| | | My loyalties were divided at the end. I had attended none of the four schools, nor had any member of my family. Two sons of friends, Michael Dunleavy and Luke Walton (I had known both fathers when they were still players, and the very young Michael had played for several summers on the same beach as my daughter) were playing for the two finalists.
|  | | Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski's program stands apart from all others, on and off the court. |
But it was in all ways as satisfying an end to the college basketball season as one can imagine. If it was not exactly the perfect four teams which made the semi-finals and finals, if Illinois and Stanford might as readily have been there, then it was as close to being the right four as you can get.
In the end Duke won, largely I think because it is Duke, and thus has the most complete program in the country, the one with the most continuity and thus the greatest allure. Even as Duke is winning this year, its players have become part of a recruiting poster for next year's best -- or perhaps more accurately phrased, most desirable -- high school players.
Before the Final Four began, I told friends that I thought it would be the Dukies. The reason was that of the four surviving teams, Duke struck me as having the highest natural plateau --that is, of all the remaining teams only it did not have to play above its natural level, and no one player had to have an exceptional game for it to win.
And its players at the most difficult and emotional moment in any game would know that. All it had to do was stay as close to its norm, sustain its confidence even when another team was making a run, and it would win. The other teams, I suspected, would have to play a bit above their normal game, or perhaps equally important, they would think that they had to play above their natural game.
For a moment there, it looked like I was as wrong as I could be. Midway in the first half against Maryland, Duke, as deep into a meltdown as it was possible to be, was behind by 22 points. The Blue Devils had completely unravelled and were playing their worst basketball of the season, playing a bit soft on defense, taking and missing too many threes, and turning the ball over. Maryland, by contrast, looked physically stronger, and every bit as confident, and based on their three earlier games this year, in which they had played Duke dead even, they were hardly intimidated by a crucial part of the Duke repertoire, its mystique.
For most college teams, a 22-point hole would have been too deep, but it was exactly at that moment that the strengths of the Duke program showed -- the intelligence and supreme confidence of the players.
They did not panic. They did not try to do too much at once. But they did change the tempo of the game, they began to attack the basket more, and they began to squeeze Maryland on defense. Gradually it all turned around and Duke outscored Maryland by more than 30 points the rest of the way.
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For most college teams, a 22-point hole would have been too deep, but it was exactly at that moment that the strengths of the Duke program showed -- the intelligence and supreme confidence of the players. |
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Only a very tough-minded, intelligent college team, with players who have confidence not only in themselves but in their teammates as well could have done that. There is a reason for that -- not many college players would know their teammates that well or have very much confidence in them. For most very talented players these days, the college game, to the degree that it exists at all, is about showcasing self, not learning a team game. Duke is one of those rare places where the program is so strong, the dynamic of team so formidable, that very gifted players also learn the game, and come to respect their teammates.
In most other cases, the players are all too new to each other. The college game, as we all know, is in serious trouble. The Final Four looms larger than ever in the sport now, in no small part because the regular season is weaker than ever. So many teams are without real identities that it becomes harder and harder for the average fan to become emotionally involved in the regular season.
Perhaps one pays attention to the exceptional special matchup of well-known powerful programs, Duke-North Carolina, Stanford-Arizona. But with so many blue-chip players either skipping college completely or showing up for cameo appearances of one or two years, what the college game lacks these days is continuity and, therefore, identity.
Here is a rule of thumb: The more naturally talented the player, the more likely he is to turn pro after one or perhaps at best two introductory years. And the more he is likely to have leverage over the coach who recruited him, and thus be just that much harder to coach. The college game becomes a brief tryout time for the pros, the agent in the wings having more leverage than the coach.
That means that the most gifted players are barely beginning to learn how to play the game (not shoot or dunk, but play the game) before they're gone. Both the pro and the college game suffer accordingly. In the pros, some players begin to understand what the game is about around their fifth year, if they're lucky. And many never do.
That means for the casual television fan like me, with no compelling allegiance to any special college, the most important thing, the chance to watch a player grow and a large group of players coalesce for a certain number of years, is largely gone and there is less and less sense of identity. The prospect of a marquee game between two schools whose players you know -- and matchups you can project -- is largely gone.
The regular season is less important: It is the Final Four for which we wait, hoping to see teams grow in our imagination over those three or four weeks, so that by the end we think we have a feel for them and we are capable of caring about what happens. Otherwise, it's like coming into a movie theater for the last 15 minutes of a western just in time for the final shootout without knowing who is the good guy and who is the bad guy.
In all this, Duke is special, what UCLA, and then North Carolina, used to be. Mike Krzyzewski not only gets more of the very best players he wants than any other coach, but because of the kind of kids he gets and the homes they come from, he is likely to keep them longer than other coaches -- except for that moment at the end of the 1999 season when Duke lost not just Elton Brand, but Corey Maggette and William Avery early. (Krzyzewski was comfortable with Brand's decision and uncomfortable with those of his teammates, not so much because he wanted them for Duke, but because he felt -- quite properly -- that they were not ready for the pros.)
Instead, most Dukies tend to stay the course for three and often four years. It becomes a team with an ongoing identity. Right now the stars seem aligned in the heavens for the Duke program, although success in high-profile American sports in this era is a murderous business, demanding endless hours in jobs that are now 12-months-a-year grinds.
But Duke has almost everything going for it. It plays in a very good conference, against other good programs, so that its games are often on television, which helps in the recruiting. Each big-time victory makes it easier to recruit the next year.
|  | | Senior Shane Battier exhibits the dedication, smarts and talent that keeps Duke on top. |
Years ago, when Marquette won the national championship, a rival coach said of Al McGuire that the thing that was most impressive about him was that he was winning with kids that no other coach at a big-time school really wanted. The reverse is true now about Mike Krzyzewski: Probably more than any other coach, he has a good chance of getting the kids that all the big-time coaches hunger for, the talented, bright kids from very steady homes, who are likely to stay around for three or four years and whose parents are particularly eager to have their sons go to Duke.
This is, after all, a moment when the world of college basketball is unusually sleazy. Every day there are horror stories in newspapers and magazines about recruiting practices in the inner city, essentially out of the netherworld which helps support college ball, the world of playground and high school basketball.
There a certain kind of uniquely predatory human subspecies exists, serving as the midwife between these two worlds, at once connected to the poorest and least successful part of America and yet working for the other world, that of the most successful, wealthiest part of the country, of which the coach is the primary ambassador.
There are rules and fees to all this: so much charged to a college coach or assistant coach to take the high school coach or the local playground fixer into this world and offer him entre; so much to help guarantee that the player shows up at college. More, there are the other predators, the representatives of the sneaker companies and the fly-by-night agents who are already moving in, ready to snatch, if need be, a kid away before college or after his first year. They are the UPS and the Fed Ex of the ghetto basketball world -- they deliver for you.
It is a brutal and inevitably cynical world, funnelling from the ghetto a kid who is already beginning to become cynical, and delivering him to a program that is already cynical (the test is this -- the prime energies go into recruiting kids and keeping them eligible, not into making sure they go to class or graduate), run by a coach who has long ago learned to be cynical and is himself looking for the next big ticket at a larger school.
The tradeoff for the coach is that he gets a very talented kid, who by the nature of the dynamic is not likely to be very coachable, and who is already thinking of turning pro. The great question -- more one for a novelist or a playwright -- is who can use whom more, the player or the coach and the program.
Generally the coach and the program win out. More often than not, they are the superior users. If the NCAA were serious about the idea of student athletes and about education for its kids, it could do two things immediately: It could pass the resolution Bobby Knight long favored, which is that you can only give out as many scholarships as kids graduate from your program each year, or it could include in its contract with whatever television network covers its games, that it is mandatory at the beginning of the broadcast, when the players and coaches are being introduced to listeners, to mention what percentage of kids have graduated from the program over the last five or 10 years.
Duke right now, more than any other program, seems to stand apart from this uniquely corrupt world. That makes Krzyzewski's program something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because it is an uncommonly attractive college, the equal in all ways of any Ivy League school (and not too big), with a big-time basketball program, Krzyzewski can get the talented kids who are also from relatively stable homes -- often two-parent homes, where parents demonstrably do not want to be hustled but want a real college with a real education for their sons.
To the degree that he has to do very much of a selling job, it is on the Richter scale of recruiting con relatively minor. ("I haven't wanted a kid this badly since I recruited Grant Hill," he tells a parent, perhaps even more than once. "I haven't gone after a young man like this since I went after..." Then all he has to do is add the names: Elton Brand. Or Jason Williams. Or Shane Battier. It feeds off itself.)
I would also like to add something in praise of two other programs, Temple and Gonzaga. Both seem to represent something special in college basketball, winning consistently against considerable social-cultural odds.
John Chaney is a tough, crusty man. Recruiting for a relatively poor inner city school in Philadelphia, he knows he does not have the best chance at the blue-chip kids. But every year he turns out basketball teams that play the game exactly as it should be played. His teams are tough, they play ferocious defense, they almost never beat themselves, and they almost always find the weakness in their opponents. In the end, it always takes a school of vastly superior talent to beat them. Watching Temple play this year was sheer pleasure.
So, I might add, was watching Gonzaga. It is no longer eligible for Cinderella status. The Zags are very good, and they play wonderful, careful, intelligent basketball. Sooner or later in most tournaments, they are simply going to run out of gas, playing against teams with vastly greater physical ability -- like Duke. But until that happens, it is just wonderful watching them play the game the way it ought to be played.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam, who has written 12 bestsellers, including Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made, The Best and the Brightest, The Powers That Be, The Reckoning and Summer of '49, will write bi-weekly columns for Page 2.
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