COLLEGE BASKETBALL / NCAA TOURNAMENT : MIDWEST REGIONAL : Duke’s Image: Not Good Enough

Duke University, Durham, N.C., 27706, has given the world President Richard M. Nixon and 1990 Miss America Marjorie Vincent, the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz and a world-class medical center, a university rice diet dedicated to improving world health and the Duke family’s tobacco empire dedicated to, well, selling tobacco.

Oh, and basketball.

And oh, what intelligent basketball. What smart, high-brow, Grade-A basketball. When Duke plays St. John’s today at the Pontiac Silverdome for the championship of the Midwest Regional, it will be out to make the NCAA’s Final Four for the ninth time--not to mention the fourth year in a row.

OK, so it’s no UCLA. Point conceded.

“Yes, we’ve done a great job,” Coach Mike Krzyzewski said Saturday. “But what Coach (John) Wooden did was in a different universe. There’s no comparison.”

Granted. And yet . . .

UCLA did what it did with 7-footish supercenters, Lew Alcindor, Bill Walton. Not always, but often. Duke does it with skinny little Johnny Dawkins and Tommy Amaker, slow but sure Mike Gminski and Alaa Abdelnaby, unspectacular Danny Ferry and Christian Laettner.

Only three schools have won more NCAA games than Duke--UCLA, Kentucky and North Carolina. Friday’s victory over Connecticut was the Blue Devils’ 41st in the tournament, tying them with Indiana. Coach K has the highest NCAA winning percentage of any active coach.

And yet . . .

UCLA went the distance, time after time.

But Duke has never won the national championship.

“In this business, in sports,” Krzyzewski said, “you’re always judged by something you haven’t done.”

So close and yet so far: second place to Nevada Las Vegas a year ago; semifinal losses to Seton Hall (in 1989) and to Kansas (1988); second place to Louisville (1986) and to Kentucky (1978); second place to UCLA (1964).

For some reason, Duke doesn’t get the ribbing that, say, the Denver Broncos of the NFL receive over never winning the Big Game. Maybe people recognize what it takes to go through a 32- or 64-team field. Or maybe those opponents always seemed superior to Duke, at least in the talent department.

The coach couldn’t play just anybody. Duke doesn’t let in just anybody. Duke is a Stanford, a Northwestern. Duke is not an iron-rim factory.

“I don’t know,” Krzyzewski said, sensitive to talk of a so-called Duke image. “I don’t want the perception to be that we’re God’s gift to basketball.

“It would be wrong for some state school to use Duke as a role model. The situations are so different. If a state school doesn’t graduate 100% of its class, that doesn’t mean there is something wrong. The circumstances aren’t always the same.”

Consider the current Duke lineup: Christian Laettner is a Fulbright cultural exchange student who is fluent in four languages, son of a German mathematics professor. Crawford Palmer is majoring in Russian and spent a summer studying in Leningrad. Greg Koubek and Clay Buckley made National Honor Society in high school. Grant Hill was his class valedictorian.

Duke has a record of 29-7 this season and since Krzyzewski arrived has won 260 games and lost 108. His mentor, Bobby Knight of Indiana, says: “I think Mike, perhaps more than anybody else in the country today, shows what college athletics can be about and what any coach can do.”

His current team gets by on more than smarts. It has topped 100 points seven times. Laettner is a 6-11 center with moves, not bulk. Bobby Hurley is a mere 6-footer, but an ideal playmaker. The Hills, Thomas and Grant, no relation, are both impact players.

St. John’s is no pushover. Lou Carnesecca’s Redmen are 23-8, including victories over tournament teams Seton Hall, Georgia Tech, Brigham Young, Connecticut (twice), Georgetown, Syracuse, Villanova, Pittsburgh, Northern Illinois, Texas and Ohio State.

Midwest Notes

St. John’s forward Billy Singleton is fighting tonsillitis. He will play. Said teammate Malik Sealy: “This is no time to rest. As Coach says: ‘When you die, you can sleep for a thousand years.” . . . Duke guard Bobby Hurley, from Jersey City, N.J., has pleasant memories of Lou Carnesecca trying to land him. “He was one of the funnier coaches who recruited me.”