Midway through John Feinstein’s Five Banners, I recalled an encounter I had with Ed O’Bannon’s calf muscle in the spring of 1995. 

O’Bannon was the star of a UCLA team that either had just won, or was about to win, the national championship. He and some teammates were in an ice cream shop in Venice Beach, California. They were all wearing their UCLA jerseys, as though they had just come from a game or, more likely, a photo shoot. The mood was festive and goofy with the incongruity of these guys in their uniforms getting an ice cream cone. I stood in line with them, right behind O’Bannon. 

I stared at these guys with the fascination that all people have in the physical presence of elite athletes, made more acute perhaps by the fact that in spite of being a lackadaisical basketball player in high school and college, I was starting to really care about the game, about playing it, practicing, wanting to be good. I stared for a while and then, not wanting to be rude, I dropped my gaze down to O’Bannon’s shoes. He was the star of that team, the one player I recognized by name. I stared at his slender shins and the sharply articulated calf muscle. The memory is vivid in part because it was so strange.

Also strange: that such an obscure, out-of-place memory would come back to me so vividly while reading a book about Duke University’s basketball program and the five championships it won under coach Mike Krzyzewski. Why?

There is so much basketball lore stuffed into Five Banners that it felt absurd to bring in another tangent of college basketball history that was not germane. UCLA does get a few mentions during the recaps of tournament play, but the center of gravity is the Atlantic Coast Conference. At the center of this extended family, from Feinstein’s point of view, is Duke and Coach K. That is the family with which Feinstein is preoccupied and to which he has attached himself, partly by having gone to Duke himself, but mostly because he is related by virtue of being so ubiquitous and persistently present at so many important moments of, as he would put it, “the program.”

Feinstein’s prose is a river of basketball minutiae, toggling between a particular game and all the complicated history between these coaches and these teams, before getting into a brief summary of the game and then the culminating events, the last-second shots made or missed. There are so many names of players and coaches, so many dates of epochal matchups, so many games recounted, so many brief synopsis of a coach’s record at a particular school. These details are tossed off in such a way as to make the reader feel as though they were driving by the open door of a cathedral that is adjacent to the main cathedral, and are able to glimpse just enough of the interior to understand that it, too, is a world worthy of entire books. The following is a representative sample of the form:

Five weeks later, having won eight in a row, [Duke] traveled to Cole Field House to play eighth-ranked Maryland. By this time, Gary Williams had rebuilt Maryland into a national power, although he had not yet reached the Final Four.

To Williams and the Terrapins, Duke had become Mount Everest. Maryland was able to beat North Carolina on a semi regular basis but didn’t have that kind of luck against Duke. Going into the 2000–2001 season, Williams was 3–21 against Krzyzewski since he had arrived to take over a wounded program in College Park. 

A great deal of Feinstein’s method is present here: we are swept into a moment in college basketball history with a recap of the recent events (having won eight in a row), the opponent is honored (Gary Williams had rebuilt) while also being put in their place (he had not yet reached the Final Four) in the way that is suggestive of how an older sibling will always find a way to shoot down a younger one, for whom the conflict has outsized importance (Duke had become Mount Everest). 

But what gives the passage the tang of family dynamics is the digression about North Carolina. The University of Maryland is an annoying upstart but UNC is a primal threat. How else to account for the marvelous bitchery of “Maryland was able to beat North Carolina on a regular basis but didn’t have that kind of luck against Duke.”

Someone inclined to defend Feinstein would surely point out that, well, it’s just the facts! Which is true. And here we have the conundrum of Duke, and all the issues of privilege and excellence and depravity and entitlement that swirl around that particular institution in a way that, for better or worse, sets it apart. Feinstein begins the book by explaining that he is writing it on the occasion of Duke’s 100th anniversary. Also mentioned: it is more or less the 50th anniversary of his enrollment at the school. When he arrived for his freshman year, there was no basketball coach. The previous one had resigned before the season. 

The Duke men’s basketball team had its worst record in its history (to that date and ever since) in the 1973–74 season. A new coach, Bill Foster, was hired. For the remaining three seasons of Feinstein’s college career, when he covered the team for the school paper, the team was mediocre. But the following year, the team had a breakout season and made a run in the NCAA tournament. Feinstein, then a cub reporter at The Washington Post working the “night police beat,” convinced his editor to let him cover the Final Four in Saint Louis if Duke made it. They made it. 

“I was sitting in Foster’s Friday press conference the day before the Blue Devils were to play Notre Dame in the semifinals,” he writes. “Someone asked him how his team had gone from last in the ACC a year earlier to the Final Four. Foster, who had one of the greatest dry senses of humor I’ve ever encountered, looked right at me and said, “Well, John Feinstein graduated.” 

It’s a good beat, colorful, but mostly it feels significant by virtue of its implication: by the time he graduated college, Feinstein had developed his method. You make such a joke about, and to, a person who has been hanging around the locker room for years, badgering you for quotes, a pest towards whom one might develop warm feelings. It’s a method whose fruits are strewn throughout the book in the form of access and trust, and it evokes a bygone era when big-time sports was not so big, and famous people were not so remote and cordoned off. College basketball coaches would wear plaid suits of dubious taste and then, after the game, they might hang around with reporters, drinking, smoking cigarettes, poring over grease-stained mimeographed stat sheets. 

Bob Knight, the Wrathful Barbarian 

Five Banners evokes the old world of college basketball before the money became gigantic. Though the college ranks were always symbiotic with the NBA, the college game was distinct from it, and basketball fans often had a preference for one at the expense of the other. A fan’s preference for the college or pro game is informed, in my opinion, in ways conscious of not, by their personal ethics. Some people found the money in the pro game to be corrupting, while others found its absence in the college game to be corrupt.

I fell firmly in the NBA camp, and wrote a whole basketball book whose focus shifted between the game played by the NBA Gods and the world of pickup basketball as played in public parks. The book’s only foray into the college game is a piece about my college coach.

Other than recounting an episode when Coach K considered going to the NBA, and the bump in salary that would accompany the move, money plays no role in Feinstein’s book. It is filled with set pieces in which he relates scenes from the trenches of the college game, often from first-hand experience. 

Among the most memorable of these is a 2 a.m. scene at Denny’s after a terrible Duke loss in 1983. It was a kind of dark night of the soul for Coach K. They had been blown out by UNC on Senior Day, and then, in the first round of the ACC tournament in Atlanta, they were crushed by Virginia, with Ralph Sampson, 109-66, “the worst loss of Krzyzewski’s entire career.”

That wasn’t on Krzyzewski’s mind after the game, when he and several friends went to a Denny’s on the Atlanta Perimeter for a 2:00 a.m. breakfast/venting session. I happened to be present, and I’ve often told the story about that gathering and its significance.

Tom Mickle, Duke’s sports information director, raised a water glass and proposed a toast to “forgetting tonight.”

Krzyzewski raised his glass and said, “Here’s to never f—ing forgetting tonight

For all the theater, pageantry, and cold transactionality around coaching big-time college basketball, there is at its center the act of teaching, motivating, instilling confidence in young people. This last one, in particular, is such a beautiful thing—when it works. You try to do it for your own kids, and for other kids, partly with the understanding that it is sometimes the non-parental voices that are heard most clearly. 

College coaches, as a rule, seem a bit more hydrated than their peers in the NBA, who have an 82-game schedule, plus the playoffs, but it’s part of the same continuum. The 2 a.m. Denny’s epiphany for which Feinstein “happened to be present” offers a window into the grind—the travel, the preparations, the recriminations, the bad food consumed during all night film sessions. 

I started to read some of the books adjacent to Five Banners on the vast Feinstein shelf—The Legends Club, about Krzyzewski, Dean Smith, and Jim Valvano, and Season on the Brink, about Bob Knight—and found a lot of self-flagellation. Knight, so upset after a tournament loss that he walked all the way back to the hotel in the snow, is one cinematic image among many. 

Knight is the wrathful barbarian for whom Krzyzewski played at Army. He looms paternally over Five Banners. Krzyzewksi is the more controlled, cool-headed disciple, the good son. When he is irrational it is mostly because of his saintly (or manic) devotion to the game; at one point both his doctors and his wife were pleading with him to take time off to let his back heal from surgery. 

Part of the problem was all the standing up, but mostly it was the stress. His wife gave him an ultimatum that amounted to: the job or the marriage. She went to the doctor’s appointment unsure if he would be on a bus to a road game or in the waiting room with her. He showed up at the doctor’s office and took the rest of the year off.

Feinstein’s habit of reciting the vital statistics of a game, a season, a career, is part of what lends his books their insular, lullaby quality, but it’s also a kind of prose-Hamburger Helper that allows him to elide a lot of stuff. Of how people beyond Duke perceived Coach K and the team, there is very little; one telling aside was that his wife, Micki, “had stopped going to road games because of the behavior of opposing fans.”

​​The tradition of coaches lashing out at referees over this or that call is as much a matter of releasing these negative emotions on some external object as it is a way of gaming the refs to give your team an edge. The coach at the center of Feinstein’s book is pretty much always in a state of control, and when he is quoted, it is usually in an aphorism. 

We get a few instances of Coach K plying his trade, most memorably in connection with Christian Laettner’s 1992 game-winning shot over Kentucky, a picture of which graces the cover of the book. Coach K’s intervention took place a few years earlier, when Laettner, then a freshman, went to the free throw line in the last second with a chance to tie a game against Arizona and send it into overtime. He needed to hit both ends of a one-and-one. The first shot missed and the buzzer sounded. 

Before anyone else moved, Krzyzewski went straight to Laettner and put a hand on his face. “You did not lose this game for us,” he said, shouting up and into Laettner’s ear. “You gave us a chance to win. You made a great play. That’s what I want you to remember.” Krzyzewski and Laettner were directly in front of the NBC broadcast position, and commentator Al McGuire heard everything Krzyzewski said.

“That was one of the great coaching moves I’ve ever seen,” McGuire said at dinner that night with broadcast partner Dick Enberg and me. “Moment like that, you lose a heartbreaking game like that, and he goes straight to the kid to make sure he understands it wasn’t his fault.”

McGuire paused for a moment and then said, “I guarantee you that kid will never miss a clutch shot again.”

The College Coach at the Center 

For decades, even the casual fan could feel that the college game and the NBA differed in many important ways. The NBA, with its superior athletic talent, played a much more liberated, improvisatory style. The college game was more buttoned down on the court. 

There were and are legendary NBA coaches but although they are brilliant tacticians, their main tactic is as horse whisperers. The college game, however thrilling on the court, has a different emotional architecture, at the center of which is the coach. The students section provides the passion, but the coaches are there for the long haul. 

In this regard, Feinstein is a card-carrying member of the very crew—broadcasters Billy Packer and Brent Musburger among many others—whose stentorian tone of reverence for the coaches and their “programs” turned me away from the game. It’s not that I need or even want some kind of ethical purity in sports, but at some point, maybe in the late 1980s, something about the television coverage of the college game started to bother me, an undertone that felt like hypocrisy.

Of all the things that the college game has that the pros do not—the youth, the sense of pomp and circumstance and tradition—it’s the agrarian subtext and the way that it binds fans to a sense of place that stands out. A college team can represent a whole region, even a whole worldview, whose center is explicitly not centered in a big city.

Will Blythe’s book, To Hate Like This is To Be Happy Forever, is written from the point of view of a man in middle age who is nevertheless in the grip of a deep and abiding passion for his University of North Carolina Tar Heels, which finds its most vivid expression in his hate for the Duke Blue Devils. Blythe was for many years an editor at Esquire, which is to say a New Yorker, a cosmopolitan, but his home state is North Carolina and his book is a meditation on what the rivalry means, and how it connects him to his sense of where he is from. 

“Duke is the university as launchpad, propelling its mostly out of state students into the stratosphere of success,” he writes. “While hardly opposed to individual achievement, North Carolina, by contrast, is the university as a home place, equally devoted to the values of community and local service.”

It’s possible my sense of college basketball as somehow corrupt was greatly influenced by a long ago movie, One on One, with Robbie Benson, about a small town ball player who comes to a big time college program. There is a love story, and a plot I dimly remember, and a sinister coach of a big time college program. The dynamic set the terms for that unease I started to feel about the college game. 

A New Era 

Some books are as interesting for what they leave out as they are for what’s on the page. For all the inside scoop in the book, I started to wonder about the process by which Duke recruited its players. This was hardly discussed at all. One exception to this is a statement by Laettner, who was widely recruited starting in his junior year of high school. His account lends some insight into Coach K’s approach. 

The very first time I met Coach K, he acted more like he was already my coach than like he was recruiting me. No one else was like that. He made no promises about how much I’d play or how many shots I might get. He just said, ‘You’re going to come to Duke and become a great player. I believe in you.’ He made me believe in myself.

Basketball players consider several factors in deciding what college to attend—the quality of the education, the quality of the “program,” the likelihood that they will get playing time, the degree to which they will get national television exposure, the possibility of being well positioned for a pro career. On all these metrics, Duke scores high. 

Feinstein is so thorough in his synopsis of games, seasons, and tournaments that at first I hardly paid attention to the transitions between one season and the next.

But with the exception of Laettner’s account, we rarely get inside the sausage factory. Only after Krzyzewski took most of the 1994–95 season off with back problems and then shook up his staff, dismissing his longtime assistant Pete Gaudet, does he even address the matter directly. 

“For years, I was the young, aggressive coach, and Pete was the wise old head who helped calm me down,” Krzyzewski said. “When I came back after ’95, I realized I had become the wise old head. What I needed, especially in recruiting, were guys who were young and aggressive.” 

At some point, after another passing reference to an “intense recruiting battle”
or “a superb recruiting class,” I started to wonder what being “aggressive” in the context of recruiting might mean. At which point I remembered Ed O’Bannon.

O’Bannon and his calf went on to a brief and undistinguished career in the NBA. His significance is not in what he did on a basketball court, but rather in a court of law. In 2009, EA Sports used his likeness in a video game for which he received no compensation, because according to the NCAA, he was an amateur. He sued. And from this ultimately successful lawsuit came a cascade of other lawsuits that have brought us to the current bizarre landscape of college sports awash in money. 

To say that players are now able to get paid for their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) understates the degree to which things are not like they were. I won’t try to unbenumb anyone by quoting an especially outlandish sum that this or that star player was paid to attend this or that school, but in asking around among people who have some proximity to Division I college basketball, I heard a number that shocked me. 

It wasn’t that it was a big number; the shock was that it was paid to the last man on the bench on one of this year’s top teams. Not the star, not the sixth man. The last man. Like the flap of a butterfly’s wing, each of these dollars has consequences that are hard to foresee. Just the other night, at the end of a thrilling game, Duke versus Auburn at Cameron, one of the announcers plugged an upcoming broadcast of an ACC game featuring the University of California at Berkeley versus Stanford. He then immediately noted the strangeness of two California teams in the Atlantic Coast Conference. “The world we live in,” he muttered. 

The game of basketball does change, even if the height of the rim doesn’t. The one-and-done era has given way to the transfer era, making player’s allegiance to schools even more tenuous. But the money to be made in college also means that players who are college stars but are unlikely to make the NBA will stay in school longer, maybe for all four years. Maybe by being more like the pros the college game will end up more like the college game. All this money sloshing around is like an underwater river that has burst out into plain sight. Perhaps its velocity has increased, but are we to believe it had not previously been there, out of sight?

Feinstein and Krzyzewski did an event at Duke in October. At the end they took questions. One person asked about NIL.

“We’re losing coaches left and right,” said Feinstein, and referenced the recent abrupt departure of longtime Virginia coach Tony Bennett, and the resignation of Notre Dame coach Mike Brey. “When Mike Brey left he said, ‘I’m exhausted. I am not a coach anymore. I am a CEO.’” Then Feinstein said to Coach K, “You might still be coaching if not for NIL!”

Krzyzewski said, “I got out of coaching because I was 74. Not because of NIL.”

“NIL is a good thing,” he continued. “It should have been there for student athletes for a long time.” College players used to be able to make money by speaking at summer camps and signing autographs. It was NIL, over 30 years ago, Krzyzewski said, but then the NCAA stopped it. “That’s what happened to Kodak, Edsel, you name it,” he said. “It’s a bureaucratic system that is trying to run a business. That’s not going to work …. A new model has to be there.”

He then added a haunting remark. “Intercollegiate football does it the best. They are a business. They are run like a business.” It’s haunting because for all the money sloshing around in top tier college basketball, it is dwarfed by college football. 

The implication is that the NCAA, for all these years, were faceless bureaucrats holding back free enterprise. But I don’t really buy that. The NCAA was excellent at executing the holy grail for every business, which is to keep labor costs as low as possible. College football is such a money-making enterprise that it has reconfigured all the conferences in the direction that free enterprise often takes when unrestrained—monopolization, with no regard for local cultures. 

I don’t want to lambast Feinstein for ducking away from discussing or even acknowledging any of this. He is entitled to the lullaby he unfurls, and in a way the insularity of the book, and his Duke-centric worldview, mimics the sense of refuge to be found in playing and watching sports. But these omissions are provocations. Maybe that is the best thing about the book. 

Thomas Beller, a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and professor at Tulane University, is a longtime contributor to the New Yorker and The New York Times. He is the author of Lost in the Game: A Book About Basketball and four other books. His memoir, Degas At The Gas Station will be published in the fall of 2025 by Duke University Press.