While Foster was piecing together his future team, he was also trying to pick up the pieces of the current team after the disastrous end to the ’73–74 season.
The first month was encouraging. With George Moses providing both strength and stability inside and the team playing their new up-tempo offense, the Blue Devils got off to a 6–1 start.
Then came the annual Big Four Tournament in Greensboro.
The Big Four had become an annual disaster for Duke but it was, quite simply, a financial bonanza for them, North Carolina, North Carolina State, and Wake Forest. The four schools got together for a weekend at the neutral Greensboro Coliseum, sold sixteen thousand tickets a night, and played four intense although, if truth be told, meaningless basketball games.
Duke was paired the first night with North Carolina. The last time they had played had been the Chapel Hill debacle in March. This game was similar: Duke playing over its head, the game going back and forth and, finally, overtime. But there was no blown eight-point lead this time and, amazingly, Duke pulled the game out, 99–96. It was a stunning victory although it was overshadowed by the fact that Wake Forest had beaten defending national champion N.C. State in the other game.
That didn’t matter to Foster or his players, however. “After what had happened in Chapel Hill,” Foster remembered, “to turn around and beat them the next time we played in another close game was very important. It got a big monkey off our back. I really felt then, with the experience we had on the team, that we could build on that win and put together a decent season.”
It didn’t happen that way, though. The next night, Wake Forest, still walking on air after beating State, beat the Blue Devils for the Big Four title. That was a disappointment. But the really bad news came the next day: Moses had flunked out of school. He could return in the fall if he wanted but he was finished for the season.
This was a blow. Moses had been more than just a good rebounder—he had been a steadying force in the locker room. He was older than the other players and had not lived through the trials and tribulations of the previous year. He played as if he believed Duke was going to win every night because he had not gone through the losing of the recent past.
Even without Moses, the Blue Devils opened ACC play with a respectable six-point loss at Maryland and a solid win at home over a good Clemson team. Armstrong hit the key shot down the stretch and suddenly people were noticing that a team that had won only ten games the previous season was 8–3. Even when it lost, the games were close. A year earlier, Duke had lost by 30 at Maryland. This time, the game wasn’t decided until the final minute.
Then came the game at Virginia. The Cavaliers were in the same kind of rebuilding mode that Duke was. They too had a first-year coach in Terry Holland and if there was any team Duke might hope to finish in front of in the ACC it was probably Virginia. The Blue Devils led most of the game. But at the end the shots didn’t fall and a freshman named Mark Iavaroni got every key rebound down the stretch. The Cavaliers won the game, 60–56.
This was the first time the players had seen Foster really lose it. He was one step short of hysterical—one small step. He couldn’t understand how they could let this team beat them and he let them know it in no uncertain terms. “That was probably the first time we realized how much losing tore him up,” Armstrong said. “I mean, none of us wanted to lose, in fact we were sort of sick of it. But it got to him worse than it got to any of us.”
That loss set a tone for Duke on the road. The Blue Devils could stay close with most teams, but they just couldn’t win. Foster’s initial analysis of Duke’s six problems turned out to be correct. The ACC schedule was just too tough. N.C. State buried them in Cameron; Wake buried them at Wake. Virginia came to Cameron on a Saturday afternoon and, with the gym half empty, beat Duke again. This time Foster was completely out of control. Losing to Virginia on the road was bad enough, but at home?
Ten days later at Carolina, Armstrong, who was playing with a bruised thigh, got kneed hard in the thigh and went down. Foster, who had grown weary of Kenny Young’s erratic play, sent Paul Fox in for him, hoping Fox would provide some stability and shooting. Fox played well and Foster announced that—even with Armstrong out—Young would not start in the next game, three nights later at Clemson. Fox would take his place.
This did not sit well with Kenny Young. The little guard had shown flashes of great talent but did not seem to understand his own limitations. The best example of that lack of understanding may have come when he told a reporter, “The only difference between Phil Ford and me is playing time.” Ford was already the best guard in the ACC as a freshman—a future All-American.
Now, with his playing time about to be reduced further, Young didn’t react well. He was late for the team bus to Clemson. Foster went ahead without him and left word that Young was not welcome to join the team even if he could find transportation to the game. The Blue Devils got their doors blown off at Clemson, 100–66, in a game that wasn’t even that close. The Clemson lead was 25 points after only ten minutes.
Armstrong tried to play in the game but had to come out, holding his thigh in apparent agony. Goetz, frustrated by the way the season was falling apart, questioned whether Armstrong was really hurt. In pain and embarrassed, Armstrong screamed at him and Goetz screamed back. It was not a pretty scene.
The next day Armstrong had two hundred cc’s of blood removed from his thigh. The doctors told the coaches that this was a badly hurt young man who had been crazy to go into the game at all. He would not play again that season. Goetz apologized.
The apology was accepted but it didn’t help the situation. Duke’s next game was at N.C. State. The timing could not have been worse. This would be the last home game for the great David Thompson, after he had brought glory, a national championship, and a 79–7 three-year record to State. The Wolfpack would be wound up and Coach Norman Sloan had a penchant for running up the score anyway.
And Duke didn’t have any guards. Armstrong was done. Foster had suspended Young for missing the bus to Clemson. Billerman had a serious case of bronchitis and was doubtful. The only guards Foster had left, facing the quickest team in the ACC, were Paul Fox and freshman Rick Gomez, who had barely played all season. Bruce Bell, whose college basketball playing experience consisted of eight junior varsity games, was brought up to the varsity and given a uniform—just in case.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so terrified in my life,” Bell said. “I had never been in a real college game and I’m sitting on the bench in Reynolds Coliseum and there’s David Thompson on the floor right in front of me. I could still remember seeing Thompson block Bill Walton’s shot the year before in the Final Four and now I might be playing against him? My God was I scared.”
Bell had reason to be scared. Even with Bob Fleischer dropping back to help Fox and Gomez bring the ball up the court, they had a terrible time. The game was out of control early and the only real question was how big the margin would be. Then, with considerable time still left on the clock, Fox fouled out. Foster marched down the bench to where Bell and Billerman sat, both of them shivering—Bell with fear, Billerman with a fever.
“He looked right at me,” Bell said. “I thought I was going to faint.”
Foster, seeing all the color drain from Bell’s face, turned to Billerman. “Think you can go a few minutes, Kev?” Billerman coughed, got off the bench, and shuffled into the game, hacking all the way. He still remembers having a coughing fit right in front of the press table late in the game. Lefty Driesell, scouting the game, was sitting a few feet away. “Kevin, you okay?” Driesell asked. “You sound like you gonna die.”
The season had become something of a Bataan Death March.
In the ACC Tournament, they played Clemson right to the buzzer, finally losing 78–76. In the final seconds, the Tigers’ seven-foot center, Wayne (Tree) Rollins, knocked Fox cold with an elbow as Fox tried desperately to foul him.
It was a fitting epitaph to the season. Duke had never given up, never quit, but had never quite gotten itself off the mat. The final record was 13–13, certainly an improvement but disappointing after the 8–3 beginning. The ACC record was 2–10, the same as McGeachy’s 2–10. Still, there were signs of life.
There’s no question we were better,” Armstrong said. “When we were healthy, we were in every game. And, at the end, even with George gone and me not playing, the guys hung in. I think we all felt like we weren’t that far away.” Foster didn’t feel that way. To him, there was no such thing as a moral victory. Even as the team was being lauded for giving Clemson such a hard time in the ACC Tournament, he was racing for the door to catch a plane out of Greensboro.
“I have to get out there and find some players,” he said. “God knows I don’t want to live through another season like this one. Not ever. It’s too painful.”
He had no way of knowing that his pain had just begun.
The coaches were back on the road that summer, hoping to spot another Jim Spanarkel, or for that matter, Harold Morrison or Steve Gray, at the summer camps. They had high hopes for their freshman class but they knew the puzzle was far from complete.
“We had to have a big guy,” Wenzel remembered. “That was a big thing with us. We felt good about the guard situation because Tate was back for two more years and Spanarkel and Gray were coming in. But we needed a big man and a pounder inside.”
The coaches, especially Foster, loved Mike O’Koren, a teammate of Spanarkel’s at Hudson Catholic. He was a 6-7 version of Spanarkel, tough and smart but more inclined to play inside than Spanarkel was. They thought he would make a perfect complement for Spanarkel. Getting him would not be easy, though. North Carolina, among others, coveted O’Koren. But with Spanarkel at Duke, the coaches thought they had a shot.
They also thought they might get Jim Graziano, a 6-9 center from Long Island being pursued by almost everyone. If those two could be wooed, the puzzle would not be that far from completion.
Goetz, Wenzel, and Lewis were on the road constantly that summer. Foster was out a lot, too, although he was running his camps, one at Duke, one in the Poconos. If the coaches found someone they wanted him to see, they called him and he came. But the crucial phone call of the summer came not from any of the assistants but from Terry Chili.
Chili, who would be one of five seniors on the team in the coming season, was working as a counselor at Lefty Driesell’s camp at the University of Maryland. There he had befriended a huge young camper named Mike Gminski. Gminski was 6-11 and 250 pounds. He was surprisingly well coordinated for a youngster who was not quite sixteen yet. Most remarkably, he had a soft shooting touch.
One day he mentioned to Chili, almost casually, that because he was so advanced academically and because the league he played in back home in Monroe, Connecticut, was so weak, he had decided to consolidate his junior and senior years of high school to one year. He would graduate from high school in June of 1976, one year early.
The Duke coaches had heard of Gminski but hadn’t paid much attention to him since he still had two more years of high school. Wrong, Chili told them when he called. The coaches immediately asked Chili to find out if Gminski would talk to them.
Earlier that summer, after attending a camp at Davidson, Gminski and his parents had stopped for an unofficial visit at North Carolina. “I had no idea that I was eight miles away from Duke,” he said. “I had heard of the school, but that was it. I had no idea where it was or what it was.”
During his visit with Dean Smith, Gminski mentioned that he hoped to play a lot as a freshman. That notion must not have sat well with Smith. Two weeks after the visit, Gminski got a letter from Assistant Coach Bill Guthridge informing him that North Carolina did not plan to recruit him.
Carolina was out. Duke wanted in. Early in September Goetz and Wenzel visited the Gminski’s. Their mission was simple: convince Gminski to visit Duke. “I remember that we all liked Wenz and Lou,” Gminski said. “But the thing I remember the most was Wenz saying to me, ‘come down for a visit and I guarantee you’ll come.’ ”
So Gminski agreed to visit Duke. The October weekend that he spent there was a big one for the basketball program. It was homecoming for the football team and three recruits were in town. The most important one was O’Koren. Next came Graziano. And then there was Gminski, the big kid from Connecticut whom no one knew much about.
“A lot of my career, I’ve been the guy people didn’t think could make the transition to the next level,” Gminski said. “When I won the punt-pass-and-kick competition at eleven, people said I’d never be any good in high school. In high school, they said I’d never be a very good college player. And when I left college a lot of people said I wouldn’t adjust to the pros.”
The Duke coaches weren’t negative on Gminski by any means. They just saw him as a gamble. When someone is 6-11 and can shoot, even if he has played against weak competition, you take a chance on him, especially when you haven’t got anyone comparable. But if the coaches had a wish list on that October weekend, Gminski would have been third.
On Gminski’s list Duke jumped right to number one that weekend. He loved everything about the school—the campus, the other players on the team and, of course, The Chapel.
On Saturday night, Spanarkel took him to a party in the SAE fraternity section. Gminski still remembers sitting on the fraternity’s bench at about five in the morning giddily drunk and happy and convinced this was the place for him. Duke was the first and last school he officially visited. He returned home and canceled the rest of his visits.
Foster was delighted to get Gminski. He was, obviously, an excellent student. He was huge. And he seemed like a good kid. From the beginning, Foster and Gminski hit it off. Gminski enjoyed Foster’s deadpan, sarcastic sense of humor, which a lot of players either missed or were uncomfortable with because it could be so biting. Gminski enjoyed it from day one.
What Foster didn’t know—and couldn’t know—was that the package he had just acquired did not consist merely of a 6-11 player with a lot of potential.
Mike Gminski is the only child of Joe and Kirsten Gminski. His size comes from his father, who is almost 6-8. Joe Gminski was an athlete in high school and went to the University of Connecticut hoping to play basketball. But as soon as practice started, Joe Gminski began losing weight. He started at 205 and within a few weeks he was down to 165. Whether it was tension or something else, no one ever found out. But his college basketball career ended before it started.
After two years of college, Joe Gminski dropped out. After giving up basketball he had turned his attention to golf and found it a lot more challenging than his class work. His new goal was to become a golf pro and go out on the tour. First, though, came the Army. Joe Gminski was stationed in Germany. While on leave he took a trip to Copenhagen and visited Tivoli Gardens. There, he met Kirsten Morkegaard, one of the park’s tour guides. She spotted Gminski listening to a band and wandered over to ask him where he had found the chair he was standing on. Gminski wasn’t standing on a chair.
The two obviously found things to talk about anyway because a year later they were married.
After he got out of the Army, Joe Gminski took his new wife—who already spoke fluent English and several other languages—back home to Connecticut. Joe went to work as a salesman to support Kirsten and their son, who was born in August 1959, checking into the world at twenty-four inches and ten pounds. “When I tell people I was always big,” Mike says, “I mean I was always big.”
When not-so-little Mike was five, his father decided to take his shot at the pro golf tour. He had continued to play golf after getting out of the Army and was a scratch player. He moved his family to Palo Alto, California, set up headquarters there, and gave it a whirl. He did not succeed. One year later, unable to qualify for any tournaments, Joe Gminski moved his family back to Connecticut. Two years after that, when Mike was eight, he quit his job to devote all his time to developing Mike as an athlete.
“When his dream died, I became his dream,” Mike said. “In fact, I think to him, I became him. It’s never been something he and I could really talk about because neither one of us is that way. We tend to hold things in. But I think maybe he remembered how my grandfather had to work three jobs when he was a boy during the Depression and never really spent any time at home. Part of him, I think, thought that he might have made it if his dad had been able to give him more time. Whatever it was, it has never been an easy thing for me to deal with.”
Kirsten Gminski went to work supporting the family, working in a department store. Joe Gminski drove a school bus, the one that took Mike to and from school. He worked out with Mike alone and he was always at Mike’s practices, first in baseball, later in basketball. When Mike chose his college, there was little doubt in his mind that his parents would follow him. “I guess you could say my dad was the ultimate Little League parent,” Mike said.
The Duke coaches knew Joe Gminski took a proprietary interest in his son. But they would not know until later just how difficult that interest would make life for them—and for Mike. For now, as the 1976–77 season began, Bill Foster was hopeful that he had signed his center for the next four years.
A critical piece of the puzzle had arrived, but it arrived with a jagged edge.
Foster’s second season at Duke was a lot like his first. George Moses had come back to school. Willie Hodge was the starting center—still talented, still foul-prone. Once, getting off the bus in Chapel Hill before a game, someone asked Foster if he had seen Willie. Deadpan as always, Foster answered, “I think he fouled out on the way over.”
Spanarkel was a starter from the first day of practice. To almost everyone, this made perfect sense. The other players could see that Spanarkel had an instinct for the game that more than made up for his inexperience. He was a superb passer, rarely made mistakes at either end of the floor and, even though he wasn’t a great shooter, he was a natural scorer. And he was tough.
The one person who had trouble dealing with the oohing and aahing over Spanarkel was Gray. When the freshmen arrived on campus that fall, Gray noticed a preseason prospectus put out by the sports information department that listed the five freshmen and their credentials. Next to Spanarkel’s name was a star, indicating this was a player to be watched. “Why does he rate?” Gray asked Goetsch, his roommate. “We haven’t even started practice yet and they’ve anointed him.”
Morrison didn’t disagree with Gray. “I remember thinking that Coach Foster hadn’t really seen me a lot and he had already decided that Jimmy was ahead of me,” he said. “It didn’t seem fair. When we were playing pickup games in the gym, he didn’t seem all that good. Of course that was always the way it was with Jim. I can remember calling friends back in Jersey and saying, ‘Who the hell is Jim Spanarkel?’ Steve and I always thought they had made their minds up even before we started practice.”
In a sense, that was true. The coaches felt that if any of the freshmen was going to be ready to play extensively it was Spanarkel. The others had potential, and in Gray’s case they felt, great potential. But none of them was as precocious as Spanarkel.
It probably would have surprised his classmates to learn that Spanarkel was having a tough time adjusting to college life. He was, in a word, homesick. “I remember when my parents and I were leaving to drive down, I started crying,” he said. “It just hit me as a very sad thing. All the way down I kept thinking, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ My older brother was at St. Peter’s. I could go there and know everyone. I thought about that a lot first semester. A lot of nights I can remember thinking, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ ”
Spanarkel was aware of the rivalry with Gray. “There were five freshmen and two of us were guards,” he said. “It was only natural that we be competitive with one another. I felt like I had something he wanted and I wasn’t going to do anything to give him a chance to get it. Steve was a great athlete and he was tough. But I always thought, to be honest, that I was a better player than he was.”
That would be borne out in the future. Back then though, Gray honestly believed that when his chance came, he would be a better player than Spanarkel. His chance would come … later.
All the freshmen had difficult moments, like college freshmen anywhere. Duke has no athletic dorms and it doesn’t believe in baby-sitting athletes. Tutor them, yes. Baby-sit them, no. Goetsch, Gray and Morrison all thought about transferring at one stage or another during that freshman year but their frustrations had more to do with basketball than with homesickness. Even though he thought of himself as shy, Morrison fit in as quickly as anyone with the team, thanks to his sharp wit and easygoing manner. He had little trouble adjusting to Duke’s almost all-white environment; it was similar to what he had become accustomed to growing up.
“I had always felt comfortable playing basketball in Newark with city blacks or hanging out in West Orange with suburban whites,” he said. “Being an only child, I didn’t mind spending time by myself. I either spent time with people I was comfortable with or by myself. Either way was fine. I liked the guys on the team right off, so I didn’t have any problems adjusting.”
Morrison did get hassled once by another black student. One night, walking out of the on-campus student hangout, the Cambridge Inn, with the other freshmen players, he was stopped by a young woman who informed him that other black students had noticed that he spent a lot of time with his white teammates. “If you expect to be accepted by the black community at Duke,” she said, “you better start sitting at the tables.”
The tables were three tables in the CI where the blacks congregated. There was nothing official about it, but the blacks sat there and the white students usually stayed away. “I laughed at her,” Morrison said. “First of all, most of the blacks were as suburban and wealthy as the white students so I thought it was kind of funny when they tried to act ‘black.’ I didn’t think I had anything to prove to anyone, black or white. I just told her if it bothered people that I didn’t sit at the tables, that was their problem, not mine. No one ever said another word to me about it again.”
Spanarkel was the only freshman who was going to play a lot—that was apparent soon after practice began. What was also apparent was that this was now Tate Armstrong’s team. With Billerman gone, Armstrong was the point guard. He was also the team leader because the seniors were quiet by nature. What’s more, he had improved immeasurably over the summer.
After sitting out the last five games of the season with his thigh injury, Armstrong had gotten himself into an almost fanatical workout routine during the off-season. By the end of the summer he was running nineteen miles a day in the awful humidity of Houston. Playing forty minutes of basketball without ever letting up must have seemed easy after that.
Armstrong had always been a good shooter. Now, though, he was quick, he was strong, and he was almost unstoppable. He started the season well, as did the Blue Devils. Again they jumped out to a 6–1 start. Then they lost two close games in the Big Four. Armstrong was averaging more than 20 points a game, Spanarkel was the best freshman in the conference, but the team still couldn’t get it done against the ACC teams.
Then came the game at N.C. State. The Wolfpack wasn’t the same—Thompson and Monty Towe were gone—but it still had Kenny Carr and it was still formidable. Carr had destroyed the Blue Devils in the Big Four Tournament and he was just as overwhelming in this game. Early in the second half, with the game turning into a rout, Armstrong got fed up. “We were trying to get the ball inside and it just wasn’t working,” he said. “I finally just said, ‘Screw it, I’m shooting every time.’ I know that sounds selfish but we were getting killed. So, I just starting shooting and it started going in.”
And in and in and in. Armstrong hit seven straight shots during one stretch. The Blue Devils didn’t win, but they rallied. Armstrong finished with 34 points. The rest of the season was a lot like that game. Armstrong was brilliant, but his team wasn’t quite good enough. Except at home against Maryland.
It was the second-to-last Saturday of the season and if a team had ever been desperate for a victory, it was Duke. The close losses were getting to everyone. (Duke was 2–7 in ACC play and the seven losses were by a total of 15 points.) The students had become so frustrated that, for the first time in memory, they had started throwing things on the court. With N.C. State coming to Cameron on Wednesday followed by Maryland on Saturday, William Griffith, the dean of student affairs, called a meeting involving athletic council members, Carl James, Bill Foster, and members of the student government to discuss the problem of fan behavior.
Foster agreed to write an open letter to the student newspaper, The Chronicle, asking that the students stop the obscene cheers and not throw things during the two home games. The sports editor of The Chronicle, a volatile sort himself, wrote a column pleading with his fellow students not to lower themselves to the level of fans at other schools.
Something worked. During yet another wrenching loss to State, the students behaved impeccably. But everyone worried about the Maryland game. During the game in College Park three weeks earlier, Driesell and Goetz had gotten into an ugly shouting match and, at the finish, the Maryland players had taunted the Duke players.
The second game clearly had the potential to get out of hand.
Early in the game, Spanarkel went down hard, hurting his ankle and never returning. Nonetheless, the Blue Devils led all night. But as had happened all season long, the opponent rallied. Armstrong kept hitting from outside, Maryland kept answering. With four minutes left, Hodge fouled out. Chili had to take his place. The Duke fans waited for the roof to cave in.
With four seconds left and Duke clinging to a one-point lead, Chili went to the foul line. If he missed, Maryland would have a chance to win at the buzzer. If he made the first but not the second, the Terrapins could force overtime with a basket. If Chili made both, Duke would win. Cameron was as quiet as it ever gets. Lefty Driesell called time to let Chili, a 60-percent free throw shooter, think about the shot. In four years at Duke, Chili had never been in a situation like this one.
It had been four seasons since Duke had beaten a ranked team and everyone in the building knew it. Chili took the ball—for once he had nothing to say to the referee—looked at the basket and shot. Swish. The cheer was hearty, but muted. He still needed one more because everyone fully expected Maryland to score at the other end. Chili took the ball again and shot. Swish.
A Maryland basket at the buzzer made the final score 66–65 but it didn’t matter. Duke had the upset—finally. Four years of frustration came pouring out of the student body. They stormed the floor, mobbing Chili, Armstrong, and Foster. They cut down the net where Chili had made his free throws and presented it to Foster. By the next morning it was hanging on a picture frame right next to Foster’s desk. It stayed there until the day he left Duke.
The celebration went on into the night. Lefty was hanged in effigy. The other net came down too. No one wanted to go. This one had been a long time coming. “I think we all thought the same thing,” Armstrong said. “We’d been good enough to win so many times but we just hadn’t won. We knew it was killing Coach Foster every single time and I think we wanted to win a game like that as much for the sake of his sanity as anything else.”
The victory meant a lot to Foster. Even though he was very popular on campus he was already questioning himself. Why couldn’t his team win the close game? Was it coaching? “After a while,” he said, “you look around and you wonder, am I the problem?”
At least for one night, Foster didn’t have to wonder anymore.
But there wasn’t much time to celebrate. Spanarkel’s ankle was X-rayed the next morning and the X ray confirmed what Trainer Max Crowder had suspected: torn ligaments. Spanarkel had become Duke’s second-best player, taking pressure off Armstrong offensively and giving the team a toughness that Duke teams often lacked. Now, he was gone.
And the team couldn’t help but feel the loss.
They closed the regular season by losing their last two games. The ACC record was 3–9. Last place. Again.
In the first game of the ACC Tournament, they lost to Maryland. But it wasn’t just a loss. It was a heartbreaking and humiliating end to their year.
With thirty-three seconds left, the Blue Devils led 72–70. Mark Crow was fouled. For the season, he had hit 84 percent of his free throws. Crow stepped up, shot—and missed. But George Moses, always alert, grabbed the rebound and fed it back outside. Duke ran the clock to eighteen seconds before Paul Fox was fouled. He went to the line, shot—and he missed. Amazingly, Moses got the rebound again. This time Duke ran the clock to five seconds before Crow was fouled again. Surely, he couldn’t miss again. All he had to do was make the first shot and the game would be over. Even if he missed, Maryland was out of time-outs and would have to race the ball downcourt and take a quick shot to try to force overtime. By this time the entire crowd in the Capital Centre was on its feet, thinking it was about to see something that had never happened in the history of the ACC Tournament: the No. 7 seed upsetting the No. 2 seed.
Crow missed. Reaching for the rebound, Moses fouled a Maryland player—Steve Sheppard who, naturally, made both free throws. Tie game. Overtime. Maryland won it, 80–78.
Armstrong, who had scored 38 points, lost control. He threw things around the locker room, pounded his fists against lockers and cried and cried. “All season long, it was the same thing,” he said thirteen years later. “That game still upsets me. If we had won, we could have gone a long way. I really believe that. But we let it get away.”
Foster was inconsolable. “This is like losing a loved one, that’s how I feel,” he told the press. “It was our game.”
Later, Foster regretted what he had said. “To compare losing a basketball game to someone dying is a little bit sick,” he said. “But I had such an empty feeling right at that moment. It just seemed as if no matter what we did, we got beat.”
For the second straight year, less than an hour after his season had ended, Foster was on his way out the door. “Players,” he said, walking out. “We need more players.”
Foster was beaten in his recruiting effort also. The only new player—other than Gminski—he signed was Marco Bonamico, an Italian who had been recommended by a friend of Foster’s who had coached in Italy. Mike O’Koren had opted for North Carolina and Graziano for South Carolina. Foster took the loss of O’Koren especially hard. After seeing just how good Spanarkel was, Foster had dreamed of pairing the two Jersey City kids together for three years. Now, he would see plenty of O’Koren—but in the wrong shade of blue.
It was Christmas Eve when O’Koren phoned Foster to tell him his decision. “It was not a great Christmas at our house,” Shirley Foster remembered. “I just wish Mike had waited two more days to tell us.”
Foster was not comfortable with the power forward situation that summer. He had Cameron Hall and Harold Morrison. Hall had a tender back and whether he could play thirty-five minutes a game on a regular basis was questionable. Morrison, even though he had built himself up to 230 pounds at the coaches’ request, was more comfortable playing outside than inside. And so, Bonamico was signed in the hope that he could add depth at both forward spots, perhaps even become a starter. Foster felt set at three spots: Armstrong at point guard, Spanarkel at big guard and, at small forward, Crow, who in spite of the missed free throws against Maryland had become a dangerous outside shooter. Gminski was penciled in as the starting center. Hall or Morrison would be the other forward.
The coach was now down to ten recruited players. Rick Gomez, the guard recruited out of New Jersey during that first desperate spring, lasted through his sophomore year, but no further. He flunked out.
That meant six players who had started the year in the program—the five seniors and Gomez—were gone. Foster used the extra scholarships to put Bruce Bell and Rob Hardy on scholarship. He did that partly because he needed bodies to fill out the bench and partly to be nice. Either way, the decision proved correct.
Bell, after agreeing to come to Duke in the fall of ’74 as a walk-on, had been miserable his first semester. “When I got there in September I heard the basketball players were working out in the gym every afternoon,” he said. “So, I went over there looking to play. But none of the guys had any idea who I was. The older guys just told me the games were for varsity players only. I wasn’t too happy with that. I hung around waiting for a chance to get into the games and every once in a while I did. But I really didn’t get much chance.
“The coaches told me that I would get the chance to try out for the JV team in October. That didn’t thrill me because I was hoping to get a chance to try out for the varsity. Then, it turned out the JV practices were at seven in the morning. I kept stumbling out of bed wondering why in the world I was putting myself through this to play an eight-game JV schedule. It was no fun at all.”
Bell stuck with it, though, and Goetz, coaching the JV team, liked what he saw. Bell was smart, and even though he looked to be about fourteen years old with his baby face, blond hair and blue eyes, he never backed down from anything or anyone.
“The first day of the second semester after George Moses flunked out, Coach Foster called me in and said that I was being put on partial scholarship [meals, books, room and board] and that they wanted me to start practicing with the varsity when the JV season was over. I was shocked, but really happy.”
Shortly after joining the varsity, Bell caught an accidental Willie Hodge elbow square in the mouth. He went down in a heap. When he sat up, everyone asked him what happened. In the high-pitched Kentucky drawl that his teammates would mimic forever, Bell said, “Gaad-dawg, Willie hit me in the mouth with an elbow!” Maybe it was the way it came out or maybe it was the fact that Bell had been so quiet since joining the team but the high-pitched yelp left everyone laughing hysterically. “The worst thing about it, though,” Bell said, “was that all those dang guys”—dang is the strongest word Bell ever uses—“thought I said hot-dawg. I tried to tell them I said gaad-dawg but they just liked it better the other way. So, every time I got hit in practice from that day on, everyone would start yelling, ‘Hot-dawg, Willie hit Bruce with an elbow.’ Heck, they kept yelling it long after Willie had graduated.”
With his outgoing, friendly manner and his willingness to take a joke, Bell quickly became very popular with his new teammates. It was so late in the season that he was given a uniform without his name on it. “Except for my buddies, no one had any idea who I was,” he said, laughing.
Rob Hardy’s story was similar to Bell’s. He too was from Kentucky, born in Frankfort, the capital, halfway between Lexington and Louisville. In eighth grade, his family moved to Columbus, Ohio. There, Hardy played football, basketball and golf. His best sport might have been golf—he was about a two-handicapper—but his obsession was basketball.
“I used to drive my parents crazy playing in the house all the time when I was a kid,” he said. “I knew I wasn’t going to be a football player because I was too skinny. So, I just focused on basketball. I was never a great player, but I was always pretty good.”
When Hardy was ten, his parents sent him to Vic Bubas’s basketball camp at Duke. This was in the late 1960s when Bubas was still Duke’s coach and one of the big names in coaching. Hardy fell in love with the school. “I knew when I was ten years old that I wanted to go to Duke,” he said. “I never applied to school anyplace else or thought about going anyplace else. The only question was whether I would be able to play basketball. If I couldn’t play there, I was going to go to school there, no matter what.”
Hardy continued to go to Bubas’s basketball camp even after Bubas quit coaching. Then, while in high school, he started going to a second camp, one in the Poconos run by a man named Bill Foster. “The second year I went there was the year he moved to Duke,” Hardy said. “I was going into my senior year of high school and I wanted him to see me play. But the day of the All-Star game, just as the game was starting, he got called away to a phone call. I played great in the game, but he didn’t see me.”
Hardy applied for an early decision to the school of his dreams. With a 3.3 grade point average and 1,200 on his college boards, he was not a lock to be accepted as a regular student. But he got in. “Happiest day of my whole life,” he said.
The day he was accepted, Hardy sent a tape of himself to Foster with a letter saying he would like to try to walk on the basketball team the next fall. He had become a good enough point guard as a senior—averaging about twenty points a game—that several Ohio Valley schools had wanted to recruit him. Hardy had eyes only for Duke.
Foster had already signed five freshmen. He wrote Hardy back saying he was welcome to try out for the JV team. That was fine with Hardy. “All I knew,” he said, “was I was going to Duke.”
That fall, he received the same treatment from the varsity players that Bell had gotten a year earlier. But it didn’t faze him. He waited his turn, played when he could and worked out on his own. The early morning JV practices didn’t thrill him, but he stuck with it. The story of what had happened to Bell the year before—being called up to varsity when Moses flunked out—was familiar to everyone on the JV. “I really looked up to Bruce back then,” Hardy said. “He would still play in the JV games, but we looked at him as a varsity player because he never practiced with us. To us, he had it made.”
When the school year ended with six players gone and only Gminski signed, Foster called Hardy in and told him he might be called up to the varsity the next fall. Two other JV players, Rick Mainwaring and Geoff Northrup, would also be given tryouts. Hardy spent the summer working strenuously to build up his body. “I went from 148 pounds to 175 pounds over the summer,” Hardy said. “Of course, there were probably a few beers thrown in there too.”
Hardy came back in the fall still not on scholarship, but working out with the varsity. He remembers that, with the exception of Spanarkel, an established star by that point, the other sophomores were standoffish. “I think they saw me as someone who maybe didn’t belong. None of them had really established themselves with a role on the team yet and now I come along. Spanarkel and Bell were the two guys I was close to right off the bat. The other guys came later.”
Even with Bell added to the team, Foster had only eleven scholarship players when the team reported back to campus during the last week of August in 1976. One week later, the number was down to ten.