Interesting coaching article from WSJ
Apr 4, 2022 15:09:17 GMT -6
Post by Greg on Apr 4, 2022 15:09:17 GMT -6
40 Years Before He Retired, Mike Krzyzewski Was Nearly Fired
Duke fans in the 1980s wrote to the man who hired Coach K about firing him. He kept his coach—and their letters.
Mike Krzyzewski was young, unproven, inexperienced and terrified when his boss summoned him early one morning in January 1984. He thought he was getting fired.
Duke athletic director Tom Butters was feeling pressure from alumni, fans and donors to do something about this coach with a funny last name who was underperforming three years after Butters took a risk on him. If he were coaching today, Krzyzewski probably would have been canned. Even then, it was the safe decision, and it would have been the popular one.
But what happened in that meeting would change the course of basketball history. Butters wanted to see Krzyzewski for exactly the reason that he feared: He wanted to rip up his contract. Except he wasn’t firing him. He was giving the coach an extension.
It turned out to be the right call.
In the alternate universe where Butters had simply fired the coach, the entire sport of basketball would look different four decades later. But his unwavering faith in Krzyzewski was rewarded with more than 1,000 wins, 60 NBA players and five national championships by the time he coached his final game on Saturday night.
How close was the winningest coach in men’s basketball to getting fired with a losing record?
“He was a heartbeat away,” Butters said in a 2011 interview, five years before he died. “If I had dropped dead, I’m almost damn certain that my replacement wouldn’t have followed suit. But my replacement also wouldn’t have had the advantage of knowing what I knew.”
The backlash he faced was so fierce that Butters liked to remind people in the following years that he kept the evidence: a stack of scathing letters he received from alumni, fans and boosters.
What happened to those letters remains a mystery. Butters said he kept them in a box at home, but his widow, Lynn Butters, said they were not in her possession. A spokesman for Krzyzewski had no idea where they might be. Other Duke officials had their own theories that hit dead ends.
But tucked inside obscure files within the school’s archives, a handful of those letters and Butters’s replies exist. They offer a peek inside his mailbox and his mind when Krzyzewski’s job was at stake.
“I wish your letter could have contained something more positive, but I understand your concern over the basketball situation,” Butters wrote one donor in 1982. “I can only assure you that the program is in solid hands with Coach Krzyzewski and that in the very near future our basketball program will once again be successful. We are sorry this valley had to come, but it came and we’ll simply work our way back to the top.”
To an unusually courteous note from a Duke economics professor, Butters wrote: “I have had the privilege of working for Duke University and its athletic program for nearly 16 years. At the very beginning I started two files: one contains letters of discontent, anger and threat; the other contains letters of appreciation. It is my understanding that a new wing is being considered in the archives to accommodate the former, and your letter looks somewhat lonely placed carefully in a manila envelope.”
Krzyzewski’s hiring prompted one such letter bound for the special wing. It began “Why? Why? Why?” and ended with a plea for the athletic director’s head on a platter. “BUTTERS MUST GO!” the Duke fan wrote.
“I am in receipt of your April 26 letter, along with several others which were received this morning,” Butters responded. “Yours was not among the most disturbing.”
It’s almost impressive how spectacularly wrong they were, but it was impossible to know at the time if Butters would be right.
“There comes a point when a decision is made that really affects everything for a long period of time,” said Dan Hill, a Butters friend. “That one really courageous decision has resulted in things that even Tom or Mike could not have ever imagined.”
It was hard for anyone to imagine his success during Krzyzewski’s early years at Duke, which started rocky and cratered with the most lopsided loss in school history to end 1983. After two years with 10-17 and 11-17 records, Duke started the next season 14-1, until three straight losses to ranked conference teams, including one to rival North Carolina and another by 33 points, plunged Krzyzewski’s team back into the familiar tumult.
The timing was conspicuous for an unscheduled meeting with the athletic director when Krzyzewski walked across Cameron Indoor Stadium and popped into Butters’s office.
“You wanted to see me?” he said.
“We’ve got a problem,” Butters said. “We’ve got a public that doesn’t know how good you are. We’ve got a press that is too damn dumb to tell them how good you are. And right now I have a coach that I’m concerned doesn’t know how good he is.”
Butters opened his drawer and pulled out a five-year contract. Krzyzewski cried.
“Tom, you don’t have to do this,” he said.
“On the contrary,” Butters recalled saying. “I not only have to do it. I have to do it today.”
In the interview nearly three decades later, Butters added: “I did it much to the disappointment and consternation of my alumni—all of whom I heard from.”
The new deal was announced the day before Krzyzewski lost a fourth straight game to drop his record at Duke to 52-52. That winning percentage of .500 was the lowest it would be for the rest of his career.
One of the first Duke alumni who supported Butters after he extended Krzyzewski was a lonely, sympathetic voice, based on the athletic director’s response: “I hope every athletic director has one Art Nash in his community just to pick him up from time to time. I agree with you, obviously, concerning Coach K and I think time will permit him to bring Duke basketball back into the national picture. It may happen sooner than a lot of folks believe.”
In the meantime, the criticism that most bothered Krzyzewski came from disgruntled members of the Iron Dukes, the school’s booster club. They called themselves the Concerned Iron Dukes.
“What the hell were they concerned about?” Krzyzewski said in 2004. “They were concerned about me. Because they didn’t think I could do the job. Well, obviously they were wrong. Then you never hear from those people.”
Some of those people would like to be heard from. One of them is a major donor named K.D. Kennedy, a leader of the Concerned Iron Dukes who wants to set the record straight. What concerned these fans was the state of the football team, he says. Krzyzewski’s future wasn’t on their agenda. “It was never mentioned,” Kennedy says. “He needs to get off of that, because it’s just not true.”
He could only guess why Krzyzewski would blame the Concerned Iron Dukes all these years later.
“He had to have a devil,” Kennedy said, “and that’s a good name to have as a devil.”
The Concerned Iron Dukes had many reasons to be seething. It wasn’t just Krzyzewski struggling as nearby rivals North Carolina and North Carolina State won championships in 1982 and 1983. They were appalled that Butters fired football coach Red Wilson after a 1982 season that ended with a win over UNC. And what infuriated people around town was his decision to ban smoking in the basketball arena. “You’re talking about a school in a town that was built on tobacco,” said Johnny Moore, Duke’s assistant sports information director at the time.
Lynn Butters took special pleasure in remembering another reason that so many Duke fans were skeptical of the coach.
“They were concerned that Mike played this man-to-man defense,” she says.
It turns out there was a reason that Krzyzewski’s man-to-man defense may not have been as effective as he desired in 1982 and 1983: Duke was trying to stop a UNC player by the name of Michael Jordan.
“Later on, I had to say to them in a very innocent manner: What do you think of his man-to-man defense now?” she said.
The Duke fans who wanted him gone finally got their wish on Saturday night when the team lost to North Carolina in the Final Four. It just took close to a half-century. Krzyzewski knows better than anybody that he was in position to retire only because one person hired him and refused to fire him.
“The guy who had the most belief in me was Tom Butters,” Krzyzewski said before his final season. “He gave me this opportunity. After three years, most people wanted that opportunity to go to someone else. I guess that’s a nice way of saying that they wanted to get rid of me.”
Duke fans in the 1980s wrote to the man who hired Coach K about firing him. He kept his coach—and their letters.
Mike Krzyzewski was young, unproven, inexperienced and terrified when his boss summoned him early one morning in January 1984. He thought he was getting fired.
Duke athletic director Tom Butters was feeling pressure from alumni, fans and donors to do something about this coach with a funny last name who was underperforming three years after Butters took a risk on him. If he were coaching today, Krzyzewski probably would have been canned. Even then, it was the safe decision, and it would have been the popular one.
But what happened in that meeting would change the course of basketball history. Butters wanted to see Krzyzewski for exactly the reason that he feared: He wanted to rip up his contract. Except he wasn’t firing him. He was giving the coach an extension.
It turned out to be the right call.
In the alternate universe where Butters had simply fired the coach, the entire sport of basketball would look different four decades later. But his unwavering faith in Krzyzewski was rewarded with more than 1,000 wins, 60 NBA players and five national championships by the time he coached his final game on Saturday night.
How close was the winningest coach in men’s basketball to getting fired with a losing record?
“He was a heartbeat away,” Butters said in a 2011 interview, five years before he died. “If I had dropped dead, I’m almost damn certain that my replacement wouldn’t have followed suit. But my replacement also wouldn’t have had the advantage of knowing what I knew.”
The backlash he faced was so fierce that Butters liked to remind people in the following years that he kept the evidence: a stack of scathing letters he received from alumni, fans and boosters.
What happened to those letters remains a mystery. Butters said he kept them in a box at home, but his widow, Lynn Butters, said they were not in her possession. A spokesman for Krzyzewski had no idea where they might be. Other Duke officials had their own theories that hit dead ends.
But tucked inside obscure files within the school’s archives, a handful of those letters and Butters’s replies exist. They offer a peek inside his mailbox and his mind when Krzyzewski’s job was at stake.
“I wish your letter could have contained something more positive, but I understand your concern over the basketball situation,” Butters wrote one donor in 1982. “I can only assure you that the program is in solid hands with Coach Krzyzewski and that in the very near future our basketball program will once again be successful. We are sorry this valley had to come, but it came and we’ll simply work our way back to the top.”
To an unusually courteous note from a Duke economics professor, Butters wrote: “I have had the privilege of working for Duke University and its athletic program for nearly 16 years. At the very beginning I started two files: one contains letters of discontent, anger and threat; the other contains letters of appreciation. It is my understanding that a new wing is being considered in the archives to accommodate the former, and your letter looks somewhat lonely placed carefully in a manila envelope.”
Krzyzewski’s hiring prompted one such letter bound for the special wing. It began “Why? Why? Why?” and ended with a plea for the athletic director’s head on a platter. “BUTTERS MUST GO!” the Duke fan wrote.
“I am in receipt of your April 26 letter, along with several others which were received this morning,” Butters responded. “Yours was not among the most disturbing.”
It’s almost impressive how spectacularly wrong they were, but it was impossible to know at the time if Butters would be right.
“There comes a point when a decision is made that really affects everything for a long period of time,” said Dan Hill, a Butters friend. “That one really courageous decision has resulted in things that even Tom or Mike could not have ever imagined.”
It was hard for anyone to imagine his success during Krzyzewski’s early years at Duke, which started rocky and cratered with the most lopsided loss in school history to end 1983. After two years with 10-17 and 11-17 records, Duke started the next season 14-1, until three straight losses to ranked conference teams, including one to rival North Carolina and another by 33 points, plunged Krzyzewski’s team back into the familiar tumult.
The timing was conspicuous for an unscheduled meeting with the athletic director when Krzyzewski walked across Cameron Indoor Stadium and popped into Butters’s office.
“You wanted to see me?” he said.
“We’ve got a problem,” Butters said. “We’ve got a public that doesn’t know how good you are. We’ve got a press that is too damn dumb to tell them how good you are. And right now I have a coach that I’m concerned doesn’t know how good he is.”
Butters opened his drawer and pulled out a five-year contract. Krzyzewski cried.
“Tom, you don’t have to do this,” he said.
“On the contrary,” Butters recalled saying. “I not only have to do it. I have to do it today.”
In the interview nearly three decades later, Butters added: “I did it much to the disappointment and consternation of my alumni—all of whom I heard from.”
The new deal was announced the day before Krzyzewski lost a fourth straight game to drop his record at Duke to 52-52. That winning percentage of .500 was the lowest it would be for the rest of his career.
One of the first Duke alumni who supported Butters after he extended Krzyzewski was a lonely, sympathetic voice, based on the athletic director’s response: “I hope every athletic director has one Art Nash in his community just to pick him up from time to time. I agree with you, obviously, concerning Coach K and I think time will permit him to bring Duke basketball back into the national picture. It may happen sooner than a lot of folks believe.”
In the meantime, the criticism that most bothered Krzyzewski came from disgruntled members of the Iron Dukes, the school’s booster club. They called themselves the Concerned Iron Dukes.
“What the hell were they concerned about?” Krzyzewski said in 2004. “They were concerned about me. Because they didn’t think I could do the job. Well, obviously they were wrong. Then you never hear from those people.”
Some of those people would like to be heard from. One of them is a major donor named K.D. Kennedy, a leader of the Concerned Iron Dukes who wants to set the record straight. What concerned these fans was the state of the football team, he says. Krzyzewski’s future wasn’t on their agenda. “It was never mentioned,” Kennedy says. “He needs to get off of that, because it’s just not true.”
He could only guess why Krzyzewski would blame the Concerned Iron Dukes all these years later.
“He had to have a devil,” Kennedy said, “and that’s a good name to have as a devil.”
The Concerned Iron Dukes had many reasons to be seething. It wasn’t just Krzyzewski struggling as nearby rivals North Carolina and North Carolina State won championships in 1982 and 1983. They were appalled that Butters fired football coach Red Wilson after a 1982 season that ended with a win over UNC. And what infuriated people around town was his decision to ban smoking in the basketball arena. “You’re talking about a school in a town that was built on tobacco,” said Johnny Moore, Duke’s assistant sports information director at the time.
Lynn Butters took special pleasure in remembering another reason that so many Duke fans were skeptical of the coach.
“They were concerned that Mike played this man-to-man defense,” she says.
It turns out there was a reason that Krzyzewski’s man-to-man defense may not have been as effective as he desired in 1982 and 1983: Duke was trying to stop a UNC player by the name of Michael Jordan.
“Later on, I had to say to them in a very innocent manner: What do you think of his man-to-man defense now?” she said.
The Duke fans who wanted him gone finally got their wish on Saturday night when the team lost to North Carolina in the Final Four. It just took close to a half-century. Krzyzewski knows better than anybody that he was in position to retire only because one person hired him and refused to fire him.
“The guy who had the most belief in me was Tom Butters,” Krzyzewski said before his final season. “He gave me this opportunity. After three years, most people wanted that opportunity to go to someone else. I guess that’s a nice way of saying that they wanted to get rid of me.”