If ever there were a case of deceptive appearances, it was Mike Krzyzewski on the day he was introduced as Duke's basketball coach.

The guy looked scared.

At times during that news conference, he sounded timid and shy, even when he joked about the difficulty of pronouncing his name.

My first impression was that Dean Smith would chew this young coach up and spit out his remains in such short order that headline writers and television announcers wouldn't have to labor through name pain very long.

Not that it's easy today, but ACC basketball was brutally unforgiving in the 1970s and '80s. Coaches had to make their bones fast. The alternative was to sink to the bottom of the standings with little hope of climbing out.

Those coaches didn't like each other very much, either. The schools had heated rivalries; the coaches had deep-fried feuds. In what for years had been a seven-team league until Georgia Tech's quiet arrival for the 1979-80 season, familiarity bred contempt among coaches and most of the players.

"No one liked each other in those days," said Kenny Dennard, a senior on Krzyzewski's first team in 1980-81. "Every game had a lot of tension. None of us on that team had any idea of what to expect from him, but we knew it would be a tough job. Every coach in the league had a tough job back then."

The toughness that would come to define Krzyzewski's now-legendary stay at Duke didn't surface immediately, Dennard said.

"I guess it sounds strange in a way but looking back on it, the thing that sticks out most about Coach K that season was how calm and patient he was with us. I know he must have been really frustrated, but he never took it out on us. He didn't do a lot of yelling or berating at all. It was all about him teaching and us trying to learn."

Under Bill Foster, the Blue Devils had won big by playing a lot of zone defense and station-to-station offense. Krzyzewski revamped everything. He installed a classic man-to-man defense. Zones were not an option. The offense was changed to constant motion with a heavy emphasis on physical, off-ball screening.

"Most of us on that team probably weren't a great fit for what he wanted to do and it was a big change," Dennard recalled. "There's no telling how many stupid mistakes I made by myself, but I don't remember Coach K blowing up at anybody."

And although that team could do no better than 6-8 in the league and 17-13 overall, there were flashes of what Krzyzewski eventually would deliver. In the season's third game -- a meeting with 10th-ranked North Carolina in the first round of the last Big Four Tournament in Greensboro -- he came very close to going 1-up on Smith right out of the chute. The Tar Heels won by two points but clearly had some trouble adjusting to facets of Duke's new playing style.

When the two teams met in Durham for the final regular-season game, Duke senior Gene Banks hit a winning shot in overtime on Smith's 50th birthday and 15 days after Krzyzewski had turned 34. Even though Krzyzewski wouldn't beat Carolina again until the semifinals of the '84 ACC Tournament, the mold was set for the mother of all ACC coaching rivalries.

"That was one of the happiest days of my life," Dennard said. "It's just as special now all these years later because it was Coach K's first win against Carolina. But then, there was no way to imagine what he would do with the program and how far he would take it. No one could have even dreamed it."