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When Richard Brodhead, the dean of Yale College, was selected to be Duke University's next president last December, he jokingly paid homage to his new school's renowned basketball team. "If there are perks to my job," he quipped at the press conference announcing his appointment at Duke, "I presume that the president gets guaranteed tickets to the basketball games."
Last week Brodhead found out the joke was on him. On July 1, Brodhead's first official day as Duke's president, he was greeted with the news that Mike Krzyzewski, the school's revered basketball coach, was considering leaving Duke to coach the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers. You'd like to think that at an institution of higher learning--even one with a top-flight basketball team--this sort of development would be viewed as a bump in the road. But at Duke, where Krzyzewski's nickname, "Coach K," is said with the same reverence as Kim Jong Il's honorific "Dear Leader" is uttered in North Korea, Krzyzewski's possible departure precipitated a full-blown crisis.
--Jason Zengerle, The New Republic
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Truthaboutduke.com --> Funny Photoshops!
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Dean Smith vs. Coach K -
Dean Smith:
Wikipedia link
Smith is one of the most prominent liberals in North Carolina
politics. Politically, he is best known for promoting desegregation.
In 1964, Smith joined a local pastor and a black UNC theology student
to integrate The Pines, a Chapel Hill restaurant. He also integrated
the Tar Heels basketball team by recruiting Charlie Scott as the
university's first black scholarship athlete. In 1965, Smith helped
Howard Lee, a black graduate student at UNC, purchase a home in an
all-white neighborhood.
He opposed the Vietnam War and, in the early 1980s, famously recorded
radio spots to promote a freeze on nuclear weapons. He has been a
prominent opponent of the death penalty. In 1998, he appeared at a
clemency hearing for a death-row inmate and pointed at then-Governor
Jim Hunt: "You're a murderer. And I'm a murderer. The death penalty
makes us all murderers." As head coach, he periodically held UNC
basketball practices in North Carolina prisons.
While coach, he was recruited by some in the Democratic Party to run
for the United States Senate against incumbent Jesse Helms. He
declined. But in retirement, he has continued to speak out on issues
such as the war in Iraq and gay rights.
Coach K:
New Republic Link
Granted, Brodhead is just the latest in a long line of Duke presidents
to kiss Krzyzewski's ring. Even before 1992, when Duke had just won
back-to-back national titles and the school's New York alumni group
pointedly told the school's then-president Keith Brodie that it wanted
Coach K, not Brodie, to address its next gathering, Duke realized that
Krzyzewski was its most important employee--and one to whom homage
must be paid. The basketball court at Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium is
now called "Coach K Court." The area outside Cameron where Duke
students camp out for tickets has been officially dubbed
"Krzyzewskiville." Krzyzewski has a faculty appointment at Duke's
business school. He even has an institution within the
B-school--something called the "Coach K Center of Leadership &
Ethics."
In addition to paying Coach K homage, Duke has paid him deference.
While it's true that Krzyzewski runs a clean program--his players stay
out of trouble, they go to class, they aren't paid under the
table--he's hardly an angel. Although Krzyzewski is always happy to
field softballs from Dick Vitale, he rarely grants less obsequious
journalists an audience and when he does, he gives them clipped, testy
answers. He's even harder on student journalists. In 1990, angered by
a mid-season report card issued by Duke's student newspaper that gave
his team a B-plus, Krzyzewski summoned the student journalists to a
meeting and, in front of his players, cursed out the students for not
giving the team straight As.
Krzyzewski is similarly abusive to referees, constantly berating
them--usually in florid language--for their apparent shortcomings. In
March, after his team blew an 11-point lead to lose to Connecticut in
the Final Four, Krzyzewski barked over and over at the refs, "You
killed us, you killed us." A favorite pastime for Duke detractors is
to count how many times each game Coach K is caught on camera
dropping, as they call them, "F-bombs." Krzyzewski has even abused his
position for partisan politics, hosting a fundraiser for North
Carolina Republican Senate candidate Elizabeth Dole that--because the
event was called "Blue Devils for Dole" and was held at a
university-owned facility--gave the impression that Duke was endorsing
Dole. In all of these cases of misbehavior, Duke has simply looked the
other way.
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