Duke's winning coach isn't afraid of losing

(CNN) -- Unlike most basketball coaches, Mike Krzyzewski doesn't use a whistle when coaching the Duke Blue Devils. He wants his players to react to the sound of his voice, even in the chaos of competition.

And the voice has been echoing in victory for thirty years.

"It's like a parent," said Grant Hill, who played for Krzyzewski and now is an NBA starter. "There's six inches between patting on the back and patting on the butt. And as a parent, he did both and did it well."

Krzyzewski, known as "Coach K," has won a lot of games at Duke. In the last two decades, he has turned the Duke University men's basketball program in Durham, North Carolina, into the envy of the collegiate world.

The Blue Devils have won three national titles since he arrived, the most recent coming last April. A number of his players has gone on to the NBA, and all but two players who played four seasons at Duke since 1980 have graduated.

But this success is not due to an obsession with winning.

"The wins come as a result of the things he believes in, the kids, the coaches," said Johnny Dawkins, Krzyzewski's assistant coach at Duke. "Not necessarily because he wants to win every game or every championship."

Krzyzewski simply said that "if my purpose on this planet was to win basketball games, it would be a bad life."

Winning is just a part of Krzyzewski's coaching style. Making shots and winning count, of course, but not as much as the people who make them.

"I guess culture is a good word to describe it," Hill said. "A group of guys that have each other's backs, love to see one another do well. Those are the things and qualities we talked about when we were here, and I think those things carry on for me six or seven years later."

Krzyzewski said that people want to be a part of the Blue Devils' culture.

"(It's) where they feel safe to try and do whatever they can do, and if they don't do it, where those people will still be there for them," he said. "They're not going to lose everything when they try and change limits."

A working-class childhood

Part of the basketball culture that Krzyzewski has created at Duke stems from his childhood in working-class Chicago, Illinois. The son of immigrants, his parents would not allow Polish to be spoken in the house. (For non-basketball fans, his name is pronounced "Sha-shef-ski.")

But the message from his mother, Emily, who scrubbed floors at the Athletic Club, was clear: never fear losing. Krzyzewski describes his mother as the "greatest person I've ever known."

"You talk about commitment. She only wanted what was good for me," he said. "And she loved me no matter what happened. I didn't realize how powerful that was until I got older and of course until I lost her a few years ago. I think she's the basis of why I'm not afraid to lose."

At Weber High School, Krzyzewski led the Chicago Catholic League in scoring while serving as class president. He was recruited to play college ball, and he enrolled at West Point, the U.S. Army's elite military academy, where he played under coach Bobby Knight.

"Oh, I wanted to quit hundreds of times at West Point," Krzyzewski said. "A dream of mine was not to become an Army officer. My dream was to be a basketball coach, a teacher ... and all the sudden I'm in the military. And I did it, primarily, because my Mom and Dad wanted me to and put pressure on me to."

He graduated from West Point in 1969 and coached service basketball teams, including two years as the head coach of the U.S. Military Academy Prep School in Belvoir, Virginia. In 1974, having reached the rank of captain, he resigned and took a graduate assistant position at Indiana University, where Knight was now coaching.

Knight is well-known for his temper and demanding coaching style, which differs from Krzyzewski's methods.

"What I learned from him was the incredible passion it took to be successful, the amount of preparation and an understanding of the game to a level that I had not experienced before," Krzyzewski said.

Knight won championships, but his behavior toward his players and others often eclipsed entire seasons and eventually led to his departure from Indiana in 2000.

Krzyzewski does his share of yelling, but he also uses a completely different approach from his old coach.

"I think there are times when everybody needs to have someone who loves them and that who they believe in tells them, 'I believe in you,' " he said. "There is no greater thing that you can tell someone and look in their eyes and say, 'I believe in you, you're good, I'm there for you.' "

Early years at Duke difficult

In 1980, he came to Duke to take over a struggling program. A headline from the school paper greeted the unknown coach by adding a description by his name: "This is not a typo."

"I thought it was pretty funny," he said.

Duke did not begin to win immediately, and Krzyzewski's first few seasons were difficult. The bottom seemed to come following a season-ending, 43-point loss to Virginia in 1983.

"I remember that night we went to a small restaurant, more like a fast-food place. And (I remember) a bunch of people around, drinking some iced tea and sodas, and somebody said, 'Well here's to forgetting about tonight,' " he said. "And I said, 'No no, here's to never forgetting about tonight. Because this is a reference point. In order to appreciate where we're going to be, we have to know how this felt, how losing felt.' "

In 1984, the Blue Devils began winning. In 1991, Duke reached the Final Four of the NCAA Tournament for the fourth year in a row. The team hadn't won a title in its previous three tries, which bothered everyone but Krzyzewski.

"So we went three years in a row, and we didn't win and now all of a sudden what was a dream, someone was trying to tell me (it) was a nightmare," he said. "And I said, 'You know what, you got something wrong with you.' And I really believe it's why we won the fourth time, the fourth consecutive year we went, because I never looked at that as pressure."

The Blue Devils won the 1991 NCAA title and repeated the feat in 1992, making Krzyzewski the only coach since UCLA coach John Wooden to accomplish such as a feat.

Success leads to burnout

By the 1994 season, center court at Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium was the center of college basketball. Besides the back-to-back national titles, Krzyzewski-coached teams made it to the Final Four seven times in nine years. But in the midst of all the success, Krzyzewski says he was falling apart mentally and physically.

"I was out of it to be frank with you," he said.

Overwhelmed by commitments far beyond coaching, Krzyzewski was racked by severe back pain and was working past the point of exhaustion. In the middle of that season, Krzyzewski was given an ultimatum by his wife.

"And my wife, Mickie, just said, 'Look you're going to a doctor today or ... that's it. You have a choice to make,' " he said. "And that was an easy choice for me to make."

Mickie Krzyzewski said her husband was "physically declining and emotionally and mentally." He was, she said, "not being the person that he was, not even being able to handle his decline."

Krzyzewski left the team in the middle of the 1994-95 season. The Blue Devils fell apart, winning four of their last 19 games in his absence.

"The most difficult part was the fact that I felt I was responsible for it and couldn't do anything about it," he said. "It was my responsibility. I mean that's my team. I learned that at West Point. You're the leader no matter what. And I wasn't there for them."

While the separation from his team tore at him, Krzyzewski needed the time more than he realized. He re-discovered his family, recovered his health and re-charged his passion. Just four years later, his team was back playing in the national championship game.

A man with 15 sons

Yet winning doesn't seem a great enough reason why so many of his players come back to him, in memory and in person. Earlier this year, many of his former players came back to Duke for a charity game and to their coach, returning to the voice they were trained to follow, one that taught them to think beyond victory on the court.

"Even now, when I talk to him, (it's) like I'm 18 years old in his office talking to him," Hill said. "He's still coaching, offering advice, coming back from injury, what to do and so forth. I'm just like a sponge trying to soak it all up."

"People need to be around him a whole season and see how much he cares about it, puts his heart and soul into it. And I think that rubs off on you, so you try to play hard for him and try to play great for him," said Christian Laettner, who played on the 1991 championship team and is now an NBA star.

For Krzyzewski, the winning that results from the efforts he pulls from players like Hill and Laettner is more than championships and titles.

"If my purpose was not just to be a basketball coach, but to use whatever success we have to do some other really good things, it adds depth, it adds meaning, and it makes winning the basketball games, or trying to win those games, much more important," Krzyzewski said. "That's where we are at right now. We have an influence; we can have a positive influence on people and that's winning."

Krzyzewski's devotion to his team perhaps is best illustrated by a story his wife tells about having their third child in 1991, when Krzyzewski was coaching the team that won his first national championship

"We didn't know if we were having boys or girls when we were having babies," she said. "When this third child was born, the doctor said, 'It's a girl.'"

"I turned to Mike, and I said, 'Are you OK? ' " He said, 'Yeah.' I said, 'But don't you want a son?' He said, 'Mickie, I have 15 sons.' Because that's how many kids were on the team. So he already had 15 sons."