ST. PETERSBURG – Blue Devil players hugged all around him, and he nodded with a half-smile, half-wince, trying to show his elation while hiding the nagging pain that makes him walk hunched over, with his left side dragging.
Mike Krzyzewski won’t talk about that pain. Not with his team in the Final Two. A bad hip is not life-threatening. So who is he to complain?
His mother and his best friend died from cancer. He had nearly lost control of his life to the point where a breakdown loomed, along with the breakdown of his family – wife Mickie, and daughters Debbie, Lindy, Jamie.
Being back here, playing for college basketball’s greatest prize, is a gift.
“How can you play in a national championship and say you’re in pain?” Krzyzewski said yesterday. “A week from now I’m going to have my hip replaced. I’m going to be great. I feel good.
“But when you ask a question if am I in pain, the first thing I want to do is get a mirror and say, ‘How I do I look? Do I look that bad?'”
Not that bad, someone said.
“Well, good,” Krzyzewski said, “I’m not in any pain.”
When he’s sitting, it’s apparent that he has changed. This is Coach OK before you, the hard lines that once creased his face eased, the dark circles under his brown eyes faded. There was always life in them, but it was chaotic. Now there is calm. The man who is poised for the triumphant return tonight, who could win his first national championship since 1992 if Duke beats Connecticut, is a different one than the man who earned the label as best coach in America.
Krzyzewski has seen the light. Though when you ask him specifically that, he makes a face and becomes uncomfortable.
“Have I seen the light?” he said. “I have a hip problem and I’ve had a great basketball team most of time at Duke. I always look at like I’ve been lucky – very, very lucky, and I appreciate that. I don’t think I should be giving the Sermon on the Mount right now. I think I should be talking about basketball.”
Basketball is easy for him to talk about. K is 469-154 in his career. He is 48-12 in the NCAAs, best among active coaches. He has reached the Final Four eight times, four behind John Wooden, three behind Dean Smith.
But the thing about Krzyzewski now is that he finally gets what Jim Valvano told him years ago, when Valvano was dying of cancer. Krzyzewski has achieved balance in his life. Valvano said he never was that lucky.
Only five years ago Krzyzewski had reached the crossroads. He came back too soon from a back operation. The pain and drain of too many hours worked nearly made him collapse. His bosses at Duke forced him to leave for the rest of the season after the team got off at 9-3, even though they knew what would happen: the team would suffer, eventually finishing 13-18, 4-15 without him.
Krzyzewski returned to work in ’95. But he hired a time manager. He made changes in his mind, the root of workaholic. Of course, he couldn’t go cold turkey, squat all day, every day in a garden patch or simply walk the labradors, Defense and Cameron, on his 11 acres on the cusp of the Duke Forest.
But he embraced life. He embraced life in basketball instead of it strangling him.
“You get more mature,” Krzyzewski said. “You learn to appreciate more. It doesn’t mean I was sad in ’91 and ’92. … I was happy as I could be. I mean, I got Grant Hill, Bobby Hurley, Christian Laettner, and we’re playing great basketball. I think I just understand things better now.”
He will never completely change, like he will never coach anywhere but Duke – especially not in the NBA, which he says he once considered. But that’s what makes him the best at what he does, what has brought Duke to the Final Four for the fifth time this decade.
“I think it’s my background from being in Chicago,” Krzyzewski said of his motivation. “My mom and dad had to go to work every day. There was no sick leave. You’re constantly worrying about not having a job. My good mother, God bless her, who passed away two years ago, even after we had been to Final Fours, I’d stop and stay with her in Chicago on a recruiting trip and she was always worried about me getting fired. That’s the background she came from. You lost, you might get fired. I just feel like you have to come to work every day. If I stop doing that than I might …”
He stopped. In his mind, he knows he could never be fired. But feelings. You can never control feelings.
“You end up making an incredible commitment to what you do,” he said. “When you win or lose it means more. To me, that’s what [tonight] is about: win or lose. [Tonight] is going to mean a lot. And that’s good. Whatever you do, if it means a lot, it drives you to a level of passion and emotion that few people experience.”
Krzyzewski has experienced it all. So the hip pain? Who is he to complain?
