The first time Jim Suddath met then new Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski in the spring of 1980, the rising senior was on crutches due to a left knee injury.
The second encounter with his new coach came later that summer after Suddath re-injured the knee in an off-campus summer pickup game. He woke up in the Duke hospital after surgery to find Krzyzewski waiting in his room to check on him.
The third time the two were to be together for any length of time came on October 15th of that same year during the first day of fall practice, the Atlanta native having just been cleared for lateral movement. Yet not long into that practice, Coach K’s first official practice with the Blue Devils, Suddath’s knee locked up on him several times and he fell to the floor in pain on each occasion.
“I had to have arthroscopic surgery,” the McCallie School chaplain recalled on Tuesday afternoon. “The second surgery had missed a cartilage floater that had been hidden. They got it out, but I was out of practice at least three more weeks. At that point, Coach had been around me three times, I was already a skinny, half-step-slow senior and I kept getting hurt. But what I’ll always remember about Coach Krzyzewski is that he didn’t throw me away. He didn’t give up on me. And by the end of the year, I was starting.”
Every story has at least two sides. It is easy and somewhat fair for college basketball’s Duke Haters to see the media monster that Coach K’s season-long farewell tour has become and cry “overkill” or “self-absorption.” In the history of college basketball and college football it is unprecedented.