Final Four: How a fluke eye injury forced Jon Scheyer from playing to coaching and eventually led to him taking over for Coach K at Duke

SAN ANTONIO — Eight months removed from the traumatic accident that permanently damaged his vision in his right eye and derailed his hopes of making the NBA, Jon Scheyer received a harsh reminder of how tough the road ahead would be.

He wasn’t quite the same player with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers that he’d been while leading Duke to a national title the previous year.

It wasn’t just that his confidence had waned. Or that his trademark court vision and feel for the game had been compromised. His lack of peripheral vision made it hard for him to see screens coming when he was on defense. He would slam into them at bone-rattling speeds, then drag himself to his feet.

“At times it was very hard to watch,” said Minnesota Timberwolves coach Chris Finch, then the head coach of the Vipers. “He was getting hit by screens that you saw coming but he couldn’t see coming. He was so tough that he wouldn’t be defeated by that, but you could feel the frustration coming from him.”

In those days, Scheyer’s eye injury was a devastating blow, the worst thing that had ever happened to him. It cut short his playing days after three nomadic seasons of professional basketball and robbed him of the chance to pursue his NBA dreams.

Nowadays, Scheyer sees it differently. Were it not for his eye injury, he would never have gotten into coaching in his mid-20s. That set him on a path toward taking over for Mike Krzyzewski at age 34, winning 89 games in his first three seasons and guiding this year’s freshman-laden Blue Devils to the Final Four this weekend in San Antonio.

“To have to say he was done playing, I know it killed him,” said former Duke teammate and close friend Brian Zoubek. “When you have an injury and you’re a shell of your former self and every day you’re reminded of that by playing not to the level you want, that’s a very, very painful thing to experience.

“But if it weren’t for the eye injury, Jon wouldn’t be coaching Duke right now. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise.”

Duke coach Jon Scheyer talks to Cooper Flagg during a practice session ahead of the Final Four. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

(Jamie Squire via Getty Images)

Two weeks ago, one of Scheyer’s former rivals on the Chicago basketball scene shared a story about the Duke coach’s willingness to play against anyone, anywhere. Patrick Beverley, the ex-NBA player turned podcaster, told listeners that Scheyer “never ducked any smoke from any athlete in Chicago,” even if that meant leaving his suburban hometown and venturing into the city in search of elite competition.

“They called him, ‘The White Mike,’ he was so cold,” Beverley said, “He had a stardom no other kid had in Chicago and his school wasn’t even in Chicago.”

That viral clip was all true, even if the idea of Scheyer drawing comparisons to Michael Jordan drew a belly laugh from Cooper Flagg and other current Duke players. A man who now rocks glasses and quarter-zip pullovers was once known throughout Chicago and beyond for his scoring exploits and all-around game.

When Scheyer was a freshman at Glenbrook North High School, he took the Spartans farther than they had ever gone in the state playoffs. The memorable run ended in heartbreak in the state semifinals when Thornbrook guard Eric Gray buried a deep game-winning 3-pointer over Scheyer with nine seconds left.

A photo in the next day’s Chicago Tribune displayed Thornwood players celebrating their victory as Scheyer lay face down in tears on the floor. Scheyer cut that picture from the newspaper and taped it to his bedroom wall, pledging not to remove it until he had a picture of himself winning a state championship to replace it.

Two seasons later, Scheyer’s Glenbrook North team won its first state championship. Head coach Dave Weber went so far as to label Scheyer “the best player ever to play high school basketball in the state of Illinois” after he scored a game-high 27 points in a 63-51 state title game victory over Carbondale.

The most legendary Scheyer story from high school came during his senior year, when he piled up 21 points in 75 seconds during a failed last-gasp comeback bid against Proviso West. The following week, WGN invited Scheyer to appear on its morning show to see what else he could do in 75 seconds, from tying shoelaces, to making sandwiches, to writing Krzyzewski’s name on a chalkboard.

While Scheyer’s high school coach was the brother of Illinois men’s basketball coach Bruce Weber, that was not the recruiting pitch that resonated to him the most. The McDonald’s All-American signed with Duke because he felt a deeper connection with Krzyzewski and then-Duke assistant coach Chris Collins, Glenbrook North’s other famous basketball alum.

Brian Zoubek thought he liked basketball until he became Scheyer’s roommate their freshman year at Duke. Scheyer, Zoubek says, was obsessed. It wasn’t just that Scheyer was a gym rat. He watched basketball, talked basketball, thought basketball. He was always studying how other teams played and thinking about what sets Duke could incorporate

“Part of the reason I knew I never wanted to coach was because I saw how passionate Jon was about basketball and I just wasn’t anywhere close to that,” Zoubek said. “Basketball was his everything. It lit him up.”

Winning, Zoubek says, was the other thing that put a smile on Scheyer’s face. It didn’t matter if it was games of Halo in their dorm room or card games or chess on the team bus. Scheyer loved to compete — and he loved to let his teammates know when he won.

“It was honestly infuriating,” Zoubek said with a chuckle, “because he’s also relatively good at everything he chooses to do.”

About the only things Scheyer didn’t win for the first three-plus years of his Duke career were the achievements he craved most. He had yet to win an ACC regular-season title. He had yet to lead Duke beyond the Sweet 16. As he entered the home stretch of his college career, he was painfully aware that his legacy was not what he hoped it would be.

What followed was the most exhilarating period of Scheyer’s young life, a two-month ascent to college basketball’s summit in 2010.

Duke claimed a share of the ACC regular-season title, throttling rival North Carolina by 32 points on Scheyer’s senior night. Then the Blue Devils blitzed Virginia, Miami and Georgia Tech to win the ACC tournament. That momentum carried over into the NCAA tournament as Scheyer and his teammates plowed their way through the bracket.

When the final buzzer sounded on Scheyer’s college career, the result of the national title game was still in doubt against Butler. Only after Gordon Hayward’s mid-court shot rimmed out could Scheyer check the one item off his college to-do list that meant the most to him.

Scheyer averaged 18.2 points and 4.9 assists while playing point guard for Duke as a senior. He was named a second-team All-American.

“He was one of the best players in the country,” Collins said. “The bigger the game, the better he played. The bigger the moment, the better he shot.”

There’s no doubt in the minds of Scheyer or those close to him that he would have made the NBA were it not for his eye injury.

Says Collins, “I would have bet everything that he would have found a way to make it.”

Jon Scheyer, Mike Krzyzewski, Nolan Smith and Brian Zoubek look on after Duke beat Butler for the national championship in 2010. (Ryan McKee/Getty Images)

(NCAA Photos via Getty Images)

Three months after winning the national title at Duke, Scheyer appeared to be on his way to proving Collins right. The undrafted free agent had latched on with the Miami Heat’s summer league team around the same time LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh all took their talents to South Beach.

The Heat needed to surround their three stars with inexpensive, high-IQ players who could space the floor with their outside shooting. Scheyer checked all those boxes. Then, as if to further prove his worth, Scheyer sank the game-winning 3-pointer in the Heat’s first Las Vegas summer league game.

Everything changed on July 13, 2011 when Golden State Warriors wing Joe Ingles swiped wildly at the ball while guarding Scheyer in the corner. Ingles poked Scheyer’s right eye with such force and at such an ill-fated angle that he temporarily lost all vision and had to be rushed to the hospital.

Eye pokes happen all the time in basketball, but this one was more serious than most. Doctors diagnosed Scheyer with a retinal tear and traumatic optic nerve avulsion, vision-threatening injuries that usually only happen with serious trauma like a car crash.

“It broke my heart because there was no one I coached who loved to play more than Jon,” Collins said. “To see that taken away from him and to go through that traumatic injury right at the worst time, it was heartbreaking and emotional for all of us.

When Collins spoke to Scheyer, he said the former Duke point guard was “very scared and very down.” He had to remain in a dark room with his eye covered. Doctors weren’t sure how much vision he would regain in his right eye, let alone if he could play high-level basketball again.

Unwilling to accept that his career might be over, Jon went straight to the basket in his parents’ driveway the moment he returned home from the hospital. He sank 23 of 25 threes, each one deeper than the last.

“I was determined to make it to the NBA still,” Scheyer said. “I felt I was the same player. But I think part of what made me the player that I was is I had a special belief and a special edge.

“After the eye injury, I could never regain that same confidence to that level.”

Scheyer, perhaps somewhat recklessly, tried out for the Los Angeles Clippers just a couple months after his injury. Still not fully adjusted to how his depth perception in his right eye had changed, he was an early training camp casualty.

Scheyer then spent parts of the next two-plus years playing professionally in the G League and overseas in Israel and Spain. The version of Scheyer that Collins watched in those years lacked his former incredible vision as a playmaker, a passer and a ball-hawking defender.

“He was battling, he was competing, but you could just tell from watching him that some of his secret sauce had been lost,” Collins said. “To even salvage a couple years playing with one eye, that just shows how special he was. I couldn’t imagine what he was going through.”

As Scheyer was playing in Spain in spring 2013, Collins was about to accept the Northwestern job. Collins floated the idea of Scheyer hanging up his high tops and joining his Northwestern coaching staff.

“I really started to think about it, really had a dream of being a young head coach,” Scheyer said. “So I was ready to go with Chris.”

Then Scheyer called Krzyzewski to get his opinion. Krzyzewski called Scheyer an idiot for considering going anywhere other than Duke.

“Word for word,” Scheyer said with a laugh. “Don’t be an idiot, come back here.”

Before the 2013-14 season, Scheyer returned to Duke as a special assistant. He assisted in developing game plans, breaking down film and in planning practices.

“I want to continue to learn from the entire staff and bring whatever I can to help the program,” Scheyer said at the time.

Little did he know he’d be running the program himself less than a decade later.

Brian Zoubek remembers exactly when he knew that his close friend was destined to be a head coach someday. It was when Scheyer racked up three championships in four years as one of the coaches at the K Academy Duke Basketball Fantasy Camp.

The camp begins with 35-and-over participants playing in exhibition games. Those games give the former Duke players serving as coaches an opportunity to evaluate the talent pool before drafting a team.

Scheyer, Zoubek says, was notorious for taking scouting seriously, assembling a team that fit together and then installing plays that fit his players’ strengths and basketball acumen.

“I was always on his team on the bench not really doing much, having a good time,” Zoubek said with a laugh. “He’d be running the whole show.”

While Scheyer has spent his whole coaching career at Duke, he sought opinions from contacts outside Durham. The brief period of time he spent playing professional basketball opened his eyes to more modern offensive systems than the one Krzyzewski traditionally ran. Scheyer borrowed sets he learned playing for Finch and David Blatt. He also peppered Finch, Brad Stevens and other coaching mentors with an array of questions.

“He always asked really good questions,” Finch said. “There was a curious nature to him. Even when he played for me, some of the conversations we would have or the questions he would ask made me realize, ‘Hey, this guy thinks about basketball in a deeper way, the way a coach would.’”

By 2021, after recruiting some of Duke’s top players and rising from Duke special assistant to associate head coach, Scheyer thought he was ready to run a program of his own. He interviewed for the DePaul job. That went to Tony Stubblefield. He interviewed for the UNLV job. That went to Kevin Kruger.

Those swings and misses turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Soon after that, Krzyzewski decided the 2021-22 season would be his last. The Duke search committee, with Krzyzewski’s blessing, chose Scheyer as his successor.

Krzyzewski’s final year was derisively framed as a retirement tour at the time, but in actuality it gave Scheyer more time to learn. He was able to think about whether he would have called timeout when Krzyzewski did or ask Krzyzewski to explain in real time a substitution he made or a set he chose to run.

“Some of the best conversations I’ve ever had with Coach were throughout that season, just talking about why he made certain decisions, what’s going on in his mind,” Scheyer said.

The history of coaches who have followed a legend is grim, to say the least. Villanova fired Kyle Neptune last month after three down seasons. Syracuse’s Adrian Autry and North Carolina’s Hubert Davis will coach under pressure next season.

To say that Scheyer has been the exception to that rule is the ultimate understatement. Last Saturday, Scheyer outdueled Alabama’s Nate Oats, improved to 89-21 as Duke’s head coach and moved within two wins of joining Bob Knight and Dean Smith as the only men to win a national title as both a player and as a head coach.

Houston head coach Kelvin Sampson, Scheyer’s opponent in Saturday’s second national semifinal, said Thursday that he has a ton of respect for the 37-year-old Duke coach.

“I’ll tell you how good Jon Scheyer has been,” Sampson said. “Nobody talks about him replacing Coach K anymore. He’s Jon Scheyer. He’s got his team in the Final Four. I think that speaks volumes for him.”

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Final Four: How a fluke eye injury forced Jon Scheyer from playing to coaching and eventually led to him taking over for Coach K at Duke

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