As the 2022 NCAA men’s basketball Final Four is prepared to be played this weekend, countless pages of content will be developed celebrating Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski as he aims for a sixth title and stands on the doorstep of retirement.
But the celebration isn’t complete without honoring Tom Butters.
Most have no clue who Butters is, but his decisions made this week possible, and they teach us an enormous business lesson. Butters is the late, great athletic director of Duke and his greatest hire was an unknown Army coach with a name no one could spell. That’s why everyone calls him Coach K. Butters deserves praise, not for his ability to spot talent—yes, he liked what he saw in the young Krzyzewski—but or his willingness to let that talent grow and flourish.
As Coach K gets ready to embark on his final weekend on the sidelines, it is worth recounting that the man viewed as a demigod by Blue Devil nation past, present, and future could count very few friends in his early years on campus.
When Coach went 38-47 in his first three seasons behind the bench, many of Duke’s big-money boosters called for him to be fired. “You cannot let the alumni tell you who to fire,” said Butters, who passed away in 2016. “I knew our coach was the absolute right man for the job. I never paid attention to the wishes and whims of the audience. You have to make decisions based on what you feel is right.”
His intense young coach eventually vindicated his boss’s choice by turning Duke’s program into one of the nation’s best, year in and year out. The coach’s record is public and you can read about it here. But there will be other testimonials that don’t involve championships won and tournaments played; instead, they will focus on what Krzyzewski taught a generation of leaders about winning and losing and the primacy of improvement.
One of those leaders was Jay Bilas, who met Coach K when he was 17 years old and started 105 games for him at Duke (1982-1986). He returned to Duke in 1990 to serve as an assistant coach while earning his law degree and, along with a Juris Doctor, won two National Championships against Kansas in 1991 and Michigan in 1992.
Bilas shared that outside of his family, Coach K has been the most meaningful relationship he’s had in his life. To illustrate, Bilas recalled the time in his freshman year when the team had just lost by 43 points to Virginia in the final game of the season. Completely outclassed by the number one team in the country at the time, Bilas and his teammates did their best once the game ended to leave the arena as quickly as possible. But Coach K urged them all to take their time and have one more look at the final score. The rest is steeped in legend.
“The first practice of our next season, when we walked out on the floor on October 15, that score was still on the Duke scoreboard,” Bilas told me in a recent interview. “It said 109-66. We tried hard all summer to forget it, but he didn’t want us to. For the next three years, we never lost to Virginia again.”
But the point wasn’t just about turning defeat into victory. Butters believed in Coach K in the same way Coach K believed in his team. Failure may be inevitable at some point and, perhaps, more often than any were comfortable with, but failure did not have to become their destination. The lesson has informed Bilas’ career as an ESPN analyst and attorney.
“Acknowledging failure is important,” Bilas said. “I've had failures as a lawyer and as a broadcaster, but to be able to honestly assess those failures in relation to where you want to be and then correct them, you have to avoid beating yourself up.” While nobody is more demanding and, at times, brutally honest (and fiercely competitive) than Krzyzewski, Bilas never recalls a nasty moment with his mentor. “He was never demeaning,” Bilas explained. “His criticism never cut to your character as a person or an athlete. It was about your performance. He understands that every player goes through highs and lows in confidence, so he focuses on keeping us accountable yet positive.”
Today, college basketball is long on demands and short on patience and attention span. Coaches are given very little time to turn teams into winners, and players devote as short a window as possible to their college program as they prepare for hopeful careers in the pros. This approach to college basketball can still produce teams that win with consistency, even if they resemble semi-professional teams more than amateur ones.
The question is what kind of leaders the sport will attract and develop. Will they attract and retain a new generation of mentors like Mike Krzyzewski, who came to Duke in 1980 as an unknown quantity and needed time—and his boss’s backing—to develop a winning leadership style? It is hardly surprising that Coach K has developed as many or more successful leaders outside the ranks of basketball as within it, yet still managed to build a winning college hoops tradition.
That’s the power and beauty of Butters’ patience and long-term thinking. And in the case of Coach K, the strategy has been paying dividends for 42 amazing years.
