As a guard, in his junior year in high school, Mike Krzyzewski stopped shooting. A few bad games for Archbishop Weber were enough to convince him to focus on distributing the ball and playing defense, but you could forget letting it fly.
That’s when his high school coach Al Ostrowski told Krzyzewski that for every time he touched the ball and didn’t shoot, he’d have to run a lap. Krzyzewski scored 30 that night.
More important than the points, or the two scoring titles he won for Chicago’s Catholic League or the appointment to West Point a year later where his mentorship from Bob Knight would define a legendary coaching career, was the lesson. What can happen when a player reaches beyond his own expectations.
For the past 40 years, five at Army and 35 at Duke, Krzyzewski has taught players to reach past logical limits. His first star recruit, Johnny Dawkins, learned it, losing to Ralph Sampson and Virginia by 43 points in 1983 and playing for the national championship three years later.
Christian Laettner embodied it, sinking the shot with 2.1 seconds left in overtime at the 1992 regional final to beat Kentucky after Krzyzewski told players in the huddle they were going to win. Fifteen years later, freshman guard Jon Scheyer stopped hanging his head after one of four consecutive losses long enough to look incredulously at Krzyzewski when he said their freshman class would win a national championship before it was all over. In 2010, they did.
“That was a moment I needed to know he believed in me and believed in us as a group,” Scheyer said. “Him saying that meant the world.”
Now the coach who prodded his teams to four national championships is one step from a place no men’s Division I college basketball has been — 1,000 wins. He and No. 5 Duke will take their first crack at it Sunday against St. John’s at Madison Square Garden, the venue where he broke Knight’s record for wins by a men’s Division I coach three years ago.
He keeps pushing past limits. As usual, he wants more.
“It’ll be a heck of a thing when and if it’s done, but it’s not a championship,” Krzyzewski said recently. “So I’d rather deal in the moment and not in a 40-year moment. You don’t win like that by being in the moment of a single-game accomplishment, you do it in the accomplishment of what you’re trying to do for an entire season. I don’t want it to be the season.”
Like Dawkins, Jay Bilas, now an ESPN analyst, was a member of Krzyzewski’s second recruiting class at Duke. He was a 6-foot-8 prospect from Los Angeles and getting recruited by other coaches on that all-time win list, ones who were a lot more familiar. Jim Boeheim, second in wins behind Krzyzewski, was an established head coach at Syracuse. Lute Olson, No. 10 now, had been to the Final Four with Iowa in 1980. Ted Owens had taken Kansas to two Final Fours. Yet Krzyzewski caught Bilas’ attention.
By NCAA rule, there were times coaches could watch him practice from 10 feet away, but weren’t allowed to speak to him. “Most of the coaches talked,” Bilas said. “He never did.”
“Somebody called my mom, a coach, and said ‘Mrs. Bilas have you ever heard of Appalachian State University,’” Bilas recalled. “And my mom said, ‘Well no, I can’t say I have.’ He said, ‘Well they just beat Duke last night. Jay is considering Duke and look what he’s about to put himself into.’ Coach K never did that about anybody else. He’s never a negative recruiter in any way.”
Other coaches told Bilas if he went to Duke, he’d have to play center rather than his natural forward position. So he asked Krzyzewksi about it.
“He said, ‘For a year, yeah,’” Bilas said. “He said, ‘We don’t have anybody that can play it better than you, if you’re as good as I think you are.’ He said, ‘I’ll recruit a big guy. You’ll get a chance to move back to your natural position.’ He didn’t dodge it. Other guys came across as salespeople, and he never did that with me. I did play center for four years, but it wasn’t his fault. I trusted that.”
Krzyzewski turned a doubt into a positive, and Bilas bought in, bulking up by 20 pounds before his junior year. Duke recruited other big men, but none who could beat out Bilas. That class of Bilas, Dawkins, Mark Alarie and David Henderson took Krzyzewski to his first Final Four in 1986 where Duke lost to Louisville in the final.
Scheyer, now an assistant at Duke, was heavily recruited and showing star qualities the minute he got to campus. But he kept getting called into Krzyzewski’s office, even as a senior when he was leading the team with 18 points per game.
“Several times he brought me in, I was caught off-guard because he came at me pretty hard,” Scheyer said. “He basically told me that I needed to be better and I wasn’t doing the job that I owed to my teammates.”
As an assistant, he sees Krzyzewski still doing the same things.
“He’s able to draw so much from a guy,” Scheyer said. “To have (a player) run through a wall for you is what Coach does the best.”
Scheyer said players know he’s not asking them to do anything more than what he would do if he could. He might not do it at 67 with two artificial hips, but in his early 60s, when Scheyer was a player, Krzyzewski dove on a ball in the locker room to make a point.
“Basically his whole speech was, ‘We need to play hard,’” Scheyer said. “He had a manager throw the ball on the ground and this is in a suit, he dove on the floor for the loose ball. He gets up, said ‘This is my ball. This is our ball. No one is taking it from us.’ And we all yelled and ran out there and won the game.”
Krzyzewski has always been known as a good motivator, and in Bilas’ mind, that’s one way he keeps growing as a coach. That’s in part because Krzyzewski keeps stretching his own boundaries. He’s spent the past nine years coaching USA Basketball.
Bilas said he got goose bumps at one of Krzyzewski’s fantasy camps, listening to his presentation about motivating the USA team to win Olympic gold.
Many of those NBA players never went to college, never had a fight song. So he created a highlight package of USA players over a recording of the national anthem sung by Marvin Gaye before the 1983 NBA All-Star game.
“He explained to them, ‘This is our fight song,’” Bilas said. “He said, ‘Our fight song is going to be played twice, before the game and when we win the gold medal.’ It was really powerful. There’s no amount of money where that doesn’t resonate with you. He didn’t lecture them. He made them feel that. It grabs you on a totally different level.”
Bilas took part in an ESPN special about Krzyzewski’s approaching milestone. Sitting midcourt at Cameron Indoor Stadium with a half-dozen former players such as Laettner and Jeff Capel, Jay Williams and Scheyer, Bilas said he thought Krzyzewski was a better coach now than he was when Bilas was a player. That drew some skepticism from Laettner, but it’s a compliment to a man always coaching people to get better.
“I always wondered growing up in LA, what it’s like to play for a guy like John Wooden,” Bilas said. “Well I know now. I know.”
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