Road to Duke
Bill Foster had to invent a word for him. "To spanarkel," the Duke coach called it, and the Washington Post spelled out what it meant in 1979: "the act of stealing basketballs, directing court traffic, dissecting the intricate flow of 10 people, flipping just the right pass, hitting the pressure jumper and looking awkward doing the most amazing things."
The awkward part was real. James Gerard Spanarkel was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on June 28, 1957, and grew up pigeon-toed. "I'm not nearly as pigeon-toed now as I was when I was younger," he said as a Duke senior. "It was blatant whenever I walked." A Duke official, trying to explain him to a reporter, admitted the obvious: "He's kind of an awkward-looking player in a way. You have to watch him over half dozen games to really appreciate him."
People in Hudson County had already watched. At Hudson Catholic, where his teammates included a younger forward named Mike O'Koren, who would go on to star at North Carolina, Spanarkel was a two-time first-team All-Hudson County pick in both basketball and baseball. In 1974 he led the Hawks to the Hudson County championship, the only county basketball title in the school's history, and as a senior he averaged 16 points and seven assists. He was offered scholarships in three sports, one of them football, which he had never played.
He visited Duke, Ohio University, Wake Forest, Holy Cross and William and Mary, and he picked the school that had not been to the NCAA Tournament since 1966 and had a coach, Foster, hired in 1974 to wake it up. He was one of Foster's earliest recruits, and he arrived with the kind of grounding that would show up in everything he did afterward. "I'm lucky to have a family and friends who would respect me even if we do fail," he said, "who stressed academics, and who made me think of myself as a person, not a basketball player."
At Duke
He was the ACC Rookie of the Year in 1976, averaging 13.3 points for a team that finished 13-14. As a sophomore he averaged 19.2 points and led Duke in scoring, and the Blue Devils went 2-10 in the ACC. Nobody hated Duke yet. There was nothing to hate.
Then the pieces arrived. Mike Gminski was a sophomore, Gene Banks and Kenny Dennard were freshmen, John Harrell and Bob Bender were transfers, and Spanarkel, a junior, was the captain. The 1977-78 team went from last place in the ACC to the conference title. Spanarkel averaged 20.8 points, was named MVP of the ACC Tournament and remembered decades later how small the stage still was. "Back then, I tell people our first time we played on national TV that year we played in the ACC championship game that they televised on ABC Sports," he said. "I'm pretty sure they preempted Wide World of Sports that afternoon to televise our game."
In the NCAA Tournament he was the Most Outstanding Player of the East Region, which Duke closed with a 90-72 rout of Villanova. In St. Louis they beat Notre Dame, a team with eight future NBA players, 90-86, and played Kentucky for the national championship. Spanarkel scored 21 points on 8-of-16 shooting. Jack Givens scored 41, and Kentucky won 94-88. "I knew we were in trouble during the game, when, I think it was the middle of the second half, he took a corner jump shot that grazed the side for the backboard and kind of banked in off the side of the backboard," Spanarkel said.
He has never pretended it didn't matter. "No. 1 is that the final score never seems to change," he said in 2025. But he also knew what that team had done to Duke's place in the country. "If you talk to guys on our team, the egos would say we put them back on the map before Coach K did," he said. "And there might be some truth to that." He thought the country liked them, too. "I think we had such a positive and infectious way of playing as individuals and as a team, a lot of people gravitated to us, and the fact we weren't supposed to be there."
His senior year started with a No. 1 ranking and a 6-0 record, then back-to-back losses to Ohio State and St. John's. "I'm not sure we really regrouped totally from that," he said. "We played out the season and we were still a good team. I think there was a fracture here or there."
His last home game, on February 24, 1979, was one of the strangest in the history of the rivalry. Dean Smith had North Carolina hold the ball against Duke's zone, Foster refused to come out of it, and Duke led 7-0 at halftime. Carolina took two shots in the first half. One of them, a jumper by Chick Yonakor, fell two feet short, the students started chanting "Airball," and Duke legend has it the chant was born that night. Spanarkel was not amused. "Basically it bothered me because I thought this would be a great game," he said. "I thought they were trying to upstage our senior game." Duke won 47-40, and he scored a game-high 17 points, missing one of nine shots. "You still have to play the game," he said. "You still have to figure out a way to win the game."
Two weeks later St. John's beat Duke again, 80-78, in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, on the same afternoon Penn beat North Carolina. It was the end of his career. He left as Duke's first 2,000-point scorer, with 2,012, a consensus second-team All-American in 1979, a two-time first-team All-ACC pick, the team's co-MVP three years running and a two-time Academic All-American. He also pitched for the Duke baseball team. The Post found him making straight A's and thinking about law school, engaged to his high school sweetheart, Janet McPherson, and admitting he never really turned the game off. "I turn into a TV freak during the season," he said. "Sometimes I wonder if I unwind at all."
After Duke
The Philadelphia 76ers took him 16th in the 1979 draft, and as a rookie he played 40 games for a team with Julius Erving and Doug Collins that reached the NBA Finals. That summer the league held an expansion draft to stock a new franchise in Dallas, and the Mavericks took him.
He has nothing but happy memories of it. "We beat the San Antonio Spurs in our first regular season game," he said years later. "We half-seriously thought this expansion thing was going to be easy. And then we finished with 15 wins in 82 games." Dick Motta once brought a tiger into the locker room to fire his team up and scared the life out of every player in the room. Spanarkel was one of only two Mavericks to play in all 82 games that first season. He averaged 14.4 points, made 88.7 percent of his free throws and scored 1,184 points, more than anyone else on the team.
His minutes shrank after that, and in 1983-84 a broken right wrist cost him three months. He played seven games that season, and his NBA career was over at 26: 259 games, 9.7 points a game, a career free-throw percentage of 85.5. "It's all good," he said in 2017. "I'm just happy to be part of a team."
He had already planned for the next part. In 1984 he went to work for Merrill Lynch in New Jersey, and he never left; four decades later he was a first vice president in the firm's Paramus office, and in 2026 Forbes listed him as a member of one of its best-in-state wealth management teams. At the same time he built a second career. He called high school games for New Jersey Network and college games for SportsChannel and the Big East, and around 1990 he became an analyst on New Jersey Nets broadcasts, first on radio and then on television. In 1998 CBS hired him for college basketball and the NCAA Tournament.
For most of the next two decades he worked both jobs beside the same play-by-play man, Ian Eagle, on the Nets and in March. In 2014 he won the New York Emmy for best sports analyst. Asked how he managed a full-time financial practice and a broadcasting schedule at once, he said time management "is the key." Phil Mushnick of the New York Post put his work this way: "Even during the Nets' most meager times, Spanarkel could sustain interest by seeing and speaking sensible, applicable basketball. He left us with at least one good lesson a game."
The Nets job ended in November 2020. YES had moved him from the broadcast booth to the studio the year before, and after 30 seasons it did not bring him back. He was 63. "Jim is not only good at what he does he is a great human being," said Chris Shearn, who had worked beside him in the studio. "I will miss learning from him during games and our talks about life."
CBS kept him. He kept working the NCAA Tournament, with Spero Dedes as his partner from 2024, and he kept playing golf at Upper Montclair, where he got his handicap down to 16 and explained his swing honestly. "I'm like Baskin-Robbins," he said. "Every swing is a different flavor."
Where Is He Now
In the spring of 2025, when Duke reached its first Final Four without Mike Krzyzewski in 47 years, an NCAA.com writer called the last man to captain a Duke team there without him. Spanarkel picked up the phone at his Merrill Lynch office in New Jersey and, while they talked, looked at something on the wall. "She took the front page of the Sports Monday on the New York Times," he said of the plaque his girlfriend, now his wife, Janet, had made him long ago. "I'm looking at it right now, faded, Monday, March 27, 1978, and it has a picture of Jack Givens on one side, a picture of me on the other and Reggie Jackson underneath it."
The 1978 team still has a group text. "The other night with Houston winning, first thing, one guy started out, what does everybody think about Houston?" he said. "Five or six responses came in within about 10 minutes."
He was generous about the coach who followed Foster. "Coach K did a marvelous job of turning that local North Carolina brand into a national and global brand," he said. He was generous about Foster, too. "I actually liked Bill Foster quite a bit," he said. "I thought he was a great coach, he was looking out for his players, he was a good marketer of programs." And he was honest about the game he lost. The final score, he said, "never seems to change."
In March 2026 CBS assigned him to St. Louis. Forty-eight years after Kentucky beat his Duke team for the national championship in that city, he was courtside next to Dedes to call Kentucky's first-round game against Santa Clara, with Givens in the same building, broadcasting the same game.
He is in his late 60s now, a gray-haired voice to a generation of fans who have no idea he was once the best player on the court in the national championship game. He still sees the game the way he played it, a step ahead of everyone and a little sideways. The final score never changes. Neither does the verb. You watch him for half a dozen games, and then you understand what it means to spanarkel.