An excerpt from Ian O’Connor’s book, “Coach K: The Rise and Reign of Mike Krzyzewski”

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 55-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 10th-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 motherf—–,” Krzyzewski screamed. “Don’t you ever f—-n’ 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 10 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 in the letter 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 75 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.

From Coach K by Ian O’Connor. Copyright © 2022 by Ian O’Connor. Reprinted by permission of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.