It was 1986, Dallas, and the coaches of Louisville and Duke were facing members of the media for the final time before their teams played for the NCAA basketball championship.
Everyone was familiar with Louisville's Denny Crum and his success.
Most, though, had to print the last name of Duke's coach, Krzyzewski, and wonder if they said it backwards would they disappear.
Mike Krzyzewski won the news conference with his charm and wit. In the first of 11 Final Fours, he lost 72-69, but a star was born that weekend.
In the next eight years, Coach K -- everyone got tired of trying to spell it right -- and Duke would make four more appearances in the Final Four, winning back-to-back national titles in 1991 and 1992. He lost to Nolan Richardson and Arkansas in 1994.
Then 12 games into the next season, it looked as if the run might be over. Coach K stepped down as the head coach of the Blue Devils.
He had back surgery during the offseason but did not give himself time to heal. As a micromanager, he never really slowed down. But when he walked away that day, he didn't go back.
He didn't attend a practice or a film session and especially not a game. He was studying the game from a different angle, and three months later he announced he would be back for the next season.
He had learned to delegate. When he walked away, he had exactly 330 career victories at Duke and Army, where he played for Bob Knight and after five years of military service and one season under Bob Knight he became the head coach.
On Sunday, Duke beat St. John's for Coach K's 1,000th victory, the most by any man in Division I basketball. Overall, he is second to Pat Summitt, who won 1,098 games, all as Tennessee's women's coach.
The locker room in Madison Square Garden was filled with family and some of the biggest names in the game, including Phil Knight, the founder of Nike. While Coach K admitted he was flattered to be the first men's coach to reach 1,000 victories, he also admitted he was concerned because his team let an 11-point lead disappear into a 43-39 halftime deficit.
"At halftime I sent a text out to destroy all the books on leadership, because it wasn't working,'" he said, jokingly.
So now the argument will begin: Is Coach K the best college basketball coach ever, or does that honor still belong to John Wooden, who led UCLA to 10 national championships in 12 years before retiring in 1975 at the age of 65 with 664 total victories over a head-coaching career that spanned 29 years, the final 27 at UCLA.
Coach K is 67, in his 40th year of coaching and appears ready to add more victories and NCAA titles to the four he's already won.
No doubt getting to the Final Four is much more difficult now than it was in the 1960s and 1970s because only 22 to 25 teams were invited to the NCAA Tournament. There are so many more Division I schools now than back then the current tournament field of 68 is cramped.
Both were great recruiters, teachers and cared about their players.
Maybe there really shouldn't be a debate over who is the best. They are both great coaches, just from different eras.
It appears Coach K has never been ejected from a game, but he's an expert at not showing off while disagreeing with officials or trying to offer suggestions. Usually if he is squatting on the floor, or positioned on one knee, he's offering his opinion of the job the refs are doing.
He's done a lot of encouraging during his career, so much that a lot of other coaches claim he gets all the call. Don't know about that, but after 40 years of averaging 25 victories per season, he knows how to win and he knows about losing.
Once he was asked what went wrong and he said: "We lost, that's what went wrong."
Sports on 01/27/2015