DURHAM, N.C. — In 2006, Mike Krzyzewski went back to South Korea in one of his first trips with USA Basketball, taking the national team to the Army’s Camp Casey ahead of the world championships in Japan. It was a return not only to the demilitarized zone, but the path not taken.
He’d been there for the first time in 1970 as a recent graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, just out of artillery school. When he returned, he was an accomplished basketball coach, climbing the record books, with three national titles to his credit and another two yet to come, not to mention three Olympic gold medals.
It’s an interesting hypothetical to consider as Krzyzewski’s final season at Duke continued with Army visiting Cameron on Friday night, a sort of personal farewell to arms: What if he’d chosen a different uniform?
“That would never have happened,” Krzyzewski says now. “I always knew I wanted to be a coach. I loved the Army. More so, if I didn’t coach, I would have been a teacher. I had my sense of duty and all that. But I didn’t have a passion.”
He even spent his last few years in the Army coaching — first in Korea, and then at the West Point prep school before leaving the service as a captain and joining his old Army coach, Bob Knight, as a graduate assistant at Indiana in 1974. His alma mater hired him as head coach after that 31-1 season, and the rest is history.
But what if it wasn’t?
Of the 148 West Point alumni honored with the Distinguished Graduate Award, Krzyzewski is one of 36 recognized for contributions outside the military. Ninety-nine recipients retired as generals. Very broadly speaking, that’s his peer group.
“He probably would have become a general,” said Pat Harris, who played for Krzyzewski at Army and later followed in his footsteps as basketball coach at West Point. “There’s no stopping him. He’s the type of individual that adjusts well to soldiers, to players, to personnel and I think that his flexibility truly would have helped him to be successful in the Army, too.”
Harris knows of what he speaks. Not only do his personal ties to West Point run deep, two of his children served in the military as well. His son, an infantry officer, is still in the Army, stationed at Fort Bragg. Like Krzyzewski, Harris served as a field artillery officer immediately after leaving West Point. It was something they discussed as coach and player.
“He had mentioned several times that if he hadn’t gotten into basketball he could have stayed in the Army,” Harris said. “He enjoyed the whole thing about leading people. That’s what he does in the sport of basketball. He would have had an excellent opportunity to do the same thing in the Army.”
Others close to him aren’t so sure. Over the course of his Duke career, Krzyzewski has frequently chafed under the strictures of the NCAA bureaucracy and railed against it, especially when it comes to what coaches can and can’t do. He has shown increasing exasperation in recent years at the NCAA’s failure to adapt to the quickly changing basketball world, and called for action in areas like name, image and likeness long before the NCAA was forced into change.
When it comes to bureaucracy and standing orders, the NCAA is truly following the so-called amateur model compared to the military. His daughter Jamie Spatola told the N&O’s Steve Wiseman that she wasn’t so sure her father would have handled that well.
“I don’t know that there are any leaders that my dad admires more than military leaders,” Spatola said. “He has a profound respect for service. But I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s too many rules. I don’t know. He might have been frustrated by the bureaucracy. He can feel frustrated about that at times.”
There is no question, though, that some of the military lineage has run through Duke’s program over these four decades. There is perhaps no better example than his relationship with Martin Dempsey, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — now in his second term as chairman of USA Basketball and a Rubenstein Fellow at Duke — but it manifests in smaller ways as well.
Duke forward Joey Baker, the son of a Fort Bragg special forces sergeant, can recognize that influence implicitly.
“The things he’s brought along with him from West Point are kind of instilled into the program and the culture here at Duke,” Baker said. “The things that he tells us as players on a daily basis are very consistent with those values, I’d say.”
And entering his fourth season at Duke, Baker can envision what might have happened if Krzyzewski had heeded a different call.
“I think with his attention to detail, his commitment to excellence, just his overall character, it would have lent himself to being an elite soldier, someone that serves our country in the best possible way,” Baker said. “I obviously could see him being a high-ranking general, something of that sort, in the long run.”
