This is the program of Chuck Cooper, the first Black player drafted by the NBA. It is the program of Sihugo Green, a consensus All-American at a time when that meant sharing a five with Bill Russell. It is the program of Norm Nixon, who willed Duquesne basketball to its most recent March Madness before going on to share a Lakers backcourt with Magic Johnson.
For now, though, and for as forever as it came to be for those men, Dukes basketball is the program of Keith Dambrot, who reanimated what has been the most forlorn program in Division I and improbably led them to their first NCAA Tournament bid since 1977 and, as of Thursday afternoon, their first victory in the NCAAs in 55 years.
“They just don’t want me to retire, I guess,” Dambrot told CBS Sports following the first official upset of the 2024 edition of March Madness: Duquesne 71, BYU 67. “I’m trying to get to the promised land, and they’re making me keep coaching!”
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Dambrot, once the high school coach of LeBron James, arrived at Duquesne in 2017 with the assignment to turn around a program that endured 32 losing seasons in the 40 years before he accepted the job. He was motivated by a pay raise, to be sure, with a seven-year, $7 million contract, but also by the fact this had been the program where his father, Sid, once played for teams that went 70-13 over three years, twice finished in the AP top 10 and once played in the NIT final.
In what will be his final season on the bench, Dambrot has completed a remarkable turnaround through a number of difficult challenges, some universal, some specific to the Dukes, and one very personal.
“First tournament win in 55 years!” James tweeted, referring to Dambrot symbolically as a “GOAT”. “Keep it going.”
AYYYYYYYEEEEE!!! First tournament win in 55 years! @CoachDambrot 🐐 @DuqMBB 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾. Keep it going
— LeBron James (@KingJames) March 21, 2024
On Monday, Dambrot announced his retirement less than 24 hours after he and his team had qualified for the NCAA Tournament with an improbable triumph at the Atlantic 10 Tournament. He is nearing his 66th birthday and recognizes the sacrifices his family has endured as a part of the coaching lifestyle. His wife, Donna, has been there for 34 years of it. She is suffering from breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy in early February. He said he wants to be there to support her journey to health. He does not know what he’ll do next. “It depends how much my wife likes me,” he said with a chuckle.
When I spoke with Dambrot in January after a competitive home loss to Dayton broken open by three straight 3-pointers from Flyers All-American DaRon Holmes, he was convinced his team had better basketball available than had been on display. Did he know this was coming, though?
How could he?
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They have won nine consecutive games, including four in the Atlantic 10 Tournament and the one Thursday against BYU. Before this, the longest such streaks were four games, and there had been the five-game losing skid into which I stumbled, which ultimately placed the Dukes at 0-5 in the A-10.
And now they are, for the moment, on top of the college basketball world.
They technically were the second team to advance to the NCAA round of 32, and they technically were the second upset by seed, but Tom Izzo winning another March game with Michigan State is not at all the same as Duquesne taking out one of the Big 12’s top teams.
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The dark years of Duquesne once seemed inescapable, in part because of the program’s own mistakes. When John Carroll briefly revived the Dukes to a 17-13 season and NIT appearance in 1993-94, star Derrick Alston departed for the NBA and there was an unsurprising decline the next season. Carroll was fired after the team went 10-18.
Three failed coaches later, Duquesne hired Ron Everhart away from Northeastern in 2006, and he recorded four winning seasons in a five-year stretch, including a trip to the A-10 final in 2009. After a 16-15 finish in 2012, he, too, was dismissed.
If there was a mistake to be made, the Dukes administration would pounce on it.
With Dambrot, it seemed at last they’d gotten one right. But then came the pandemic, and the decision to renovate their homecourt into the presently impressive UMPC Cooper Fieldhouse, named for one of the program’s great heroes. It’s a great building now, but it meant playing without a true homecourt for two seasons.
When I covered the team in my first season on a college basketball beat, the squad was filled with solid players and terrific young men, mostly local to the Pittsburgh, like wing Brian Shanahan and guard Tony Petrarca. They were not successful teams, though. From 1987-89, the Dukes went 24-37 while Temple was earning the No. 1 ranking in college basketball and Rhode Island was making a run to the Sweet 16.
For the longest time, it seemed as though that struggle always would define the future of Duquesne basketball.
But against BYU, guard Dae Dae Grant scored 19 points without a turnover, backcourt partner Jimmy Clark scored 11 and the Dukes converted 10 consecutive free throws in the final 19 seconds. The Dukes held a 14-point lead early in the second half, but BYU fought to tie the game with 1:30 left. And still Duquesne found away to prevail against the No. 6 seed Cougars, with Clark's electric drive and two free throws putting his team back in front for good.
Whatever happens Saturday in the second round, they will have redefined what it means to be a Duquesne Duke.
"I think the biggest thing is our toughness is on display, and if you're a tough team, both mentally and physically, you have a chance to win," Dambrot said. "I think these guys' toughness over the year has really improved, which has made us a good basketball team."
Dambrot declared that was obvious at the start of the second half, when a scrap for a loose ball turned into a held ball that got more than a little physical and led to coincidental technical fouls against BYU’s Noah Waterman and Duquesne’s Fousseyni Drame.
“I think the little – I don't know what it was – little scuffle at the beginning of the second half kind of showed everything about what we're about,” Dambrot said. “We're going to compete at a very high level in a very clean way, but we're going to compete and make people earn every inch of the court.
“When you start the Atlantic 10 0-5 and lose a lot of heartbreakers and people kind of count you out, if you look at our last eight weeks or so, we've been in a million of these things.”
Not like this one, though.
This was in March Madness. It will not be forgotten soon.
