Road to Duke
His father called him a dollar baby. The elder Bender was a Marine, and when his son was born at Quantico, Virginia, on April 28, 1957, while the family was there on assignment, the delivery cost a dollar, the going rate for military families. The nickname stuck to all three Bender children, Bob and his two younger sisters, and so did something else: the gym. His father went on to spend 18 years as a high school basketball coach in Bloomington, Illinois, which is where his son grew up.
"We were always around the game," Bender told the University of Washington's alumni magazine in 1998. "As a family, we were either going to my games, or my sisters' games. And my dad always brought the game home. When I played in high school, I played for him. I couldn't get away from the game, and I had enough."
He would get over that. First he became one of the best guards in the country. As a freshman at Quincy Catholic Boys he helped the team reach the state Class A quarterfinals. At Bloomington High he played for his father for three seasons, and the only reason it was not four is that his father stepped aside for Bob's senior year to help the family manage the recruiting. That senior season he averaged more than 22 points a game for a 26-5 team that reached the state Elite Eight for the first time in 45 years. He scored 50 points against Cairo, a school record, and finished with 1,723 career points. The Chicago Sun-Times named him its 1975 Player of the Year, he was a Parade All-American, and the Basketball Museum of Illinois, which inducted him in 1985, says he was ranked as the No. 1 point guard prospect in the nation.
Everybody recruited him. Bill Foster wanted him at Duke. Indiana sent, among others, a young assistant named Mike Krzyzewski, who had joined Bob Knight's staff for the 1974-75 season. Bender chose Indiana, and in the fall of 1975 he walked into the best college team of its decade.
The 1975-76 Hoosiers went 32-0. Nobody in Division I has gone unbeaten since. Bender played in 17 games behind Quinn Buckner and Bobby Wilkerson and scored 35 points all season. On March 29, 1976, at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, Indiana beat Michigan 86-68 for the national championship, and Knight got him into the game. The box score credits him with one minute and no shots. He was 18 years old and had a national championship ring.
He did not stay. Knight's temper was already famous, and Bender, by the alumni magazine's account, was intimidated by it. Duke historian Jim Sumner put it more plainly: he "chafed under Bobby Knight's leadership style." Foster, who had lost him once, recruited him again, and this time Bender listened. He left Bloomington, Indiana, after the 1976-77 school year had begun, enrolled at Duke and sat out the year the transfer rules required.
He never criticized Knight by name in the public record. But two decades later, asked to explain how he coached his own players, he said this: "When I was a player, I didn't like it when a coach would belittle me. I learn best when someone is more positive with me."
At Duke
He arrived at a program on the edge of something. Duke had gone 2-10 in the ACC the year before, but Foster had Jim Spanarkel, Mike Gminski and a freshman class led by Gene Banks and Kenny Dennard, and he had two transfer guards: Bender and John Harrell, a Durham native who had come over from North Carolina Central. Harrell had won the starting job by the time Bender was eligible, so Bender came off the bench and split the minutes. In 1977-78 he played 32 games, averaged 3.5 points and 2.6 assists and did what a sophomore point guard on a team of scorers is supposed to do, which was get the ball to Spanarkel, Gminski and Banks.
Duke went 27-7, won the ACC Tournament and reached the Final Four in St. Louis. In the national semifinal Bender played 19 minutes and handed out five assists in a 90-86 win over Notre Dame. In the final, on March 27, 1978, he played 17 minutes against Kentucky, made all five of his free throws and finished with seven points and four assists. Jack Givens scored 41, and Kentucky won 94-88.
Duke lost, but Bender had done something no one had done before. He had played in the national championship game for two different schools. More than four decades later the Seattle Times would still call him the only player in NCAA history to have done it.
That fall Duke was ranked No. 1 in the preseason, and the expectations were loud. After the homecoming football game, the basketball team held a scrimmage, and a standing-room crowd chanted "Salt Lake City! Salt Lake City!", the site of that season's Final Four. Sports Illustrated's preview asked Bender whether he was going to become the first college player to win championship rings with two different teams. "You can count on it," he said.
He was the starter now. Harrell was hurt in the preseason and never got the job back, and Bender had the best season of his career: 6.8 points a game, 59.5 percent shooting from the field and 86.9 percent from the line. His best night came in the ACC Tournament semifinals against NC State, when he scored 16 points and made the late free throws that sealed a 62-59 win in Greensboro.
Hours later he was in a hospital bed. He was admitted to a Durham hospital three hours before the ACC final against North Carolina and had his appendix removed while the game was being played. Duke lost to the Tar Heels 71-63. A week later, still without Bender and with Dennard out on a bad ankle, Duke lost to St. John's 80-78 on a late jumper in the second round of the NCAA Tournament in Raleigh. "At the end, it came down to that jumper," Foster said. "Give them all the credit."
His senior season was the one that looked most like him. He played 33 minutes a night, handed out 159 assists, 4.8 a game, and ran a team that won the ACC Tournament with three wins in three days, the last a 73-72 win over Maryland in which he had five assists. In the NCAA Tournament Duke beat Penn and then, on March 13, 1980, at Rupp Arena in Lexington, beat top-seeded Kentucky 55-54, two years after Kentucky had beaten Duke for the title. Two days later, in the same building, Purdue beat Duke 68-60 in the regional final. Bender scored 10 points. It was his last college game, and Bill Foster's last game as Duke's coach.
In three seasons he played in 93 games and finished with 514 points and 332 assists, and Duke went 73-24 with two ACC championships and three NCAA Tournament bids. He graduated in 1980 with a degree in history.
After Duke
The San Diego Clippers had drafted him in the sixth round in 1979, 119th overall, a year before he finished at Duke, and told him that he would not make the team that year but might get a chance later. After graduation he spent a few weeks in an NBA camp and toured with an AAU team, and then he did the thing he had been promising himself since he was a boy in his father's gym. He walked away from basketball. "I didn't want to do that," he said of coaching. "I had to get away from it."
He took a job with a financial consulting firm in Durham, wearing a tie and jacket and making cold calls to companies about their payrolls and Social Security taxes. "After six months, I decided it wasn't for me," he said. Duke's athletic director, Tom Butters, needed someone for the Iron Dukes, the department's fundraising arm, and hired him. Bender was good at it, but it put him close to the team without being part of it. "I was involved in the athletics but from the fringe," he said. "And I would hear about it if the team wasn't doing well. I decided then that I wanted a hands-on chance with the team."
Duke's new coach had an opening on his staff. It was Krzyzewski, the Indiana assistant who had helped recruit him out of high school, and he liked Bender but was not sure how much he wanted it. "Are you sure this is something you are committed to, or are you just trying it?" Krzyzewski asked him. Bender understood that if the answer was the second one, he would not get the job. He joined the staff for the 1983-84 season.
The timing was perfect. In his six seasons as an assistant Duke went 164-45 and played in six NCAA Tournaments, reaching the Final Four in 1986, 1988 and 1989. The 1986 team lost the national championship game to Louisville, 72-69, which put Bender in a third title game with a third team, this time on the bench.
In 1989 Illinois State hired him as its head coach, in Normal, the twin city to the Bloomington where he grew up. Athletic director Ron Wellman had interviewed seven candidates. "We found our guy right there," Wellman said. "He was so positive, appreciative and easy to work with. I knew he was our guy." The Redbirds won the Missouri Valley Conference Tournament and went to the NCAA Tournament in his first season, then won the league's regular-season title in 1992 and 1993. He was the Valley's coach of the year in 1992 and went 60-57 in four seasons. One day Wellman asked him to write down the five schools where he would most like to coach. Georgetown, Texas, Florida and Washington were on the list.
In April 1993 Washington called. He was 36. "The potential is there to have an outstanding basketball program," Krzyzewski said. "Bob will do a great job." The program had six straight losing seasons, and its one proven returning player, Mark Pope, transferred to Kentucky. "When we got there, we looked at each other and asked ourselves, 'Who are we going to beat?'" Bender said. The first team went 5-22. He cut practices from three and a half hours to under two and opened them to anyone who wanted to watch. "If you are going to play in front of 15,000 screaming fans in a game on the line, why not in front of a few people in practice," he said. One night in January 1995, a frustrated senior named Scott Didrickson knocked on his door at 10 p.m. without calling first. "He welcomed me into his home," Didrickson said, "and we sat and talked for an hour. He gave me a hug and I walked out feeling so much better."
By his third year the Huskies were in the NIT and he was the Pac-10 Coach of the Year. In 1998, his fifth season, Washington went to its first NCAA Tournament in 12 years, beat Xavier on a last-second shot and Richmond, and led No. 2 seed Connecticut 74-73 in the regional semifinals before Richard Hamilton's falling fadeaway at the buzzer won it for UConn, 75-74. "I'm reminded of it every spring," Bender said more than 20 years later.
Texas wanted him next. A Texas regent, Tom Hicks, flew him on a private jet to Palm Springs to talk about the job. Texas's previous coach had reportedly made about $200,000 a year more than Washington was paying Bender. At the team's awards banquet in April he stood up and ended it. "It isn't money," he said. "There isn't a Lear jet in the world that could make this better." Krzyzewski was not surprised. "His loyalty is what sets him apart," he said. "Of all his traits, that is his best. His loyalty to his program, to his friends, to his players."
Washington went back to the NCAA Tournament in 1999 and then fell off. After three straight losing seasons the school fired him in March 2002, with a 116-142 record, Brandon Roy and Nate Robinson already signed in a recruiting class he never got to coach. "Everything he's done these nine years he's done with class," senior Grant Leep said. "Everybody who's played for him has as much respect for him as you can have for anybody."
Then came 15 seasons in the NBA as an assistant coach and scout, with Philadelphia under Larry Brown, nine years in Atlanta, and stops in Milwaukee, Brooklyn and Memphis. "I enjoyed every stop along the way," he said. "I really enjoyed the coaching part of it. There's no recruiting."
Where Is He Now
In January 2021 a Seattle Times writer caught up with him while he was walking his dog through a neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina. His NBA run had ended a couple of years earlier, after two seasons with the Memphis Grizzlies, and he and his wife, Alice, a Duke graduate herself, had settled in the Triangle, about half an hour from the campus where they both went to school.
The children had followed them there. Their daughter, Mary Elizabeth, lettered four years on Duke's women's soccer team. Their son, Trey, was then a senior on Duke's lacrosse team, and his father was trying not to hover. "We're 30 minutes away, trying to give him some space," Bender said.
He was still close to Krzyzewski, and to Gonzaga's Mark Few and his old Washington assistant Ray Giacoletti. He said he would go back to the NBA "in a heartbeat," and that he had not ruled out college coaching either, though not at the level he once chased. "I wouldn't want to coach at a Pac-12 or ACC level," he said. "I would want to coach at a school where some might have aspirations to play in the NBA, but for the most part they're there to be the best college players they can be." He did not dwell on the way it ended in Seattle. "I loved my nine years at Washington," he said. "The thing I'm most proud of is we rebuilt the program and left a foundation."
That is the shape of his whole career. He tried to leave the game once, at 23, and lasted six months. The boy who had had "enough" of it at Bloomington High spent the next four decades inside it, and when the biggest job of his life came calling, he stayed where he was.
At Washington he used to have his players over for dinner, and the thing they remembered was a table in his house that held his NCAA Tournament rings, watches and keepsakes. "I loved that the most," said Jason Tyrus, who played on his first Husky team. There is one championship ring on that table, from one minute in Philadelphia when he was 18. The second one, the one he told Sports Illustrated in 1978 that you could count on, never came. What he got instead was a line in the record book as the man who played for the national title with two schools, and a career spent proving what Krzyzewski said about him. He was wrong about the ring. He was right about the rest. You could count on him.