I'll be OK with Coach K when he brings home the gold
The wall was erected. I got zero access to anybody. The book sucked. Maybe it would have sucked anyway. I'll never know. His book, Leading with the Heart, came out in 2000 and was an instant best seller. Bite me.
He has irritated me ever since. I've written several heartfelt Coach K critiques, most recently this one, which came after our most ridiculous of several conference call confrontations over the years.
But all of that is history. I mean it. It's history ... if.
If Coach K wins gold in Beijing.
International basketball matters to me -- more than any other sport -- which makes our failure to win an international gold medal since 2000 so personally painful. How can we be 43.8 points per game better than the Olympic field in 1992, then finish sixth just 10 years later at the 2002 Worlds?
The rest of the planet has been catching up, fine, but we've helped the process by regressing so badly. As fun as it is to blame everything on Lyin' Larry Brown, the coach of the 2004 U.S. team that won a bullcrap bronze in Athens, our problems have run much deeper than him.
Coach K can fix those problems. Our American failings in international basketball can be traced to team makeup and player motivation. The idiots in charge have been unable to put together the best mix of players, and the coaches have been unable to get the most out of them. It's been the same thing every time. It's been infuriating.
Coach K is too smart to repeat the mistakes of the UNC mafia, Larry Brown and George Karl, the last two U.S. coaches. His roster has three unselfish point guards (Jason Kidd, Chris Paul, Deron Williams), a great shooter (Michael Redd), a great defender (Tayshaun Prince) and a great rebounder (Carlos Boozer) sprinkled among some of the most spectacular talents in the world (Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Dwight Howard, Chris Bosh).
This team is loaded because these guys wanted to play for Coach K, and he won't let them lose. He'll infect his team with his competitive nastiness -- remember Christian Laettner's stomp and Gerald Henderson's elbow? -- and he'll pull out every Jedi mind trick he's used over the years at Duke. By the time he's finished the United States will have its gold, Lithuania's starting five will receive their silvers in triage, LeBron James will transfer from Cleveland to Duke and I'll be the biggest Coach K butt-kisser this side of Dick Vitale.
Unless we lose.
In which case I'll be really irritated with him.
