LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- To North Carolina fans, he was Rat Face.
To the U.S. Olympic basketball movement, he was Mr. Gold Medal.
To Kentucky fans, he was the guy who didn’t punish Christian Laettner or get punished for recruiting Corey Maggette.
To Bellarmine fans, he was applauded for bringing the Knights to Cameron Indoor Stadium twice.
To reporters at the Duke student newspaper, he was the guy who bristled at occasional questions.
To this former reporter from the Indiana Daily Student, he was the graduate assistant Indiana coach who sent a brownie and milk to my hotel room on a Friday night in Evanston, Illinois.
You know who he is. Everybody knows who he is. He’s Mike Krzyzewski, who earned the first row (and for me, first chair) in the discussion about the best and the brightest college basketball coaches in history.
He rolled into Durham, North Carolina, from West Point on March 18, 1980, as a guy with a Polish name nobody could spell. After he turns 75 in February, Coach K will roll into retirement at the end of the 2021-22 season as the guy who turned Duke into the Yankees, Celtics or Microsoft.
You might love him. You might loathe him. But you will have an opinion on him and his 1,097 victories, five national championships, dozen Final Fours, three gold medal-winning teams and consistent collisions with the teams in the Kentuckiana area.
Locally, only Louisville holds bragging rights against Coach K, beating him nine times in 16 games with at least one farewell appearance at the KFC Yum! Center ahead next season. Coach K is 7-3 against Indiana, 6-2 against Kentucky and 1-0 against Bellarmine.
That’s 35 games (21-14) that provided 35,000 memories.
Tobacco Road is where Coach K planted his system and thrived in the shadow of Dean Smith and Jim Valvano. But don’t overlook how much his riveting encounters with Louisville, Kentucky and Indiana contributed to his ability to build the Duke brand.
Coach K’s first crack at winning a national title came in 1986 at Reunion Arena in Dallas. Duke took over for North Carolina as the nation’s No. 1 ranked team over the final three weeks of the season. Louisville had lost seven games, including a 12-point stinker against North Carolina State in mid-February.
Duke had only lost twice, and few people outside the 502 area code expected the Blue Devils to lose a third time. Denny Crum, Pervis Ellison, Billy Thompson and Milt Wagner didn’t have time for the Duke mystique.
The Cards won their second national title, 72-69. After the game, Indiana coach Bob Knight, the guy who mentored Coach K as a West Point player, saw Crum and offered lukewarm congratulations that included Knight’s observation Duke was the better team.
“Not tonight they weren’t,” Crum famously replied.
And so it was. Although the Cards won, that game became a turning point for both programs.
For Louisville, it was the fourth Final Four appearance in seven seasons. The Cardinals didn't visit another Final Four until Rick Pitino took them in 2005.
Nobody could keep Duke out of the party. The Blue Devils showed up in 1988. And 1989. And 1990. And 1991, when Coach K, Laettner, Bobby Hurley and Grant Hill toppled unbeaten UNLV at the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis for the program’s first national title.
Look out.
Kentucky and Indiana entered Coach K’s world not long after that. Duke’s impossible 104-103 overtime victory against Rick Pitino and Kentucky’s Unforgettables at The Spectrum in Philadelphia belongs at the top of any list of the greatest college basketball games ever played.
Jamal Mashburn scoring from everywhere. Laettner’s absurdly unpunished stomp on Aminu Timberlake. John Pelphrey going toe-to-toe with Grant Hill. Sean Woods’ poised determination to make what should have been the game-winner.
You know the rest. 2.1 seconds. Kentucky not guarding the inbounds pass. Hill. Laettner. Pelphrey. Feldhaus. 10-10. 10-10. 30 points.
For me, the footnote that should never be forgotten was Coach K making his way to the radio broadcasting spot of Cawood Ledford, who was calling his last Kentucky game. I was standing 5 feet away when Krzyzewski asked for a microphone and headset so he could speak directly to Kentucky fans about his admiration for the UK players as well as for Ledford. Talk about championship stuff.
And it served as a jarring contrast to what happened a week later in Minneapolis. This time, for only the second time in his career, Coach K was matched against Indiana and Knight.
That was a Duke team trying to become the first back-to-back NCAA champions since John Wooden and UCLA in 1973.
That was an Indiana team with Calbert Cheaney, Greg Graham, Alan Henderson and Damon Bailey, trying to get Knight even with Adolph Rupp as a winner of four NCAA titles. Knight was The Force in college basketball.
Not anymore.
Duke won by three. In Bloomington, that season will always be remembered as a missing banner because of the in-game friction between Knight and official Ted Valentine that resulted in a technical foul.
The friction was only beginning. After the game, the basketball world gasped as Knight gave Coach K a blow-by handshake and then ignored him in a hallway while talking to Duke’s players.
You never knew what triggered Knight’s ire. John Feinstein, a friend of Coach K’s who wrote a best-selling book about Knight, speculated that the IU coach was annoyed Coach K had not given him sufficient credit.
The friendship faded but, fortunately, was saved. Knight was there in Madison Square Garden in 2011 to hug Krzyzewski when he set the record for most wins as a college basketball coach.
I could go on — and on.
There are the stories about Kentucky’s remarkable comeback from a 17-point deficit against Duke to win the 1998 Southeast Regional, about Louisville’s start-to-finish dominance of Duke in the 2013 regional final in Indianapolis, to Coach K borrowing John Calipari’s one-and-done playbook to win his fifth national title in Indianapolis in 2015, to Krzyzewski inviting Bellarmine to Durham for two games, the first an exhibition, the second the first Division I game played by Scott Davenport’s program.
It’s been some run by Krzyzewski — and so entertaining that so much of it has run through Louisville, Kentucky, Indiana and Bellarmine.
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