Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 17, 1993 TAG: 9301170250
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOHN A. MONTGOMERY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
BRILL FOLLOWS DUKE ON 2 DREAM SEASONS
A SEASON IS A LIFETIME. By Bill Brill and Mike Krzyzewski. Simon & Schuster. $20.In 1980, Duke University Athletic Director Tom Butters entered the market to hire a new basketball coach. One of his first calls: Indiana's volatile legend, Bobby Knight.
"You couldn't stand having me around," Knight said.
Butters wanted Knight's recommendations. He sought his opinion of a legitimate candidate, Army's Mike Krzyzewski, who had played under Knight at West Point and coached under him at Bloomington.
"Now there's a guy with all of my good qualities and none of my bad ones," "The General" reportedly said.
In basketball circles, higher praise does not exist. A coach with that kind of rep should win all the time.
He has.
Krzyzewski (pronounced shu-SHEF-ski) came to Duke and quickly restored the basketball program to its former glory. The past two seasons, he has taken monumental steps beyond.
Krzyzewski has brought back-to-back NCAA basketball titles to Duke, the first repeat champion in 19 years. The Blue Devils have been among the coveted Final Four five seasons in a row and six of the past seven. Moreover, the Duke players are enrolled in bona fide classes, do their homework and graduate - on time.
This past summer, Krzyzewski (mercifully, most call him Coach K) was an assistant coach with the United States Olympic "Dream Team." Duke's latest star, Christian Laettner, was the only collegiate player on the team.
In Coach K's spare time, he has co-written (with former Roanoke Times & World-News executive sports editor Bill Brill) a highly readable account of the past two championships, "A Season Is a Lifetime."
The title refers to the ever-changing composition of a college basketball team. Entire classes of players come and go each year but even during the season, college-age players mature physically and emotionally.
Most of the book's characters (Bobby Hurley, Grant Hill, Thomas Hill, Cherokee Parks) are still gracing Cameron Indoor Stadium with their presence on a team that had gone unbeaten until last week.
The writing is wonderfully lucid but painstakingly detailed. The presentation is refreshing, an appropriate medium between the commonplace sports-book genre extremes that either turn the reader off by exaggerating the importance and complexity of sports or that insult the reader's intelligence with spoon-fed simplicity.
Although who wrote what in this joint effort is not identified, the reader suspects Brill carried the team.
Coach K obviously supplied much of the raw material (undeniably the story line is a good one), as well as access to the players. Krzyzewski did some of the writing, too, because he acknowledges a Simon & Schuster staff member for teaching him words he didn't know.
This, perhaps, is the most difficult statement in the 270 pages to accept. Anybody with Coach K's record, his ability to teach, to motivate, to psychoanalyze his players, to react in tense game-situations, to manipulate the media and to stay one step ahead of the opposition, knows the definition of all the words used in this book.
Although most readers know Duke wins it all before picking up the book (and if by chance you don't, you do after you see the dust cover), reliving two of college basketball's most memorable games (UNLV in the 1991 tournament, Kentucky in '92) is a savory experience.
Game-by-game, Brill chronicles the march to the championships, cleverly interweaving concise vignettes of each of the instrumental players.
Predictably, the analysis of the Duke basketball program ultimately is positive. But it makes a laudable effort to be fair, addressing the many minor controversies the program has endured in recent times. Is Laettner gay? (No); Was Hurley ticketed with a DUI? (Yes); Did Laettner violate NCAA regulations in originally committing to produce a diary for GQ? (No.)
Criticisms are few. But occasionally, the book's flow bogs down with unimportant details: Do we really care about the seating assignments on the team bus? Is it relevant that Mrs. K, "a light drinker," "got smashed" after the UNLV game? That daughter Debbie, a Duke student, broke up with her UNC boyfriend because he clapped after a Carolina basket against Duke while sitting with the Krzyzewskis at the ACC tournament?
Throughout the book, Brill is selective with his adjectives, only overusing "Hall of Famer." Dean Smith, Jeff Mullins and Calvin Hill (twice) earn the moniker, and Krzyzewski feels former Duke basketball coach Vic Bubas "should be in the Hall of Fame."
Speaking of Brill's credentials . . . Nowhere does Brill mention that he is a Duke alumnus and has written another book on Duke basketball, information which would substantiate this book's direction and intent.
A summary of the seasons' statistics or at least a reproduction of tournament-game box scores would add to the book's value.
A "Season Is a Lifetime" is patterned somewhat after John Feinstein's successful "A Season On The Brink," a first-hand season-long diary of Feinstein's stay with Bobby Knight and the Indiana basketball team in the mid-1980s.
But it would be an overstatement to say "A Season Is a Lifetime" has all the Knight book's good qualities and none of the bad. More accurate would be to say it is of similar style and can stand on its own.
John A. Montgomery has lived in Roanoke for 25 years, but grew up and was introduced to college basketball in Indiana.