There have been so many recruiting victories in the years since, so many times when Mike Krzyzewski walked into a living room, or into a gymnasium, or onto an outdoor court at a summer basketball camp and pitched the very best players in America why they should attend Duke University and not Kentucky, or UCLA, or Kansas, or (best of all) North Carolina. Yet there may have been no more unlikely coup than the one Krzyzewski pulled off in the spring of 1977.
Krzyzewski was in his second year coaching basketball at West Point, he had just turned 30 years old, and he was coming off a 20-8 season with a good roster returning in the fall.