The family often debates the details, but if you ask Jamie Spatola, it all started with a dare. Jamie, the daughter of Mike Krzyzewski, was working at Duke’s summer basketball camp doing odd jobs and managing the camp’s bank when, one day, Chris Spatola, a camper and rising senior in high school, came up and introduced himself.
“I’m not sure if it was to be funny, at first, since I was Coach’s daughter or whatever, but I think there was some sort of dare between the two brothers,” she says. “I’ve only gotten bits and pieces of the story over the years.... We were both very, very young, so I think there was some funny business between him and his brother going on with that.”
“Her version, you can ask her,” Chris Spatola says with a laugh. “I don’t want to get into what I think her version is.”
But no one disputes what happened next. Jamie started coming to Chris’s games during camp, and the two ate meals together between sessions. By the time Spatola was a sophomore at the United States Military Academy, the friendship had blossomed into romance. Now, a decade later, Spatola paces the hardwood of Cameron Indoor Stadium, ready to address the program’s summer camp as Duke’s director of basketball operations. Ring on his finger, back on the floor where his adult life started. Beyond meeting his wife on this court, Spatola played two games against Duke as a cadet at West Point and even held his wedding reception here.
Spatola looks at the 700 campers, the crowd he once sat among. For him, it’s tough not to get caught up in it all.
“I’ve got to pinch myself a lot. It’s funny how it has come full circle,” Spatola says later in his office in Schwartz-Butters. “That’s when it’s really surreal for me—when I’m standing in front of the camp on the first day.... It’s a little bit overwhelming, to be honest.”
Back in Cameron, Spatola stops his gait. There’s work to do.
Considering the couple’s history, it only made sense to hold the wedding reception in Cameron. The stadium was dressed splendidly for the occasion. A metal grid covered with fabric created a new ceiling and hid the seats in the upper bowl. The Cameron Crazies’ bleachers had been folded in, and the floor, covered with a massive carpet, was topped with white cloths on blue and pink tables. Krzyzewski, the bride’s father, stood up to give a toast.
“You know Jamie, I actually picked him before you did,” Krzyzewski began. A layer below the temporary floor, almost a decade before the wedding day, Krzyzewski had seen promise in the guard before most other Division-I coaches.
Spatola grew up fascinated with New Jersey native Bobby Hurley’s game. Chris’s father, Mike, was a member of Krzyzewski’s staff during his summer camp, and Chris was among the best players to attend. But Krzyzewski knew that Spatola, at just 5-foot-10 and 150 pounds, probably didn’t have the ability to play at a place like Duke. Still, Krzyzewski insisted he was a Division-I-caliber player, so he called Army head coach Dino Gaudio and gave his pitch: Spatola had the potential to be an excellent player and an even better cadet. As a former Army man himself—not to mention one of the most successful coaches of all time—Krzyzewski’s endorsement carried weight, and his words confirmed Army’s previous evaluation of Spatola. The Black Knights extended an offer, and just months later, Spatola was on campus.
By sophomore year, Jamie had officially become his girlfriend, and Army visited Duke twice in Spatola’s time at the Academy. Despite his strong play—the box scores from those two games hang framed in Spatola’s office—his team was trounced by the Blue Devils, 100-42 and 91-48. After the game, Krzyzewski called Spatola into his office. The coach’s intensity vanished. Krzyzewski the opposing coach became Krzyzewski the mentor.
“They had beaten us by 40, and I hate to lose, especially like that,” Spatola recalls. “He [said he] thought we had a good team, which we did, and that you can’t let something like this get you down.”
Although Spatola had wanted to be a college coach for a number of years, a military commitment as West Point cadet delayed his move from the court to the bench. In August of 2005, a year after marrying Jamie, Spatola headed off to Baghdad to serve as a battery commander.
As an officer, he led a team of 15 men running security in part of the Green Zone, specifically at the al-Rasheed Hotel and the convention center in which the Iraqi Parliament met. He helped the military oversee security at checkpoints, ran counter-mortar operations in the general area of the buildings and coordinated regular, three-to-four-mile patrols. Securing the buildings was especially difficult during the Saddam Hussein trial because the al-Rasheed Hotel housed many witnesses—that is, they were high-value targets, Spatola says. And when the Iraqis had their first free elections, insurgent activity seemed to be a distinct possibility.
A world away, his newlywed wife couldn’t do anything but worry. “It was obviously really hard at the time,” Jamie Spatola says. “And the way I think about it now is that it’s something I would never, ever want to have happen again…. It was really good for us, because what are we going to have to do that’s much more difficult than that in the course of our marriage?”
Spatola served in the military for five years and was recognized for his “exceptional service” in Operation Iraqi Freedom before returning to the U.S. safely. His military career complete, it was only a matter of time before he returned to Cameron: Spatola has now been on the Duke staff for two seasons. Though he admits that he has coaching aspirations, for now, he is content to roam the floor of Cameron Indoor, taking advantage of the chance to learn from one of college basketball’s greatest.
The similarities between Spatola and his father-in-law are notable. As point guards, both were captains of West Point’s basketball teams. Both have reputations as high-character family men and loyal friends. The two even lived at the same military base—Fort Sill, Okla.—immediately after getting married. And now, of course, they’re family.
“I want to be a head coach eventually, but I’m learning a lot now and I’m in a great situation,” Spatola says. “Let’s be honest, Coach has been here for 30 years, he’s in the Hall of Fame, he’s coaching the [most] elite team in the country in the Olympic team. Where else are you going to learn? It’s a basketball doctorate…. Eventually something will come up, and I’ll jump at it.”
All those years ago—before he was married, before he was a cadet, before he worked for Duke—Spatola sat on the court. Now he stands on it. Someday, he’ll take a jump from it.
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