Second Thoughts Disappear

No more bull in Durham.

No more of this second-place stuff. No more of this almost winning the national championship. No more of this going home empty-handed to the Gothic architecture, manicured gardens and stain-glassed chapels of Durham, N.C., to endure sympathetic looks from the basket-case scholars and nutty professors so devoted to Duke University basketball.

They were sick of the Mr. Congeniality award. Yes, it was mighty nice of the NCAA to keep inviting the Blue Devils to the pageant, and yes, it was terribly charming to be able to remind everybody that in four of the past five tournaments, it took a championship team to send them back to North Carolina with a “Y’all come back now.” From 1986-1990, Duke was eliminated by Louisville, Indiana, Kansas and Nevada Las Vegas, champions all, and by Seton Hall, which lost the 1989 final in overtime.

Enough of that also-ran bull.

Duke finally won the whole shebang--72-65 over Kansas, on the 25th anniversary of a championship game won by Texas Western over Kentucky by the same score--Monday night under the Teflon bubble of Indiana’s Hoosier Dome, where the winning coach, Mike Krzyzewski, acted so amused by all the gab about Duke’s previous disappointments that he couldn’t resist saying on his way out the door:

“Hmmm. I wonder when we’ll win it again.”

For all the Devils in the blue dress, this one was dedicated to all those true-blue alumni of Duke who would have sold their souls to be national champions. To Dick Groat, to Jeff Mullins, to Art Heyman, to Jack Marin, to Gene Banks, to Mike Gminski, to Johnny Dawkins, to Jay Bilas, to Phil Henderson, to Danny Ferry. To guys who played from 1905-1925, when the school was called Trinity College, and to guys who played for E.M. Cameron, Vic Bubas, Bucky Waters, Bill Foster and other Krzyzewski predecessors.

Twenty years ago, Krzyzewski was on the faculty of a prep-school military academy in Virginia. Son of a 79-year-old Chicago woman who scrubbed floors to make ends meet and wept the day his appointment to West Point came through, he has become a man some call “Coach K” because of the difficulty in spitting out Sha-shev-skee and a man others are calling the smartest coach in college basketball.

Now he is a proud parent himself, one who reacted to the sight of his three daughters crying and his basketball players hugging by saying excitedly: “Did you see their faces?”

When the game was over, one of the players, Brian Davis, squeezed the coach and even pounded love taps onto Krzyzewski’s temple with a closed fist. If Davis had gotten any closer to Coach K, to borrow a line from Groucho Marx, he would have been behind him.

It was Davis who hopped around the Hoosier Dome afterward hollering: “The monkey’s off his back! The monkey’s off his back!”

His coach, though, acted as though the only monkey at Duke must be in some science lab.

“It’s never been a monkey on my back,” Krzyzewski practically huffed.

He has a habit--call it creative amnesia--of resisting any suggestion that he or Duke had ever suffered any previous disappointments. If pride goeth before a fall, Mike Krzyzewski must have been the proudest coach in America. Even that 30-point abomination against UNLV a year ago was something best conveniently forgotten, at least in the eyes of Coach K, who told his players to pretend it never happened.

Whatever his game plan, it worked. Duke took the national championship in an absolutely stupendous game of college basketball . . . Saturday. Krzyzewski will insist until his dying breath that it was Kansas that Duke had to beat for the title, and so will the NCAA, but we know and he knows that Nevada Las Vegas was the real team to beat. It took every ounce of discipline Coach K had to warn his players, as he did Saturday: “Hey, you guys, we’ve still got a game to play.”

And a nice little game it was. Not a pulse-speeder, necessarily, but a nice little game as games go. It had heroism from biggest-man-on-campus Christian Laettner and leadership from li’l-devil Bobby Hurley and an unforgettable slama-jama from Grant Hill and a surprise element from mystery guest Bill McCaffrey, who now has bragging rights at home over his older brother Ed, who led the nation in receptions last season as a wide receiver for Stanford.

Duke’s past history?

Old news to Krzyzewski, who said: “These guys are too young. They don’t know what the heck happened last week. “

Oh, yes, they do. Last week, Duke defeated Nevada Las Vegas. Last week, Duke won the national championship, its first. Monday night, well, that was strictly a coronation, the day proud old Duke finally got promoted to king.