The game had come down to the final seconds. With more than twenty-one thousand people on their feet in the Dean E. Smith Center, North Carolina guard King Rice stepped to the foul line. Three seconds were left and the Tar Heels trailed Duke, 87–85.
A lot was at stake. This was the regular season finale. If Carolina won, it would tie for the ACC regular season title and Duke would be relegated to a tie for fourth place. But if Duke won, the Blue Devils and Tar Heels would be tied for second place. What’s more, a Duke victory would ruin the Carolina seniors’ last home game and would give them two straight victories in the Deandome.
In a Rockville, Maryland, bar, two Duke graduates watched on a giant television screen. “He’ll make both shots,” said one, pointing at Rice, “and Carolina will win in overtime. It’s the old Carolina piss factor. You think you’re going to beat Carolina, then you lose and you’re pissed.”
The other alum nodded and didn’t say anything. Rice made the first free throw. “See, I told you,” said the first one. “Overtime.”
Rice missed the second. Robert Brickey rebounded for Duke and was fouled. He went to the foul line, made one free throw, and the clock ran out after he missed the second. Duke had won, 88–86.
The second alum turned to the first. “Guess you were wrong,” he said matter-of-factly. “They won.”
He didn’t say “We,” he said “They.” Even though he once wore the uniform, John Harrell no longer thinks of Duke as We. He had sat and watched the last few minutes of the game without flinching once. His only comment, when Duke’s Quin Snyder had missed a free throw in the final minute, had been, “What do you know. He choked.” That was it. Nothing more.
“I really don’t feel anything when I watch Duke play now,” Harrell said. “They won the game today, that’s fine. If they had lost, that would have been fine with me too. It really doesn’t matter to me. I respect their program but I don’t have any emotional attachment to it or to the school.
“I have a lot of good memories of Duke but I also have a lot of bad ones. I’m glad I have a Duke degree and I’ve got warm memories of a lot of people there, but that can’t wipe out what happened.”
In many ways, John Harrell personified the 1978 Duke miracle team. He had gone from being an unknown transfer from North Carolina Central to the starting point guard on a Final Four team and the hero of the semifinal victory over Notre Dame. All of that in twenty months.
“When I made the two free throws to beat Notre Dame, it was as incredible as anything that has ever happened to me in my life,” Harrell said. “My mother still has a scrapbook full of all the stories about that game and me making the free throws. It was as wonderful a moment as I’ve ever had in sports.”
But it went downhill after that. Duke lost the final to Kentucky. Like everyone else on the team, Harrell was caught up in the emotion of the postgame scene in the locker room and on the court. He was touched—and amazed—by the greeting the team received when it returned home to campus the next day. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many people crammed into a space [the main quad] that small all at once in my life,” he said. “Seeing how much it meant to all of them was a great thing.” Harrell spent the summer at Duke, working out with several other players preparing for the ’79 season. Academically, he would be a senior, but he had two years of basketball eligibility left. “My goal was simple,” Harrell said, remembering that summer. “I wanted to be the best point guard in the country. I had established myself the year before. I knew the players now, I knew the system, and we were going to have a great team. There was no reason why I couldn’t be as good as anyone.”
But Harrell wasn’t the only Duke point guard working on his game that summer. Bob Bender, who had split time with Harrell during the last twenty-two games of the season, was also improving himself. Harrell and Bender were very different as players. Both were good but not great shooters. Harrell was certainly quicker and less likely to turn the ball over. Bender was more spectacular, more daring. He was also more verbal than Harrell, more of the prototype floor leader.
“Johnny had more talent than Bob, there was never any question about that in my mind,” said Harold Morrison, Harrell’s closest friend on the team. “But I think the coaches were more comfortable with Bob out there. He was more of a talker than John. He was what they call a coach’s player.”
Bender was also white. While Morrison wonders if that might have had something to do with what eventually happened, Harrell does not. “I really don’t think race had anything to do with it,” he said. “I’ve certainly given that some thought, but I don’t think that was it. I just think they wanted Bender to be the point guard when he first transferred from Indiana and I got in the way for a while. When they had the chance to move me out, they did.”
There is bitterness in Harrell’s voice when he talks about this. Bill Foster decided to switch the roles that season, making Bender the starter with Harrell coming off the bench. Harrell thinks that was unfair, that the job was his and the change should not have been made until—and unless—he had the chance to be outplayed by Bender when the season started.
Everyone on the team, aided by 20–20 hindsight vision, now agrees that the team would have been better off if Foster had left the Harrell/Bender combination intact. Bender thinks that too. But almost everyone agrees that Foster’s only motivation in making the change was his belief that it would make the team better.
“Bill was about one thing,” said Gene Banks, “and that was winning. He would never do anything to the team if he thought it might hurt the team. He thought we would be better with Bobby starting. He might have been wrong, but there’s no way he made the change for any reason except wanting to win.”
Harrell could not accept that. He called his mother in tears when Foster told him Bender would be starting, and he never accepted the switch. “I’ll say this,” he said. “I did not deal with it very well at all. I sulked and I pouted. I thought I had been treated unfairly and I didn’t bounce back from it. I became another malcontent very quickly.”
Lou Goetz, the one member of the coaching staff Harrell felt close to, had left to become the head coach at Richmond. Harrell is certain that Goetz would have talked Foster out of making the switch if he had still been there. Goetz isn’t sure about that. He does concede that Bender was more capable than Harrell of dealing with not starting.
“Johnny always had a tendency to get down on himself very quickly,” Goetz said. “I remember when he first transferred over from North Carolina Central, he had some trouble adjusting to the work. He got very upset about it and wondered if he could make it at Duke. Of course he could and he did, he just had to adjust.
“He needed to be told he was doing a good job and to be reminded that we all had faith in him. Bob was much more self-motivated. Coming off the bench didn’t bother him. Johnny needed the reinforcement of being a starter. It was important to him. He played great in ’78. I mean he only turned the ball over once a game [39 times in 34 games], which is remarkable for a point guard. My instinct, looking at it now, would have been to keep things the same. But I wasn’t there to watch them practice every day so I can’t say for sure.”
If Harrell had dealt with the benching the way Bender had dealt with not starting the year before, the two guards might have continued to split time. But he didn’t do that and, as the season wore on, freshman Vince Taylor became more and more of a factor. He was young and innocent, glad to play coming off the bench and not aligned with, to use Harrell’s word, the malcontents. Eventually, Taylor moved past Harrell in the pecking order. Harrell really slid after that.
“I called my parents and told them to stop coming to the games,” he said. “There was no point in them coming to watch me watch. I hated practice, I hated being on the blue team. I got out of shape, mentally and physically. That’s why when Bob got sick [with appendicitis] I wasn’t ready.”
Harrell became the starting point guard again after Bender got sick. But in his first game back, North Carolina beat Duke in the ACC Tournament final. Harrell, given just a few hours’ notice that he would be starting, played poorly. But a week later, against St. John’s in the NCAA Tournament, he was playing very well when Wayne McKoy caught him in the eye with an elbow and knocked him silly. He didn’t come back until the last fourteen seconds—the last fourteen seconds, as it turned out, of his college career.
“I wanted the coaches to talk me into coming back when the season was over,” Harrell said. “I don’t mean with any promises but just by telling me that I would have a role with the team the next year, that they felt they had lost something by not playing me. But they didn’t do that. They made excuses. I just couldn’t see any reason to come back.”
And so Harrell passed up his last year of eligibility and graduated that spring with his degree in math. Foster, disappointed that Harrell had not dealt with the point guard switch better, never really knew how bitter Harrell was. But he did understand how disappointed Harrell had been to lose the starting spot. He arranged an invitation to the New Jersey Nets rookie camp for Harrell that summer.
“I felt like I could play with just about all the guys in the camp,” Harrell said. “But they weren’t looking for a six-foot point guard who didn’t turn the ball over. They were looking for someone who could dunk backwards standing still. Something spectacular. I’m not spectacular.”
Cut by the Nets, Harrell returned to Durham to become an actuarial trainee for a local bank. He thought he wanted to become an actuary. During that basketball season, Foster provided him with tickets to all the games and asked him if he would talk to visiting recruits about Duke.
“I talked to one kid, Danny Young,” said Harrell. “I told him that I thought Duke was a great school and if he was interested in going to law school, which he said he was, Duke would be a great place. But as for basketball, I said I thought there were communication problems between the coaches and the players.
“I felt badly about saying that. It really wasn’t fair. After that, I told the coaches I didn’t want to take their tickets anymore, that I didn’t want to be critical to outsiders but I wouldn’t be dishonest either. I just decided to disassociate myself with the basketball program.”
A year later, Harrell moved to Washington, D.C. to go to work for a computer company as a programmer. He had worked with computers during that first year out of school and found he enjoyed it. During that time, he put basketball behind him. He didn’t play or watch or keep track of any teams. “It hurt too much,” he said. “I thought the bitterness would fade but, for a while, it actually grew. I just thought I could have been a much better player than I ever had the chance to become.”
Shortly after moving to Washington, Harrell was introduced to Darleen Corbett, who had gone to Hillside High School at the same time Harrell was there, though he hadn’t known her then, only her brother. The two were introduced by their mothers, started dating, and were married in December of 1981. But the romance had been too much of a whirlwind and the marriage didn’t work. Two and a half years later, they divorced.
“It just didn’t work out,” said Harrell, who is the only member of the ’78 team to have gone through a divorce. “We like each other, but we couldn’t live together as it turned out. The good thing for both of us is that there weren’t any children so we were able to separate without any problems.”
After his divorce, Harrell changed jobs, moving to a consulting firm. From there, he moved to a company called Dialcom, which is one of the largest electronic mail services in the world. He now runs the data base and the directory service.
“It’s a great job for me because I still get to work with the computers, which I’ve always enjoyed,” he said. “But it also allows me to get some management experience. I remember what it was like playing for Bill Foster. I think he was an excellent teacher but not a very good manager. I try to be more of a communicator with the people who work for me than he was.”
Unlike Morrison and Gray, Harrell has not yet put the anger he felt at the end of his Duke career behind him. His background, growing up in Durham, may be part of this. “I guess I never felt completely comfortable at Duke,” he said. “I grew up a Carolina fan and then I went to North Carolina Central for a year. Duke was entirely different. It was never a place I felt I could relate to on any level. Even the black kids there were never very friendly to me until they found out I was a basketball player.
“That’s not to say it isn’t a great school. I had some great moments there and I have some great memories of people and of what happened to us in ’78. I really enjoy it when people recognize my name and remember that I played in the Final Four or that I made the free throws against Notre Dame. But I don’t feel an attachment to the school in any way. I haven’t been back to a game there since 1980 and I really don’t have any desire to go back to a game now. It’s behind me.
“I have gotten interested in basketball again the last few years. I watch on television and follow what’s going on in the game. But I watch basketball clinically, not emotionally.” As befitting a man who works with numbers, Harrell is not an emotional person by nature. At least not outwardly. The hurt of ’79 is still clearly there, though. “I get emotional about some things,” he said. “I just saw The Natural for the first time a couple of weeks ago and I got really emotional watching that. I think it’s because the guy got his chance and I felt good about that.”
Harrell still talks to Morrison on a semiregular basis and has talked at different times to Banks and Gminski in recent years. And, having gotten engaged recently, he took his fiancée on a tour of the Duke campus when they were in Durham to visit his family.
“When I talk to Harold, it’s never for fifteen minutes,” he said. “It’s always an hour. Or two. There are strong feelings there. I feel the same way about the other guys on the team. I still wear the ring because it brings back memories of the good times there, of what we achieved together in ’78. I told my fiancée that when we get married I’ll wear my wedding band on my right hand. The Duke ring fits my left hand and I’m not going to take it off.”
And yet, when the reunion of the ’78 team was being organized last spring, the one member of the team who seemed genuinely uninterested in attending was Harrell. “I would like to see the guys,” he said. “I would enjoy that, seeing how they’re all doing and telling old stories and remembering how we used to give each other such a hard time back when things were good.
“But I still don’t feel like I could look the coaches in the eye—except for Lou. If it were just the players, it would be one thing. But if the coaches were there I would walk in, sit down, and find myself thinking, ‘When will this be over?’ I know that’s how it would be. I can’t stop myself from feeling that way, even though I wish I didn’t.”
His teammates, who would like to see him again, understand. “Johnny Gun was the quietest guy on the team right from the start,” Bell said. “It was easy to think he was aloof, but he really wasn’t. He was just very quiet.”
Perhaps Harrell was quiet because he was an introvert in a room full of extroverts. Perhaps he always felt just a little bit like an outsider since he hadn’t been recruited.
Now, though, established in business and in life, Harrell isn’t shy or quiet. He is heavier than he was in his Johnny Gun days but he still moves gracefully, like the ex-athlete he is. Maybe someday his feelings about Duke will change. But Harrell doesn’t think so.
“I was talking to a guy in a bar a couple weeks ago and he remembered that I played for Duke,” Harrell said. “He said to me, ‘I went to Ohio State. I remember when we came from way behind to beat you in Madison Square Garden. Do you remember that?’
“Well, of course I remembered it. I think if the guy had brought that up to some other guys on the team, they would have gotten upset, not necessarily with him, but just with the memory of that weekend. It didn’t bother me at all. It was just something that happened.
“To me, that’s what my Duke experience was, something that happened. If I have a regret, it’s that I didn’t come back my last year because if I had I would have gotten a free year of graduate school even if they hadn’t played me. I should have been more pragmatic about the whole thing but I was twenty-one years old.
“The two things I remember most vividly about Duke are the Notre Dame game and calling my mother, crying, to tell her I was being benched and didn’t know why. The high and low, that’s what I remember. The rest is mostly a blur. To tell you the truth, I like it that way.”
There is some justice in this. After all, to his teammates, Johnny Gun was always something of a blur, on and off the court. Ten years later, nothing has changed. They remember him, fondly. He remembers them, fondly. But that’s where it ends. The blur remains a blur.