A dog named Blue: Coach K’s final season will look different without his coaching companion
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Coach K’s Next Job
By next spring, Mike Krzyzewski will make the full transition out of coaching when Jon Scheyer takes over the Duke program. Coach K will have plenty to do at Duke even after his coaching days end. Krzyzewski is under contract to work as an ambassador for the school. How has Coach K reached this point in his career, and what’s next? This is The N&O’s special report.
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After Duke’s plane returns to RDU from New York in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Mike and Mickie Krzyzewski will head back home in the dark, and when they turn up the circular driveway of their house, that face won’t be there waiting.
The dining room window next to the front door will be empty. The familiar yellow face, ecstatic at the coach’s return, won’t be there for the first time in more than a decade.
Krzyzewski will go through his final season as Duke’s head coach without his constant companion for the last 12 ½ years, a yellow Labrador named Blue who watched more film with the coach than any of his assistant coaches.
Took more walks than any of them, too.
“He was my guy,” Krzyzewski told the News & Observer. “When I came home, the walks, I work outside a lot, watching tape — he’s there. I miss him.”
Blue died in Krzyzewski’s arms this summer, a week after being diagnosed with lung cancer. It’s a measure of Krzyzewski’s grief that he brought it up, unprompted, during an August media briefing. He had sporadically mentioned Blue over the years — “I don’t have a doghouse. I have a dog. His name is Blue,” Krzyzewski said in 2013 — but never like that. It was an unburdening, a rare moment of uncontainable private grief displayed publicly for a perpetual companion.
“Always. And a good one,” Krzyzewski said later. “And also, not just as a guy, but also at my age you don’t just have somebody new to fool around with. He was good. A great dog with the kids. People. He was just a good guy. Just a real good guy.”
Anyone with a dog — any pet, really — has their own relationship with it, but there’s something different with coaches who have dogs: A working companion during all the late hours, a walking partner during constitutionals to blow off steam or clear one’s head, an unfailingly friendly face after the hardest losses, or when even when the die-hardest fans and wealthiest boosters have lost faith.
If you need a friend in coaching (or many other cutthroat pursuits), get a dog, the saying goes.
Krzyzewski has had three.
The first two — a black Lab named Defense and a chocolate Lab named Cameron — were family dogs, companions for his daughters as much as a coach who didn’t have dogs growing up and had to learn to love them.
“Defense was my dad’s first pet,” Krzyzewski’s daughter Jamie Spatola told the N&O’s Steve Wiseman, a phrasing that could potentially apply to basketball as well.
Blue, who was born just before Krzyzewski won his fourth national title in 2010, was different. The girls were long out of the house. When Krzyzewski got home from work or the road, Blue was always there, waiting impatiently for his walk.
“As soon as I came in,” Krzyzewski said. “Even though I’m talking to Mickie, he was like, ‘Let’s go. Let’s go.’ ”
When you’ve been somewhere as long as Krzyzewski has been at Duke, there are fundamentals that become constants, a routine that becomes a comfort as much as it is a means to an end. That’s changing for Krzyzewski now. He’s already off the recruiting trail, almost but not quite fully disengaged from that process. While fully invested in the Xs and Os of this Duke season, his interactions with successor Jon Scheyer will necessarily increase as part of the transition.
These are small but jarring changes for someone as set in their (successful) ways as Krzyzewski has been. And yet none of them will be as personally disruptive as this final season spent without the furry, floppy companion who was by Krzyzewski’s side when no one was watching.
Blue’s role will not be filled during this season. “We haven’t recruited anyone to replace him,” Krzyzewski joked in August, because Mickie wants to travel with the team during this farewell season and it wouldn’t be fair to a new dog to spend that much time alone.
Selecting a replacement for the irreplaceable Blue will be one of Krzyzewski’s first and more important post-retirement tasks. Even if he was unsure, his family may insist upon it.
“That man needs, he needs a dog,” Spatola said. “He needs a dog.”
This story was originally published November 7, 2021 at 6:00 AM with the headline "A dog named Blue: Coach K’s final season will look different without his coaching companion."
