Jim Suddath came up out of East Point, Georgia, the Atlanta-metro community just southwest of Hartsfield International Airport. He had grown to six feet eight inches by his Woodward Academy days in College Park - the prestigious Atlanta-area private school whose academic standing had placed graduates at every Ivy League and ACC academic powerhouse for decades. He had played basketball at Woodward at the kind of level that drew the attention of Division I head coaches across the Southeast. Bill Foster, the Duke head coach who had been building one of the dominant ACC programs of the late 1970s, recruited Jim Suddath out of Woodward in 1977. The full scholarship was offered. Suddath accepted. He arrived in Durham in the fall of 1977 to begin his Duke basketball career.
The freshman year, 1977-78, would become the most famous season in Duke basketball's pre-Coach K modern era. Bill Foster had built a Duke team around the All-American center Mike Gminski, the senior guard Jim Spanarkel, and a freshman class led by Gene Banks and Kenny Dennard. The 1977-78 Duke team won the ACC Tournament. The team reached the Final Four. The team beat Notre Dame in the national semifinal. And in the NCAA national championship game in March 1978, Duke lost to Kentucky 94-88. The same Kentucky game that, four decades later, Jon Weingart would tell his JHU Hub interviewer was the reason he knew Duke was a good school when his study-hall classmate flipped him a Duke application across the table. Jim Suddath's first college season was Duke's NCAA national championship runner-up year. He was a freshman role player on the most famous Duke team of the Foster era.
His sophomore year, 1978-79, Duke was again competitive in the ACC. His junior year, 1979-80, the Duke team made another deep NCAA Tournament run - this time reaching the Elite Eight before losing to Purdue in Lexington, Kentucky. The 1979-80 squad was Bill Foster's last Duke team. By that point, Suddath had developed a reputation as one of the better outside shooters on the Duke roster - the kind of player who, by the framing the Duke Report would later use in its 2014 retrospective on him, would have been a three-point specialist if the three-point line had existed then. When his shot was dropping, he not only scored but helped open the lane for Gene Banks and the post for Mike Gminski.
And then, in a late February 1980 game against Maryland, Jim Suddath felt something pop in his left knee. He took a week off. He played the rest of the season. He played minutes all the way through to the Elite Eight loss to Purdue. In early April 1980, just after his junior season ended, Duke team physician Dr. Frank Bassett operated on the knee. The cartilage had torn. Dr. Bassett repaired it using arthroscopic surgery - a technique still relatively uncommon at that point in the field. The recovery was supposed to set Suddath up for his senior year. Bill Foster departed Duke for South Carolina that same summer. Mike Krzyzewski, the thirty-three-year-old former Army head coach, was hired in March 1980 by Tom Butters to replace Foster. Jim Suddath would become the senior leader of Coach K's first Duke team. Whether he would be physically able to play the senior season was, by the spring and summer of 1980, an open question.