Mike Tissaw was born on October 25, 1960, and grew up in Fairfax, Virginia — Northern Virginia, fifteen miles from the White House and deep inside the basketball culture that would eventually supply Duke with Johnny Dawkins, Tommy Amaker, Danny Ferry, and Billy King. The D.C. metro area's Catholic league — Mackin, DeMatha, Archbishop Carroll, St. John's — was one of the best high school conferences in America. Krzyzewski would later tell the Washington Post that he targeted the region from his earliest days: "We thought D.C. would be really important for us. It was a talent-rich area, which had basketball all year round."
But Tissaw arrived at Duke before Krzyzewski did. He came for the 1979-80 season under head coach Bill Foster, whose 1978 team had reached the national championship game behind Gene Banks, Mike Gminski, and Jim Spanarkel. Tissaw was a 6-foot-8 forward, big enough to play inside in the ACC but without the defining athletic gifts that separated good college players from great ones. His freshman year, the 1979-80 squad won the ACC Tournament, beat Kentucky in the Sweet 16 at Rupp Arena, and reached the Elite Eight before falling to Purdue. It was the last team Bill Foster would ever coach at Duke.
Then everything changed. Foster left for South Carolina. Duke athletic director Tom Butters drove to West Point and hired an unknown 33-year-old Army coach named Mike Krzyzewski. The system, the coaching style, the expectations — everything Tissaw had signed up for vanished overnight. He was about to become the answer to a question nobody wanted to ask: what happens when a new coach inherits players he didn't recruit?