Coach K and I

For one week in the each of the summers of 1974 and 1975, I played on a basketball team coached by Mike Krzyzewski. I was attending the Bob Knight Basketball School. (Knight wanted it called a school not a camp, because he saw his work as teaching.) Coach K served then as an assistant coach at Indiana. I was one of the least talented boys there; I doubt he knew my name. I knew his—though nobody, not Knight, probably not even himself, could have predicted the heights he would climb.

Memories grow fuzzy with the years. Some of the stories I tell may not be exactly true. One thing I do remember with total confidence is a thing Coach K did for me. At the time I would have said “a thing he did TO me”. But I have come to understand that he acted out of kindness.

His preferred method of initiating a conversation with players at the Bob Knight Basketball School was to grab a handful of shirt and yank you toward him. He pulled me close after a game and asked where I went to school. “Bloomington North”, I gulped. We stood less than five miles from it. Big school, he said, lots of good players.

He let go of my shirt and looked me in the eye. I could see the wheels turning in his head. Finally he squinted even tighter (it's hard to see his eyes under any circumstance) and said, “You might want to consider another sport.”

I pulled away as fast as I could and stomped back up the hill to the dorm where the players stayed. I might even have cried a little, I honestly don't recall. I know how mad I was. Over the following weeks I tried to use this affront as motivation. But at some level even my adolescent incarnation had enough self-awareness to know he was right. Ultimately, I needed not another sport, but another calling.

Coach K did not. He had an eerie ability to pierce to the heart of things. When we did what he told us to do on the court we succeeded. He took no guff, had no problem getting in players' faces, demanded that we execute what he taught every second of every practice and game. Yet even then he stood apart from Knight in one crucial way. He had the understanding to know when a player could not handle screaming or mind-games. He knew when to let up. I feel this knowledge was rooted in a genuine concern for the player.

When I saw that winning Olympic coaches do not receive gold medals I felt sad for Coach K. Not sorry—nobody needs to feel sorry for a man with a solid marriage, great family and the string of professional milestones he has accomplished. But the man deserves a medal. Maybe someday I'll see him in Bloomington. If I do, maybe I'll pull him over by the shirt and tell him what I think.

Or maybe I won't.