Bennett’s, UVA’s gift to Krzyzewski touched Duke coach’s heart

By Jerry Ratcliffe

Intense rivals during ACC battles, Virginia’s Tony Bennett and visiting Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski shared a special moment before Wednesday night’s game at John Paul Jones Arena.

Krzyzewski, the Hall of Fame coach who is retiring at the end of the year, was presented a plaque from Bennett and UVA prior to tipoff of the nationally-televised game. Bennett took the microphone and delivered a heart-felt message to the longtime Duke coach.

“It was the right thing to do,” Bennett said after Duke handed his Cavaliers a narrow 65-61 defeat. “I appreciated our crowd being classy. [Krzyzewski’s] contributions are monumental to the game, to the modern game of basketball and college basketball, and when someone can last that long and do what he’s done. Again, it was the right thing to do.”

A media member asked Bennett if he had rehearsed his message or if it was just spoken in the moment.

“I don’t have a speech writer or anything like that,” Bennett jested. “I thought about that.”

Krzyzewski was impressed with the gesture.

“It was very, very good of Tony to do that,” Coach K said. “I’m not looking for a farewell tour or anything like that, but it is my last year and if there’s some way that we can celebrate the brotherhood that’s in the game, then that’s a good thing.

“We’ve got all this stuff going on with the handshake lines and all that, but tonight was beautiful. It showed the brotherhood in our league, the respect programs have for one another and that coaches have for one another and it meant a great deal to me.”

Krzyzewski said that the basketball gods have a way of sending messages, and his message when the plane landed in Charlottesville brought back memories of his first Duke teams facing Virginia’s Terry Holland and North Carolina’s Dean Smith.

He joked with his much-younger coaching staff that he had to coach against (Ralph) Sampson and (Michael) Jordan.

“I had a chance to touch Terry before the game,” Coach K said. Holland, who suffers from dementia, attends the home games with wife Ann, who is good friends with Krzyzewski’s wife, Mickie, who attended Wednesday night’s game and accompanied her husband into the postgame media room. Mickie Krzyzewski is related to a former familiar and popular face at UVA sporting events, the late Monk Bingler, her uncle.

Coach K pointed out that in the older days, coaches’ wives were all friends, a fact that most fans didn’t realize.

“That’s the ACC I know,” Krzyzewski said.

He joked about Virginia’s gift in a kind way, noting, “What they gave me weighs about eight hundred pounds,” Krzyzewski cracked. “I thought [Bennett] gave it to me and had me carry it so that I’d get a hernia right before the game.”