MISSION FIRST: No Excuses

It has been more than 47 years since the June day in 1969 when Mike Krzyzewski graduated from West Point and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army.

He has gone on to become one of basketball's most iconic figures—a coach with more wins than anyone who has ever coached college basketball at the Division I level, someone who has become a one-name star: "Coach K," no further introduction needed.

And yet, all these years later, Capt. Michael William Krzyzewski, U.S. Army (ret.) will tell you there isn't a day that goes by that he doesn't think about his alma mater and how fortunate he was that his parents convinced him to go to a college he had zero interest in attending.

"The very first thing I think about when I think of my school is how proud I am to be from there," he says, sitting in his palatial office on the Duke University campus on a warm spring afternoon. "I'm proud of it every single day. I never take my West Point ring off."

He pauses to twist the ring on his finger, looks at it for a moment, smiles and continues.

"West Point is a part of me, it's a part of who I am. I have no idea where my life would have gone if I hadn't gone to school there but I'm pretty certain it wouldn't have been to this."

"This," is an office filled with mementos of a remarkable career: five national championships and 12 Final Fours during his 36 years as Duke's coach, not to mention three stints as the U.S. Olympic coach and 1,043 career wins, the first 73 as the head coach at Army.

Krzyzewski readily admits he wasn't the least bit impressed or tempted when the new coach at Army, a 24-year-old novice named Bob Knight, showed up on his doorstep on a June evening in 1965. Knight had come to Chicago to visit Loyola Academy to talk to coach Gene Sullivan about one of his players.

While they were talking, Sullivan mentioned that the leading scorer that season in Chicago's Catholic League was still undecided about where he was going to go to college. Knight called Al Ostrowski, Krzyzewski'c coach at Weber High School who, in Mike's words was, "blown away," by the thought of one of his players going to Army. That evening, Knight visited William and Emily Krzyzewski and their younger son.

"The thing is, my parents were overwhelmed by the notion that I might have the chance to go the United States Military Academy and then serve my country," Krzyzewski says. "They thought it was an honor just to have coach Knight come to their home to talk about it.

"I didn't feel the same way. I was NOT blown away by the thought of going to Army, not at all. I did NOT want to go into the Army for four years, no way. It really had nothing to do with Vietnam, it had more to do with the fact that I knew I wanted to be a coach. I didn't think going to Army and being in the Army was going to get me there."

Knight suggested the Krzyzewskis take a few days to think about Mike's decision. For the next couple of days, William and Emily staged an evening ritual.

"They would stand in the kitchen talking, knowing I was in the next room listening. They spoke Polish to one another and I didn't understand very much. But there's no word in Polish for 'stupid,' or for 'dumb.' So, I would hear, 'Mike stupid; Mike dumb.'

"I knew what they were doing. They were goading me. Finally, I just walked in one night and said, 'Okay, okay, I'll do it.'

His eyes glistened just a little at the memory. "Other than marrying my wife, it was the best decision I ever made. Or, more accurately, it was the best decision my parents ever talked me into." He smiles one more time. "Or conned me into."

Krzyzewski talks often about how his West Point experience has influenced his coaching. Perhaps no coach in history has ever embraced FAILURE the way he has.

"At West Point you learn that failure isn't a destination," he says. "It's part of a continuum that leads to winning as long as you don't let it stop you. Failure is part of your training at West Point because the Army needs to know how you handle it. If you can't handle it at the Academy, how are you going to handle it in battle? If failure beats you in battle, people die.

"If you fail in a basketball game, nobody dies but if you're going to ultimately succeed, you have to use it to make you better. When something bad happens, you don't stay there, you figure out how to put it behind you and NOT fail the next time."

Krzyzewski served in the Army for five years after graduation and was hired by Knight, his old coach at Army, as an assistant at Indiana after his retirement from the service. After one season there, he was brought back to his alma mater to fix an ailing basketball program. The Black Knights had gone 3-22 in 1975 and Krzyzewski was brought in to try to restore a program that had gone to the National Invitation Tournament, then just about as prestigious as the NCAA Tournament, seven times between 1961 and 1970.

Krzyzewski was able to turn the program around, winning 20 games and again reaching the NIT in 1978. His fifth season, however, was a tough one: graduation and injuries dropped the team's record to 9-17. It was at that point that Duke Athletic Director Tom Butters shocked the world by hiring the 33-year-old Army coach to direct one of college basketball's best-known programs.

Legend has it that Knight was the person who recommended Krzyzewski to Butters. It wasn't, in fact Knight was pushing Bob Weltlich, another of his former assistants for the job and encouraged Krzyzewski to take the Iowa State job, which he had been offered.

Krzyzewski decided to ask Col. Tom Rogers, who was his officer representative at the time, what he thought.

"Iowa State's a good job," Rogers told him. "But I think Duke is special. You need to ride the Duke thing out."

Krzyzewski decided to listen to Rogers, who had become a father figure to him when his own dad passed away during his junior year at West Point. In fact, when Rogers retired from the Army, he went to work for Krzyzewski at Duke.

On March 14, 1980, Krzyzewski and Mickie, his wife, visited Duke and Kryzyzewski met with Tom Butters for a third time. When the meeting was over, Butters thanked Krzyzewski for coming and wished him a safe trip home. Krzyzewski left the office baffled, he had thought he was going to be offered the job.

After the Krzyzewskis had left campus to head to the airport, Steve Vacendak, Duke's Associate Athletic Director, the man who had first brought Krzyzewski's name to Butters, asked his boss how the interview with Krzyzewski had gone.

"What are you thinking Tom?" he asked.

"I'm thinking he's the next great coach in the college game," Butters said.

"So, you hired him," Vacendak said.

Butters, who passed away in the spring of 2016, shook his head. "I can't do it Steve," he said.

"How can I hire a 33-year-old coach who just went 9 and 17 at Army?"

"If he's the next great coach," Vacendak answered. "How can you not hire him?"

Butters stared at Vacendak for a moment. "Go back to the airport and get him," he said finally.

That night, after Vacendak had pulled Krzyzewski out of line as he was boarding his plane, Duke hired Krzyzewski. The headline in the student newspaper the next day read as follows: "Not a Typo: Krzyzewski."

"Everyone was expecting me to hire a 'name' coach," Butters said years later. "They didn't expect a name they couldn't spell or pronounce."

For three years, it looked as if that name would be a footnote in Duke history. The Blue Devils were 38-47, the third season ending with a humiliating 109-66 loss to Virginia in the opening round of the ACC Tournament. It was then, very late that night, that Krzyzewski's West Point education kicked in.

Hours after the loss, sitting in a Denny's restaurant on the outskirts of Atlanta with some friends, Krzyzewski listened when someone raised a glass of water and said, "Here's to forgetting tonight."

Almost red-faced, Krzyzewski raised his own glass and said: "Here's to NEVER forgetting tonight."

Duke beat Virginia the next 16 times the two schools played. But there was more to it than that.

"Sometimes anger plays a role in success too," Krzyzewski says. "I was angry that night—with a lot of different people, but more with myself than anything. I had to figure out a way to get the job done. I had to be better and I had to find a way to make my team better. It was pretty simple: we needed to get going. And I was the one responsible for getting that done."

The first thing a Plebe learns at West Point? Three answers are acceptable when addressing an upperclassman: "Yes, Sir, No, Sir," and perhaps most importantly, "No excuse, Sir."

Krzyzewski went into 'No excuse, Sir,' mode. He had already changed his recruiting approach after one failed recruiting season. Now, he made changes to his staff and to the way he approached his players. He came up with four words that he thought were crucial to winning consistently: attitude, belief, prepare and execute.

"You've got to have the attitude that there's a way to do something; a way to win," he says. "If one way doesn't work, your attitude has to be, 'Okay, find another way.' Then you have to believe you're going to win. Attitude and belief help you prepare. And, once you've done all that, you have to execute."

In Krzyzewski's fourth season, Duke was 24-10. Two seasons later, the five seniors who had gone 11-17 as freshmen went 37-3 as seniors and went to the Final Four. That group embodied Krzyzewski's philosophy that failure isn't a destiny, just part of the continuum.

That team's National Championship game loss to Louisville is perhaps Krzyzewski's greatest regret as a coach. He blames himself, 'No excuse, Sir,' but also used that failure to achieve arguably his greatest victory five years later.

"In '86, we were exhausted after the (national semifinal) game against Kansas," he says. "Mark Alarie and David Henderson had played every minute and didn't have their legs on Monday in the championship game. I just couldn't find a way to get them the rest they needed.

"Five years later, after we upset (Nevada Las) Vegas in the semis, I was in the same situation with Christian Laettner. He was tired and banged up. So, remembering what had happened against Louisville, I began stealing rest for him right from the start of the game. Every time there was a stoppage at around 16:30 or 12:30 or 8:30 or 4:30, I took him out. I knew that way he'd get an extra minute or more of rest and THEN another two minutes at each TV timeout and I could keep him relatively fresh."

The strategy worked. Duke won the game – and Krzyzewski's first national title.

"It was good that I was able to learn that lesson and help our guys win that night in '91," he says. "What was too bad was I didn't learn it in time to save the '86 team from a loss it didn't deserve."

Krzyzewski is 69 now and has done everything a college basketball coach could hope to accomplish. He long ago surpassed his arch-rival and nemesis, North Carolina's Dean Smith and Knight, his old mentor. In fact, he has won as many national titles as those two COMBINED and, when he won his fifth title in 2015, he trailed only UCLA's John Wooden (10) on the all-time list.

"Almost nothing great happens without adversity," Krzyzewski says, looking at a wall with five banners, one for each national title. "Everyone wants to be on the damn train when you're winning. The guys who get you there though are the ones who figure out a way to get it moving when it's stalled.

"Those are the moments when you grow, when you become a better coach and a better person. I learned all of that at West Point."

Krzyzewski has kicked in all the doors, but he honestly believes he might still be on the outside looking in somewhere if his parents hadn't spent those nights in the kitchen saying, 'Mike-stupid, Mike-dumb.'

"I hear people all the time say, 'A kid has to make his own decisions in life.' Not always. Sometimes a kid needs to listen to his parents because they're older and smarter than he is. There isn't a day that goes by that I'm not grateful to them or a day when I'm not proud to tell people I'm a graduate of West Point."

Clearly, William and Emily Krzyzewski knew what they were doing on those June nights more than 50 years ago. They were guiding their son to a place they believed would make him a better man.

But even they had no idea how smart young Mike would turn out to be.

No excuse, Sir. None needed.

Army West Point Athletics

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