If the ’79 disaster did nothing else, it took the Blue Devils out of the national spotlight during the off-season. Teams like DePaul, Kentucky, and Indiana were being looked to as national powers. North Carolina and Virginia—which had signed seven-foot-four-inch Ralph Sampson—were getting most of the attention in the ACC.
This suited Foster and the players fine. Six players—half the team—had graduated. Spanarkel’s departure was the one that would really matter. He had been taken in the first round of the NBA draft by the Philadelphia 76ers after leaving Duke as the school’s all-time leader in points, assists, and steals. He was the first player in Duke history to score more than two thousand points. Not bad for a slow, pigeon-toed kid from Jersey City.
But as much as Spanarkel would be missed, the same could not be said for the other five graduates. Hardy, accepted at Louisville law school, had certainly established a role for himself as a hard worker and as the leading bench jockey in the ACC, but he had never been a key player. The other four graduates—Goetsch, Harrell, Morrison, and Gray—had all been miserable during their senior year; their college dreams having gradually and bitterly turned to dust.
Their places were taken by four eager freshmen: a pair of guards, Tom Emma and Chip Engelland, and two 6-8 forwards, Allen Williams and Mike Tissaw. None was a superstar but all had potential. More important perhaps was that all were starting fresh. There was no emotional baggage, no anger about not starting. Their presence changed the tone of the locker room from divided to united. They looked to Gminski, Bender, Banks, and Dennard as respected elders.
“It was a much more normal situation than what we had had the two previous years,” Bender said. “Before that, we had the young guys playing and the older guys sitting. That was bound to catch up with us sooner or later and it did—in ’79. Now, we had the kind of setup you look for in a successful program, the older guys playing, the younger guys working their way in and learning as they went.”
Foster seemed more relaxed that fall. Not loose—that would never be the case—but not so loaded down by expectations. As practice began, he liked what he saw of the new players. Banks and Dennard also seemed to have their freshman eagerness back again. The new coaching staff had now been together a year and was more comfortable as a unit. Goetz was still missed, but not as much. After all, one third of the team (the four freshmen) didn’t even know who he was.
And, while a lot of people were writing the Blue Devils off—they were picked third in the ACC in preseason—the fact was that four starters were back, led by Gminski, who had been the ACC player of the year in ’79. Vince Taylor, now a sophomore, would take Spanarkel’s spot, and while he would never be the scorer or all-around threat Spanarkel was, he added an element of quickness that the team had often lacked in the past.
Preseason passed quickly and uneventfully. The season began a week earlier than usual because Duke had been invited to play in the inaugural Tip-Off Classic in Springfield, Massachusetts. Springfield is the home of the Basketball Hall of Fame and the birthplace of basketball. It was at what is now Springfield College that Dr. James Naismith nailed a peach basket up one day in 1891 and thus invented the game. It made perfect sense for the basketball season to start each year in Springfield.
To get the new event started right, the game’s sponsors wanted two name teams that were likely to be highly ranked. Ideally, they would have liked to have matched the previous season’s NCAA finalists. But Michigan State without Magic Johnson and Indiana State without Larry Bird—they had both turned pro—would not be much of a matchup. The sponsors looked back one year farther to ’78. Duke and Kentucky. Perfect.
For Duke, this was an opportunity, not to get even—nothing was going to change the outcome of the ’78 final—but to gain a measure of revenge and to find out where this team might be going. While most of the ’78 Kentucky players were gone, they had a slew of outstanding young players. Most preseason polls had them ranked in the top five.
It was a classic basketball game. Duke’s starters all played well but the unsung hero was Suddath, who came off the bench with Dennard in foul trouble and scored 11 points, made 5 steals, and grabbed 4 rebounds. Kentucky was as good as advertised and it took a Bender drive down the middle with two seconds left in regulation to put the game into overtime. On the play, Bender surprised Macy, who was looking for him to pull up and shoot or pass inside to Gminski or Banks. Instead, Bender blew past him, beat the Kentucky big men to the basket, and tied the game. In overtime, the Blue Devils dominated, winning 82–76.
It had been a gut-check game and they had responded. If the innocence of ’78 was long gone, they had proved they were now a smart, experienced team that had seen just about everything there was to see in basketball.
After Kentucky came the Big Four. They just got by Wake Forest in the opener—Gminski making a pair of free throws in the last five seconds to clinch the victory—then destroyed North Carolina, 86–74 in the final. Carolina was the team with the expectations this season; everyone was back from the ACC championship team. But all five Duke starters scored in double figures and they beat the Tar Heels with ease. It was the three hundredth victory of Foster’s college coaching career.
As Foster walked off the floor, Joe Gminski came up to him, put out his hand and said, “Congratulations Coach, great job.” Foster said thank you. But when he got a few steps past Gminski, he exploded.
“Can you believe that guy?” he said. “Tonight it’s ‘Great job, Coach.’ What will it be when we lose a couple of games? If there’s one thing I’ve learned in coaching it’s that you have to keep moving. If you don’t, your friends come and go and your enemies accumulate.”
That was the first time Foster hinted that he might leave Duke. His team had just beaten its archrival convincingly and Foster had just passed a milestone in his coaching career, yet all he could see in his mind’s eye was Joe Gminski and others who were constantly second-guessing him.
“Bill is not a person who can handle criticism,” Lou Goetz said. “To begin with, he hasn’t run into it very often during his life. Beyond that, he wants very badly to have people approve of what he is doing. In the end, if you stay in one place, people are bound to criticize you. It comes with the territory. I think his moving on was, in some ways, inevitable. It fit his character.”
After the Big Four, the Blue Devils jumped back up to No. 1 in the polls. They had beaten Carolina while Kentucky, Indiana, and DePaul had all lost. Presto! Welcome back to No. 1. This time it was different, though. It wasn’t a life-long dream coming true. And they knew exactly how much being ranked No. 1 in December meant if you lost early in March: nothing.
They did keep winning throughout December. When the month was over, they were 7–0 and still No. 1.
The only down note during this period were the rumors that had started to swirl around Foster. Frank McGuire had announced at the start of the season that he was stepping down as South Carolina’s coach at the end of the season. Almost as soon as McGuire’s announcement came, Foster’s name was linked to the job. South Carolina needed rebuilding and Foster was a builder. The word was out that he wasn’t happy at Duke and that South Carolina was putting together a lucrative package to lure him down there.
“We all heard it,” Bender said. “But it was one of those things where you didn’t just march into Bill’s office and demand to know what was going on. To begin with, it was his life. Beyond that, at least at first, I don’t think any of us really believed it. Rumors are rumors.”
But often as not, there is a reason for a rumor.
Foster had never truly been comfortable at Duke. At first, he had been intimidated by the school’s academic reputation. “I always joked when I first got there that I coached there but I never could have gone there,” he said. “I always felt a little bit overwhelmed by the people in the Duke community.”
Shirley Foster felt it even more. “I always had the sense that people at Duke thought that Bill was very lucky to be able to work at Duke. I think he was lucky. But they were also lucky to have him. I don’t think they saw it that way and we always felt that, as if they looked down on us because we had gone to a place like Elizabethtown.”
Real or imagined, these feelings became more important when Foster began to feel heat during the ’79 season. To him, most Duke people were frontrunners, there to cheer you on in good times, second-guessing in bad times. Perhaps if Foster had felt that the people who mattered most at Duke were solidly behind him, he might not have let the fans—or the Joe Gminskis—bother him. But he didn’t think Athletic Director Tom Butters appreciated him and that bothered him most of all. Eleven years later, Butters says he still cannot understand why Foster felt that way.
“I didn’t know I had a problem with Bill Foster until people told me secondhand I had a problem with him,” Butters said. “I always thought he was a great coach and, more important, a great coach for Duke. I thought I always supported him and gave him what he needed. But he didn’t feel that way.”
Foster’s problems with Butters were symptomatic of a larger problem. His insecurity had nothing to do with his job but with a feeling of not being appreciated—or loved.
“Bill is not the kind of guy who would ever go in and ask for a raise,” Wenzel said. “What he wants is for you to come in and give him the raise because you feel he deserves it. I think that was the problem with Butters. It wasn’t that Butters ever came in and demanded more wins or anything like that. It was that he didn’t come in and say, ‘Hey Bill, we know what a fantastic job you’re doing. What can I do to help?’ ”
The paving of the coaches’ parking lot became symbolic of the Butters-Foster relationship. For years, Duke’s coaches had parked in a small lot right behind Cameron, only a few steps from the basketball office. The only problem was that the lot was unpaved; when it rained it quickly became soaked and muddy. Foster asked Butters if the lot could be paved. Butters said it could. But then it didn’t happen.
“I had given approval for the paving of the lot,” Butters said. “The money was there and it was going to be done early in the spring. But for some reason Bill thought I was holding things up. I wasn’t.”
Whatever the holdup, Foster took it personally. Several players still remember watching him get out of the car one rainy day that season and pull a newly laundered jacket out of the car to take into Cameron. As he did, his foot slipped a little and he dropped the jacket in the mud. “How many fucking games do we have to win here before we get a decent parking lot!” Foster screamed.
During Foster’s early years at Duke, he almost never used profanity. Now, while he didn’t use it as often, say, as Bob Knight, he used it regularly. The parking lot situation often was the cause.
But that wasn’t all. There was also Dean Smith. This is a problem all coaches in the ACC have to deal with in varying degrees, none more so than the Duke coach. Eight miles from Cameron, at Carolina, sat Dean Smith. He had been there since 1961 and had been the dominant force in the league since 1967, when Carolina made the first of seven Smith-led trips to the Final Four.
Dean Smith was—and is—God in North Carolina. The newly built 21,000-seat basketball palace at Carolina is named for him. As the state school, Carolina is always going to have far more fans than Duke, and with a legend as Carolina’s coach, Duke is always going to be up against Dean-mania no matter how often it wins.
When he arrived at Duke, Foster seemed able to handle that. He made light of it, often saying, “Before I came down here I thought it was Naismith who invented basketball, not Dean Smith.” He delighted in listening to imitations of Smith’s nasal midwestern twang, and talked often about using what Smith had achieved at Carolina as a role model for his program at Duke.
But gradually that changed. After Duke’s success in ’78, Foster thought Duke might be at least competitive with Carolina in terms of public attention, if not public affection. It didn’t happen. “Everywhere he went,” Wenzel said, “it was Dean, Dean, Dean.”
The players were certainly aware of this feeling. As far back as the preseason of 1978, they could sense that Foster was getting tired of Smith-mania. All of them remember walking into a high school gym in Roxboro for a preseason scrimmage that year. A fan walked up to Foster and said, “Which one of these guys is Phil Ford?”
“He went off,” Bender said. “We got into the locker room and he started yelling, ‘I don’t know about you guys but I’m sick and tired of people thinking there’s only one team in this goddamn state!’ He had a piece of chalk in his hand and when he was finished he threw the chalk down on the floor. It bounced off the floor, flew up into the air and landed perfectly in the chalkholder at the bottom of the blackboard. Everybody just stared for a second. Then Bill looked at us and said, ‘I’ll just bet you don’t think I can do that again.’ ”
Foster could laugh at himself then. By 1980, he wasn’t laughing—and the notion of getting away from Dean and the murderous ACC schedule was very tempting. Everyone sensed it. But with the Blue Devils at 11–0 and holding the No. 1 ranking, it hardly seemed conceivable that Foster would be going anywhere.
They won the league opener against ACC newcomer Georgia Tech, a team that had last place locked up before a game was played. That sent them into Clemson with a 12–0 record. The Tigers had perhaps their best team ever, led by Larry Nance and Billy Williams. Littlejohn Coliseum was filled beyond overflowing. The listed attendance that night was 13,500 in a building that seats 11,000. “I’ve never seen a place so full in my life,” Gminski said. “The aisles were packed. You had to wonder if the fire marshals took the night off.” It was a superb basketball game. The Blue Devils had a chance to win in regulation. With the score tied, Foster called time and set up a play for Engelland. This surprised the veterans. “We were all a little baffled,” Gminski said. “Chip was a good shooter, but he was a freshman. Gene and I were both hot. Why not run something for one of us with Chip as the alternative?”
Foster had confidence in Engelland, but he missed the shot. Clemson won in overtime, 87–82, even though Banks finished with 31 and Gminski with 30. The spell had been broken. There was no time to sulk, however: Carolina was coming to Cameron on Saturday.
This was a game both teams wanted desperately to win. Duke never likes to lose at home and the Tar Heels had been embarrassed by Duke’s easy Big Four victory. Dean Smith, always looking for a psychological edge, actually planted a story with a local reporter, getting him to write a column claiming that Duke would win the game by at least 15 points. Smith then used the column as bulletin board material.
For Foster, this was a big day. A country music freak, he had become friends with the Oak Ridge Boys and they were coming to the game. But they didn’t help. Carolina came out hot and built a quick lead. The Blue Devils rallied in the second half and got even. Then the Tar Heels ran off 15 straight points and Duke never came back. The final was 82–67.
More grist for the “Dean’s God” mill. Questions suddenly were being raised about Duke’s ability to play in the big games. And the Foster-to-South Carolina rumors continued to grow. Foster did nothing to quell the rumors, refusing to talk about them. He had become more and more reclusive, talking to fewer and fewer reporters and fewer and fewer people in general.
Things quickly went from bad to worse. Two days after the Carolina loss, Banks and Dennard collided in practice. Both went down hard. Banks got right up, Dennard didn’t. He had seriously bruised his thigh. All season, Dennard had been a model of consistency. He had kept his word of the previous spring to come back with a new attitude. He had worked hard and partied much less. He was averaging 10 points and 6 rebounds a game and was diving for balls as in his freshman days. It was exactly that kind of dive that brought on the collision with Banks. Now, he would be out indefinitely.
In five days, the Blue Devils had gone from an undefeated, top-ranked team to a team with a 1–2 record in its own conference, a team without its number three scorer, and a team besieged by rumors that the coach was leaving.
They managed to win their next three, scraping past Wake Forest 67–66 and then beating State at home and pathetic Georgia Tech in Atlanta. That brought Virginia and freshman phenom Ralph Sampson to town. For Gminski, jockeying for position in the first round of the NBA draft, this was an important game. Even as a freshman, Sampson was a major test of a good big man. Gminski played well, numbers-wise, scoring 20 points and getting 10 rebounds. But Sampson was better. Down the stretch, he made all the big shots and the Cavaliers won, 90–84.
This was a major letdown for Gminski. Coming off his junior year, he had hoped to have a huge senior year, partly to win games, partly to make himself rich. “Something happened to me senior year,” he said. “I seemed to get tentative at times, usually the worst possible times. Maybe I was worrying too much about the pros instead of focusing on what was going on right then. Whatever it was, I didn’t play that well. I still had good numbers, but I wasn’t playing well. I can always tell the difference. There are times when I have good numbers but I know I’m not playing the way I can. I felt that way a lot that year.”
By now, there was some tension between Gminski and Banks. The year before, Gminski had been the ACC player of the year and a first-team All-American. Banks had been second team All-ACC. Banks thought Gminski shot the ball too often and too much of the team’s offense was designed for him.
This was a little unfair. Gminski was 6-11 and almost unstoppable when his shot was on. Banks, at 6-6, could do more things athletically, but wasn’t the scorer Gminski was. Banks didn’t think he got the credit he deserved.
“That year, a lot of things started to bother me,” Banks said. “It seemed as if when we lost, I got the blame. When we won, Mike got the credit. Then, when things started to go bad, everyone started to write us off.”
The Blue Devils won at Pittsburgh and Wake Forest with Dennard still out and Gminski and Banks both playing well. The Wake win upped their record to 17–3 and they moved back up to No. 4 in the polls. Next came Maryland, at Maryland.
The Terrapins were the surprise team in the ACC, perhaps in the country. They had been picked sixth in the ACC before the season but they had blossomed. Albert King had finally become the star everyone had expected him to be, and 6–8 sophomore Buck Williams, considered too small to play center, had emerged as the most fearsome rebounder in the league. They weren’t a big team, but they were a great shooting team that loved to run if you gave them the chance.
On a cold Saturday afternoon, Duke gave them the chance. Except for Gminski (17) no one rebounded and absolutely no one got back on defense. The Terrapins put on a clinic in the second half, humiliating the Blue Devils, 101–82. “That may be the best I’ve ever had a team play,” Lefty Driesell said. Foster saw it another way. To him, it was as poor an effort as he had seen from one of his teams in a long time.
They went to Virginia three nights later. Gminski was excited to learn before the game that Red Auerbach of the Boston Celtics was attending. Because of some shrewd trading, the Celtics had the first pick in the NBA draft that year. But Auerbach wasn’t there to see Gminski. He was there to see Sampson, hoping to talk him into leaving college at the end of the season. Gminski’s pride was hurt when he heard that. The Blue Devils’ pride was hurt, too, when they lost 73–69.
Dennard, who had missed eight games, was ready to come back. He did, in a nationally televised game against Marquette. The Blue Devils trailed by 18, switched to a man-to-man defense and rallied to get even. Then, Foster switched back to zone. Marquette made the shots in the last couple of minutes and won, 80–77. On NBC, Billy Packer questioned Foster’s decision to switch back to the zone. Foster was furious. Now, it seemed, everyone was second-guessing him.
That defeat drained everyone. The long trip to Wisconsin, the comeback, then the disappointment of losing. They went to State three days later and played their worst game since the State debacle of ’78, losing 76–59. Gminski played one of the worst games of his career, getting a grand total of two rebounds. There was no fight in them at all, no spirit, no sense that anyone gave a damn.
They had now lost four in a row, the longest losing streak since the end of the ’77 season. The record was 17–7 overall but in the ACC they were 5–6. Even with the NCAA Tournament expanded to forty-eight teams—and with no limit on the number of schools that could be chosen from each conference—they were in a deep hole.
The Duke campus that week was like an open-air morgue. Everyone was virtually certain that Foster was leaving and it seemed as if the team had left town ahead of the coach. Maryland was coming in on Saturday for a game that amounted almost to a last stand.
Cameron was full of signs that Saturday: “Bill, please don’t go,”; “Coach, you’re still our Coach,”; “South Carolina, leave our coach alone.” The students still felt the same way as always about Foster and they wanted him to know it. Foster noticed. “I wish they wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I just want to focus on trying to get this team straightened out.”
That wasn’t realistic, though. Foster’s silence had made it apparent to everyone that he was seriously considering leaving. That wasn’t something you could just pretend wasn’t happening. The only person connected with the team Foster had talked to about leaving was Wenzel.
“He called me over to the house one night in February and asked me what I thought,” Wenzel said. “To me, Duke was exactly the kind of place where he wanted to be and where he should be. But he talked about being an independent, about the fact that they really wanted him and the chance to start fresh. By the time I left, I realized that it would have been out of character for him to stay.”
They beat Maryland that afternoon, 66–61. Gminski, embarrassed by his play against State, made the big shots. Banks had 20 points while Bender had 11 points and 9 assists. Then came the home finale against Clemson. This would also be the last home game for Gminski and Bender.
Moments before the seniors were supposed to be introduced, Tom Butters took the P.A. and announced to the crowd that Gminski’s number 43 would be retired. It was the first uniform retired at Duke since the immortal Dick Groat had graduated in 1954. A lot of outstanding players had come through Duke since that time: Art Heyman, Bob Verga, Jeff Mullins, Jim Spanarkel. None had rated this honor. Gminski was stunned.
“It caught me completely off-guard,” he said. “I had hoped something like that might happen, but I had no inkling. For the first few minutes of the game, I was so emotional I couldn’t play a lick.”
Gminski recovered just in time. He came on late to finish with 29 points and 19 rebounds. He got ample help from Banks—who had 24 points—and needed every bit of it. For the second time that season, the two teams went into overtime. Once again, the home team won by the score of 87–82.
When it was over, Gminski and Bender took the P.A. to thank everyone for all their support. As Gminski finished, Banks grabbed the microphone and said, “Well, this might be my last home game too. I might pass up my last year and turn pro.”
The two seniors, knowing Banks was kidding, grabbed the microphone from him and literally carried him away before he could make things worse. But the crowd didn’t react well. It seemed to them that Banks was trying to steal the spotlight from Gminski and Bender. Betrayal was in the air. First Foster, now Banks.
On the final Saturday of the regular season, they went into Carolina expecting to lose and did just that. Dean Smith didn’t need to plant any columns before this game. The Tar Heels were flying and they humiliated the Blue Devils, 96–71. Several of the players’ girlfriends had planned a party for that night to celebrate the end of the regular season.
“We were in no mood for a party,” Gminski said. “We just got drunk and angry. We looked at ourselves and said, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ We sucked at Carolina, simple as that. We rolled over and died. There was no excuse for that.”
They had finished the regular season 19–8, 7–7 in the league. That tied them for fifth place with Virginia but made them the sixth seed in the ACC tournament since Virginia had beaten them twice. The only way they were going to make the NCAA’s was to win the tournament. That didn’t seem very likely.
Foster had concluded his negotiations with South Carolina. He hadn’t signed anything but he had a verbal agreement with USC Athletic Director Jim Carlen. That week, prior to the ACC Tournament, he met individually with Banks, Dennard and Suddath to explain to them why he was leaving before their senior year. All three understood.
“He had to make a move,” Dennard said. “The man was making himself sick. Right or wrong, he felt like he had to get away from Duke. As long as he felt that way, he had to do it.”
Banks agreed. “If he had stayed at Duke,” he said, “I think he would probably be dead now. The man had been like a father to me. I just wanted him to do whatever would make him happy.”
The pre-ACC Tournament stories blamed Duke’s collapse on the turmoil surrounding Foster. The Blue Devils, in the opinion of most, were done. Ironically, their first-round opponent, N.C. State, also had a lame-duck coach.
But Norman Sloan had announced early in the season his intention to move to the University of Florida. There were no ifs, ands, or buts and the Wolfpack had improved steadily all season. They came into the tournament 20–6, having finished third in the league behind Maryland and North Carolina. They had embarrassed Duke the last time the teams had played in Raleigh. Most people expected the Blue Devils to make a quick exit.
“Everyone thought we were finished, especially after what happened at Carolina,” Gminski said. “My dad told me that he was looking for someone to buy his tickets for the last two nights of the tournament because he knew he wasn’t going to need them. That’s how bad it was.”
Everywhere the players turned they heard that all of them had quit, led by Foster. “It finally got to us,” Banks said. “Everybody said we stunk, that we couldn’t beat anyone. No one wanted to even see us when we got to Greensboro. After all the questions and all of us trying to come up with answers we just said fuck it, we’re sick of all this crap. Let’s just kick some ass.”
In short, they finally got mad. Perhaps for the first time since ’78 they felt they had something to prove. And, for the first time since ’78, they put aside distractions and jealousies and concerns about who was getting the headlines. They went to Greensboro wanting to show people that rumors of their death had been greatly exaggerated.
On opening night, they came out flying, blew to a huge lead on State and never looked back. Banks completely shut down State star Hawkeye Whitney and scored 24 points himself. Their easy victory raised eyebrows but, after all, they had been up and down all season. This had clearly been an up night. Carolina in the semifinals would be a test.
Of course, Carolina had just embarrassed them six days earlier in Chapel Hill. Gminski had a vivid memory of Tar Heel center Rich Yonaker pointing into the stands at his parents after hitting a shot over him. Dean Smith was a big believer in pointing at the teammate who feeds you a good pass, and Yonaker had taken the concept a step further. “When I saw that,” Gminski said, “I wanted to get ill.”
Now they had a chance for redemption. Maryland, the top seed, had already beaten Clemson in the first semifinal when Duke and Carolina took the court. Foster had put the team through a tough workout during the afternoon shoot-around, wanting his players to sleep for a while after practice so they would be wide awake for the 9:30 tip-off.
They were awake. Gminski, often so unemotional, was on fire. The rest of the team took its cue from him, all of them remembering the roaring Chapel Hill crowd. The game was over by halftime. The final was 75–61. Gminski had 24 points and a career-high 19 rebounds. The team that had been written off forty-eight hours earlier was in the final. Still, to get into the NCAA’s, they would have to beat Maryland.
That wouldn’t be easy. Maryland had become a wonderfully balanced team with Greg Manning, Ernest Graham, and Albert King all able to score from outside and King and Williams difficult to stop inside. King was the star, the player of the year in the ACC, and a legitimate first-team All-American. Banks, who had already stopped Whitney and Mike O’Koren, would have to try and control King.
For both teams, this game was a crusade. Duke needed to win to get into the NCAA’s and to be redeemed. Maryland had not won the ACC Tournament since 1958. In twelve years at Maryland, Lefty Driesell had coached his team into the tournament final four times but had not yet won the title. The Maryland players, knowing that their regular season championship meant little, wanted desperately to win.
The Duke players woke up on Saturday morning, looked out their windows, and couldn’t believe their eyes. It was snowing. A real blizzard that would eventually dump sixteen inches on Greensboro, bringing the city—the entire East Coast, in fact—to a halt. To the Blue Devils the snow meant one thing: Duke weather was back, just like ’78.
Due to the weather, the Greensboro Coliseum was half empty that night, the first time in memory there had been empty seats for an ACC championship game. Those who couldn’t make it because of the snow missed one of college basketball’s great games.
Albert King was never better. Banks matched him. Every rebound was contested viciously. Maryland took a 6–0 lead. As it turned out, that was the biggest lead either team had all night. The difference for Duke was Vince Taylor, the sophomore guard. He had the best game of his career with 19 points. Most important, with Maryland up by three and trying to kill the clock, he made back-to-back steals. The first led to a breakaway lay-up, the second to two Gminski free throws. From there, they seesawed to the finish, each team having an answer for every basket.
The pressure kept building, but neither team was willing to fold. With thirty-one seconds left, King hit his 27th point of the night to put Maryland ahead, 72–71.
Now the pressure was on Duke. Maryland concentrated on keeping the ball away from Gminski and Banks. Taylor had to shoot with ten seconds left. The ball rimmed out. Ten bodies crashed the boards. Dennard got his hand on the ball but couldn’t control it. Rather than try to grab it, he tapped it back on the board. When it came down again, it ended up in the hands of the surprised Gminski. Never one to look a gift basketball in the mouth, he laid the ball in with eight seconds left. Duke was up, 73–72. Maryland got the ball to halfcourt and called time with five ticks to go.
Everyone in the building knew King would take the last shot. The play Maryland wanted to run was simple: Screen for King at the top of the key to allow him to come out and get the inbounds pass. Then run everyone else down to the baseline to clear room for him. Banks would have to somehow deny King penetration—if he got within eighteen feet he would almost surely bury the winning shot.
As the teams walked back on the court, King and Banks passed one another. Instinctively, each reached out to tap the other, a sign of their mutual respect. Maryland ran the play as planned. King caught the pass thirty feet from the basket and faced Banks one-on-one as the clock ticked down. Banks knew King would get his shot. The question was, from where?
“I wanted to push him out as much as I could,” he said. “If I got too close, he would go by me. I tried to force him left [toward the sideline] so he couldn’t get as close as he wanted.” Banks’s slight overplay forced King just a tad wider than he wanted to go. With two seconds left, he pulled up from twenty feet and shot.
The ball hit the top of the front rim and bounded high into the air. Buck Williams went up to try to tip it. He had position. But in a split second, two things happened. First, the ball hit the rim a second time as it came down, throwing Williams’s timing off. Then, to make sure Williams couldn’t somehow get a hand on the ball, Dennard undercut him, taking his legs out from under him. The two of them collapsed in a heap on the floor. On the second bounce, it was Banks who ended up with the basketball. The clock was at zero. There had been no whistle. Maryland was screaming for a foul on Dennard, but to no avail.
It was over. As soon as he heard the buzzer, Banks began leaping in the air for joy, screaming and pointing at press row. Then, all of a sudden, he collapsed in a heap at center court. At first, amidst the celebration, no one noticed. But when everyone saw Banks not getting up, it was apparent something was wrong. He was hyperventilating.
“I was just so geeked up, I lost it,” he said. “I was screaming at the writers because they had said we were finished and I wanted them to know what I thought about that. I was so exhausted and excited that I just got dizzy.”
In the Maryland locker room, every single player cried unabashedly. It had been a brutal, draining game and they had literally come up an inch short. King was chosen as the MVP. Later, that would annoy Banks. For now, he was just trying to breathe.
Foster was dazed. He could not believe the effort his team had put out for three days to win the championship. As he came off the floor he turned to Tom Mickle and said, “How can I leave now? I’ve got to think about this again.”
But he wouldn’t have that chance. Tom Butters had had enough with all the speculation and the rumors. Before Foster left the building that night, Butters told him he wanted a decision by the next day. “I didn’t think it was fair to the players to go to the NCAA Tournament and be asked over and over again about their coach’s status,” Butters said. “I wanted Bill to make up his mind.”
Foster’s mind was made up. He had been emotionally carried away in the aftermath of the victory, but that faded quickly. The next day he submitted his resignation to Butters, effective at the end of Duke’s season. Twenty-four hours later he was in Columbia, South Carolina. There, he was introduced as South Carolina’s new coach.
The players were still in a fog after the Maryland victory. They were back in the NCAA Tournament with a second-round date against the winner of the Washington State–Pennsylvania game. And they now officially had a lame-duck coach.
“The best thing for us during that period was that everything happened so fast,” Bender said. “We had to play three times in three nights. Then we got our bid, then they announced Bill was gone. It was boom, boom, boom. We never had time to think about what was happening.”
What they could think about was that there was still the NCAA Tournament to play—and there was one more chance to relive 1978.
“We got some of it back during that ACC Tournament,” Dennard said. “We were the old, get-after-it Blue Devils. We just wanted to win, do whatever we had to. Gene was never better than he was that weekend. But we were all in it together for the first time in a while. Bill announcing he was leaving put us in that kind of situation again. We felt like this was the last go-round for the old gang and we wanted to make it special.”
They started with an easy 52–42 second-round victory over Penn. The Quakers tried to slow the pace, as they had done to North Carolina the year before, but Gminski hit every big shot, the Blue Devils played great defense, and the game was never really in doubt. That put them into the round of sixteen, the Mideast Regional semifinals. The place: Lexington, Kentucky—Rupp Arena. The opponent: Kentucky.
“It was like Notre Dame all over again,” Bender said. “No one gave us a chance to win. We had beaten Kentucky in the first game of the season when they were breaking in their new players. Now, they had a whole season of experience and we were playing on their home court.”
In those days, the NCAA still allowed tournament teams to play on their home floor, which was unfair. A school should not have home court advantage just because it is wealthy enough to have a large arena. For Duke—or anyone—to play an NCAA round of sixteen game before more than twenty-three thousand fans—twenty-two thousand of them Kentucky fans—was wrong. But that was the hand they had been dealt.
“In a way, it almost became our advantage,” Banks said. “We were wired before that game. It was the old ‘Let’s show these guys’ attitude. Instead of thinking we couldn’t do it, we were determined to show people that we could.”
Foster’s status added to the drama of the story. Every game he coached could now be his last at Duke. The players were asked time and again if they were trying to win this one for him. Their answer was honest. “We’re trying to win this one,” Dennard said, “for us. He’s one of us.”
The first half of the Kentucky game was a repeat of the Notre Dame game in St. Louis. To the astonishment of the Kentucky fans, the Blue Devils, not the least bit intimidated, came out and proceeded to put a clinic on the Wildcats.
Early in the game, Gminski stepped in front of Sam Bowie on the fast break and took a charge. He jumped in the air and shook his fist. This was totally out of character and it sent an electric jolt through the team. “When Mike did that, I knew we were going to win the game,” Bender said. “That kind of emotion wasn’t Mike. But it was there that night and we all fed off it.”
The first half was almost perfect. Every Bender pass worked. Taylor was superb and Gminski and Banks were all over the boards. At half-time, it was 43–29—the exact same score of the Notre Dame game two years earlier.
It couldn’t last. For one thing, Kentucky was too good to get blown out. Players like Kyle Macy, Sam Bowie, and Derrick Hord were not going to just roll over and die, especially with the crowd ready to boo them out of the state if they did. Kentucky began to hit. The crowd grew louder. The Blue Devils got tight and started missing. The lead dwindled and dwindled. Kentucky finally got even at 54–54 with a little more than a minute to go.
Duke wanted to play for one shot, but Kentucky wouldn’t allow it. Banks got inside and was fouled with twenty-one seconds left. He went to the line with the crowd screeching. His first free throw rolled out. One left. This one crept over the rim and in. Duke led again, 55–54, but Kentucky had the ball with a chance to win.
The Wildcats looked inside but Gminski had Bowie blanketed. The ball finally swung to Macy, the All-American. He put the ball on the floor and head-faked Vince Taylor. Taylor didn’t go for the fake. Macy went up with Taylor all over him. It was a forced shot that hit the back rim and bounded away. The buzzer sounded and Rupp Arena went into shock. Duke–55, Kentucky–54. Final. It was as unlikely a victory as could be imagined. Duke had scored 12 points in the second half—and won. Amazingly, they were one step from going back to the Final Four.
Emotionally drained and physically exhausted, they had to play Purdue on Saturday in the regional final. The Kentucky crowd turned out in force to root against the team that had eliminated their beloved Wildcats. It was like another road game.
Six years earlier, Foster’s Utah team had faced Purdue in the NIT final in what turned out to be Foster’s last game at Utah.
History repeated itself. Purdue center Joe Barry Carroll outplayed Gminski inside and Taylor, the hero of the Kentucky game with his 15 points, couldn’t buy a basket, finishing the game with only 2 points. Banks had 14, but shot poorly also. They managed to lead 30–28 at halftime but Purdue took over midway through the second half. Gminski and Banks were in foul trouble. There was no rally. The final was 68–60.
This was the most heartbreaking loss of all. Kentucky in ’78 hadn’t really felt like a loss. St. John’s in ’79, while devastating, was hardly unexpected given the physical condition of the team. But this, two days after the joy of the Kentucky victory, was more than they could bear. Dennard, who had fouled out, chased one of the referees down at game’s end and, still enraged, snapped a towel in his face.
“When I fouled out, sitting on the bench the last couple of minutes, it just all kicked in on me,” he said. “I mean, this was the end. Bill was gone, Mike was gone, the future was gone. I was in a rage and I directed it towards the ref. The guy had called nine fouls on me in two games. Sometimes you know a guy is picking on you and this guy was. I turned to Mike Tissaw and said, ‘When this is over, I’m gonna slug the guy, I don’t care what happens to me.’
“When the game was over, I chased after him and started to hit him. Then I stopped myself and started to just walk away. But he was smirking at me, I swear he was. So I just took my towel and went, ‘Zap!’ Got him right on the side of his face. As soon as I did that, two state troopers showed up and got between us. But all the way down the tunnel I was screaming at him. It was just pure, pissed-off emotion. I was so mad. We could have won that year. But we didn’t and I knew it was never going to be the same. End of an era, all that. Something just snapped inside me.”
A few minutes later, a Lexington writer who had witnessed the scene asked Dennard what happened, commenting, “You didn’t show a lot of class there, did you, Kenny?”
“Whoever said,” Dennard snapped back, “that I had class?”
Everyone else was as upset as Dennard even if they didn’t react as overtly. Walking off the floor, it hit Foster that he wasn’t Duke’s coach anymore, that when he walked out of the locker room, he would do so as an employee of the University of South Carolina.
“He walked in and started to tell us how proud he was of us,” Gminski said, “and then just lost it. Then we all lost it.”
They all cried. This was a different ending from St. Louis, a more painful and more final one. “There was no way to rationalize losing that game,” Dennard said. “To this day, I wish Bill hadn’t let things get to him the way he did. He had a bad recruiting year, so what? So what if he lost thirteen games one year? He was the right coach for Duke and Duke was the right place for him. But he just didn’t understand. He couldn’t deal with things.”
Bill Foster certainly couldn’t deal with any long farewells. When the team bus pulled up to the hotel, the lobby was packed with Duke people. They were all waiting there to congratulate the team and the coaches on their effort. Foster couldn’t handle it. He raced to the steps and went straight up to his second-floor suite. A few minutes later, he and Shirley walked briskly through the lobby, saying good-bye as quickly as possible.
At the door, Foster turned to Wenzel. “Take care of the team,” he said. Wenzel nodded. Foster jumped in the car that was there to take him to the private plane—sent by South Carolina A.D. Jim Carlen—and was gone. It took no more than ten minutes.
“I’ll never forget that scene,” Bender said. “It was such an empty feeling. My career was over and that was sad. But after all Coach Foster had done for Duke, taking us from nowhere to being one of the top programs in the country, it was just sad that he would walk into that lobby, see all those people, and could only think about getting out as fast as possible. It made me want to cry all over again.”
Steinwedel was going with Foster to South Carolina. Chili had decided to get out of coaching to pursue a career in business. Wenzel would be interviewed for the job as Foster’s successor but never seriously considered. He too would follow his boss to South Carolina. Gminski and Bender were graduating. Of the sixteen men who had walked out of the St. Louis locker room with their arms around one another only three—Banks, Dennard, and Suddath—were left. And Max. That was it.
“It was a feeling,” Suddath said, “of being all alone. It was as if Duke basketball had just vanished from the face of the earth.”
Ten days later, Mike Krzyzewski, a thirty-three-year-old Bob Knight protégé who had been the coach at West Point for five years, was named to succeed Foster. Banks and Dennard skipped the meeting Butters called to introduce the new coach to the team. That left Suddath as the only representative of the ’78 team in the room. The chants of “we’ll be back” seemed a lot more than two years past. The era, as Dennard had put it, was over.