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John Feinstein

It’s not so easy to tell Coach K and Dean Smith apart

I

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n March 1993, Duke and North Carolina played each other in Chapel Hill in a game with all sorts of national ramifications. Duke was the defending national champion. North Carolina was ranked No. 1 in the country.

Early in the game the two coaches, Mike Krzyzewski and Dean Smith, both clearly uptight, were up on every whistle. After several minutes, lead referee Lenny Wirtz had seen and heard enough. He called Krzyzewski and Smith to the scorer’s table. “I know it’s a big game,” he said. “I know you’re both a little hyper. But you have to calm down and let us work the game.” Smith nodded. Krzyzewski did

not. “Lenny, there’s 21,000 people in here who are all against me,” he said. “You three guys are the only ones I can talk to.” Wirtz laughed. Smith did not.

“Lenny, don’t let him do that,” he said. “He’s trying to get you on his side.” Krzyzewski glared at Smith, who glared back. Krzyzewski stalked back to his bench and said to his assistant coaches, “If I ever start to act like him, don’t ask a single question, just get a gun and shoot me.”

Time to round up the guns. That’s not to say that

Krzyzewski has morphed into his former arch rival, but as he has become older, more successful and more famous, it is clear that he has come to see the world through a prism far more similar to Smith than he might ever have imagined.

Consider some anecdotal

evidence: Smith was famous for shining the spotlight on his seniors — no matter who they were. In 1975, a North Carolina team led by Phil Ford, Walter Davis and Mitch Kupchak, won the ACC tournament. Smith’s opening comment after the championship game was as follows: “Clearly the leadership we got from our seniors was the key to our winning this tournament.” Those senior leaders were Brad

Hoffman, Ed Stahl and walk-on Mickey Bell. Last Sunday, junior Nolan

Smith was voted the MVP of the South Region after scoring 29 points in Duke’s win over Baylor in the final. Duke’s best player in the first three games of the tournament was Kyle Singler, another junior. The three Duke players in the Final Four interview room Friday for the practice day at Lucas Oil Stadium? Seniors Jon Scheyer, Brian Zoubek and Lance Thomas. Dean Smith always made a point of lowering expectations every chance he got. He always said he would be glad to win any game by one point and would never take an NCAA bid for granted — even while making the NCAA tournament the last 23 seasons of his coaching career. Several years ago, after a win over Butler, Krzyzewski made this comment: “That’s the kind of team we could play in the NCAA tournament . . . if we’re lucky

DAVID J. PHILLIP/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Mike Krzyzewski, sounding like his ex-rival: “I’m just happy to be a part of [the players’] experience.”

enough to make the tournament.” Duke was 22-2 at the time. There is also the issue of

officials. In 1984, after a difficult loss at home to North Carolina, Krzyzewski said there was a double standard for officiating in the ACC: one applied to Smith and North Carolina, the other applied to the rest of the league. Smith was furious — for years — over that comment. These days every coach in the ACC is convinced that the double standard has moved 11 miles down the road from Chapel Hill to Durham. Several years ago, Krzyzewski was reminded about the double-standard comment and laughed. “Looking back, I can see why Dean was upset when I said that,” he said. “There’s always going to be a sense that a team on top gets the calls because it wins a lot. Good teams tend to win close games because they have players who make plays. We didn’t lose to Carolina in 1984 because of the referees, we lost because of Michael Jordan and Sam Perkins.”

Smith was always very

protective of his players and went out of his way to credit them for victories while blaming himself for losses. Krzyzewski is exactly the same way. The Final Four “is the players’ experience,” he said Friday. “I’m just happy to be a part of their experience.” And then there was Smith’s remarkable ability to take a question about how well his team had defended and turn it into a lecture on why the NCAA should crack down more on gambling, or why it was unfair to make his team miss class the day before a

region semifinal game to fly in for an open practice and a news conference at the region site. Friday, Krzyzewski was asked about the fact that nine players in his team’s semifinal Saturday against West Virginia are from New York or New Jersey. His answer wandered from that subject to his belief the NCAA should allow coaches to work with their players during the offseason, to a lecture on his daughter taking piano lessons. “If my daughter takes piano lessons, you don’t cut her off from her teacher from April to September,” he said. “Players shouldn’t be cut off from working with their coaches from April to September either.” He made perfect sense. Smith

always made perfect sense, too. At his last Final Four, which was here in 1997, he turned a question about Shammond Williams’s poor shooting into a commentary on Larry Brown becoming a father again at the age of 56. Friday, Krzyzewski worked his seven grandchildren into a question about Duke being considered evil. There’s an old saying in the

ACC: ABD — Anybody But Duke. Of course that old saying replaced an older saying: ABC — Anybody But Carolina. Smith always said that ABC was a compliment because it meant his team had been good for a long time. Friday, Krzyzewski said this: “It’s good that people talk about us being back at the Final Four because it means we’re here and we’ve been here before.” Yes they have. Krzyzewski has now reached 11 Final Fours — as many as Smith.He’s also won 12

ACC titles — one less than Smith. He does have three national titles to two for Smith but that’s because he gets all the calls. Oh wait, it was Smith who got all the calls.

Confused yet? The point here is this: Becoming more like Dean Smith isn’t a bad thing; it’s a good thing. Smith was not only one of the greatest coaches who ever lived; his program stood for all that was good about college basketball. Krzyzewski has built a similar program at Duke, regardless of what people who have never met him write or say about him. “We’re not going to apologize for being good, for going to class and for wanting to win,” Krzyzewski said. “I think doing all that is a good thing.” Smith’s teams won games, went to class and wanted to win. Smith retired with 879 wins. Krzyzewski now has 866. Of course their politics were

always very different. Smith is a liberal Democrat, someone who took part in antiwar marches during the Vietnam War, took part in protests advocating a nuclear freeze and actively campaigned for years against Jesse Helms, the conservative former senator from North Carolina. Krzyzewski is a lifelong

Republican who voted for Ronald Reagan twice and for Bush, father and son, twice each. Smith was thrilled when

President Obama was elected in 2008. So was Krzyzewski. He voted for Obama, too.

For more from the author, visit his blog at www.feinsteinonthebrink.com.

MIKE WISE

Cook pushes past the pain and reaps the rewards

wise from D1

sign language when you pulled hard off Florida Avenue in Northeast Washington, through the gates of Gallaudet University? What if you were Kevin Cook, and three seasons in, none of that ended up amounting to real hardship? What if the Division III women’s team you agreed to coach via e-mail, the team that had not won a conference game in the three years prior to your arrival — one that would lose a league game by 75 points that first year — would one day seem so trivial a problem?

Especially when your hand began shaking two years ago, and the physician said the word you didn’t want to hear: Parkinson’s. Or when your sister, the person you were closest to in this world —the little girl you grew up with, the woman who helped you move halfway cross-country and then researched a holistic diet when she found out you had a life-altering disease — died at the age of 47 in an Ohio house fire this past December after rescuing two of her children. “Beautiful girl,” Cook said

quietly in his office late Thursday afternoon. “She was really somethin’. ” He hands you an obituary of

Kelly Lynn O’Neill Preston, which features a small photograph of a striking, smiling blonde-haired

woman. “At times people said she looked like Stevie Nicks. We actually were both adopted, but I never felt that way. She was my sister. Didn’t think anything else of it.”

“She lived in an old farmhouse.

It was an old electrical cord that caught on fire in the kitchen. Windy, winter night — the whole thing. I still keep and look at her e-mails.” Seated across the desk from her coach, Easter Faafiti, his best player, lowered her glance. “We wore her favorite color in our shoe strings after it happened —baby blue,” she said. “We just got all the team together and tried to make him feel like he has a strong family here. He cried at first, but he stayed strong for us. He was always strong, even in the most sad times.” The coach manages a half-smile and begins to talk about the good things that came out of the most trying year a 49-year-old divorcee, trying to hold down any job in his profession, could imagine. And of course that’s where the story forks.

See, after the tragedy and the tears, something special happened: Gallaudet, perennial doormat, got good. By compiling a 14-12 record,

Faafiti and her teammates won more games in one season than the program won in the previous

JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Despite battling Parkinson’s disease and grieving his sister’s death in a house fire, Coach Kevin Cook has remained focused on the court.

three years combined, and it was Gallaudet’s best record in 10 years. After losing 63 straight Capital Athletic Conference games, the Bison won one for the first time in five years this season. And that team that laid the wood on Gallaudet, 101-26, in Cook’s first season? St. Mary’s went down hard in February, but only after Cook changed into an all-pink suit at halftime during a breast cancer awareness charity night.

An image of Cook pulled up on

amobile phone, of essentially a human Easter bunny leaping for joy after Faafiti fired a beautiful

baseball pass from her own end line for the game-winning layup with eight seconds left, is a marked contrast from the person who sat in this very office in mid-December and dropped the phone when he heard the news of his sister.

“One of my players signed ‘pink’ that night, and I just went in and changed,” Cook said, taking his index and middle finger and positioning them near his chin. In a slow, measured tone, the coach added, “It’s been an incredible year — of highs and lows.”

East Indian yoga in a heated room has helped. “That and a lot of prayer,” he said. Asked the prognosis he was given for Parkinson’s disease, he added, “I was told, ‘In 20 years you’re not going to have much of a quality of life.’ I had to rebuke that statement right off. I say, ‘My healing is right around the corner.’ ” This weekend, Cook will go to the women’s Final Four in San Antonio. On Tuesday, he will become the second Division III coach to receive the prestigious Carol Eckman Award, named for the late West Chester coach who organized the first women’s college basketball championship in 1969. He is much better at sign language today than his first season. Though most of his players are completely deaf and a few, like Faafiti, are hard of hearing, Cook did not use an interpreter for the first three weeks of practice this year. “I’m still learning,” Cook said, chuckling. “I still don’t

understand when Easter asks out of the game. The finger spelling is hard. I just sign: ‘I don’t understand. Keep playing.’ ” Faafiti is cracking up now, smiling. “Funny, huh? I’m a guy and I wound up coaching women. . . . I’m not deaf and now I’m at Gallaudet.”

It all seems to fit in the end. Who knew the man who once

had offices down the hall from Larry Brown, Roy Williams and Jeff Van Gundy at different times during his coaching career would end up just fine with guiding the Gallaudet Bison as far as they can go.

“I like it here — feels like

family, you know,” Cook said. Before you leave the office, there is a quiet moment and an uncomfortable pause and you end up mumbling the old cliche during times like these: “What’s that saying, ‘When one door closes, another opens’?” Cook’s eyes suddenly grow wide and he reaches for the keychain in his pocket. “It’s amazing you said that,” the coach said. He pushes aside the regular keys and finds the knickknack given to him after he lost his job in Houston. “God Never Shuts One Door Without Opening Another,” it reads. Kelly “gave me that key,” said

Kevin Cook, pursing his lips, nodding.

wisem@washpost.com

KKS

D3

If Butler takes out Michigan State, it won’t be an upset

Cinderella’s slipper

doesn’t fit on the fifth-seeded Bulldogs

by Jim Larranaga

There are no words that can describe it. Planning for it can take years, with no guarantee of ultimate success. And there is no better feeling for a coach or a player. Taking your team to the Final Four is like climbing Mount Everest and planting your university’s flag at the top. Butler University’s ascent be- gan in the early 1990s, and I was lucky enough to have been there when the journey began. Back then, I was a young head coach at Bowling Green and was look- ing for ways to improve our pro- gram, so I called Dick Bennett, then the head coach at Wiscon- sin-Green Bay (it was years be- fore he moved to Wisconsin and took the Badgers to the Final Four). We had played his team the previous two seasons and were so thoroughly impressed that I wanted to pick Coach Bennett’s brain. How did he get his players to execute as a team so well? I called Barry Collier, a good friend and then Butler’s bright head coach, and invited him to join me on my trip to Wiscon- sin. That trip proved to be in- valuable for both of us. Our meeting with Coach Ben-

nett had less to do with Xs and Os and more to do with philoso- phy. Not just basketball philoso- phy, but a philosophy about life and a coach’s responsibility to his players. Coach Bennett shared with us his philosophy of “humility, passion, unity, ser- vanthood and thankfulness.” After the meeting, Coach Collier went back to Indianapolis and built his program into a winner. He won so often that other schools started calling him and asking him to take over their programs. Although he loved Butler, he decided to accept the head coaching job at Nebraska in the Big 12.

When Coach Collier left, he recommended his assistant, Thad Matta, for the head coach- ing job. Instinctively, Coach Matta chose to adopt the same philosophy as his predecessor. He had so much success that just a few years later he was lured away by Xavier and now employs that same philosophy at Ohio State, where he led the Buckeyes to the 2007 Final Four. Thad was replaced by his assistant, Todd Lickliter, who after several strong seasons moved on to the University of Iowa.

Collier, in the meantime, left

Nebraska and returned to But- ler as athletic director. With the success that Butler was enjoy- ing it would have been natural for him to conduct a national search to find a replacement for Coach Lickliter. Instead, he

chose to elevate an unknown 30-year-old assistant coach with no head coaching experi- ence. His name: Brad Stevens, who has built his own program based on the same simple phi- losophy — “humility, passion, unity, servanthood and thank- fulness” — that was followed by the coaches who preceded him. This Saturday in the Final

Four, Butler will take on Coach Tom Izzo and the Michigan State Spartans, the same coach and program we at George Ma- son faced in the first round of the 2006 NCAA tournament. Tom has built a tradition of ex- cellence that is the envy of every college basketball coach in the country. He has taken his team to the Final Four in six of the last 12 years, making it to the championship game last season before falling to North Carolina. Tom is at the top of the coaching profession. He is not only a great coach but a great person. He runs a first-class program and is the consummate role model for all the young coaches entering the profession. But how can Butler possibly

compete with Michigan State and move one step closer to be- coming the first true mid-major program to win a national championship since Texas Western in 1966? Well, the Bulldogs have al- ready shocked the experts who predicted they would lose to Texas-El Paso in the first round, to Murray State in the second and to top-seeded Syracuse in the West Region semifinals. In addition to defeating those quality teams, they advanced to the Final Four by knocking off a strong, physical and extremely athletic team in Kansas State. How did they do it? They did it by playing stifling defense, out- rebounding bigger and stronger players, and sharing the ball on offense against both man-to- man and zone defenses far bet- ter than even the most knowl- edgeable basketball analyst could predict. Coach Stevens is just 33 years old but has shown poise and gamesmanship that would even impress James Naismith, our game’s inventor. He has won more games in his first three years than any coach in college basketball history. Can you imagine? This young coach has built not just a good team but a great program. They are not the Cinderella team that we were in 2006. No, these Bulldogs are a No. 5 seed with a winning tradi- tion that began long before this season.

So can Butler defeat Michi- gan State? The answer is yes. Coach Stevens and his players not only have a winning team but a well-established winning philosophy that gives them a chance against anyone.

jlarrana@gmu.edu

The author is the men’s basketball coach at George Mason. He led the Patriots to the Final Four in 2006.

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