This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast.

John Feinstein is a sports writer of 42 books, 23 of them, New York Times bestsellers.

His first book about Bobby Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers,

A Season on the Brink, is the best-selling sports book of all time.

He's also the friend of Duke University's legendary basketball coach,

Mike Shishowski, otherwise known as Coach Kay,

who won five national titles at Duke and three consecutive gold medals as the head coach of the U.S. men's Olympic basketball team.

John's here to tell the story of how that almost didn't happen.

I actually first met Mike Shishowski and Jim Valvano on the same day when I was a senior in college.

Duke was playing Connecticut in New York City at Madison Square Garden. Duke was bad in those days.

People refused to believe that Duke was ever bad in basketball, but they were bad.

In fact, the Duke Yukon game was the first game of the Garden doubleheader.

The feature game was Fordham and Rutgers.

That's how different times were.

And I flew into New York, which was my hometown, with Bill Foster, who was then Duke's coach,

Tom Mickle, who was Duke's Sports Information Director, and Tate Armstrong, who was the

star of the team who had played on the 1976 Olympic team for Dean Smith. And there was a media lunch every Tuesday in those days in New York

for the New York basketball coaches. And Jim Valvano was coaching at Iona and Mike Shosheski was

coaching at Army, his alma mater, where he had played for Bob Knight.

And when the lunch was over, Valvano came over to see Bill Foster because he played for him at Rutgers.

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