Duke Vs North Carolina In Final Four Saturday Reveals A State Divided By The Letter, ‘K’
By Willie Drye for LVSportsBiz.com
CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA — A ringing telephone kept interrupting bartender Justus Heizer’s conversation with an early lunch customer at Four Corners, a basketball-themed restaurant and bar overlooking a corner of the University of North Carolina campus in downtown Chapel Hill. The calls were from basketball fans wanting to enter a drawing for seats at 17 tables for Saturday night’s big game against the Carolina Tar Heels’ arch rival, the Duke Blue Devils.
Heizer said he’d been busy answering the phone since the drawing was announced. The management of Four Corners—named for a bedeviling slowdown offense devised by fabled UNC coach Dean Smith—set up the lottery to help control the overflow crowd expected to watch the game on seven giant flatscreen TVs overlooking the bar.
Duke and Carolina have been playing basketball against each other for more than a century. During the past six decades or so, many of their games have been high profile contests. But there’s never been a game like this one. The two teams, whose campuses are only about 11 miles apart, will be squaring off to determine who plays in Monday night’s NCAA championship game.
“It’ll be legendary. One for the history books,” Heizer said after dropping another lottery entry into a plastic box near the cash register. Hanging on the wall above the register was a framed cartoon depicting Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski as the Blue Devils’ mascot, complete with horns, trident, hooves and pointed tail.
A visitor to Chapel Hill would’ve been hard-pressed to find a flattering depiction of Coach K or anything complimentary about Duke University. A store selling Tar Heel memorabilia next door to Four Corners displayed T-shirts reading “Breathe If You Hate Duke” and “Anyone But Duke.”
On the picturesque oak-studded North Campus of the nation’s first state university, students went quietly about their work. The only basketball stories in The Daily Tar Heel—UNC’s student newspaper—reported the women’s team’s tournament loss to South Carolina.
But there were signs of the approaching apocalyptic showdown in the Student Bookstore. Baseball caps touting the Tar Heels’ unexpected appearance in the 2022 Final Four were prominently displayed, as were copies of To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever, Carolina alumnus Will Blythe’s insider’s take on the basketball rivalry that sends sports programming marketers into ecstatic frenzies whenever the two teams square off.
On the cover of Blythe’s book is a caricature of Krzyzewski with distinctly rat-like features.
Coach K’s presence in the upcoming showdown adds an extra layer of dramatic irony to the tournament that undoubtedly is prompting additional squeals of joy from marketers. After 42 years, 1,202 victories, and five national championships, this will be his last NCAA roundup.
In the other corner, coach Hubert Davis—who played under the fabled Smith—has taken the Tar Heels to the brink of supremacy in his first season as North Carolina’s head coach. Who can resist such a story? The clever rookie of impeccable basketball pedigree versus college basketball’s all-time winner. The presence of two more basketball bluebloods—the University of Kansas and Villanova University—in the Final Four field adds still more glitter. The four finalists have won a total of 19 NCAA championships, with Carolina’s six titles leading the group.
Two of the finalists—North Carolina and Kansas—share basketball DNA that goes back to the invention of the game by James Naismith in 1891. Naismith became KU’s first coach and eventually coached a clever player named Forrest “Phog” Allen, who later became head coach at Kansas. Allen coached a cerebral player at Kansas named Dean Smith from 1949 to 1953. Smith became head coach at North Carolina in 1961. He hired Roy Williams as an assistant coach. Williams became head coach at Kansas around the time a sharpshooting guard named Hubert Davis enrolled as a freshman at UNC. A few years after Dean Smith retired in 1997, Roy Williams came back to Chapel Hill as head coach. Williams hired Davis as an assistant, and when he retired last year, Davis was named head coach at Carolina.
Krzyzewski’s image is displayed with more respect in Durham. A skillful artist has painted a portrait of K on a bridge abutment on the Duke campus with the quote, “Don’t worry about losing. Think about winning.”
Krzyzewski’s public statements and behavior during the past 42 years have sparked heated conversations among North Carolinians. And the fanfare surrounding his announcement that this would be his last season has added still more zest to the discussions. Carolina fans were ecstatic when the Tar Heels beat the Blue Devils in Krzyzewski’s final home game at Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium a few weeks ago.
“I think a lot of fans’ ‘hatred’ of K is because of this whole ‘victory lap’ during his final season, as opposed to the way Dean Smith and Roy Williams chose to (quietly) retire,” said Ron Stutts, recently retired after a 43-year career at Chapel Hill’s WCHL radio, flagship station for the Tar Heel Sports Network.
Stutts was surprised at Krzyzewski’s comments after his team’s loss to UNC in Cameron a few weeks ago.
“Personally, I felt a little bad for his young players, who had to feel the weight of the world on their shoulders, and then when he said what happened was “unacceptable,” of course, that came across as throwing his players under the bus,” Stutts said.
Joe Thoma, who came to Duke as a grad student around the same time that Krzyzewski became the Blue Devils’ coach in 1980, said Coach K “brought a certain churlishness” to Durham. Thoma recalled “an infamous profanity-laced tirade” that Krzyzewski unleashed against the staff of Duke’s student newspaper, The Chronicle, because of coverage of the basketball program that he considered unfavorable.
Duke fans picked up on Coach K’s intensity. “We had the Duke fans—Cameron Crazies—building their reputation as an unruly, down-and-dirty mob, and Krzyzewski encouraging them, early on,” Thoma recalled.
Others, however, saw a different side of Krzyzewski’s personality.
Van Goodman, a retired paramedic, recalled the moment that “K won me over” when his employer was providing emergency medical service for an Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament in Charlotte.
“While exiting the floor, he paused to thank us for being there,” Goodman said. “He was the only coach to do so.”
North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green, who teaches poetry classes at Duke and is a writer in residence at UNC, met Krzyzewski early in his Duke career when he came into a Durham shop where she was working as a sales clerk. Green helped Krzyzewski select a gift for his wife. The coach became a regular customer, she said.
“I found him to be very gentle,” Green said. “We never talked basketball. My experience with him was nowhere near the basketball court.”
Stutts, the retired broadcaster, echoed Green’s perception of Krzyzewski in private.
“I have actually met Coach K and found him to be very nice,” Stutts said. “At least, he was to me. Very intense, and mostly serious, but it was all positive.”
Krzyzewski’s public persona will be very much on display for the next few days, and North Carolina will be intensely focused on the events. There will be spirited disagreements, and some of those disputes probably will last for years.
Still, Green, the poet, sees a sort of unity in the rivalry’s fervor among North Carolina residents of all ages, ethnicities, and incomes.
“I love the people’s passion, and the rigidity they construct,” she said. “It crosses so many boundaries.”
Willie Drye is an award-winning author and journalist in Wilmington, North Carolina. He studied English and Journalism at the University of North Carolina and hopes the Tar Heels chase the Blue Devils back to Durham with their pointed tails tucked tightly between their legs.
