Road to Duke
The most hated player in college basketball history spent his high school summers washing floors, painting walls, laying carpet and mowing grass at Nichols School, because that was the deal. Nichols was the most exclusive prep school in Buffalo, and the Laettners could not afford it. His financial aid came with a work requirement, and the tuition it did not cover was paid off through a monthly coupon book. He was, by Gene Wojciechowski’s account in The Last Great Game, “in all probability, the poorest student at the school,” and almost certainly the only one whose pants came from the Sears catalog, the one place his parents could find a length that fit him.
Home was Angola, New York, a blue-collar town on Lake Erie thirty miles south of Buffalo. George Laettner ran a printing press at the Buffalo News; the surname was German but the family was Polish, and his grandparents had argued in it. Bonnie taught elementary school. Christian was born August 17, 1969, and he and his older brother Christopher earned their allowance as field hands on a nearby farm: fifty cents for a thirty-pound bushel of green beans, fifty cents for forty-eight pounds of cucumbers. Christopher also spent years bullying his little brother.
Nichols made him repeat eighth grade, since his August birthday made him young for his class and his entrance scores were only fair. He loved it; for the first time in his life he enjoyed reading books, which his mother the teacher noticed. He was 6-foot-7 as a freshman and started on varsity, and he had been taking elbows from the pressmen in his father’s pickup games for long enough that the high school ones did not register.
By his sophomore year the letters were arriving from everywhere. When Bob Knight called the house, Christopher assumed it was a neighbor pulling a prank and hung up on him. George picked up the second call: “Sorry, Coach Knight, that was my idiot son.” In December 1987 his Nichols coach, Jim Kramer, told a reporter, “Christian is being called the heir-apparent to Danny Ferry at Duke.” That same month the Tampa Tribune’s Joe Frisaro watched him score 39 in a holiday tournament in Ocala, the last two on a buzzer-beater, and wrote: “Imagine, a 6-foot-10 center who’s a deadly shooter, has excellent athletic ability and is willing to dive all over the court for a loose ball. He dribbles behind his back and hustles more than a shopping clerk at Christmas.”
His mother wanted Notre Dame. So did his brother, who came back from a visit to South Bend and told him, “Christian, you’ve got to go to Notre Dame.” He had already decided he wanted the ACC, and would visit only Virginia, North Carolina and Duke. He had been watching Duke since the 1986 Final Four: “They all looked at each other and they seemed to be having a lot of fun out there. I’ve got to check out Duke.” Carolina nearly turned him. What tipped it was that Dean Smith already had a championship and Mike Krzyzewski did not. “I didn’t want to go to the already established team,” he said. “I wanted to go to the team that was looking like they were heading there, but just needed a little more help. I didn’t know that I would be that help, but I knew I wanted to be part of the process.”
He made the calls to Terry Holland, Smith and Krzyzewski himself, in November 1987. Then he called his mother, who burst into tears. “Because I love Dean Smith,” she explained. His seven-year-old sister Katherine cried too, because she could spell Smith and Holland but not Krzyzewski.
When Krzyzewski came to Angola that December, the Laettners served Polish sausage and pierogies on a Ping-Pong table under a tablecloth, lit by a mechanic’s trouble light hung from the ceiling. The coach looked up at it and said, “Oh, a Polish chandelier.” Mickie Krzyzewski had met the recruit at their house that fall and found him “coldly beautiful.” Her daughter Debbie asked her father a question the rest of the country would spend the next four years asking: “How can you be that confident?”
At Duke
The record is 123-26. In the NCAA tournament it is 21-2. He is the only player to start in four Final Fours, won the 1991 and 1992 national championships, scored 2,460 points, and still holds the tournament career records for games played (23) and points (407). Duke retired his No. 32. He shot 57.4 percent from the floor for his career and 55.7 percent from three as a senior, standing 6-foot-11.
Krzyzewski’s description of the freshman was about none of that. “Christian is very intelligent. He’s really a basketball purist. He’s a perfectionist,” he said in 1989. “A lot of times this year that has hurt him because he gets angry at himself. When he channels that energy to the next play in a positive manner, that puts him at a very high level.”
The first test of that came on February 26, 1989, against Arizona, when he missed the front end of a one-and-one with a second left and Duke down two. Richard Nixon, watching on television, sent word: “I know you feel badly, young man. But everything will be just fine. I know, I’ve won a few and lost a few myself.” Laettner has called it the turning point of his career. “It was an NCAA type game, a very intense game. Before that, we didn’t play in many games that were very close,” he said. “I wanted to face it again, I wanted to challenge it again.” A month later, in the East Regional final against Georgetown and Alonzo Mourning, the most heralded freshman in the country, he scored 24 on 9-of-10 shooting and Duke went to the Final Four. Larry Felser wrote in the Buffalo News that he “could end up ranking with Bob Lanier as the greatest basketball player ever to come out of Buffalo.”
The first buzzer-beater came a year later. Elite Eight, 1990, UConn, overtime, Duke down one with 2.6 seconds left: Laettner took the inbounds pass and hit a turnaround at the horn, 79-78. “This game was by far the most fun I’ve had in my whole life,” he said afterward. “You didn’t know you were going to win until the buzzer went off.” The championship game a week later was the opposite kind of history. UNLV beat Duke 103-73, still the widest margin in a title game.
Eleven months after that, UNLV came back to the Final Four unbeaten, on a 45-game winning streak. Duke won 79-77. Laettner scored 28 and made the free throws that decided it in the final seconds, and two nights later put up 18 against Kansas for the program’s first national championship and the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player award. Across the six games he scored 125 points, a tournament high.
Then March 28, 1992. East Regional final, Philadelphia, Kentucky. Sean Woods hit an off-balance shot over Laettner with 2.1 seconds left in overtime to put the Wildcats up 103-102. Duke assistant Mike Brey remembers what Laettner did next: “Christian has the presence of mind, he was always thinking the game, he goes immediately into a timeout signal. He has his hands up. Doesn’t react to the shot, just gets the timeout.”
In the huddle Krzyzewski said, “We’re going to win. We are going to win.” He admitted years later, “I don’t know if I really believed it, but I kept saying it.” Laettner’s version: “Most of the guys on the team looked at him like, ‘you’re crazy, we’re going to be in Myrtle Beach celebrating the end of the season soon.’ Turned out I was the only sucker that believed him because I thought you’re supposed to believe everything your coach says.”
Rick Pitino, in the other huddle, had one instruction. “Laettner hadn’t missed a shot the entire game, so at the timeout, I told my guys, ‘Whatever you do, don’t foul him.’ Pelphrey and Feldhaus just froze.” Nobody guarded the inbounder. Grant Hill threw it 75 feet. Laettner caught it at the free-throw line, faked, and put the ball on the floor once, and Hill, watching from the far baseline, thought: “No!!! No, no, don’t dribble! We don’t have enough time for that.” Laettner knew otherwise. “I knew I didn’t have to rush anything. I knew I had time where I didn’t have to fling it up there real fast, so I just went into a basketball move, something that gives you a little bit of rhythm.” He turned and hit the jumper. Duke 104, Kentucky 103.
Walking into the locker room, Thomas Hill told him, “Hey, I don’t think you missed a shot.” They checked the stat sheet: 31 points, 10 for 10 from the floor, 10 for 10 from the line. Tim Higgins, who refereed it, told his wife in the parking lot that it was the best college basketball game ever played, and a quarter century later said he still thought so. Brey put it more directly: “He was so calculating, such a cold-blooded winner. There’s never been a more clutch guy in the history of the NCAA tournament.” Duke beat Michigan for the second title nine days later.
Earlier in that same game, he had stepped on the chest of Kentucky’s Aminu Timberlake while Timberlake lay on the floor. It was the image that fixed the reputation. An ESPN online poll two decades after he graduated named him the most hated player in college basketball history, and the 2015 documentary “I Hate Christian Laettner” tried to explain why, sorting the reasons into race, privilege, looks, bullying and greatness. He has never argued the premise. “I think you need to play the game with a little chip on your shoulder,” he said in 2013. “I guess I did not do a good job of masking that out there on the court.” The night the film aired he posted a video apology to Timberlake, twenty-three years late, with the caption, “I am only going to say this once... But I mean it.” Of the documentary itself he wrote: “At 45, I’m different than when I was 20. Maybe now you understand a little bit more about who I am and what fuels me.”
After Duke
That spring USA Basketball put him on the Olympic team, the only college player on a roster of Jordan, Magic, Bird, Barkley, Ewing and Malone. The spot could have gone to Shaquille O’Neal, and O’Neal was angry until his family set him straight. “My father and uncle Jerome,” Shaq recalled, “they were real, said, ‘Hey man, he won two in college, what’d you do.’” Laettner understood the assignment. “They allowed me to be Christian Laettner, but at the same time they wanted me to know, to be, and to act like a rookie, and that’s what I did,” he told Dan Patrick. He has said the same thing would have been harder for O’Neal or Alonzo Mourning: “Maybe you gotta throw the ball to Shaq a little bit more, or Shaq might not be willing to accept that role as I did.” The Dream Team won its eight games in Barcelona by an average of 44 points, and is enshrined as a team in the Naismith Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame on his own in 2010.
Minnesota took him third in the 1992 draft. He averaged 18.2 points and 8.7 rebounds as a rookie and made the All-Rookie team, scored at least 16 a game for four seasons, and after a 1996 trade to Atlanta made the 1997 All-Star Game at 18.1 and 8.8. After Atlanta came the journeyman years: Detroit, Dallas, Washington, and finally Miami, where in his last season he was a teammate of O’Neal, the man whose Olympic spot he had taken thirteen years earlier. He played 868 games, scored 11,121 points, and earned about $61 million in salary. In 2010 he told Sports Illustrated: “People always approach me and ask about that game, every day of the year, especially when it comes tournament time. It’s crazy, but I don’t mind it. It’s better than ‘How’s the weather up there?’”
The money went into Durham. In 1995 he and Brian Davis, his roommate and teammate at Duke, founded Blue Devil Ventures and set about converting abandoned tobacco warehouses downtown into apartments and offices, the West Village project, early in downtown Durham’s revival. He gave Nichols School $1 million in 2001, for the gym and for a scholarship fund that still carries his name and class year, for a student who needs the help he once needed. In 2005 he and Davis gave Duke $2 million, most of it toward the practice facility behind Cameron. “Athletes who care about a lot more than basketball,” Krzyzewski said at the announcement. At various points he was also a part-owner of a Triple-A baseball team and of D.C. United.
Then it came apart. Blue Devil Ventures expanded into Baltimore and Philadelphia without their original partner, Tom Niemann. A bid for the Memphis Grizzlies was financed with loans from other athletes, and when the bid failed the loans went unpaid. The recession did the rest. Scottie Pippen turned a $2.5 million loan into a $2.5 million judgment. Shawne Merriman lent $3 million and won a $3.7 million judgment. Johnny Dawkins, the player who had started Krzyzewski’s program, was owed roughly $670,000. By 2010 his position was being reported as roughly $10 million in assets against $40 million in liabilities. By June 2016 five creditors, among them NFL players Jonathan Stewart and Ernie Sims, had filed to force him into involuntary bankruptcy over more than $14 million.
The bitter part is that West Village worked. The final phase sold in February 2016 for $187 million. Laettner had sold most of his stake to a Washington investment firm before that, and what remained is not public; estimates at the time ran anywhere from $10 million to $28 million. His attorney, Hassan Zavareei, said only that “some of the proceeds from that sale will be divided among his creditors.” A settlement with the five was filed that September.
Where Is He Now
In July 2023 there were about sixty kids in the gym at Nichols School, and a ten-year-old named Brody Peters explained to a television reporter why he had signed up: “He made the best shot in college history.” Laettner was running his camp at his old school for the first time in three years. “It’s great being on the court coaching the game I love,” he said. He does a few of these every summer. “I do like maybe two, three, four camps a summer. I’m getting old so it is getting harder. But I do love it and I’ve got to keep doing it.”
He lives in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, outside Jacksonville, divorced, with three children, and fishes for muskellunge. The business years are over. There was a season as an assistant with the Fort Wayne Mad Ants in 2012, in what was then the D-League, and a turn on The Z Team, an Olympic Channel series in which former Olympians take over struggling teams. Mostly there are the camps, the speaking engagements, the signings, and the NBA pension.
Buffalo has not made a fuss about him, and he seems to like that. “I love that Buffalo is still a little bit like it was when I was here 35 years ago,” he said that summer. “I can still go to my favorite restaurants.” Then, of the town that gave the world the most hated player in the sport: “In Buffalo, I guess we don’t make a big deal out of everything, but the people in the basketball world realize that I’m from here.”
He has had years to decide what he thinks of 2.1 seconds in Philadelphia, and he has decided. “When you’re 22, you don’t know much. You don’t realize the historical significance of things,” he said in 2013. “It was a very special moment. I wouldn’t change a thing.” The scholarship at Nichols carries his name and his class year, 1988, and goes to a student who needs the help he once needed. And most Julys he is back at the school where he used to wash the floors, showing a gym full of ten-year-olds how to catch, and turn, and shoot.