A Season Is a Lifetime: The Inside Story of the Duke Blue Devils and Their Championship Seasons
Books / Hardcover
Books › Sports & Recreation › General
ISBN: 0671798111 / Publisher: Simon & Schuster, January 1993
A past president of the U.S. Basketball Association, with the full cooperation of Duke's basketball coach, chronicles the Blue Devils' 1992 championship season
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To Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, every season is a whole new lifetime. College-age players change so much from year to year, both physically and emotionally; even when the names are the same, the team is different. That's the challenge of coaching college sports; that's also the fun of it.No one does it better than the man they call Coach K. When his Blue Devils won their second-straight NCAA Championship, they became the first team to repeat as champions since UCLA's run from 1967-73. They were talented, sure, but they also had a coach who saw the trap of trying to defend a national title, and who stressed to them over and over that they were pursuing a championship instead - trying to win something new, not holding on to something from the past that no one could ever take away from them.A Season Is a Lifetime is the dramatic story of that pursuit. Starting with their loss to North Carolina in the 1991 ACC finals and their run to the NCAA title (highlighted by their stunning upset of top-ranked UNLV), we watch Coach K lay the groundwork for a season that would test and challenge his veteran team; we see the team respond with an early-season run that forces him to apply the brakes for fear of peaking too soon; we follow them through a stretch of injuries that tests their resilience and versatility; then we sit on the sidelines with Coach K and the rest of the team as they survive The Greatest Basketball Game Ever Played, the rousing victory over Kentucky, on the way to winning the 1992 NCAA tournament.Throughout, we ride the team bus, sit in on practices and private meetings, share the emotions, the fears, the joys of a team meeting its challenges and finding the best within itself. We meet Christian Laettner, the three-time All-America, four-time Final Four participant, a great player and leader, whose sometimes grating personality could rub his teammates the wrong way; Bobby Hurley, the gritty little point guard, a leader on the floor, whose true abilities are appreciated only by his coaches and his teammates; and Grant Hill, a spectacular player whose soaring dunks and quick moves have brought him out of the shadow of his Football Hall of Fame father.But above all, A Season Is a Lifetime is an unprecedented look inside what some call the best college sports program in America. Krzyzewski cares deeply about his players; there's a close family atmosphere around the team. The players go to class and they graduate on time, often doing classwork on team flights and faxing in papers from the road. We see how Krzyzewski motivates his players in the most positive ways possible, showing them the best in themselves and challenging them to find it again and again. And we see the love, the closeness, the sense of community and collective responsibility they find together as they achieve their goals.A Season Is a Lifetime is a remarkable book, a detailed, probing, inside look at college sports at its best, as the Duke Blue Devils prove you can run a clean program and still win in the big time - and win again.
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