Back in the day, Art Heyman really encapsulated something about Duke Basketball and became the face of the Blue Devils. That lasted a fairly long time, until the Foster era, really. You could argue about who took on that role in the late ‘70s. Was it Mike Gminski? Jim Spanarkel? Gene Banks? Kenny Dennard?
We’d say it was Dennard, at least partly because his personality and style bore a resemblance to that of King Arthur, as Heyman was sometimes called. He personified the fun-loving side of Duke Basketball
as it existed then.
Mike Krzyzewski, who coached Banks and Dennard for one year, brought a much more serious tone to Duke, and a commitment to winning that was unsurpassed.
And during the Coach K era, Christian Laettner emerged as the new face of Duke Basketball.
He was ferocious and relentless. And while he was GQ handsome, Grant Hill saw something else in Laettner. Laettner, Hill told Chris Webber on Webber’s podcast, was portrayed “… as a goody two-shoes. I was like, ‘No, this is not him at all.’”
He also said this: “Christian, at the time, was the blackest white guy I’ve ever been around. We had what we call the ‘black’ bench at Duke. In between classes, for 20 minutes, the black students would congregate. It was under a big tree, so there was shade. He’d be the only white person there… I remember I came on my visit, I stayed with Brian (Davis) and Christian, and Christian was playing the Jungle Brothers.”
The funniest part of this is that it came on Webber’s podcast. Michigan’s Fab Five derided Duke for years, but Duke was 3-0 against the Wolverines in those years.
It was next to impossible to beat Duke in the Laettner era and that, Hill believes (correctly), is why Duke is hated.
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