He's 75 years old now and his blood pressure spiked so much during a recent game against Wake Forest they had to put him on an IV trip at half-time. He earns about $10 million a year coaching basketball and spends inordinate night hours alone watching game film, not sleeping, forgetting to eat. He is sometimes priestly, sometimes profane, he carries rosary beads and for 41 seasons he has been the public face of Duke, the private college that represents a few acres of unimpeachable American entitlement. And tonight's his night.
"And I know there's gonna be TV, radio – a Duke guy and a Carolina guy and they're gonna be talking and saying stupid stuff to each other and... that means NOTHING. That's what sport is about for the fans. But it's not for coaches," Mike Krzyzewski (pronounced Che-chef-ski) warned this week as he prepares for the closing act as the front-man for one of the most compelling and loathed teams in America.
Sometimes, the fates conspire. Just eight miles divide the campuses of Duke, in Durham, and North Carolina, in Chapel Hill. They've played basketball games against one another for 100 years and have met 256 times without ever once crossing paths in the NCAA finals – until tonight.
And the occasion will, as it must, revolve around the peculiar magnetism of "Coach K". He grew up in 1950s Chicago living the Polish-immigrant equivalent of the experience that Philip Roth chronicled and subverted: the desire for immersion; the chase for respectable American life.
He found it through a deep Catholicism, a military graduation from West Point and, primarily, through channelling a burning requirement that all his gilded sons, his extended basketball family, match the obsession he brought to Duke after landing there in 1980. Five national titles, 12 Final Fours and 1,202 games over 41 years: what a run. And it all stops this weekend.
In the 1980s, Duke basketball teams seemed to mirror Reagan-era entitlement. If Patrick Bateman had supported a sports team, it could have only been Duke. Their players then were predominantly white and pouting and had names redolent of louche privilege: Quin Snyder, Bobby Hurley, Christian Laettner and Danny Ferry.
Duke basketball fans – the self-anointed Cameron Crazies – revelled in an unapologetic obnoxiousness and emanated an eerie similarity: a cult suggesting rarefied suburbia, pristine orthodontics and a sinisterly narrow taste in music. Duke was the essence of academic privilege, renamed after an endowment from the 19th century tobacco magnate James Buchanan Duke, with an endowment of $12 billion, 15 Nobel Laureates and one ex-president (Nixon) and the students who have filled Cameron Hall through the Krzyzewski decades celebrated that elitism.
“It’s all right! It’s okay” went one of the chants during the relatively rare occurrence of a loss at home. “You’re gonna work for us someday.”
Because of the perpetual success of the Duke basketball “programme”, this select fragment of American society featured regularly on nationally televised sports broadcasts. Duke home games became a pageant in which the crowd and the team itself was indivisible: a certain message was communicated across the Republic. Through their berserk, radiant celebration of, well, themselves, the Duk-ies made it clear that they believed themselves to be on a glorious pathway of bright shining promise, which they deserved because they were smart and furnished with the kind of work ethic embodied by Coach K himself. To outsiders it was a glimpse into the soul of American power and it was unnerving: as shiny and disposable as a shampoo advert except one that kept showing up, decade after decade.
But what made the Duke story remarkable, as the years rolled on, was the constancy of Krzyzewski. He never changed: the black hair always just-cut, the hawkish demeanour, the country club attire. The decades rolled; presidents came and left but there was Krzyzewski, returning with every autumn, always wired into whatever game and radiating an intensity which suggested the future of mankind depended on Duke – his Duke – winning. They won a lot and frequently by playing spellbinding, brilliantly coached basketball. And so they became easy to hate.
Because this is his last season, Krzyzewski agreed to allow ESPN’s Wright Thompson behind the curtains for an epic hour-long written portrait which is wonderful not so much because of what he has to say but because it offers an insight into a turbulent, soulful and often lonely life’s work. It confirms what we know: that there is an unrelenting brutality behind the illusory glitter of elite sport. The game is merely the show.
The reality of Krzyzewski’s life involves wandering through the warren of arena corridors at one in the morning, long after the crowd has gone, lukewarm pizza slices on a bus or landing home at the small Durham airport at four in the morning. Former players talk of the tantrums, the outbursts, the tears – theirs – the loyalty and the unexpected kindnesses. His wife and children talk of the game as his obsession.
And he has been doing this for 41 years.
There is something fated and extraordinary about Krzyzewski returning to the Final Four (out of the 64 starting teams in the March Madness tournament) in his twilight hour. He has trenchantly resisted all invitations to bask in golden reflection, honing that rottweiler energy for the next win.
Stay up late tonight and you'll see the great and good at courtside – there's Jordan, there's Barack etc... – and, scattered through the crowd, the maturing faces of his former Duke starlets of yesteryear. But Krzyzewski will own the building.
And he has earned it. What makes it so intriguing is that if he – if Duke – lose against their dreaded neighbours he will not, of course, go gently. He’ll exit nursing the sustaining fury, seething that this one got away, unfulfilled and burning for next season – only to realise that there is no next season for him. It’s a potential nightmare to carry into the splendours of retirement.
Millions will tune in hoping to see just that happen.
And because of that, Duke will probably win.
