OLD SCHOOL TIES

The Lakers called in June, but in October Mike Krzyzewski was back in Cameron Indoor Stadium, putting the Duke Blue Devils through basketball practice on a floor long since emblazoned with the words “Coach K Court.”

In a nearby conference room, a young man painstakingly decorated plates for a heavy hitters’ booster dinner, writing out some of Krzyzewski’s motivational sayings in sauce around the plate rims.

Outside, signs on campus pointed to parking for the Coach K/Fuqua Conference on Leadership, a management seminar conducted by the school of business that included the announcement of a $2-million endowed chair in the coach’s honor, the Michael W. Krzyzewski University Professorship in Leadership.

The Lakers offered Krzyzewski $40 million to become their coach.

These are the sorts of things they could not match.

Attached to Cameron Indoor Stadium is what amounts to Krzyzewski’s ivory tower: The six-story Schwartz/Butters Athletic Center requires a fingerprint scan to open the elevator doors on the top floor, where the Hall of Fame coach’s offices overlook the plaza known as Krzyzewskiville.

“The Laker thing -- it seems like eight years ago,” Krzyzewski said.

“I’m happy to be coaching at Duke.... I didn’t think I could appreciate it more, but I do, what I’m doing here and the people I’m doing it with.”

Having his name on a court, his words on a plate and his fingerprint electronically memorized are not reasons to turn down a job.

But those things are symbolic of a status the 57-year-old Krzyzewski has at Duke that he could never have in the NBA: He is more than a coach, and he works for an institution that is known for more than a basketball team.

“How many basketball coaches in America are on faculty?” asked Duke President Richard Brodhead, referring to Krzyzewski’s role as “executive-in-residence” for the Duke Center of Leadership and Ethics.

He added, “There is a way in which the real question is this: Do you want your work to be continuous with the larger work of human education and human development? Or do you want it to be something absolute, by itself?”

Shelden Williams, a bruising Duke forward, could never quite imagine Krzyzewski with the Lakers.

“Coach K wants his environment controlled,” Williams said. “I’m a big Laker fan, but what happened there with Kobe and Shaq, it was silly. That’s little-kid stuff. Basketball should be more professional.”

Yet, in a way, the Laker overture made by General Manager Mitch Kupchak seemed to come at just the right time to lure Krzyzewski.

“It was, from the beginning, always a longshot as far as we were concerned,” Kupchak said. “I thought it would be one of those calls where you bring it up and then within an hour you’re on to the next person. Quite frankly, that was the way my conversation with Roy Williams went.”

Krzyzewski, however, was listening.

Duke freshman Luol Deng had left for the NBA after one season. Shaun Livingston, now a Clipper, had decided not to go to college after originally signing with Duke.

“I thought the state of college basketball could weigh into his decision,” Athletic Director Joe Alleva said. “One of the things he takes great pride in and loves in his job is his ability to mold a player, to mold a man. And if you only have them for one year or two years, it’s hard to reap the benefits of that.”

It was all becoming frustratingly fleeting.

“That was just my take, with the environment in college, the point in life, having been somewhere 25 years and knowing this may be one of your last chances to try something different,” Kupchak said.

College basketball, Krzyzewski said, was losing its “brand,” and he didn’t believe various NCAA policies he saw as misguided were helping.

Duke also had a new president.

“It’s no joke: To become known as the person who lost Coach K on your first day would be a dubious fame,” Brodhead said.

So began what has become almost a ritual in North Carolina -- the all-consuming coach-watch.

The previous two involved Williams and rival North Carolina, and both were memorable for Williams’ emotional angst. (He turned down his alma mater to remain at Kansas the first time, then took the job the second time.)

There is no indication Krzyzewski came close to picking up the phone to tell the Lakers yes.

“In my heart, I didn’t think we’d lose him,” Alleva said. “But the amount of money they were throwing around, he is a human being. You’ve got to think about it, because it was just an unbelievable amount of money. You could establish your family’s future for a long time. That was the only thing that scared me.”

News reports speculated that Krzyzewski and his family had gone to the Carolina coast to ponder the decision over the Fourth of July weekend.

“My parents never left the house. I wish we’d been at the beach,” said Debbie Krzyzewski Savarino, one of Mike and wife Mickie’s three adult daughters. “I kept bringing in food, but we were running out of fast-food places. There were these high-powered meetings going on, and I’m bringing in mashed potatoes from Kentucky Fried Chicken, with cole slaw.”

When Brodhead and Alleva weren’t there, Mike, Mickie and Debbie -- the only daughter who was in town that weekend -- weighed the decision.

“I had never seen him think about it as much,” Savarino said. “I don’t know if that meant that I was nervous that he would go. I knew that his heart has always been here at Duke.

“But the Lakers are the Lakers,” she said. “What a complete honor to be considered, and to be the one they really want? Amazing. Can you imagine that, when your name is Mike Krzyzewski and you’re this Polish guy from Chicago? Who knew that he would even go to college, much less everything else?

“One thing I said to him -- and I’m not saying he does what my sisters and I say, but he does make us feel as if he takes our opinions into consideration. My thing to him was, this isn’t about Los Angeles or Durham. It isn’t about Duke or the Lakers. It’s, ‘Are you done coaching college basketball?’

“I just didn’t think he was done.”

That two of Krzyzewski’s daughters and his four grandchildren live in Durham was cited as a reason for him to stay, but Savarino said the family was so close-knit that she and her sisters might have moved their families to the West Coast.

The conversation never got that far.

“We were still discussing different items about the decision-making, and you could just look at him and see that his decision had been made,” Savarino said.

Some began to speculate even before Krzyzewski announced he was staying that the whole thing had been a political power ploy. The idea was that it was a way to take the upper hand with Brodhead, grease the wheels on a planned $15-million practice facility, or even to gain an edge in recruiting by being the coach Kobe Bryant wanted.

Alleva calls that “garbage,” and Brodhead discounts it.

“The Lakers didn’t need a coach because Duke had a new president,” Brodhead said. “I do think there was some eagerness on his part to get some sense of what I was like, and what terms the two of us might be on with each other. I don’t find that unreasonable at all.”

Kupchak says Duke became “very aggressive” in its efforts to keep Krzyzewski. Alleva says the practice facility was “expedited.” But because Duke is a private institution, financial details of the enhancements Krzyzewski received to stay aren’t public.

“There were some considerations, but I just want to say it was not as if we were competing in financial terms,” Brodhead said. “If it had been about the money, we would have lost him. It was about the life, and when Mike talks about it, he talks about making sure you find what you really believe in, making sure your life has its full resonance.

“Yes, if the college game ended up having no resemblance to the game he knew and loved, then maybe the moment would come where you’d make other plans. I never heard him say he thought we’d quite reached that point.”

Had Krzyzewski left, Alleva said, “it would have been a real blow to college basketball.”

Mike Montgomery, another coach who showed it is possible to succeed with legitimate student-athletes and without breaking NCAA rules, had just left Stanford for the Golden State Warriors.

Krzyzewski called it coincidence, but allowed, “I think it’s a time where people are kind of crying out for some semblance of order or change in college basketball.”

The problems in college basketball are now problems of his choosing, because he could have shed them by going to the NBA.

“I think this summer was really important for me,” Krzyzewski said. “I was afforded some opportunities, not just the Lakers, but some initiatives with the new NCAA president, Myles Brand, to be at meetings with people really trying to get their arms around our game. I don’t think anyone’s had their arms around our game, the college game, to try to figure what direction it should go. I’ve loved being part of that.”

Many coaches have felt the NCAA was implementing too many rules without their input, such as the since-rescinded “five/eight” rule limiting their ability to replace players who’d left the program.

Krzyzewski called Brand “the first president we’ve been allowed to talk with, where you feel like you’re on the same team.”

“The NCAA has been absolutely amazing in what this president is trying to do for the game of basketball,” Krzyzewski said. “I’ve become incredibly excited about that after being frustrated for most of the time with initiatives about the game.”

A major issue is the early defections to the NBA. The next NBA collective-bargaining agreement might address that, but Krzyzewski said the NCAA should at least adjust its rules to create a different timetable.

“If you’re going, declare right after the Final Four,” he said. “Then at least schools have the spring to recruit again. If you wait until the end of May and then say, ‘I’m going to put my name in and test the waters,’ it’s not fair. It’s using the system properly, but the system is flawed because it’s not coordinating both ends -- the NBA and college basketball.”

In the end, Krzyzewski did what only the rarest of elite players do: He tested the NBA waters, and he stayed in school.

“I think his style fits better here, and I think he realizes his style fits better here,” Alleva said. “I’m not knocking the NBA at all. It’s just another world.”

By staying, Krzyzewski will enhance a legacy that is already secure.

If he adds two more national championships to his three, he will pass Adolph Rupp and finish with more championships than any coach but John Wooden -- and he will have done it in the era of a 64-team NCAA tournament.

“You could make a case he would be the greatest college coach of all,” said Connecticut Coach Jim Calhoun, whose team defeated Duke in the Final Four semifinals last season. “He has a chance at Duke where you might be able to argue the point he was the greatest at what he did, like a Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio.”

With 694 victories, Krzyzewski could finish his career with more than 900, surpassing the record of 879 held by Dean Smith that is likely to be broken first by Bob Knight.

“That’s no reason to stay,” Savarino said. “If you stay to win games, it’s not the right motivation. You have to stay because you love it.

“Do I think he retires at Duke? I don’t know. Obviously that is a trend, for kids to go to the NBA. He has to decide, and I can’t make that decision for him. I think it has to be year to year, if that’s so hard on him.”

At Duke, he has a lifetime contract, the title of special assistant to the president and a revered place on campus, alongside such luminaries as poet and novelist Reynolds Price and John Hope Franklin, an eminent African American historian.

With the Lakers, he would have entered a world in which nine NBA championships weren’t enough to give Phil Jackson a Teflon shield.

At Duke, Krzyzewski chooses his own players and holds reporters at arm’s length.

In the NBA, players do not automatically respect authority, and a coach might face reporters a dozen times in a week, including three times on a game day.

“If he wanted to make a stab at the NBA, I think he’s such a competitor, that he’d be successful in whatever he decided to do,” Savarino said. “He expects so much of himself. He would make it work.

“Now, do I believe he would ultimately be happy doing that?

“I’m not so sure.”