Krzyzewski, coaches know health must be priority

• Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski is talking openly about his health after Roy Williams and Jim Calhoun health scares
• Krzyzewski is telling the story of his two hip replacement surgeries (in 1999 and 2002) in the booklet 'Had I Known Then'
• Krzyzewski walks, stretches and still does some rehabilitation exercises to maintain his health these days

Coaches and health concerns have gone hand-in-hand as long as coaches have worked long hours, year-round, in high-pressure situations. But they haven't always talked openly about it.

Now, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski is – the same week that recently retired Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun mentioned he had surgery to remove an apparently cancerous growth from his lungs and two months after North Carolina coach Roy Williams had surgery to remove a potentially cancerous tumor from his kidney.

Calhoun also had spinal surgery in February and surgery to repair a fractured hip in August.

"You definitely think about taking better care of yourself whenever you hear about someone in your own profession getting sick in whatever way that is," Krzyzewski told USA TODAY Sports on Wednesday. "If something's wrong, you've got to take care of it right away. For me, I'm fortunate it wasn't cancer.

"For me, it was arthritis. … We have trainers to take care of our athletes. Sometimes, it's like parents. You take care of your children and forget to take care of you."

Krzyzewski is telling the story of his two hip replacement surgeries (in 1999 and 2002) in "Had I Known Then," a booklet co-authored by Ellyn Spragins in which joint replacement patients share advice they wish they would have given their younger selves. Krzyzewski writes in his letter to his younger self to "tend to the pain" immediately instead of ignoring it for a long, miserable college basketball season of 1998-99.

"I thought that I could live with the pain," said Krzyzewski, who had previously missed most of the 1994-95 season due to back surgery and exhaustion. "I was just about to start the 1998-99 season, and I said, 'Look, I'm a competitor. I can take this. I'm Superman.'

"That season was a horrible one for me. Record-wise, it was great. We played for a national championship. But I was not at my best – I had to coach from a chair and was fighting pain every day."

Krzyzewski got his left hip replaced days after the national championship game, and he got his right hip replaced in 2002 – without hesitation that time.

"I move better than I did when I was 50, 51 years old, and I'm 65 right now," Krzyzewski said, adding that he realizes now he looked like "someone who had just lost a fight all the time" all throughout the 1998-99 season.

Krzyzewski walks, stretches and still does some rehabilitation exercises to maintain his health these days.

He's not the only coach thinking about ways to improve his health on a regular basis. A week after longtime college basketball coach Rick Majerus died at 64 after battling heart issues most of his adult life, Villanova's Jay Wright, 50, said he didn't understand and appreciate the idea of rest until recently. Between recruiting, planning practices, traveling and coaching games, it's an exhausting year-round commitment that wears you down if you don't stop to pause.

"There's no days off," Wright said Tuesday. "I do think, if you look at the guys … who have been doing it a long time, they're bright guys. Coach K, look at his offseason with USA Basketball. The guy's working. (Coaches like he, Rick Pitino and Jim Calhoun) are really smart about finding their time to rest.

"I'm getting to the point where I'm not the young and up-and-coming coach anymore, so I look at those guys and see what do they do well. That's one of the things I have learned about all of those guys – they're very smart about the allocation about their energies and their time."