April 7, 1989 …
For at least the fourth time since midnight, Bill Foster looked at his watch. “I have to get going,” he said—again—thinking about the wake-up call that was now only five hours away.
Bruce Bell, sitting a few feet from Foster, put his beer on the table and shook his head vehemently. His voice, high-pitched under the most serious of circumstances, was half an octave higher after an evening of drinking. “You can’t leave yet, Coach,” he insisted. “We haven’t even called H yet.” Foster, who had been sipping white wine while everyone around him was guzzling beer, smiled. Harold Morrison—H—had been recruited by Foster out of West Orange, New Jersey, in 1975. At the time, the coach thought H would help him turn the basketball program at Duke University around.
As it turned out, Morrison had been a key man in Duke’s rise as a basketball power. But not in the way that either he or Foster had imagined or wanted. Now, however, ten years later, Foster didn’t remember the problems and frustrations—his or Morrison’s. Like the other men in the room, he thought not about Harold Morrison, the unhappy senior, but about H, the team wit of 1978.
“See if you can get him, Juice,” Foster said, calling Bell by his nickname. Bell was on his feet heading for the phone almost before Foster’s sentence was finished. It had been almost ten years since he had spoken to Harold Morrison, yet calling him seemed the most natural thing in the world.
When Morrison picked up the phone, Bell, in a voice rapidly approaching soprano, said, “God-dog, Willie hit me in the head with an elbow.”
Morrison, three thousand miles away, said, “Excuse me?” Bell repeated himself, squealing, “God-dog, Willie hit me in the head with an elbow.”
Morrison got it the second time, remembering the line and the voice. “No! No way!” he screamed. “It can’t be! Juice? Is that you, Juice?” Then he stopped himself. “Of course it’s you. No one else in the world can talk like that.” Bell was dissolving in laughter. Foster took the phone. “H, guess who?” he said. And then, a little nervously, “It’s Coach Foster.”
“Coach!” Morrison seemed genuinely happy to hear Foster’s voice. The bad memories went into recess, at least for the moment. Foster was laughing by now, his mind off his watch, the wake-up call, and the crucial group of recruits waiting for him back at Northwestern. “We ate dinner at The Kanki in your honor, H,” he said, a reference to a restaurant where Morrison had twice become desperately sick while a Duke undergraduate. Shifting gears quickly, as the men around him smiled, he said, “You’ve got a family now, don’t you?”
“Four kids,” Morrison replied. “Two are my wife’s by her first marriage. I guess you could say I got them in the draft.”
Morrison’s old teammates were now lining up to take the phone from Foster. “Got to go, H. There’s some other guys here who want to talk to you. In fact, I think this next guy wants to try to straighten you out.” As he handed the phone to Jim Suddath, who was two months away from being ordained as a minister, Foster turned to Bell. “Are you going to try to get Gray, too?”
Bell was stunned. If there was a player Foster had coached in six years at Duke who he would have reason not to want to talk to it was Steve Gray. If Morrison’s college basketball career had been one of broken dreams, Gray’s had been a nightmare. Every person in the room had two distinct memories of Gray: the pass off the rim and the dribble off the foot. It may have been unfair, but it was true. Even Gray, thinking back to those two heartbreaking disasters in his sophomore season, had once shaken his head and said, “After that, if I had been smart, I would have just gone and sat in the stands with all the other students and watched the games.”
Apparently, though, the evening had become giddy enough that even Gray, the angry man of the team (his nickname had been Charlie Manson), could now take part. To the delight of everyone, Foster was actually relaxed and enjoying himself. For his former players, this was a side of him they had almost never seen. It had been nine years since any of them had played for him but to all of them he was still, “Coach.”
They were all adults now, most of them with families, all of them with jobs and pressures and anxieties. Yet, returning to their alma mater for an unofficial reunion eleven years after their most glorious moment, they had quickly reverted to their college roles. Coach was Coach. Bruce Bell, father of three, a successful lawyer in Lexington, Kentucky, was again Juice, his old teammates screechingly imitating his voice. Rob Hardy, also a Kentucky lawyer, was a walk-on, just as he had been eleven years earlier. Suddath, even if he had worn his minister’s collar, was Sudds, the naive lefty shooter whose Georgia drawl matched Bell’s. Jim Spanarkel, the team captain, was definitely still the team captain, the guy everyone looked up to, the most likely person in the room to nail anyone—even Coach—with a one-liner. Scott Goetsch might weigh more than three hundred pounds but he hadn’t stopped being The Fonz. Bob Bender was about to become a head coach himself. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and talked about “the kids” on the current Duke team. To his old teammates, though, this was still Benny talking: suave, sophisticated and—no doubt—full-of-it Benny. Gene Banks, even if he showed up looking like the cover of next month’s GQ, would always be Tink, short for Tinkerbell. And if Tink said he’d meet you outside in fifteen minutes, you knew he might—might—be outside anytime in the next hour. Kenny Dennard—Dog and Dirt—was different only in the sense that the testicle he had lost to cancer gave everyone something new to tease him about.
The idea to bring the 1978 team back to Duke had come about after several of the players had contributed to the Max Crowder Endowment, a scholarship fund Duke was setting up in honor of Max Crowder, the school’s basketball trainer since 1962, a man who had worked with every Duke basketball player of the past thirty years. Crowder was to be honored at the annual Hall of Fame Banquet on April 8. Why not, reasoned Tom Mickle, the man putting the Crowder Endowment together, invite the whole ’78 team to come back that weekend?
After all, Duke had done nothing the year before to mark the tenth anniversary of this team’s miraculous run in March of 1978. “Too soon,” said Tom Butters, the athletic director. “Maybe you do it after twenty years, but not after ten.”
Maybe. They were not the first Duke team to reach the Final Four, or the last, but they were the most unlikely. In 1977, Foster’s third Duke team had finished last in the Atlantic Coast Conference, the fourth straight season that Duke had been last or tied for last. Forgotten were the glory years of the 1960s, when in 1963, 1964, and 1966 the school had gotten to the Final Four. Duke had become a laughingstock, a doormat, a school that in four years had an aggregate 11–49 record against ACC teams.
Then, suddenly, without warning, it had all turned around for Duke. A team with only one senior—Bell, a onetime walk-on—and with two freshmen and two sophomores in the starting lineup, went from the bottom to the top, winning the ACC Tournament. From there, they had gone on to become national darlings, going to the Final Four, then actually reaching the national championship game. The 94–88 loss to Kentucky in the final couldn’t dampen what they had done. They were America’s Team before the term was popularized by the Dallas Cowboys. They were bright, funny, irreverent, and they could play.
Best of all, with only Bell graduating, they would surely get their national title the next year. Or the year after. Or both. But they never came close again. Not this team, anyway. Not this coach.
On the campus where Foster had once been a hero, the man who succeeded him, Mike Krzyzewski, was now an icon, having finally put together a perennial powerhouse. Foster could have walked across the quad on this April afternoon without turning five heads. He had come back to Duke with mixed emotions. But in the glow of this reunion, as with most reunions, the bad times were either forgotten or ignored. They had been a special team once and now those were the times they remembered. For these few hours, they were special once again.
Four of them had not come back. H had wanted to, but to come three thousand miles from San Francisco and leave his wife with four kids for the weekend was impossible. Charlie Manson might have come the three thousand miles from Los Angeles if H had—they had stayed in touch over the years—but when Morrison couldn’t make it, neither could Gray. John Hunnell—Johnny Gun to his teammates—had to work, or at least said he had to work.
And then there was Mikey. No one would have enjoyed this weekend more than Mike Gminski. He would have ripped and been ripped more than anyone. But Mikey was still playing. He had just signed a five-year, eight-million-dollar contract with the Philadelphia 76ers. This amazed and delighted his old teammates. But it did not prevent them from abusing him or from waking him up at 1 A.M. to remind him that no matter how much money he made he was still a 6-11 Polack with no neck.
In many ways, this group was no different from any other that was brought back together after several years. There were familiar stories and old jokes and fond memories. But this team was different. Perhaps never in college basketball’s long history has a group of characters so diverse become so close.
The 1978 team was too young to understand what it was doing. There had been so much failure in the past at Duke that no one cared how they won, as long as they won. Players like Bell, Gray, Morrison and Goetsch, who might have objected to younger players like Banks, Dennard, Suddath and Harrell relegating them to the bench, really didn’t mind, as long as the team won. A year later that all changed. But that was later.
Banks, black, from the Philadelphia ghetto, and Dennard, white, from a rural North Carolina town, became close friends. Suddath, the born-again Christian from Georgia, looked up to Spanarkel, the wise guy from Jersey City. Harrell and Bender, both transfers, became the point guards. Harrell was the son of a math professor at North Carolina Central, a small black college in Durham. Bender was a coach’s son from the Midwest. Harrell transferred to Duke without a scholarship, a move across town in 1976 noticed by no one. Two months later, Bender also transferred to Duke, but he came from Indiana, which had just won the national championship, and his arrival made headlines.
They didn’t win a national championship. In some ways, that didn’t matter then. It doesn’t really matter now. They were a team that represented innocence. They had never won, they had never felt jealousy or envy, they had never failed to meet expectations. Dennard and Banks didn’t know that the sight of a black teenager and a white teenager hugging unabashedly on national television would make them celebrities. Spanarkel couldn’t possibly understand that seeing a knock-kneed, pigeon-toed guard dominate a basketball game would send people into ecstasy.
It came so fast and went even faster. There was no second chance for this team, just the one joyride. Only two people associated with that 1978 team have ever been to another Final Four. Crowder, the trainer, who comes with the franchise, has been a part of all seven Final Four teams at the university. Bender, as an assistant coach at Duke, has been to Krzyzewski’s three Final Fours. But the other eleven players, the four coaches, and the three managers got there once.
“The teams I’ve been part of as a coach that made it to the Final Four all expected to be, or at least hoped to be there,” Bender said. “In ’78, we had no clue. It came out of nowhere. We started the season hoping we would at least be good enough to get to the NIT. Just being in the NCAA Tournament surpassed our wildest dreams. To play for the national championship was something we never gave any thought to. Until we were there. Then we all looked around and kind of said, ‘Oh my God, look where we are now.’ We never thought about where we were going. All we thought about was how much fun we were having. As long as we kept winning, we got to keep having fun. All we wanted to do was play basketball because we had figured out that we were good, damn good, and beating people was fun. We were having fun, that’s all it was.”
It was never that way again at Duke after 1978. In fact, it is probably fair to say, in this era when so much money is involved in college basketball, that it has never been quite that way again anywhere. College basketball lost its innocence long ago. But that Duke team had it. The morning after the Blue Devils lost the national championship game, one of the headlines in The Durham Sun said this: “DUKE FANS EXPECT NATIONAL TITLE NEXT YEAR.”
They weren’t alone. Almost from the minute that headline appeared, everything changed. But during the 1977–78 season, Duke was a place found in fairy tales. It didn’t last—fairy tales never do in real life. The extraordinary success the members of that team found at such a young age was followed, in many cases, by extraordinary adversity. Cancer. Heart attack. Brain tumor. Automobile accident. Failure.
Through it all, in a very real sense, all of them hung on to 1978. Gray, Morrison, and Harrell, who all left Duke unhappy, still wear their 1978 rings. No matter what else happens to them, they all still have ’78. Even as the years pass, even if they haven’t seen one another, the feeling persists.
“I could walk into a room with any of them and it would be as if we hadn’t seen each other for ten minutes, not ten years,” said Goetsch, who practices law in Baltimore. “That goes for any of them. Gray. H. Sudds. Kenny. Tink. Every one of them. There is a bond between us that will never go away, even if we never see each other again.
“When we walked into that locker room in St. Louis after losing to Kentucky, we all cried. Not because we had lost, but because it was over. We knew then we’d been through something that would never happen again. Never. The feeling in that locker room was a feeling of closeness I’ve never felt in my life. Nothing close.”
Every member of the team says the same thing about that locker room scene. Every one. In the retelling, most begin to cry, or at least choke up, their eyes glistening at the memory. But what makes that moment most remarkable is that this was not an era where basketball teams spent every waking moment together.
“We didn’t hang around together all that much away from the locker room,” Bender remembered. “We were all different and we all had a lot of friends away from basketball. But when we walked into the locker room or onto the floor, for whatever reason, we were everything a team should be.”
A team that won. A team that lost. But always a team. Then. Now.
It was after 2 A.M. when Bill Foster looked at his watch one last time. The beer was gone. The police had come twice to ask for quiet. Foster had enjoyed himself. For his players, seeing him like this made the entire weekend worthwhile. They had never seen him so loose, so relaxed. They all worry about him, the way he once worried about them. As important as the other coaches were, as vital as each player’s contribution was, Bill Foster was the architect, the man who built the foundation. He was Duke basketball when each of them arrived; in many ways he is still Duke basketball to each of them today.
“I’m glad I came,” Foster yawned as he said good-bye to everyone, his wake-up call less than four hours away. “I wasn’t sure I would feel that way. The guys haven’t changed at all, they’re all still the same.”
In truth, all of them had changed; Foster too. But the feelings they shared hadn’t changed a bit. They never will.