Michael Jordan has long had a reputation as something of a difficult teammate. But Duke’s legendary coach Mike Krzyzewski experienced otherwise.
Coach Mike Krzyzewski has been the head coach of the Duke Blue Devils for well over 40 years now. Through the course of this time, coach K has won 5 NCAA titles and catapulted the university among the most reputed recruiting schools across the country.
Duke products are expected to hit the league with a better level of NBA readiness than other athletes. There’s a pretty good reason for that – they’ve been through the tutelage of a coach who’s turned the NBA down at least 6 times.
However, even coach K wasn’t always revered the way that he is today. The 73-year-old did achieve enough to be appointed as Chuck Daly’s assistant coach for the Dream Team program. But he didn’t think that he’d earned the respect of NBA All-Stars like Chuck and MJ.
Mike Krzyzewski talks about how Michael Jordan made his life comfortable with the Dream Team
Coach K was led to feel very comfortable in his role by Michael Jordan. He talked about the steps taken by MJ to ensure that he got the respect that he needed from the Dream Team to be effective in his role as an assistant coach.
Krzyzewski had thought that he would have a tough time getting through to a player from Duke’s rival school. But in his own words, Coach K found out that he couldn’t be more wrong:
“I actually think it was his way of making me feel comfortable. But he said, ‘coach’ and he said, ‘please’ and when it was over, he said, ‘thanks.’”
“He gave me a chance to have an ego, and then he called me with respect. There was no organizational chart where he was the top guy, and I’m here on the bottom. On his team, everybody was important.”
