March 29, 1974 …
It was a warm, rainy Friday evening in Durham when Bill Foster was introduced to the world as Duke’s new basketball coach. In less than a week, Foster had gone from New York—where his Utah team had lost the National Invitation Tournament final to Purdue—to Durham for a tour of the Duke campus; to Greensboro to watch the national championship game between N.C. State and Marquette; to Salt Lake City to talk to his wife Shirley about the Duke job; and then back to Durham.
“I’m really happy to be here,” Foster said, “I think.”
The “I think” was supposed to be a joke, but there was a lot of truth in those two words. Foster really wasn’t sure he was doing the right thing. In fact, on his way to Durham, changing planes in Chicago, he had almost turned back.
“I panicked,” he remembered, years later. “I got cold feet. I said, ‘Why are you doing this?’ I had a good thing going at Utah. We had gotten through the rough times and now I’m going to another place to start over. Shirley was pregnant, she certainly didn’t need a move right then. But I had made a commitment so, really, there was no backing out. But if I had understood just how tough things were, I might have turned around and gone home anyway, commitment or no commitment.”
There was no way that Foster, as an outsider, could understand how bad the basketball situation at Duke had become. This was a school living on its past. From 1960 to 1969 with Vic Bubas as the coach, Duke was one of the glamor basketball programs in America. Players like Art Heyman, Jeff Mullins, Jack Marin, Bob Verga, and Mike Lewis were All-Americans for Bubas and, between 1960 and 1966, the Blue Devils won four ACC titles and reached three Final Fours.
But by 1967, Dean Smith had built his own powerhouse eight miles down the road at the University of North Carolina. Bubas still had good teams, but not dominant ones. Nonetheless, when he announced that he was going to retire at the end of the 1968–69 season at the age of forty-eight, everyone at Duke was stunned.
Bucky Waters, a former Duke assistant who had gone on to become the head coach at West Virginia, was hired to replace Bubas. Waters was a stern disciplinarian, a no-nonsense type of coach. He believed in short hair and long practices.
This was during the Vietnam era. Duke had been the scene of a student takeover of the administration building in 1969. Antiwar and anti-Nixon feelings were running high on campus, even among athletes, normally the most conservative members of any student body. Waters recruited well during his first two years, but his style didn’t fit the times. Four of his players, from a freshman team that had gone 16–0, transferred before their junior and senior years. The next recruiting class went 13–3 as freshmen—this was before freshmen were eligible to play on the varsity—and three of those players also transferred.
With many of his key recruits deserting (and with others who stayed extremely unhappy) Waters’s record slipped steadily: 20–8, 20–10, 14–12, 12–14. The student newspaper, The Chronicle, wanted him gone. “Dump Bucky” signs began to crop up in the student section at home games. At the end of that fourth season, with one year left on his contract, Waters asked for an extension. He was told no. Duke didn’t fire coaches. Waters’s contract would be honored. But there was no indication he would be given a new one. In fact, the implication was that, barring a major turnaround during the 1973–74 season, the coach would be fired.
Waters understood. He knew he was in an impossible position. Without a new contract he was a virtual lame duck. That, combined with all the previous problems, made recruiting virtually impossible. On September 10, a week in to the fall semester, Waters resigned. He had been offered a job at the Duke hospital and decided the opportunity was too good to turn down.
This was everyone’s easy way out. Waters didn’t have to spend a season as a lame duck. Duke didn’t have to face questions about why it had kept Waters around for a fifth year if the decision to dump him had already been made. Fine for Waters. Fine for the administration. But horrible for the basketball program. Coaches just don’t resign in September, five weeks before practice is set to begin. Coaches resign—or get fired—at the end of the season so that a successor can be found during the spring. Duke was in an impossible situation, trying to find a coach when school was already underway.
The logical thing to do was name Neill McGeachy, Waters’s top assistant, as interim coach for the season. If McGeachy did well, he would be considered as a candidate to replace Waters on a full-time basis. But Athletic Director Carl James, never a man who did anything the simple way, wasn’t about to change his ways now. He began calling head coaches, hoping that someone might be enticed—even at this time of year—to jump to Duke.
One of the coaches James called was Bill Foster. “I was shocked,” Foster said. “Partly because of the timing, but also because I was not exactly setting the world on fire at Utah. I wasn’t quite sure why anyone would want me.”
Foster was forty-three at the time and had just completed his second year at Utah with an 8–19 record. “If we don’t upset Brigham Young in the last game of the season, we become the first Utah team to lose twenty games,” Foster said. “It had not been a great season. Now, all of a sudden a guy calls me and says, ‘Would you be interested in coaching Duke?’ ”
The answer was yes. But not one month before practice began and not coming off a losing season during which Foster had played several freshmen extensively. Not only did this upcoming season promise much more, Foster was not about to leave Utah without a coach one month before practice started. So James said he understood and told Foster he might hear from him again, which was fine with Foster.
The next person James called was Adolph Rupp. Yes, that Adolph Rupp. The Baron of the Bluegrass, the winningest college basketball coach of all time. The year before, at the age of seventy, Rupp had been forced into retirement by the University of Kentucky. James had the notion that if he could bring Rupp out of retirement for a year or two, he would certainly gain some national attention for his moribund program; he might even get some of the glamor back into it.
Rupp was interested. Very interested. He was angry that Kentucky had forced him out and he saw Duke as a way to prove to the world that he was not too old to coach. Duke had tradition, it had a big name, and it needed a winner. The Baron was, after all, a winner. A few days before practice was to begin, Rupp told James he would take the job.
No one at Duke had any idea what was going on. McGeachy, the top assistant, was in charge for the moment, waiting like everyone else, for something to happen. Then, on October 14, the day before practice was to start, Art Chansky, the sports editor of the Durham Morning Herald, broke the story: Duke was trying to hire Adolph Rupp.
“After Bucky quit, I kept trying to find out from my Duke sources who Carl was trying to hire,” Chansky said. “I was getting nowhere. Even McGeachy didn’t know what was going on. Then, I heard they were talking to Adolph Rupp. I ignored it. It was just too preposterous. Then I heard it again. And again.
“The funny thing was, I had Rupp’s home phone number because when I had worked at The Atlanta Constitution one of the rituals they had for new reporters was to assign them to call Rupp. The idea was, you’d think there was no way you could get Adolph Rupp on the phone and then you’d find out that not only could you get him on the phone, you couldn’t get him off. He’d talk to anyone, any time, because he was so pissed off that Kentucky was running him off.
“So, I called him. And, he said, ‘Sure I’ve talked to Carl James about coming over to Durham to coach.’ I called Carl and he gave me a very stiff ‘No comment.’ I remember thinking to myself, ‘My God, the old man isn’t hallucinating. They might actually hire him.’ ”
Chansky’s story did not exactly set off dancing in the streets of Durham. Rupp may have been a god in Kentucky but to Duke people he was just an over-the-hill old man who had fought integration throughout the 1960s and had given every indication during his last few years at Kentucky that he was well past it as a coach. How in the world, the players wanted to know, do you rebuild a basketball program with a seventy-one-year-old coach?
By now, James had a fiasco on his hands. Practice had started. He had no coach. He was being laughed at because of his flirtation with Rupp. In The Chronicle that day, Bob Fleischer, the starting center, had an angry letter denouncing the athletic department for its handling of the coaching vacancy.
On October 17, Duke announced it would hold a 10 A.M. press conference the next day to name the new coach. Chansky called Rupp again. “I’m so glad you called,” Rupp told him. “We’ve got a terrible storm down here and my phone has been out for hours. I still can’t make a call out and I have to reach Carl James. My farm manager died today [Rupp owned a 1,500-acre farm outside Lexington] and I just can’t leave here to take the coaching job at Duke. Will you call him for me and ask him to give me a call?”
Chansky called James, who mumbled something about not knowing what Chansky was talking about, hung up and, no doubt, called Rupp. Now, James had a 10 A.M. press conference to name a coach, and no coach. Finally, he called McGeachy and asked him to be in his office at 9 A.M. There, he offered him a one-year contract.
At the press conference an hour later, James denied Chansky’s assertion that McGeachy had just been offered the job that morning. “Who is your source on that?” James demanded to know.
Chansky’s source was McGeachy, who had told him just before the press conference what had happened. James and Chansky stood yelling at one another while the rest of the media watched both amused and amazed by what had become of Duke basketball. In the back of the room, the members of the team watched the scene with equal bemusement.
The press release handed out that day heralded “A New Era At Duke.” Indeed it was.
Six months later, Carl James insisted that he had told McGeachy when he was hired that he was only an interim coach and that he was continuing his search for a permanent replacement. McGeachy insists that he refused the job on an interim basis and was given a one-year contract with the promise that he would be given a chance to prove he deserved a longer contract.
The press conference was a harbinger of what was to come. The ’73–74 season was a disaster. The players were happy McGeachy had finally been given the job but uncertain about his future—with good reason. The Blue Devils played well some nights, poorly on some others. There were some embarrassing blowouts and some heartbreaking losses. But none of the losses compared to what happened in Chapel Hill on March 2, 1974.
This was the regular season finale. Duke was 10–14. North Carolina, strong as always, was 22–5. One of those victories had come in Durham back in January. With the score tied at 71 and four seconds left, Carolina’s Bobby Jones had stolen a crosscourt inbounds pass thrown by Duke guard Paul Fox and hit the winning lay-up at the buzzer.
That had been Duke’s big chance for a major upset; the kind, the players thought, that would give McGeachy a chance to retain his job. Their chances of winning in Chapel Hill were extremely slim, especially since Duke had not won in Carmichael Auditorium since 1966.
But the Blue Devils had one of those days. With seventeen seconds left, they led 82–74 and Carmichael was a morgue. Jones made two free throws to make it 82–76, but so what? All Duke had to do was kill seventeen seconds. A couple of inbounds passes and the game would be over.
It didn’t quite work out that way.
Carolina stole one inbounds pass and scored. Then another. Amazingly, it was 82–80 with five seconds left. On the third try, Duke finally got the ball inbounds—to junior forward Pete Kramer. He was fouled with three seconds left. All he had to do was make the front end of the one-and-one and the game would finally be over.
Kramer missed.
Mitch Kupchak rebounded for Carolina and immediately called time. Since this was Chapel Hill, the clock stayed right at three seconds. Still, the Tar Heels had to go ninety-four feet and score in three seconds. The ball came in to freshman Walter Davis. From just beyond halfcourt, he heaved a desperation shot. It hit the top of the backboard—and dropped in. Overtime. Which was merely a formality. Duke was finished.
Neither school has ever forgotten that game. At Carolina, it is considered one of the great moments in the school’s history. In March of 1989, the Charlotte Observer ran a huge story commemorating the 15th anniversary of what is known as “the eight-point game.” At Duke, students today still whisper about those seventeen seconds. No lead is considered safe, especially against Carolina.
For the players on that team it was the nadir of what had already been a horrendous experience. Five days later, in the opening round of the ACC Tournament, they lost meekly to Maryland, finishing the season with a 10–16 record—the worst in Duke history. By then, it had been announced that a search for a new basketball coach had formally begun and the players were angrily saying that McGeachy deserved more time and a fair chance.
He would get neither. In truth, Carl James had never stopped recruiting Bill Foster, even after giving the job to McGeachy. He had flown to Salt Lake City to see Utah play and to talk to Foster—informally—about moving to Duke. Foster, even though his team was built around sophomores and en route to a 22–8 record, was most definitely interested.
Foster was, after all, an easterner. He had grown up in Norwood, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia, and gone to college at Elizabethtown. He had coached and taught for six years in Pennsylvania high schools before becoming the coach at Bloomsburg State in 1960 at the age of thirty. Three years later he had moved to Rutgers. After eight very successful seasons there, he had been lured west by Utah, largely because he felt he had taken Rutgers about as far as he could. He was also very aware that he had a chance to be a star in Salt Lake City, away from the glutted New York media market.
“Going to Utah was a gamble but I felt like it was one I sort of had to take,” Foster said. “I loved it at Rutgers. We had a house we loved and the school had always been good to me. But this was the kind of experience I just didn’t think I was going to get if I stayed at Rutgers. I mean, fifteen thousand, five hundred seats. A television show, a radio show. It wasn’t so much the money as the experience. This was a whole different type of job for me.”
Not an easy one, though. Utah basketball was down when Foster took over. The Utes were 13–12 his first season but graduated several seniors off that team. Foster had to play with freshmen the next year and that produced the 8–19 mark. But that one poor season did not damage his reputation as a builder. He had turned a horrendous program around at Rutgers and had been popular with the students, his players, and the media while he was doing it. Carl James was intrigued by Foster. And Foster was intrigued, almost fascinated by Duke.
“I remember my first reaction was, ‘What a great school,’ ” he said. “But I also remembered [former Duke All-American] Jack Marin telling me once, ‘It’s a great school but you can’t win there anymore.’ I knew there was a risk involved but there were still a lot of reasons for me to be interested.”
Location was one reason. Foster’s mother lived alone in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, and could not fly. Sometimes during the season, Foster would fly red-eyes back and forth from Utah just to spend a day with his mother when she wasn’t feeling well. Durham would be much closer than Salt Lake City. She might even get to see her grandchildren on occasion.
What’s more, Foster owned and operated a lucrative basketball camp in the Pocono Mountains each summer. Going back and forth between the camp and his home at Utah was exhausting.
There was more. Foster had always been aware of Duke. As a freshman at tiny Goldey Business College, a small college prep school in Wilmington, Delaware, he had been recruited briefly by Duke as a basketball player. He still carried in his wallet the newspaper clipping that reported Duke’s interest in “The Goldey Flash.”
Back at Duke, rumors were flying. Bob Boyd, the coach at Southern California, had reportedly been interviewed by James. Some alumni were pushing Lefty Driesell, a Duke alumnus who had built powerhouses at Davidson and Maryland, for the job. James kept saying he wanted “a super-coach,” but wouldn’t say who it would be. Maybe, the players joked, he was going to hire John Wooden.
Regardless of who became the coach, he would have a massive rebuilding job on his hands. Duke had ended with a 2–10 record in the ACC, finishing in last place for the first time in the school’s history. The 10–16 overall record was also the worst in history. Recruiting, especially with a coaching change, was a likely disaster. Lou Goetz, who had played for Foster at Rutgers and then coached under him at Rutgers and Utah, remembers thinking the move to Duke was a fabulous idea when Foster first broached it to him. “It was only after we got there that we began to understand what we had gotten ourselves into,” Goetz said. “There were times, a lot of times during those first three years, when we all wondered whether we could get the job done. We came close to failing.”
Failure is something Bill Foster can’t deal with. He is a driven, single-minded person who is always his own worst critic. After his second year at Utah, he was honestly concerned about the possibility that Utah might fire him. In fact, the officials at the school were delighted with the way he had put things in place for the program to succeed—which it did that year.
But simple success wasn’t enough for Bill Foster. If he had a good team, he wondered why it wasn’t a great team. And, even though he liked living in Salt Lake City, he felt cut off from the world he had grown up in back east. He wondered if, in ten years, anyone outside of Utah would know who he was if he remained there.
“The thing you must remember about Bill is that he’s never been truly happy,” said Goetz, who has known him for almost twenty-five years. “That’s just not in his nature. Even when he has had success, he has always worried that failure is waiting right around the corner. I think that’s one of the reasons why he’s always kept moving. Somehow he worries that if he stays in one place too long, failure will catch up to him.”
Foster had been a college coach for fourteen years when James approached him about moving to Duke. He had had only one losing season (his first) at Rutgers and one at Utah. Other than that, he had always coached winners. But not big winners. He had been to four NIT’s, but never to the NCAA’s. He was about to become the president of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, but he wondered if he belonged in the same room with the top names in his profession. Duke was down, but it was a place that had been up. It was in the most prestigious conference in America. It had a beautiful campus, a student body Foster thought he could relate to, and the money to recruit on a national level, which Foster knew he would have to do if he was going to make Duke competitive again.
Foster told James he would take the job—even though he wasn’t certain it had really been offered to him. “I don’t actually remember Carl saying, ‘We’d like you to be the coach,’ ” Foster said. “But when I told him I’d take the job, he seemed happy about it. At least I think he was happy about it.”
James was a difficult man for anybody to read. He was, to say the least, circumspect. Once, he had told a student reporter that Duke’s swimming coach was retiring the following season. When the student called the coach for a comment on his retirement, the coach wasn’t quite sure what to say. “I was in Carl’s office yesterday talking about next season,” he said. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
James was actually a hardworking, decent man who, as a Duke graduate, genuinely cared about the school. But he would never be mistaken for The Great Communicator. Apparently, though, he did want Foster to be his coach: as soon as Foster accepted what had not been offered, a press conference was called to introduce him.
Before he met the press, Foster met his new team. Since Duke had not exactly dominated the national limelight, Foster had to take a media guide into the meeting so he would know who the players were.
There were four seniors—and since they had played freshman basketball in 1972, Foster would be their fourth coach. No one in the room bore any resemblance to David Thompson, who had just led N.C. State to the national title. Looking at the players in the room and thinking about those at some of the other ACC schools, Foster came up with a quick assessment of the program for his new boss.
“We’ve got six problems, Carl,” he said. “N.C. State, North Carolina, Maryland, Wake Forest, Clemson and Virginia.”
It was intended as a wisecrack but the ring of truth was loud and clear. Duke’s talent had fallen way behind the rest of the ACC.
In order to change that, Foster would need a strong staff, an aggressive group of assistants who would comb the country for players with talent and good grades, who wanted to be part of a rebuilding process. “We’ll sell two things,” Foster decided. “The academics and playing time.”
Duke had to stress academics to recruits. That was the only area in which it might have an advantage over other schools. Many top players simply couldn’t be recruited by Duke because of the admissions standards. Even though that narrowed the talent pool, it meant that a lot of the players it would want to get involved with would be the kind who might want to go to a school like Duke. Foster had to push that concept hard.
His first task was to hire a staff. He had already decided that Goetz would come with him from Utah. Goetz had been a good, but not great player for Foster at Rutgers, a 6-2 forward who survived because of his smarts. After Goetz graduated, Foster hired him as a graduate assistant and then took him to Utah. Even though Goetz was only twenty-seven, he would be the number one assistant at Duke.
Joining him would be another Rutgers graduate, Bob Wenzel. Three years younger than Goetz, Wenzel had spent two seasons as a graduate assistant at Utah before leaving to get a full-time job at Yale. Foster wanted him on the staff, too. Wenzel was packing his bags almost before he hung up the phone after Goetz called to say, “Coach wants you down here.”
The third assistant would be Jim Lewis, a holdover from the Waters/McGeachy staff. Foster thought it was important to have some continuity, both for the sake of the players and because Lewis had been in contact with the players Duke was recruiting that spring.
Picking his staff was relatively easy for Foster. His next job was a lot harder: He had to win the players over.
The team had liked McGeachy; they weren’t happy with the way he had been treated, and Foster told them in his first meeting that he was pleased that they felt that loyalty. He said he hoped, in time, he would earn that same feeling from them. He pointed out that he had not been at Duke during the fiasco that had passed for the previous season and asked them to start on square one with him, just as he planned on doing with them. He also told them that if anyone wanted to transfer he would try to help them do so.
No one did. “Part of it was Duke,” said Tate Armstrong, a freshman on that McGeachy team. “It isn’t exactly a place you want to leave even if basketball is going terribly for you. But a lot of it was Bill. I think he struck all of us as being a very sincere guy who would work very hard to turn it around. We all knew he was going to be the coach no matter what we thought so why not give him a fair shot?”
The next step was winning the student body back.
Duke students have always thought of the basketball team as being theirs. Football games at Duke are little more than an excuse to drink beer in the sun and get a head start on that night’s party. But basketball is another story.
Cameron Indoor Stadium is one of college basketball’s special places. It is an old relic with a low ceiling and bleacher seats running around the entire court. More and more, as big money has come into college basketball, arenas have been built with plush, expensive seats close to the court. The big-money contributors sit in these seats; the only thing that can get them on their feet is the national anthem and, perhaps, the need to go to the bathroom at halftime.
This is not the case at Duke. Downstairs is for the students; the bleachers are within a few feet of the court. Given this proximity, the students believe it is their obligation to play a role in the outcome of the game. Their participation goes well beyond noise. If an opponent has had the misfortune to get into some kind of trouble before playing at Duke, heaven help him.
When N.C. State’s Moe Rivers was arrested for allegedly shoplifting a bottle of aspirin in 1974, he was pelted with aspirin tablets when he appeared before the Duke students. A few years later when two other State players were picked up for trying to steal underwear (yes, underwear), they were bombarded with underwear that had been painted red and white, State’s colors. In 1983 when State’s Lorenzo Charles was charged with mugging a Domino’s Pizza delivery man, twenty Domino’s Pizzas were delivered to the State bench just before tip-off.
And it wasn’t just State that got picked on. Whenever Lefty Driesell came to town the students showed up en masse wearing bald skullcaps. They always had different chants waiting for North Carolina that were usually just obnoxious enough to enrage Coach Dean Smith. “I suppose you think they’re funny,” Smith once said to a reporter who had graduated from Duke. “Well, I guess you would—since you went to Duke.”
Duke students clearly looked upon basketball as a participation—not a spectator—sport. But some of that had been lost during the Waters/McGeachy era. In ’74, the student section had been full for just three games—N.C. State, North Carolina, and Maryland—all ranked teams. With all the chaos that had gone before, Foster knew he had a lot of work to do to get the students involved with “their” basketball team again.
“The notion that the students were really important to the success of the team at home had always been there,” Foster said. “I had to get it back to that point and I thought I had to get it back quickly for the sake of the team the next year but also for the sake of recruiting. You didn’t want to bring a kid in and tell him this was one of the great home courts in America and then have him look across and see the bleachers half empty.”
Foster spent most of his first spring at Duke and a large portion of the next fall going to fraternities and dormitories to speak to student groups. He answered questions for as long as they wanted to ask them. Very quickly, even before he had coached a game, Foster became a popular figure in the student body.
Promotions have always been a passion of Foster’s, dating back to the business classes he took at Goldey and the business-education major he pursued at Elizabethtown College. “I always figured that if I ended up not liking teaching or coaching that I would have my business background to fall back on,” he said. “As it turned out, I used a lot of my business background in my coaching.”
Foster was one of the first business-minded college basketball coaches. As far back as the 1950s when he was coaching high school, he had organized an annual clinic in suburban Philadelphia, bringing in speakers one weekend each spring to talk to the area’s high school coaches. When the clinic grew steadily, Foster went another step, putting up $2,500 to promote an exhibition basketball game between the Philadelphia Warriors and the Minneapolis Lakers. This was 1958 and the Warriors had a rookie who had gotten some attention. His name was Wilt Chamberlain.
Foster made his $2,500 back—and more. He also set up one of the first pure basketball camps in the country. Most camps were just general camps in those days; the notion of a one-sport camp was brand new. By the time Foster and his partner, Harry Litwack sold the camp in 1987, it ran eleven weeks a year and was one of the top basketball camps in the country. And by then, everyone was running basketball camps.
At Rutgers and at Utah, Foster had been heavily involved in the promotion of his teams. When he arrived in Salt Lake City, the Utah Stars of the American Basketball Association were the hot ticket in town. Foster immediately asked for a meeting with the Stars management so that Utah could make sure it scheduled home games on nights when the Stars wouldn’t be playing. He then dubbed his team “The Runnin’ Utes,” and went about trying to sell out a 15,500-seat arena.
At Duke, Foster had a smaller—8,800 seats—arena but he also had a recent tradition of losing. He also had N.C. State, the new national champions, twenty miles to the east and perennial power North Carolina eight miles to the south. So Foster called his new team “The Runnin’ Dukes,” and talked about the run-and-gun style the Blue Devils would play.
“Of course, we didn’t have any speed at all,” Tate Armstrong said. “But he felt if we could push the ball down the court intelligently, we would get better shots, even if we didn’t get lay-ups. He was right.”
Foster also felt that the push-it-up style of play would be more attractive to potential recruits than a methodical, walk-it-up-and-pass-it-twenty-times approach. As it turned out, he was right about that, too.
The Runnin’ Dukes of Bill Foster were not going to run anybody out of the gym, especially not in the ACC. But very quickly, Foster had done a lot to get Duke basketball turned back around from the nosedive it had been in for five years. He had the players on his side, he had the students on the way, he was getting attention by promising to play aggressively, and he had a very young staff on the road looking for the right players for the future.