Coach K named one of the worst men in sports

Deadspin ran this article about the 10 worst men in sports and had the following to say about Mike Krzyzewski:


It would be easy enough to be repelled by someone with the most human characteristics of a rat, but it is much easier to hate a rat-like person if he also happens to be an elitist scumbag. Mike Krzyzewski has the double crown. Coach K is superbly awful. He has developed a practiced rhetoric about creating scholar-athletes at his private university, which, he seems to believe, is the sacred ground for all that is holy in college athletics, and the result is the worst possible kind of elitism. It is elitism that pretends to have perspective.

It is saying just how truly remarkable it is to have two private institutions in the national championship game ("It's a pretty cool thing"). It is not understanding that there is a reason the referees called more fouls on Maryland in the 2001 semifinals. It is having a court, a plaza, and a practice facility named in your honor and not understanding, really, that this happens only at private institutions with the most loaded of wealthy donors — and then still claiming that 1.) all this would be possible in a public-school setting, and that 2.) it is only because of private-school envy that people begrudge him his success. "Let's say at Ohio State that we did what we have done at Duke," he told Will Blythe in his 2007 book To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever. "There would be statues. There would never be anybody looking for anything wrong with what you did."

Coach K, who has the second most wins in the history of men's college basketball, will probably have a statue in the next decade. He is, after all, 63 years old. The sculptor will soften the rat qualities and he will look imposing and in control and ready to curse you out, and we won't even have to look for anything that is exactly "wrong" with what he did, because his awfulness is just consummate — it is, really, an elite kind of awful. (Emma Carmichael)