Bucky Waters

He was fourteen years old and he had already worked out that the game was not only played on the floor.

Raymond Chevalier Waters was born December 17, 1935, in Philadelphia and raised across the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey, in a neighborhood his family spent itself trying to get him out of. He would be the first of them to go to college. The mechanism he chose was a transfer: he left his own high school for Collingswood, a few miles south, because Collingswood put its athletes in front of the people who picked the state all-star teams. It was not a basketball decision. It was a visibility decision, made by a teenager about his own life, and it is the first evidence of the thing that would define him — an instinct for the machinery around the game, for who decides and how.

Collingswood turned out to be the right room for another reason. His coach there was Jack McCloskey, three decades away from assembling the Detroit Pistons teams that would win two NBA championships as the Bad Boys. Waters caught passes in the fall, pitched in the spring, and played guard in between; with center Bob Seitz he helped Collingswood take the South Jersey Group IV title in 1953.

Everett Case found him in 1954. The NC State coach who had dragged Southern basketball out of its own indifference offered a four-year scholarship, and Waters went south and discovered the limits of his talent almost immediately. Across three varsity seasons from 1955 to 1958 he appeared in twenty-eight games and averaged 1.5 points. He was a reserve guard on a team that did not need him. What he did instead was work: he managed the football team, he sat close to Case, he watched a man build something. He was on the 1956 ACC championship roster. As a senior he got more backcourt minutes on a team that went 18-6 and finished ranked twentieth in the country. Forty-three years later NC State would give him its Distinguished Alumnus Award, which is a strange and rather beautiful outcome for a 1.5-point scorer.

The first job was a year at Ashe Central High School, up in the North Carolina mountains where the roads switchback and the gyms are cold. Then, in 1959, Vic Bubas hired him at Duke.

He was twenty-three, running the freshman team, and he spent six years inside the most successful stretch of basketball the school had ever had. He was on staff for ACC championships in 1960, 1963 and 1964. He helped recruit Art Heyman, Jeff Mullins and Bob Verga — the players who took Duke to Final Fours and made Bubas a national figure. He scouted C.B. Claiborne, who in 1966 became the first African-American to play basketball at Duke. And he worked the state of West Virginia for Duke, which is how West Virginia came to know exactly who he was.

They hired him in 1965, at twenty-nine, to replace George King. He went 19-9, 19-9 and 19-9 — the same record three years running, which reads like a typographical error and was not. The 1966-67 team won both the Southern Conference regular season and the tournament, reached the NCAA Tournament, and lost a first-round game to Princeton; Waters was named Southern Conference Coach of the Year. The following year they went to the NIT. His star was Ron "Fritz" Williams, who scored 1,687 points in eighty-four varsity games at better than twenty a night and once handed out fifteen assists in a conference tournament game against Davidson. Williams was also part of something larger: Waters coached West Virginia's first integrated basketball teams, inheriting an effort King had begun and carrying it forward with Williams, Jimmy Lewis, Ed Harvard and Norman Holmes.

Four seasons in Morgantown, 69-41. And along the way he beat Duke twice in three tries, including a 1966 upset of a Blue Devil team that was ranked first in the country and undefeated and would go on to the Final Four. Afterward Bubas found him and said two words.

"Proud of you."

Three years later Bubas stepped down, and Duke came for the man who had beaten him.

He was thirty-three years old, and the job he took was less a job than an inheritance nobody knew how to value.

Vic Bubas had gone to three Final Fours in ten years and turned a good regional program into a national one. "There's no way to really relay the glamour of the Bubas era," is how Duke Basketball Report would put it decades later, and that was the problem: the glamour was the standard, and the glamour had been built on a recruiting pipeline that walked out of the building with the man who dug it.

The first season looked like continuity. Waters won his first six games, matching Harold Bradley for the best opening run any Duke coach had managed — an overtime win over Virginia Tech in Greensboro to start, then Rudy Tomjanovich's Michigan team beaten in Ann Arbor. Duke entered the AP poll at nineteenth at 9-1. Against top-ranked Kentucky, Randy Denton outscored Dan Issel 28-20 and pulled twenty-one rebounds. Then it turned: four straight losses to ranked teams, North Carolina and NC State and Maryland and South Carolina, the Maryland game ending on a thirty-five-foot Will Hetzel heave. They fell out of the poll and finished 17-9.

Underneath the record, something quieter was going wrong. Dick DeVenzio, the point guard, had averaged 12.2 points under Bubas. Under Waters he averaged 7.8. Randy Denton, who would leave Duke with a 19.7-point career scoring average — sixth in school history — and a 12.7-rebound average that still leads it, had felt the change coming the day Bubas quit.

"My heart dropped," Denton said. "He was always kind of a father figure to me, because my father thought so much of him."

The second year was the best one. Duke went 20-10 and reached the NIT at Madison Square Garden as the top semifinal seed, which in 1971 meant something the modern bracket has erased — the NCAA field held sixteen teams, and finishing fourth in New York was a genuine accomplishment. They lost the semifinal to North Carolina, the only time the two schools would meet after the ACC Tournament until 2022, and then lost the third-place game to St. Bonaventure 92-88.

And on January 22, 1972, he coached the best night of his tenure. Duke Indoor Stadium was being renamed for Eddie Cameron, the athletic director and former coach who had built the place; the ceremony required an opponent, and the opponent was third-ranked North Carolina. Duke was unranked. Robby West drove the length of the floor and rose into a pull-up jumper, and Duke won 76-74 in the building that from that night forward was Cameron Indoor Stadium.

"Still one of the most talked about shots in Duke history," Waters said fifty-one years later.

There is a second, less-quoted piece of his Carolina record: the instruction he gave his team before facing them. "Do not get drawn into the outside noise," he told them. "Beat them badly and I'll take you out with three minutes left to avoid any confrontation." It is a coach's line — controlled, tactical, slightly bloodless — and it is a fair sample of the man the Duke student body was about to turn on.

Because the campus he was coaching on was not the campus that had hired Bubas. This was Duke between 1969 and 1973: Vietnam, the draft lottery, the occupation of the Allen Building three months before Waters arrived. He ran a program on rules about appearance and behavior, and he was read as militant, a martinet in a moment that had no patience for one. Students carried FIRE BUCKY signs in his own gym. Players transferred out. "It was not a pleasant environment," DBR wrote, which is the kind of sentence that covers a great deal of ground.

The recruiting collapsed with it, and the emblem of that collapse was David Thompson, the Shelby forward who would become Skywalker and the greatest player the ACC has produced. Thompson went to NC State. Duke's freshman team had to play against him. And Duke was placed on NCAA probation over violations connected to his recruitment — the only probation in the institution's history, and, in DBR's careful formulation, "violations that involved no one in the program." Waters coached under a punishment for something he had not done, in a gym where his own students were calling for his job.

One more scene tells the era on him. Waters recruited a West Virginia player named Warren Baker, who came to Durham on a visit with John Lucas, encountered racial hostility from Duke students, and went to Morgantown instead. Waters could sell the program. He could not sell the campus.

The last two seasons were 14-12 and 12-14. In September 1973 his contract had a year left on it, and he went to Carl James — Duke's new athletic director, not Eddie Cameron, though the story is often told wrong — and asked for an extension, a public signal that the school still believed in him. James declined to give one. Waters resigned rather than coach a lame-duck season. Practice was to open in days.

He was thirty-seven. He had gone 63-45 at Duke, .583, with one NIT and no NCAA Tournament appearances, and the job passed to his own assistant, Neill McGeachy, who had two weeks to prepare.

Years later, asked what had happened, Waters did not blame the students, or James, or Thompson, or the probation.

"I didn't change much," he said. "Maybe didn't keep step with the culture, with the kids."

Here is the fact that makes Bucky Waters unusual among fired coaches, and it is worth sitting with: he did not leave.

He resigned the basketball job in September 1973 and stayed at Duke University for another thirty-one years. He moved into development — fundraising — and rose to Vice Chancellor for Alumni and Development at Duke University Medical Center, a title he held under an institution whose students had recently been waving signs about him. He retired in June 2004 after forty-one years of service to the university. In doing so he followed Vic Bubas twice: once onto the bench, and once into the administration building, where Bubas had gone before him.

The instrument of his second career was a golf tournament. In 1974, months after the resignation, Waters co-founded the Duke Children's Classic, a celebrity-amateur event at the Duke University Golf Club, and then ran it for thirty-one years. He was extraordinarily good at it. Perry Como played in it. So did Mickey Mantle, Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra. By the end it had raised more than fourteen million dollars for Duke Children's Hospital & Health Center, and it survived him in the role, running until a final round on May 30, 2008.

It is a genuinely strange sentence to write about a man remembered for a 63-45 record: his largest measurable contribution to Duke was fourteen million dollars for a children's hospital.

The third career was television, and it lasted thirty years. He worked for NBC, ESPN, USA Network, Jefferson-Pilot and Raycom, the Madison Square Garden Network, Fox Sports and NBA TV. He spent twelve years as NBC's college basketball color commentator alongside Bob Costas, worked games with Billy Packer, called PGA Tour golf and Durham Bulls baseball, and anchored coverage for NBC at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. There is a small detail from the NBC years that says everything about how he approached the job: during telecasts he sat on a stool, so that he and Costas would be at eye level.

He was clear-eyed about the improbability of it.

"I have a great face for radio," he said, "but they gave me a shot at TV."

He was also clear about what he actually brought to a broadcast, and it was not a face. "I really understood the game," he said. "What coaches and players were going through emotionally, what was going through their heart, mind — I was blessed to have that come out in my commentary." Of his most famous partner he offered a working analyst's compliment: "The games I did with Billy Packer went really fast."

The honors accumulated in the second half of the life rather than the first. Duke's medical school gave him an honorary Doctor of Medicine. NC State named him a Distinguished Alumnus in 2001. He went into the South Jersey Sports Hall of Fame, and in 2005 he received the Lou Gehrig/Catfish Hunter Humanitarian Award. He served on the board of the V Foundation for Cancer Research, where he is listed as a board member emeritus.

Duke Basketball Report, which has never been sentimental about his coaching, put the arc plainly: he "remained at Duke after resignation and eventually rehabilitated his standing with the community." He was run out of one building and spent three decades making himself indispensable in another one across the street.

He married his high school sweetheart. Dorothea Walter — Dottie — became Dottie Waters on September 1, 1956, while he was still a reserve guard at NC State with two seasons left to play, and they raised Michael, Terry and Linda, and then twelve grandchildren arrived. In 2008 the two of them moved into Croasdaile Village, a retirement community in Durham, about four miles from the arena where the students once told him to leave.

In April 2020, at eighty-four, he had his aortic valve replaced. The report of the surgery came with a quote that is the most Bucky Waters sentence in the record.

"I'm a grateful 84. And frisky! I told them if I get off the redshirt list and back in action, I'll make commercials for them."

He kept going to Duke games. He walked more slowly by then, and used a cane, and he was there. In the spring of 2023, at eighty-seven, he sat for a long interview and talked about the coach who then had one season on the job. What he admired about Jon Scheyer was not the record.

"He didn't try to be Mike Krzyzewski," Waters said. "He was Jon Scheyer with his own quiet dignified way, and that impressed me most."

It is not hard to hear what is underneath that. Waters had spent four years being measured against Vic Bubas and had never been able to be him.

He had less patience for the rest of what the sport had become. "When I coached, you had four years and they improved physically, mentally, skill wise," he said. "Now it's come and go." And then, flatly: "I am so glad I am not coaching." He was working on a memoir, with a title that tells you he had made his peace with what he was and was not as a player: *Sharing My Life Above the Rim — Without One Dunk!*

The last line of that interview is the one to end on. He had watched the Atlantic Coast Conference he grew up inside — Everett Case's conference, Bubas's conference, the one he had coached in and broadcast and raised money alongside for sixty years — get taken apart by realignment and money and the transfer portal. He was eighty-seven. He had buried most of the people he started with.

"I wonder," he asked his interviewer, "if I will see the ACC obituary before you write mine?"