An Ace In The Hole

A coach reaches the NCAA final with players from Mercer Island, Wash.; Scottsdale, Ariz.; Bowie, Md., and Rolling Hills, Calif. the same way he gets shu-SHEF-skee out of K-R-Z-Y-Z-E-W-S-K-I: by working hard at it. Duke's nucleus of four senior starters had gone 11-17 as freshmen; this season their 37 wins (against three losses) set an NCAA standard. "I keep hearing about Cinderella," Krzyzewski said. "To me, our guys are Cinderella, only the ball is four years old."

When the game clock showed 4:13 on Monday, it seemed as if it might never strike midnight. Duke led 63-60 at that point, and Crum called timeout. He normally eschews timeouts. He had passed on one when Duke burst out to a 15-8 lead—11 of those Blue Devil points by Dawkins on the way to 24—and he didn't call one after the Devils stretched a three-point advantage at the half to a six-point lead with 11 minutes remaining. "Timeouts aren't the answer to everything," Crum says. "I like to let the players work things out for themselves."

But here he called one, and on the bench he set up something Louisville calls Swing 'Em. It was a play designed to clear four Cards above the foul line and isolate Ellison in the low post against Jay Bilas, where the other members of Duke's superb defense—most notably forward Mark Alarie and guard Tommy Amaker—couldn't provide any help. Studying a videotape of the ACC championship game on the day of the final, Louisville assistant coach Wade Houston noticed that Georgia Tech had used a similar set successfully against the Blue Devils. And here it worked perfectly for the Cards, with Crook finding Ellison, who pinned Bilas on the block and laid the ball in.

With guard Jeff Hall dogging Dawkins man-to-man in the Cards' 1-3 zone, David Henderson tried vainly to take command as his All-America teammate had done in the first half. But, barging through the Louisville zone, Henderson committed his fourth foul and would miss three shots in the last 2� minutes. Wagner, who hadn't scored a field goal for the first 34:28, hit a backdoor layup on another pass from Crook. Dawkins, who hadn't hit a field goal over the last 15:25, answered with two free throws with 3:08 left. Then forward Billy Thompson sank a hanging jumper in the lane to put Louisville up for good, 66-65.

The game's next bucket came after another Crum timeout, called with 48 seconds left and the 45-second shot clock down to 11 seconds. Hall lofted an airball just right of the rim. But Ellison cradled the ball and laid it in. Louisville led 68-65 with 38 seconds left. "Jeff," Ellison said, "told me it was a pass."

Ellison would make good on both ends of a one-and-one 11 seconds later to finish the job for the Cards. "They have the ability to win in five minutes," LSU's Derrick Taylor had said of Louisville after experiencing a similar deadly Louisville spurt in Saturday's semifinal. "In fact, they did win in five minutes." Well, this time the Cardinals won in four minutes, earning the championship rings that Bill Olsen, Louisville's athletic director, had been confident enough to have the players fitted for two days before the Cardinals left for Dallas.

"Three more, man," said Charles Jones, the former Louisville center (class of '84), as he went from freshman to freshman in the locker room. "You'll almost have enough rings for one hand."

The Cards had earlier received alumni encouragement from Rodney McCray, a member of Louisville's 1980 championship team, who had prepared a three-minute video that was screened before the semifinal. The gist of his message: It's a 'Ville tradition to reach the Final Four, what with six appearances in the past 10 seasons. "But while we should be thankful to be here," as Ellison later recounted, "we hadn't come off with the championship yet. And Rodney was telling us that would be something new."

Despite Louisville's stunning improvement—after a 19-18 season, it went 32-7 this year, winning 20 of its last 22 games—Crum joined such luminous clipboard carriers as Jim Dutcher, the Minnesota coach who quit in January after three of his players were arrested for sexual assault, in receiving exactly one of the 192 votes cast by sportswriters in the Associated Press Coach of the Year balloting. One is also the number of four-year Cardinals that Crum has failed to guide to at least one Final Four in his 15 years at Louisville. Let's hope the electors were trying to make the point that Crum isn't Coach of the Year, but maybe Coach of the Last Fifteen. (Crum voted for Krzyzewski in the coaches' own Coach of the Year balloting; Krzyzewski abstained. "They don't let Polish coaches vote," said Coach K. "Besides, I take offense when I'm asked to mark an X.")

Perhaps Crum is overlooked in these popularity contests because he does so little in extremis. He doesn't overcoach, overprepare or overreact. This season alone, he had one player blithely skip a practice ( Wagner), another bolt a game early (Mark McSwain) and a third skip a game altogether (Kevin Walls). In each case his reaction was that of a guy who likes, as Wagner says, "to listen to that Kenny Rogers stuff."