Bringing Showtime To Duke
In the last 20 years, a stretch in which Duke has won four national championships, no program in college basketball has been better, or more polarizing, than coach Mike Krzyzewski’s. Duke was an underdog in the early 1990s, thrilling impartial observers by knocking off the sport’s establishment to win back-to-back NCAA Tournament titles. Those years have long seemed positively ancient. Now, as Duke’s cheerleaders applaud the team’s consistent success, its detractors are just as quick to bemoan its overexposure on national television, not to mention what they perceive to be a general air of smugness. Either way, Duke is college basketball’s marquee draw.
In 2007, though, Duke lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, and Krzyzewski convened his entire staff for a traditional end-of-season meeting. His agenda concerned basketball strategy—with its youngest team in decades, Duke had dropped its last four games—as much as the universally gleeful response to Duke’s early demise. Duke’s coaches were accustomed to the team’s role as a Goliath, but they felt there was a difference between rooting against a college and spewing venom at college players. A gradual escalation of vitriol, peaking in 2007, convinced them that something, at long last, needed to change. At that conference, it was decided: Duke’s players needed to have more fun, and for their sake, other people needed to see them doing so.
For years, Duke had produced a recruiting pamphlet called Blue Planet. It was mostly informational, meant to entice prospects and inform boosters, but eventually, it would transform into a full-color monthly magazine, complete with a hefty Web presence. The new site started in earnest, with rudimentary highlight packages, occasional blog posts and public-service announcements touting the team’s commitment to community service. Soon, the videos evolved in frequency (more) and formality (less). Something strange happened: Blue Planet was a smash hit. The response was so overwhelmingly positive that last season, even Krzyzewski sat in front of a camera for a weekly question-and-answer session. This year, the program put out its first viral video, a compilation of increasingly preposterous trick shots by the senior Kyle Singler. It’s been looped almost one million times on YouTube.
Even three years ago, when Duke hit the nadir of one of college sports’ most remarkable runs, the goal of this effort was to showcase a side of an impenetrable program that no one ever glimpsed. The unfettered access offered to Blue Planet was part of Duke’s larger plan to humanize its players, who, at least outwardly, appeared to enjoy basketball as much as a morning chemistry lecture.
This is a classic ploy of public relations, but for an enterprise as tightly controlled as Duke’s, it marked a monumental departure. At the time, it was mostly aspirational—an acknowledgement that Duke’s basketball prowess relied partly on sentiment and image. And last April, for the first time in 10 years, Duke’s basketball team capped this unlikely reinvention with its most improbable national championship yet.
Cameron Indoor Stadium, the home of college basketball’s most iconic program, looked young in old age. This was last October, six long months before Duke would reign atop the sport and almost 70 years after the first game in the quaint arena, no larger than a high school’s gymnasium. The seats in the upper bowl, once the color of an overcast morning, had been painted dark blue. The buttresses between sections were washed to look less like cement. It was only the year before that a video monitor replaced the scoreboard suspended over midcourt, and with all of the lights out, it gleamed in the dark. Even the sound blared unfamiliar, with the announcer Michael Buffer asking a capacity crowd if it was ready to rumble. ”It was a new beginning,” Nolan Smith said recently. “A fresh start for the program.” He was referring to the occasion for the physical makeover: the basketball team’s first practice, an event that combined spectacle with sports. While other elite teams appealed to their fans with a lavish, late-night event called Midnight Madness, Duke typically opened its season with a practice behind closed doors. Finally, Duke spurned the subdued tradition and joined the crowd with its version, Countdown to Craziness.
Nolan is a senior guard at Duke, suddenly the team’s finest player, though he wasn’t when Buffer called his name that evening. “A 6-foot-2 junior from Upper Marlboro, Maryland—” Buffer bellowed, and the place filled with the tinny bass of a Jay-Z track that begins, “Allow me to reintroduce myself.” The spotlight settled on Nolan, back to the court, reveling in the attention. His eyes were covered with plastic blue shutter shades. He turned around and started to strut, shaking as he stepped. He was shimmying! Even he was trying, not very hard, to hide his clenched teeth with his upper lip, and the 9,314 spectators roared in equal parts delight and surprise. It had been a long time since anyone but a brash visitor had danced so proudly in this arena. No one had worn short shorts here for many years, either, yet in the slam-dunk contest later that night, Nolan slipped out of his jersey to reveal a 1980s getup underneath. After his tomahawk jam, he posed, hands on his hips, like Superman.
“You remember that night?” I asked him one day last week.
So much had happened since then. Duke had beaten North Carolina, twice, en route to the 2010 ACC crown, ACC Tournament title and, of course, the national championship. This season, as a senior, he’s on track to lead the Atlantic Coast Conference in points and assists. He would be the first player ever to do so. But all those accomplishments, like the latest basketball renaissance at Duke, depended first on a private developmental process that took place in public. This school has churned out better scorers, better passers, better players, better heroes and better villains, but not someone like Nolan, who’s injected an unexpected charisma into Krzyzewski’s program.
“Of course I do,” Nolan said, leaning into his wide grin.
Nolan arrived on campus in the fall of 2007, a few months after that fateful staff meeting, and it took him nearly two years to flash the pizzazz that earned him the nickname Showtime. He labored through a lackluster freshman season, playing just 15 minutes a game, and he almost left Duke before Krzyzewski convinced him to stay in a 30-minute phone conversation. His sophomore campaign proved more difficult. Duke climbed to No. 1 in the polls with Nolan starting at point guard, but by February, the Blue Devils fizzled, and Nolan found himself relegated to the bench. Three games after his demotion, he bounded into a blind screen and crashed to the floor with a concussion.
Around this time, with Nolan recovering from dizziness, headaches and a general aversion to bright lights and loud noises, Krzyzewski pulled him aside for a conversation that changed the tenor of his career. ESPN had just published a long story about his relationship with his father, Derek, who died of a heart attack in 1996, when Nolan was eight. Derek had been a fan favorite at Louisville, where he won a national title in 1980—he’s even credited with popularizing the high-five—and in the photos that accompany the 7,000-word piece, the physical similarities between the two are striking.
“Oh, man, this kid’s going to be an emotional wreck,” Krzyzewski recalls thinking after the story’s publication. He called Nolan and asked him to come to his office to chat about it.
“No, Coach,” Nolan said. “I feel great about it.”
“It was almost a relief that someone else could tell the story,” Krzyzewski says. “He was proud of the story, and it was a burden that was lifted from him. Really, it was a huge event.”
Not long afterward, Krzyzewski sought out the sophomore with some advice. “Just be you,” he told him.
In college, Nolan had tried to fit himself into the mold of a serious-seeming, pass-first point guard. But in high school, at the basketball factory Oak Hill Academy, Nolan found his niche as an aggressive, carefree combo guard, comfortable curling off a screen or isolating himself at the top of the key. That had never been his role at Duke. After his chat with Krzyzewski, he reverted back to his natural position. Jon Scheyer took over the point-guard duties and bumped him off the ball, relieving him of all its pressures. The Blue Devils won the ACC Tournament, and though they lost in the Sweet 16, when Nolan was hampered by a flu that he didn’t reveal in public, Duke had finally found a permanent fix. “That’s when Coach K realized who I was going to be as a player,” Nolan says. “We both realized it at the same time.”
One day last week, I met Nolan for lunch at the sort of eatery germane to a college campus, where he might share an outdoor table with four people he had never met. He walked up to the restaurant wearing a long black jacket, hood down, and a fitted Washington Nationals cap, high enough on his forehead so that it didn’t obstruct his eyes. It took him three minutes to make it fifty feet. Another student approached him, fumbling in his pocket and grasping for an iPhone. He held it out in front of them with his left hand, as if they were a couple in Pisa. Nolan asked to see the photo—they squinted their eyes to approve—and the kid took a few more chatty steps with Nolan before moseying off the other way. Wonderful! Time to eat. Nolan was interrupted again, this time by a well-wishing employee at the hot-dog cart across the way, who accompanied him to the glass door. Finally! Let’s chow down. But just as we took our place in line, there was the student from the walkway, again, dressed in a white T-shirt with the words Duke Basketball emblazoned over his heart. “This looks stupid,” he confessed as he handed me the phone to snap an identical photograph.
When I relayed the interaction to him, Krzyzewski acted as if he had just seen a similar encounter. “He’s had more outward fun than any player we’ve had,” he said, “and he’s touched, in a very personal way, more people than anyone who’s played here.”
Krzyzewski was in his office, on the sixth floor of the administrative building adjacent to Cameron, wrapping up a media blitz that might have made his mentor Bob Knight hurl a chair across a gym. His suite was messy with plaques, posters and trophies, while other mementos—framed newspapers, commemorative chairs, signed basketballs—were scattered on the floor. A potted plant grew on his desk. Krzyzewski, clean-shaven without a hair out of place, wore ash-gray fleece sweatpants, dressed for practice directly afterward. He is a busy man. Already he was 15 minutes behind schedule. And yet here he was, lounging in an upholstered chair, explaining carefully why he refers to his All-American as a modern-day Pied Piper.
“He brings joy into people’s lives, and that’s a hell of an attribute,” Krzyzewski said. He realized how fickle that might sound, and he elaborated by poking fun at the description. “It’s, like, ‘What do you do?’” he asked, acting as his own interrogator.
Then Krzyzewski, who will soon own more wins than anyone who’s ever coached college basketball, sheepishly raised his hand, smirking like a grade-school student. “Oh,” he deadpanned, “I bring joy!”
In the summer of 2009, after the position switch but before he emerged as an All-American, Nolan reserved the name @NdotSmitty on Twitter. Almost instantly he exhibited a personality that had been absent in his first two years. He soon would benefit from an unexpected effect, silly though it sounds. Starting with Countdown to Craziness, the event that kicked off his junior season, he looked looser and smiled more. He was attacking the basket, warding off defenders in the half court and draining his long-range shots, all with a certain levity. He was playing like he tweeted.
The timing couldn’t have been more ideal. Duke was newly committed to a lighter atmosphere, and after Krzyzewski coached a collection of NBA players to the gold medal at the 2008 Olympics, the staff believed even more in this ethos. But Twitter, a medium that allows anyone to publish on a whim, tested the philosophy. Even now, some two years later, universities are banning their players from social networks. It was only a matter of time before Duke’s coaches backed down, but they never did.
“He’s changed,” Nolan said when I asked him if, two years ago, he would have thought Krzyzewski would permit him to tweet. “One thing he knows is that we want to show people our personalities. On the court, we play hard—all business. We’re fun-loving guys off the court.”
He’s tweeted almost 8,500 times, and his tweets then were the same as they are now. They range from collegiate (“Just seen a great play on campus put on by Duke students!”) and absurd (“wicked witch of the west still scares me!!”) to pensive (“I’ve been sitting in the dark for about 4 hours now, just chillin and thinking!! #newfocus coming soon!!”) and resilient (“Today is a new day! And guess what I’m built to win! I’m about to have a great day!”). He even proclaimed in October, on Twitter: “I’m about to change my name to Ndotsmitty that will be on the back of my jersey!! Lol that’s all people call me now!” So many people respond to his tweets—and he responds to so many of those responses—that he carries an extra iPhone just to scroll through mentions of his name, cradling the mobile device on his BlackBerry. He owns an iPad, too. Sometimes, on a long trip, he invites his 24,000 followers to ask him questions, and he answers all of them. On the morning of every Duke game, he tweets something like, “It’s Gameday!! Yessirrrr!!!” and during last year’s NCAA Tournament, it seemed like this daily announcement boasted a larger readership than the campus newspaper.
Before long, as a junior, he was carrying a digital video recorder around campus to film his typical Saturday for Blue Planet’s website: driving on Towerview Road to Cameron; asking Ryan Kelly to name his favorite teammate (Nolan, naturally); walking through the aisle of the local Super Target to buy Scooby-Doo fruit snacks; singing in the car to “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”; challenging a student to a game of H-O-R-S-E in the municipal gym on the freshman campus.
Few people outside the team’s tightly shielded circle had seen a Duke player act so candidly. Pretty soon, everyone else saw a transformed Nolan on the court. He averaged 17.4 points per game and rounded out a triumvirate, with Scheyer and Singler, that was the most potent in the nation. His 3-point clip surged to 39 percent, and as adept as he was shooting, his ability to drive in the lane was even more vital. His regular season peaked when Duke’s did, at home in March against North Carolina, in the most lopsided win in the rivalry’s history. He poured in 20 points, including a ferocious dunk off a hesitation dribble in the first half. In the game’s waning minutes, he lobbed an exclamatory alley-oop that all but ignited a celebratory bonfire, which he dutifully attended.
In the NCAA Tournament’s Elite 8, he posted a then-career-high 29 points to propel Duke to its first Final Four since 2004. The dagger was a 3-pointer that he attempted inches away from Krzyzewski, standing on the sideline. (They slapped hands as soon as the ball swished, even as Nolan backpedaled to play defense.) More people started to follow him on Twitter, and instead of holing up in a hotel room, he tweeted more than ever. The Blue Devils then throttled West Virginia in the Final Four with basketball that was simultaneously pretty and perfect, and they beat Butler two days later in one of the sport’s classic championships.
That evening, with scraps of confetti still dotting the hardwood, Nolan walked back out to the court. A national championship cap rested sideways on his head. He didn’t need to search long to find what he was looking for: a logo emblemizing the 1980 Final Four in Indianapolis. This was the same city where his father, Derek, had won his NCAA title. Carrying his new trophy in one arm, Nolan crouched and pointed down, right at the ‘80 etched in paint. A Duke staffer snapped a photograph and, the next afternoon, uploaded it online for anyone to admire.
Nolan considered bolting early for the NBA Draft—he was projected to be a second-round selection, at best—but he and his co-captain, Singler, returned for their senior season to defend their title. His decision wasn’t a surprise. Even Nolan’s mother, Monica Malone, cops to enjoying college hoops more than she does the NBA, and when I joked that her opinion might change next year, she snapped back quickly. “The NBA’s a job for Nolan!” she said recently. “This is fun.”
The public spotlight shined even brighter once the season started. By this year’s Countdown to Craziness, the second-annual season-opening bash, Nolan needed little time to choose his introductory anthem. He settled on another Jay-Z song called “Encore.” Then the Blue Devils, a near-unanimous No. 1 in the preseason, unveiled Kyrie Irving, the freshman dynamo who combined with Nolan to form a backcourt so explosive that murmurs of an undefeated season reached fever pitch. Yet that seldom weighed like a burden, as it used to.
“Nolan’s able to develop a lighter atmosphere about winning, which doesn’t wear a team out,” Krzyzewski said.
Even as Irving’s out indefinitely—his injury prompted fans to start the support website Save Kyrie’s Toe—Nolan’s filled in with the panache he previously lacked. “My first two years, I wasn’t comfortable,” Nolan said recently. “It was business, business, business. Now, we have personalities like mine, and that’s rubbed off on some of the other guys.”
He’s carried Duke so far, averaging 21 points and 5.6 assists per game as a fringe national player of the year candidate, and his charm is just as transparent as it was last March. Nolan receives the most fan mail of any player—around the holidays, he tweeted his address for people who wanted autographs—and every so often, he rides up to the fifth floor of the basketball office to collect his haul, even though the program’s administrative assistants offer to sift through the letters for him. Tent No. 2 in Krzyzewskiville, the tent village that pops up before Duke’s annual home game with North Carolina, even baked brownies for its number’s bearer.
The outside image of Duke has shifted, too. Through Twitter, his connections to Washington, D.C. basketball players and a summer stint with USA Basketball, Nolan appears to know almost everyone he guards. And on the court, no longer do Duke’s games resemble Big Ten football slugfests, let alone bantamweight boxing matches. It was just in 2006, after all, that the team’s road losses were celebrated with court storms so raucous that Krzyzewski once pulled his starters before the buzzer out of caution.
“Teams don’t come at us like that,” Nolan says. “They respect us more than in the past.” What about fans? ”It’s a lot less hostile now. They still want to beat Duke, but it’s not the same.”
After Nolan told me that, I asked Krzyzewski if he, too, thought the perception of Duke has shifted. “I don’t know how people perceive the program. There are some people who perceive the program to be the best thing that’s happened to this planet, and there are some who see it as the evil empire,” he said. “But other players on other teams, they all like Nolan. He’s one of the really great people people that we’ve had in our program, and in that way, he’s touched people in a different way. Maybe those people who want to look at something negative, they can see the program in different light. And the people who do support the program, and do love it, they also can see the program in a different light.”
On a cold January afternoon, after milling about all day, I walked into Cameron around 5:45 p.m. for an 8 p.m. tip. I hadn’t been to the arena since March. It was, as always, awfully bright and empty. It was not as warm as I remembered, with drafts of wind rushing in through open doors. A crew of technicians tinkered with broken bulbs on the video board, which had been lowered to the level of the floor for late repairs. Otherwise, in this empty space, it was positively serene.
At 5:54 p.m., before any other player, Nolan walked out to the court wearing a long-sleeved blue shirt, white practice shorts and blue socks, which he would replace come tip, pulled midway up his legs. With a walk-on rebounding, standing underneath the basket and facing him, he glided around the perimeter, canning jumpers, then 3-pointers, methodically moving clockwise, counter-clockwise and clockwise again. After 20 minutes, he cut to bank in layups. He switched sides to float looping shots, higher every time, the basketball equivalent of the Eephus pitch. He started to sweat at his upper temples. At 6:21 p.m., he threw down an alley-oop and jogged into the tunnel, silently acknowledging a man in a Windsor-knotted necktie and shaking hands with a Durham police officer. There were still no fans in the arena.
Watching him, and only him, was sublime in a way I had never before experienced basketball—a sort of single lens with panoramic capabilities. I saw him swipe at his ears, chatting with Irving, to make sure he had deposited his diamond studs in the locker room. I saw him quibble with a referee about a missed foul call, only to apologize, with subtle hand gestures, after a timeout and roll his eyes at another call on the very next play. I saw him, on a fast break, take off three steps from the rim, move the ball from his right hand to his left, initiate contact and spin the ball off the glass and through the hoop. I saw him cross up a defender by snapping the ball violently behind his back, take three steps in the lane and dish across his body to a forward, who flushed the dunk. I saw him point in appreciation to Singler after a 3-pointer, and I saw a teammate return the thanks right back to him. I saw him start in front of Duke’s bench, wheel his way through the right side of the lane and scoop the ball, with his arm extended, for a contested layup. I saw him laugh greedily after a missed layup that would’ve registered him an assist, and on the ensuing dead ball, I saw him ignore a fan, in the first row, who shouted, “Ndot, you’re unstoppable, baby!” I saw him throw on his shooting shirt and a headset to answer questions from the broadcasting booth. When I saw him slap a few hands before disappearing into the tunnel, I saw no one left in the bleachers.
I couldn’t have picked a better night to watch him. It was a marvelous performance—spectacular, Krzyzewski said afterward—with Nolan racking up 28 points, eight assists and one turnover, all while reducing his defensive match to his worst output of the season. This might have been the clinic that cemented him, even in January, as the ACC’s player of the year.
That night, though, one moment lingered with me long after Cameron cleared out. It had nothing to do with basketball. At the very end of the game, an 84-68 Duke win, Nolan was matching strides with his assignment on Boston College right after a quick timeout. The two guards were almost bumping into each other, they were so close, and yet they weren’t chatting, just shuffling their feet in step. The official scorer was ready to sound the horn, the referee poised to blow his whistle. In this lull lurked a strange silence. Walking the way of the four title banners in the rafters, Nolan glanced at press row to his left, one last time, like an instinct. He paused. His eyes widened, ever so slightly, and—yessir!—there it was: the sly hint of a smile.
(Source: thepostgame.com)
