Coach K's family reflects on the Duke legend's role as dad, grandpa and father-in-law - The Washington Post
The couple had just moved from Oklahoma to Durham, N.C., not far from where Jamie’s parents lived. On this night, for the first time, her parents were coming over for dinner.
Her husband, Chris, was nervous. He gets along well with his father-in-law, but this wasn’t just pasta night with the family. It was an important rite of passage, as it is for any young couple, something of a graduation into adulthood. And Jamie’s dad is a noted perfectionist and alpha who usually gets his way.
He was also Chris’s boss. After taking the job and moving to town, Chris had been so determined to make a good impression that he’d hired his father-in-law’s landscaper, Keith, to plant bushes and lay sod at their new home.
“Man, I’m glad we got this done,” Chris remembers saying before dinner that night. Then it was showtime. His in-laws were pulling up.
Jamie and Chris walked outside to greet them. Jamie’s mother was going on about the wooded property’s beauty. But her dad, Mike Krzyzewski, who was cradling two bottles of fine Napa Valley wine, seemed transfixed by this … thing … next to the walkway.
“Whose decision was this?” Krzyzewski, Duke’s legendary men’s basketball coach and Chris Spatola’s father-in-law, asked. Jamie and Chris shrugged, because isn’t a plant just a plant?
Not to Krzyzewski, an avid gardener whose luxury Escalade’s interior is often littered with leaves, mulch and assorted yard waste. This plant, close to the Spatolas’ front door, was a weeping Nootka false cypress that Krzyzewski’s guy, Keith, had selected, and about which the Spatolas had no strong feelings. It was an evergreen, unusual looking, kind of big. It was a tree. But its branches drooped, making it look a little like a forlorn Christmas tree. And that was precisely the problem, Krzyzewski explained, in the same excruciating detail as if he were correcting a freshman’s mechanics on a jump shot.
“You need to send a strong message, plant-wise, when people come up to your home,” Chris remembers him saying, an extremely Coach K way to think about such a thing. “And that’s just a sad-looking tree.”
In that moment, on that walkway, Krzyzewski — with his five national championships, dozen Final Fours, three Olympic gold medals — wasn’t a coaching icon who built a basketball dynasty using talent, his own instincts, and relentless attention to detail. He was every father-in-law ever. Chris also knew Krzyzewski was right about one thing: “The Weeper,” as the coach nicknamed it over the following years, wasn’t just a plant. Between this father-in-law and son-in-law, it had been designated as an article of disharmony, as one family’s symbol of the awkward, occasionally fraught, often silly power struggles that underpin the American in-law structure.
“A battle for respect,” says Chris Spatola. As a former participant at Duke’s basketball camp who’s known Jamie since they were teenagers, Chris has been in the Krzyzewski orbit for years. After completing his commitment to the Army, he spent five years on Duke’s men’s basketball staff as a graduate assistant and director of basketball operations. Now he’s an ESPN basketball analyst who, to make his own existence more complicated, must sometimes criticize Duke and its set-in-his-ways leader, who happens to be his wife’s dad.
Like Krzyzewski, Spatola played basketball at the U.S. Military Academy and later became an officer in the Army, where he learned to push back on superiors if he disagreed with them. This, apparently, extended to disagreements about conifers.
“It wasn't even about me liking the plant! It was about him coming to my home and telling me to change that plant,” Spatola says. “By that time, I had been to combat. I was a West Point grad, and I was a good husband. ‘This may be your daughter, but this is my family.’ There were some real mind games going on, and no, that tree is going to stay right there.”
Sometimes when Krzyzewski visited, he offered to pay to replace “The Weeper” with any other plant of the couple’s choosing. Other times, he threatened to drive over in the middle of the night, back up his Escalade, and yank it from their yard. Spatola, mostly joking but not entirely, says he told his father-in-law he’d sue him if he did that, or maybe call the cops.
Krzyzewski finds the exchange hilarious. “Because he was stubborn,” he said during a 2019 interview with The Washington Post, “he wouldn’t get rid of the damn thing. And so I played that game with them: ‘Still got the god---- Weeper, huh? How can you have that?’”
Jamie was caught in the middle of this, essentially two rams clashing over a tree nobody liked. She rolled her eyes sometimes, but she also understood her dad. Krzyzewski calls his three daughters his “best friends” and is confident in the instincts that made him wildly successful in the four-plus decades he led Duke before announcing last year that he’d retire after this season. It was also important, Jamie says, for her young family to establish and protect boundaries, showing respect to Krzyzewski but not necessarily appeasing him.
“The indifference grew into a more impassioned, We put that thing in the ground; we’re planting our roots here,” she says. “It’s also a metaphor for a healthy father-in-law and son-in-law relationship: that the father-in-law is there, you know he’s watching, you know he’s still looking out, but ultimately he’s not going to pull up your Weeper.”
What’s also true is that Jamie and her two older sisters grew up around their father, gradually learning to navigate his emphases and quirks. Their husbands had to adjust on the fly. Chris already spoke two of Krzyzewski’s languages: those of basketball and West Point. He later took up gardening to further connect with “God’s gift to landscaping,” he jokes, to better show deference while also standing his ground.
“He’s an iconic figure, as we know,” Chris says. “How do you find your place in that world where you also want to be respected?”
Beyond Krzyzewski’s professional stature, Chris had to negotiate anxieties common for any son-in-law. Who pays for dinner when you’re out with Coach K? And how do you address him? Surely not “Mike,” which virtually nobody calls him, so Mr. Krzyzewski?
Jamie enjoys these sociological black holes, along with watching people squirm as they search for their contours. Her dad coaches young men and happens to be an expert in manipulating their emotions. So when someone enters his realm with the bold intention of dating one of the coach’s daughters, Jamie finds the proceedings highly entertaining.
Usually, when the girls were younger, Krzyzewski didn’t say much when a boy visited, allowing their mom, Mickie, to play the good cop. He preferred to greet the strangers with an uncomfortably long stare. One time he told his oldest daughter, Debbie, that she could have a boy to the house on one condition: He wasn’t allowed to sit on the family’s furniture. Krzyzewski issued frequent reminders that men could, and would, fail them.
“I tell my daughters — this is before they got married — ‘I never want you to be solely dependent on a guy,’ ” he said. “Because guys can be dirtbags.”
He was an engaged, if occasionally awkward, listener while his daughters were teenagers. His middle daughter, Lindy, preferred to call Grant Hill for relationship advice, but sometimes her dad cornered her and offered wisdom in his own way.
“Somehow the analogy always came back to basketball,” Lindy says. “You're talking about issues of the heart, and yet somehow that's likened to a man-to-man or zone defense. ‘I see you trying here, Dad, but this isn't the time.’ ”
Lindy suspects at least one boy asked her out just to get tickets to a Duke game, since he stopped calling after they went to Cameron Indoor Stadium together. So it was a relief later when a Wake Forest classmate named Steve Frasher admitted he had no idea who her father was. He’s from Ohio, grew up wrestling and playing football, had never watched the Blue Devils. Lindy took him to a game and, afterward, into the locker room, where Steve introduced himself to Duke superstar Steve Wojciechowski. This was in 1997, not long after “Wojo” appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Frasher told him sharing a first name should make him easy to remember.
Then Frasher met Duke’s coach. He doesn’t remember what Krzyzewski said, but it was unforgettable the way he stared deep into the young man’s eyes. “Kind of looking to see if there are good things in those eyes or bad things,” says Frasher, who’s now a home builder and real estate agent in Durham. Lindy is a dean at a private school.
Lindy and Frasher started dating, and he picked up that the safest way to address Krzyzewski is by “Coach.” Not “K,” which his daughters hate, and never “Mike.” Frasher also learned about Krzyzewski’s ruthless intensity and self-punishment following a loss.
When Duke underachieves, the coach can be volatile, and his red-faced explosions are as legendary as they are predictable. He played for Bob Knight at Army, and early in his coaching career, he adopted some of Knight’s more infamous coaching habits, often being combative with journalists and belittling players to the point of making them cry. In 1990, a year before Krzyzewski won his first national title, he invited student newspaper staffers to Cameron after an article he disliked. He issued a rant decorated with profanity, according to a subsequent New York Times story, and “scatological and anatomical references.”
Krzyzewski softened long ago, those close to him say, but his response to losses can be no less extreme. A few years ago, when a player was feeling sorry for himself, Krzyzewski ended practice and invited players, coaches and support staff to midcourt so everyone could have an actual pity party. Just this month, after North Carolina upset Duke in Krzyzewski’s final game at Cameron, he scolded home fans for booing — “Everyone be quiet,” he hissed — two years after shouting for the student section to “shut up” (He later apologized for both outbursts).
In November 1999, Frasher and Lindy were dating, and he had bought an engagement ring and intended to propose. But first, he wanted to phone Krzyzewski and let him know. The night before the call, Frasher watched as the Blue Devils blew a double-digit lead against Illinois, pleading with the basketball gods to let Duke survive.
“He’s somewhat intimidating, and you don’t want to do it. You put it off to the very end, and it was kind of like I messed up, because if Duke doesn’t win this game, he’s not going to be in a good mood,” Frasher says. He watched Chris Carawell drain two free throws, Illinois’s Frank Williams miss a three-pointer, Jay Williams snag the rebound as the clock mercifully expired and Duke held on. “I have never cheered for Duke harder.”
Frasher made his call, got his future father-in-law’s blessing, celebrated and began planning with Lindy. During the first years of their marriage, Frasher says, he attended family gatherings but didn’t say much. The Krzyzewskis like board games and bocce and Motown songs, and Frasher would sometimes watch as one of sports’ most celebrated figures got a few glasses deep into an Opus or Silver Oak during Thanksgiving or some other special occasion. If the right mood hits, “Coach” might disappear into the kitchen to fetch a spoon, then return to serenade Mickie and everyone else by singing Smokey Robinson’s “Ooh Baby Baby” into his silver microphone.
Tipsy K can be sentimental and reminiscent, family members say, and these are sides of himself he rarely shows the public. He’ll effusively thank his wife and daughters — Krzyzewski calls his family the “Starting five” — for supporting and loving him for so many decades, even as basketball commanded his attention and occasionally drained his joy. He’ll praise the sons-in-law who love and dote on his girls as Krzyzewski does, jokingly saying he’s a “good scout of talent,” Jamie says, because he knew Chris had the right stuff even before she did.
Krzyzewski had gotten to know Chris when he camped at Duke, later vouching for him to former Army coach Pat Harris and recommending he play for the Black Knights. The couple married in 2004, and Krzyzewski seemed legitimately worried before Chris deployed to Iraq. He visited him at Fort Sill and interrogated Chris’s commander about his son-in-law’s safety. The coach later sent a box of Duke basketball shirts for Chris to hand out among his unit.
“We’re tough-love kinds of guys; we’re guys in sports, so we’re not the most sentimental dudes to begin with,” Chris says. But both teared up, he continues, “and were emotional in that moment in my life.”
Krzyzewski can be goofy, doubling over in laughter when Frasher makes an easy joke about, say, a blowfish. Lindy says her dad is so compartmentalized that he often doesn’t remember many of his on-court eruptions, or the fact that he initially wanted even his grandchildren to call him “Coach” before Mickie and everyone else nixed that.
“We gave him absolute hell,” Lindy says. He listens to stories about himself like this and howls, wiping tears, sniffing the laughter away. Then he falls apart again. The effort to make his grandkids call him “Coach,” Lindy says, was “one of the moments where he’d really laugh at himself, and we just slayed him.”
Other than Michael Savarino, who actually plays basketball for the Blue Devils, Krzyzewski’s nine other grandkids address him as “Poppy.”
He’s an elite trash talker, reminding Chris that he may be a better gardener now, but he’ll never be on his father-in-law’s level. “He’s like Division III, and I’m NBA. Or (Team) USA,” Krzyzewski said. “Maybe Division II.”
Then, inevitably, the wine runs out. So Krzyzewski sends his sons-in-law into his massive wine cellar to select another bottle or two. It keeps the party going, but it’s also another social experiment. Each year Krzyzewski hosts a wine auction in Napa Valley named after former North Carolina State Coach Jim Valvano, and since 1999 the event has raised more than $130 million for the V Foundation for Cancer Research. And because Krzyzewski’s interests tend to become obsessions, he has befriended winemakers and restaurateurs, assembling a vast collection of bottles. Some are rare, valued in the thousands, theoretically reserved for special occasions.
But family gatherings sometimes qualify, and though Spatola and Frasher have learned the ways of the fermented grape, they still struggle with the deeper function of this exercise. Because what does Coach K actually want from this? It’s clearly about more than just wine. Something modest and palatable, equivalent to the Blue Devils reaching the NCAA tournament? Or a big, meaty Caymus that’ll cut down the damn nets?
“They're like three teenage boys going down there, giggling and excited,” Lindy says. “There is an element of stealing your girlfriends' parents' liquor, and at the end of the day, you want to bring up the right stuff.”
The smart play, then, is to bring back options: three bottles that represent a range of value and quality. It’s a shrewd act of political deference, suggesting they need the big man’s help in making the final decision. Besides, they know he’ll probably open the best one anyway.
Krzyzewski’s family has recently begun preparing for another big occasion, and though he’ll always be “Coach,” soon he won’t be Duke’s coach. His daughters admit feeling unmoored, considering their dad has led the Blue Devils since two years before Jamie’s birth. Krzyzewski will leave the program in assistant coach Jon Scheyer’s hands, and though the two of them have talked plenty about hoops and leadership and character, they sometimes discuss parenting. Scheyer has a young daughter, too, and Krzyzewski seems to feel a tinge of envy that his understudy has so many experiences ahead.
“So how did it feel last night when you walked into her room and she’s still awake and you kissed her on the forehead, and she said, ‘Daddy,’ and you tucked her in?” Krzyzewski said he told Scheyer. “How f---ing lucky you are.”
But there are upsides to the change, Lindy says. For instance, the family will be able to celebrate Krzyzewski’s birthday, which falls on Feb. 17 and therefore during the heart of the ACC schedule. That’ll mean more gatherings and louder songs and gifts to give, but that raises one more question. If you’re Coach K’s son-in-law, what do you possibly buy him?
He’s a multimillionaire who gets whatever he wants, and he’s such a challenge to shop for that Lindy’s Christmas gift to her dad is usually delivering pots of Italian wedding or chicken and wild rice soup because it soothes his throat after so much screaming. The grandkids give Poppy whoopee cushions or a broomstick horse from the dollar store.
But Frasher and Spatola have no idea what to get Krzyzewski for a retirement gift. New gardening gloves? A trinket from West Point? Another bottle of cabernet?
“We can't afford better wine for him than he can afford for himself,” Jamie says. “What are we gonna bring, something that we picked up at Harris Teeter?”
She’s talking during an interview on Zoom when, through a window, she notices a vehicle pulling into her driveway. It’s Keith, the landscaper, and suddenly inspiration strikes. Her eyes widen.
“A very fine, very weepy Weeper,” she says. “Don’t you think? Isn’t that what we need to do? Only if we can find the weepiest of all.”
Jamie imagines the scene, smiling as she pictures her dad walking outside one morning and discovering it still in its pot, situated in a prominent place in his manicured yard. He’ll grimace, of course, and promise to plant it, right next to where the family’s new puppy uses the bathroom. Jamie says the gift must come from Chris, and in the pot a note from him will be waiting, because though his father-in-law may think a weeping Nootka false cypress is a weak plant for the front of a home, even he’ll have to admit it sends a strong message gift-wise.
“I think we’ve got to do this,” Jamie says, knowing her dad will crack up, doubling over with his elbows on his knees, wiping away the tears and choking back the laughter before falling apart again.
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source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/03/18/coach-k-daughters-sons-grandkids/
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