he’s still keeping tabs on me is just remarkable.”

  Krzyzewski had spent more than four decades connecting with four generations of McGuinnesses, starting with Grandma Anne, exchanging personal, handwritten letters with various family members, endorsing some for jobs, even sending Joe some old suits of his so he would have clothes to wear as an assistant college coach. Coach K recommended Joe’s younger brother Jack Jr. to the West Point coaches in the early 1980s after watching him compete at his Duke camp.

  The McGuinnesses all became passionate Blue Devils fans who tracked Krzyzewski’s top recruits in high school and didn’t miss a game on TV. As a young boy, Joe’s son Patrick would slap the floor during basketball camp because he wanted to become the next great guard at Duke. Joe’s sister Kate wrote Krzyzewski a letter in 2019 to update him on the family and inform him that her daughter Elizabeth had enrolled in Duke’s physician assistant program in pursuit of a master’s degree. Coach K said he would help Elizabeth with anything she needed, and he invited the family to a game at Cameron Indoor Stadium, where they sat six rows behind the home team’s bench.

  To a man and a woman, the McGuinnesses were in awe of Krzyzewski’s grace. They couldn’t understand how he did it, how he found the time and patience to remain invested in every friend he’d made.

  Those close to the living legend with five national titles, nearly 1,200 Division I victories, and three Olympic gold-medal finishes as the leader of Team USA often instruct inquiring minds to look past the talent he has successfully recruited and developed, and the Xs and Os he has drawn on the board. They advise others to focus on Krzyzewski’s ability to connect with people from all walks of life, his ability to motivate people to achieve things they did not believe they were capable of achieving, and, above all else, his ability to build lasting bonds with his players, assistants, team managers, childhood friends, and former teammates and coaches.

  The secret to Coach K’s greatness, his friends say, is found in his relationships. Thousands of them.

  Including those with an Irish Catholic family that produced a low-scoring rotation player who spent only two seasons with Krzyzewski, during which Army went a combined 23-28. Coach K told Joe McGuinness’s wife that he keeps Joe’s prayer card on his desk, and he told Joe’s son Patrick that he also keeps a card in his briefcase so that it remains with him everywhere he goes.

  As much as nearly anyone else Krzyzewski has met in his seventy-five years on the planet, the McGuinnesses have felt the power of his impact in a most personal way. They saw what he meant to their cancer-stricken loved one. They know that in his final days, Joe effectively sought Coach K’s permission to die.

  Why has Michael William Krzyzewski been able to move people so profoundly? How did a low-income street kid, the son of a cleaning lady and an elevator operator who got by without high school educations, become quite possibly the greatest college basketball coach of all time?

  Before he announced that he would end his forty-seven-year college career after the 2021–2022 season, those were the questions I set out to answer. To understand where Krzyzewski’s journey ended, you have to understand where it began. You have to understand his Polish neighborhood in Chicago, and how it fueled the raging fire within.

  1

  Columbo

  MICKEY, AS MIKE was often called by the neighborhood kids, was always out there in the schoolyard, all alone with the ball and his thoughts. Friends saw him in the rain, sometimes even in the snow after he was done shoveling the court. He dribbled in solitude and worked on his moves against an imaginary defender while pretending a championship was on the line with a few seconds to go.

  Mickey was going places. He figured out early that the game was the vehicle to get him there.

  In Chicago, a kid had to learn how to handle a cold, wet basketball, and learn young Mickey did. A local girl, Vivian Przybylo, would be walking to her grandmother’s place, or to the neighborhood grocer or butcher, and see the same boy doing the same things on the same Christopher Columbus School court no matter what season it was, or what time it was in the morning, afternoon, or night.

  “I don’t think I ever passed that schoolyard without seeing him playing basketball, often by himself,” Przybylo recalled. “He’s the most determined person I ever knew.”

  Determination was a necessary character trait passed down to the boys and girls who always gathered off Leavitt and Augusta Boulevard at the Columbus elementary school and who would call themselves “Columbos” for life. They were the grandchildren of Polish immigrants who firmly believed in an honest day’s work an
d in the all-American dream that suggested they could someday have lives like those of the wealthy people they labored for.

  Krzyzewski’s paternal grandparents, John and Sophie Krzyzewski (their surname was printed as “Krzyzowski” in a number of documents), had emigrated from Poland to the United States before the turn of the twentieth century; his maternal grandparents, Josef and Magdalena Pituch, had emigrated from Wola Radziszowska in Lesser Poland Voivodeship after the turn of the century; in some documents they listed their home country as Austria. (Their region was under Austrian control.)

  Josef’s story was a common one in his Polish neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago in an area that would come to be known as Ukrainian Village. Pituch traveled on the SS Zeeland from Antwerp, Belgium, and landed in New York, at Ellis Island, on March 21, 1906. He married Magdalena Daniel in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, three years later. A rugged-looking five-foot-eight, 175 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes, Josef found work as a coke drawer and as a rigger in a coal mine.

  Josef and Magdalena would move from Keisterville, Pennsylvania, to Chicago, where the janitor and homemaker (who went by the Americanized names Joseph and Maggie) lived with their six children at 2039 West Cortez Street. One of their five girls, Emily, married one of the Krzyzewskis’ seven children, William, on June 18, 1935. According to the 1940 federal census, the last one taken before their sons were born, Emily made $446 over thirty-nine weeks in 1939 as a machine operator in a cosmetics company (stuffing cotton inside of powder-puff applicators), while William earned $1,560 over fifty-two weeks as an elevator operator in a private building. Emily hadn’t attended school beyond eighth grade; William had completed only two years of high school. They wanted something better for their kids.

  Their first son, Bill, was more than four years older than Mike, who was born on February 13, 1947. They were raised in the family’s brick two-flat on Cortez, starting on the upstairs level and then moving downstairs to the first level when their aunt, Emily’s sister Mary, moved out. Big Bill towered over the more athletic Mike. They both received their Catholic elementary school education at St. Helen, a short walk from their well-appointed, if sparsely furnished, home. William and Emily did not want their sons to take the Polish language classes available to them because they knew that a Polish accent, or any discernible connection to the homeland, could put future educational and employment opportunities in jeopardy.