When John Feinstein was a student at Duke University in the late 1970s, the basketball team was something of a joke: “When I say to people that Duke was last in the ACC in my four years,” Feinstein tells the INDY, “they think I’m lying.”
It didn’t take long, though, for Mike Krzyzewski, an unknown former Army coach with a hard-to-pronounce last name, to turn the program from a laughingstock to the cream of the crop when he was hired in 1980. Feinstein has been on the sidelines chronicling the Blue Devils’ success ever since.
A New York City native, Feinstein is a decorated journalist and the author of 42 books and counting, including the 1986 classic A Season on the Brink and other New York Times bestsellers, giving voice to some of the most memorable moments in sports. It’s only appropriate that, eventually, he would take readers inside college basketball’s most polarizing program.
Out this month from Duke University Press, Five Banners: Inside the Duke Basketball Dynasty is a fresh look at the historic program that has hovered near the apex of the college basketball world for nearly four decades. Under Coach K’s tenure, Duke men’s basketball reached the summit five times, winning NCAA national titles in 1991, 1992, 2001, 2010, and 2015.
Five Banners reads more like a journal than a history book, with anecdotes from players, coaches, and other important figures throughout the program.
INDY: Duke is such a storied program, and a lot of ink has been spilled. Why write this book now?
JOHN FEINSTEIN: Well, first, to give you the background, my agent is friends with the head of Duke Publishing, whose name is, believe it or not, Dean Smith. And Dean came to my agent and said, “Would John have any interest in doing a sports book for our 100th anniversary?” Dean contacted me and I said, “Well, if they’d let me do what I want to do.” I didn’t want to do a book on the history of volleyball or something like that. I wanted to do a book on something I knew. So I came up with this idea to write about the five championships, since I covered them all, and knew Krzyzewski very well dating back to when he was at the Army, showing how old I am.
They liked the idea. Dean liked the idea, so I went ahead with it. And I think what I was trying to do—because you’re right, people know the basics of the five championships, and of course, there was a 30 for 30 on Christian Laettner after they won in ’92—so I wanted to write about things I knew but hadn’t written about the program, about Krzyzewski, about guys like Grant Hill and guys like Johnny Dawkins and people like that. And so that’s what I attempted to do—build those stories around the five championships.
You said you wanted to highlight things you had not written about, and I think that really comes through in the anecdotes about players like Nate James and Quinn Cook.
I don’t think anybody wins championships without Nate James, without Quinn Cook. It’s interesting—the 2015 team, which is considered a one-and-done team because of the three freshmen who starred and then went on right to the NBA—but Quinn Cook, Amile Jefferson, and Marshall Plumlee were very important parts of that team. They don’t win without those guys.
I think that one of the things that has to be learned in the post-Krzyzewski era is that it’s great to recruit star freshmen—they’ve got a kid right now who’s allegedly going to be the number-one pick in the NBA draft next year. But you need more than great freshmen. You need those role players. You need those older guys with experience. I think that’s one of the things I tried to explain, especially in writing about the 2015 team. The irony was the 2010 team was the year that Mike had recruited Kyrie Irving but won the national championship with juniors and seniors because Irving wasn’t there yet. I think John Calipari learned that lesson in recent years.
When did you decide you wanted to start writing books?
Step 1: I had to realize I wasn’t going to be the point guard for the Knicks or play center field for the Mets. I knew that in high school, but when I got to college, I fell in love with newspaper journalism. I was able to write fast because I write like I talk, so I was comfortable writing fast. I loved covering different things, whether it was straight news, which I did throughout my four years, or covering a Duke fencing team, which I did.
That was also the post-Watergate period, so everybody wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein. I was lucky enough to actually work for Bob [Woodward]. He’s been a great friend to me for more than 40 years now. And I think everybody who writes, whether it’s for a newspaper, a magazine, whatever, wants to write a book at some point. I still remember a friend of mine, Phil Wood, when he interviewed me on this Baltimore talk radio station for A Season on the Brink, said, “Well, I guess everybody who writes has a book in him, and John’s tumbled out.” And I wanted to say to him, the book’s number one on the bestseller list. I think it more than tumbled out.
I actually proposed a book to Dean Smith after [UNC] won the championship in ’82. I always had a good relationship with him, and I said, “OK, you’ve won the championship, that monkey is off your back. You could win again next year”—because they had [Michael] Jordan and [Sam] Perkins coming back. “I’d like to spend the summer reporting on your life and then be around during the season.” He couldn’t have been nicer. He actually said, “Let me think about it. Let me talk to Linnea [Smith’s wife].” And he called me back and he said, “You know, I’m just not ready to be as honest as I think you’d want me to be about that.”
I was 25, and then when I came up with the idea to do A Season on the Brink, I did get the chance. And my goal, Justin, was to write a book that would do well enough I’d get to do a second book. I never dreamed it would be a number-one bestseller, so it couldn’t have worked out better for me.
I interviewed Scott Ellsworth, who wrote The Secret Game about Duke and NC Central University. He mentioned A Season on the Brink as something that he really appreciated. He ended up writing a basketball book many years later, but, to your point, his did not just tumble out either.
I don’t think any book tumbles out, to be honest, but, yeah, I’m flattered that Scott would bring up A Season on the Brink because I love that book. And to me, I’m about to start teaching here at Longwood University, and I taught at Duke many, many years ago, before my kids were born. And one of the things, the most underrated things to me about being a reporter, a journalist, an author, is the idea. I’ve always been good at ideas. I’ve rarely taken ideas in my life from editors. One of the things I learned in my years as a newspaper guy—and I still write for The Washington Post—was don’t ever put yourself in the hands of an editor for an idea, because they’ll get it wrong.
What do you remember about Durham from your time as a Duke student? It’s a very different city today than it was in the 1970s and ’80s, and the relationship between Durham and Duke has evolved as well.
There was a lot of culture shock involved. I grew up in New York City. I lived in a neighborhood where I played ball most days with a [diverse] group and I thought everybody was a liberal Democrat. I was shocked when there were guys crying in my dorm when Spiro Agnew resigned. I was running up and down the hall screaming, “Nixon’s next!”
But it helped me grow, because I can remember nights in the dorm where we would sit around and argue. Lots of football players lived in my dorm, and they were mostly Midwestern, white, in case of the guys in my dorm, and conservative, and they didn’t understand why I was against the Vietnam War or Richard Nixon. But they were bright guys. So even though we disagreed, it led to very interesting conversations.
I went to a basketball game with my dad in Cameron when I was visiting as a recruited swimmer, and Duke wasn’t any good back then. And when I say to people that Duke was last in the ACC in my four years, they think I’m lying. But they beat Maryland that day. Maryland was second in the country. Gary Melchionni, who was a senior, scored 39 points. And as we walked out, I said to my dad, “I’m sorry,” because he wanted me to go to Yale. He was an active professor there. “If I get in here, I’m going here.”
Back then, Durham was still pretty much a tobacco town. There were not many good restaurants. There was the Ivy Room, which we went to. But mostly when we went out to dinner, we went to Chapel Hill. There were good restaurants there, and there were girls. But that was a very different time. Durham is a very different town now. Duke’s a very different school. So like Mike Krzyzewski and coaching the basketball team, I’ve had to adapt to Duke being a different school than the one I graduated from.
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