The one thing he could never be was invulnerable, and that fact made every wound a mortal wound.
at the time that UNLV—whose players were intimately friendly with a man convicted of fixing horse races and college basketball games, and which had gone undefeated through 34 games that season—was shaving points against a team that it was sure, from past experience, couldn’t compete with it. If so, it got away from them. Duke won by 2 points, then beat Kansas in the final.
Duke’s program was built to fill the opposite angle of the NCAA racket from the sharps and outlaws, to balance things out: Krzyzewski was the person willing to treat—and promote—as a moral code whatever restrictions the athletic association might wish to put on the working conditions of its unpaid employees.
, until the supply of NBA-caliber players willing to serve a four-year apprenticeship had dwindled so far that Krzyzewski suddenly could see the virtue in offering two- or one-year terms to his scholar-athletes.Back in those first years of real championship success, Duke seemed to be attracting more and more players who wanted to be the stomping Laettner, rather than the pass-slinging Hill.
. The pain became manageable again after a few months of rest, during which Smith and Wallace opted out of their junior years to become the No. 1 and No. 4 picks in the NBA draft, respectively.The episode passed, and Duke got good again, and again, and again. Maryland improved too, but Krzyzewski’s teams would beat the Terps over and over, in horrible and humiliating and sometimes overtly rigged ways.
, swiped the ball, and beat Duke downcourt for a layup in the final second. It was a perfect little parable; Maryland went on to win the national championship.Maryland has never won another one. College conferences mutated and spread; the ACC became some sprawling thing with Notre Dame, Boston College, and Syracuse in it—Louisville, even—and Maryland, in the doomed pursuit of football success nobody wanted, joined the now-14-member conference still called the Big 10.
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