McCallie’s Suddath on Coach K: “He didn’t throw me away.”
The first time Jim Suddath met then new Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski in the spring of 1980, the rising senior was on crutches due to a left knee injury.
The second encounter with his new coach came later that summer after Suddath re-injured the knee in an off-campus summer pickup game. He woke up in the Duke hospital after surgery to find Krzyzewski waiting in his room to check on him.
The third time the two were to be together for any length of time came on October 15th of that same year during the first day of fall practice, the Atlanta native having just been cleared for lateral movement. Yet not long into that practice, Coach K’s first official practice with the Blue Devils, Suddath’s knee locked up on him several times and he fell to the floor in pain on each occasion.
“I had to have arthroscopic surgery,” the McCallie School chaplain recalled on Tuesday afternoon. “The second surgery had missed a cartilage floater that had been hidden. They got it out, but I was out of practice at least three more weeks. At that point, Coach had been around me three times, I was already a skinny, half-step-slow senior and I kept getting hurt. But what I’ll always remember about Coach Krzyzewski is that he didn’t throw me away. He didn’t give up on me. And by the end of the year, I was starting.”
Every story has at least two sides. It is easy and somewhat fair for college basketball’s Duke Haters to see the media monster that Coach K’s season-long farewell tour has become and cry “overkill” or “self-absorption.” In the history of college basketball and college football it is unprecedented.
Then again, Krzyzewski’s career is unprecedented, filled with NCAA Division I records likely never to be broken, especially his 1,202 total victories heading into this weekend’s
Final Four in New Orleans.
“From the beginning, he was very disciplined, very organized,” recalled Suddath of Coach K’s first season in Durham. “He was coming from West Point, where he’d both played for Bobby Knight and been the head coach. There was kind of a drill sergeant mentality.”
There was also a drill sergeant’s voice and language, a vast change for the soft-spoken, religious Suddath from his former coach Bill Foster, who had guided the Blue Devils to the NCAA title game during Suddath’s freshman season in 1978, then reached a regional final in March of 1980 before taking the South Carolina job.
“Coach Foster was intelligent and witty,” said Suddath. “He had a wry sense of humor.
He could get on you, really criticize you watching film, but without yelling at you. Coach Krzyzewski was more dramatic. He was young and fiery. But I was not shocked or upset by his bursts of (foul) language. That was just his style.”
What Suddath and so many of his teammates on Coach K’s first Duke squad struggled with was defense. Under Foster, the Blue Devils had run a complex defensive strategy employing a number of zones to keep opponents off-balance. Under the Knight disciple Krzyzewski, there was only one defense.
“We only played pressure man-to-man,” said Suddath. “We did not play a single second of zone defense my entire senior season.”
“Tennessee has prepared me in many ways and in ways that showed up when I got to the Senior Bowl and to the (NFL) combine,” Taylor said Tuesday in a news conference. “The strength staff here helped me get bigger, stronger and faster, and when it came to the board work at the Senior Bowl and at the combine, it was simple and easy. I kind of shocked myself knowing that my IQ of the game is really big, and Tennessee prepared me for that.
“This is what I’ve dreamed of, and it’s finally here now.”
Nine former Vols will showcase their skills Wednesday afternoon at Tennessee’s pro day in the Anderson Training Center. Butler, Jones, Mays and Taylor will be joined by receiver JaVonta Payton, defensive lineman Ja’Quain Blakely, walk-on linebacker Donovan Slates, and defensive backs Theo Jackson and Kenneth George Jr.
Jones is the only Tennessee player who showed up on NFL. com’s four-round mock draft that was released earlier this week, with the receiver and return specialist getting pegged midway through the fourth round to Indianapolis. Jones amassed 62 receptions for 807 yards and seven touchdowns last season but certainly turned heads at the combine with a 40-yard dash time of 4.31 seconds.
“A lot of people were expecting me to run a high 4.4, and I even heard a 4.5,” Jones said Tuesday. “I knew all along what I could run, but I didn’t think I was going to run a 4.31. I tapped into another level there.”
Taylor sizzled at the combine as well with a 4.36 in the 40, with Butler and Mays also among the 324 players and 82 Southeastern Conference players invited to the NFL’s top talent stage. Jones, Mays and Taylor went to Indianapolis after traveling to the Senior Bowl in early February, while Butler and Jackson received invites to the East West Shrine Bowl in Last Vegas.
“I went out there with a chip on my shoulder,” Butler said. “I think everybody knows that the Shrine Bowl is a really good bowl, but I wanted to be in the Reese’s (Senior) Bowl and didn’t know why I wasn’t. I went out there thinking there wasn’t anybody better than me, and I wanted to prove myself right.”
Once Wednesday’s pro day is over, it will be a waiting game for the participants. Taylor has been training out in Arizona and said he went there weighing 187 pounds with 7% body fat and now weighs 199 with 5% body fat.
Yet no training or body shaping measures can conquer the unknown that awaits each of these Vols.
“Going into signing day, you have an idea of exactly what you’re getting into,” Taylor said. “You know who the coaching staff is going to be, and you kind of know what the environment is like and what Knoxville is like. In this situation, you don’t have a clue about anything.
“You don’t know where you’re going to live here in a couple months.”