Jim Valvano

James Thomas Anthony "Jim" Valvano (March 10, 1946 – April 28, 1993), nicknamed Jimmy V, was an American college basketball player, coach, and broadcaster.

While the head basketball coach at North Carolina State University, his team won the 1983 NCAA Basketball Tournament against small odds. Valvano is not only remembered for running up and down the court after winning the game against the Houston Cougars, seemingly in disbelief and looking for someone to hug, but also for his inspirational 1993 ESPY Awards speech, given just eight weeks before he died of bone cancer.

Biography

Personal

Valvano was the middle child of Rocco and Angelina Valvano, and was born in Corona, Queens, New York. Valvano was a three-sport athlete at Seaford High School in Seaford on Long Island and graduated in 1963. He married his high school sweetheart, Pamela Levine, and they had three daughters - Nicole, Jamie, and Lee Ann. His younger brother, Bob, is a sportscaster and former basketball coach.

Football coach Vince Lombardi was Valvano's role model. Valvano told an ESPY audience, on March 3, 1993, that he took some of Lombardi's inspirational speeches out of the book Commitment to Excellence, and used them with his team. Valvano discussed how he planned to use Lombardi's speech to the Green Bay Packers in front of his Rutgers freshman basketball team prior to his first game as their coach.

Barry Hannah

Howard Barry Hannah (April 23, 1942 – March 1, 2010) was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi. Hannah was born in Meridian, Mississippi, on April 23, 1942, and grew up in Clinton, Mississippi. He wrote eight novels and five short story collections.

His first novel, Geronimo Rex (1972), was nominated for the National Book Award. Airships, his 1978 collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, the American Civil War, and the modern South, won the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. The following year, Hannah received the prestigious Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Hannah won a Guggenheim, the Robert Penn Warren Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story.

He was awarded the Fiction Prize of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters twice and received Mississippi's prestigious Governor's Award in 1989 for distinguished representation of the state of Mississippi in artistic and cultural matters. For a brief time Hannah lived in Los Angeles and worked as a writer for the film director Robert Altman. He was director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, where he taught creative writing for 28 years. He died on March 1, 2010, of a heart attack.

Dear World

Dear World is a Broadway musical with a book by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee and music and lyrics by Jerry Herman. With its opening, Herman became the first composer-lyricist in history to have three productions running simultaneously on Broadway. It starred Angela Lansbury, who won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical in 1969 for her performance as the Countess Aurelia.

Based on Jean Giraudoux's play The Madwoman of Chaillot as adapted by Maurice Valency, it focuses on the Countesses Aurelia, Constance and Gabrielle, who deviously scheme to stop businessmen from drilling for oil in the Parisian neighbourhood of Chaillot. The forces of idealism, love and poetry win over those of greed, materialism and science.

Productions and background

The musical had a notably troubled preview period that included multiple changes to the script and score. Lucia Victor, Gower Champion's assistant and a director of several revivals, including Hello, Dolly!, was hired as director, but resigned shortly thereafter, due to "artistic differences" with the musical's star, Angela Lansbury, and the authors, according to The New York Times.Peter Glenville was then hired, but resigned following negative reviews during tryouts in Boston, Massachusetts. Producer Alexander H. Cohen stated (in an article in The New York Times of November 19, 1968) that "there was no friction between Mr. Glenville and Miss Lansbury, the composer, the authors or the producer... an advance arrangement had been made with Mr. Glenville to direct the show through last week only." The show's final director, Joe Layton, was then hired, also replacing the choreographer Donald Saddler.

Mike Krzyzewski

Michael William Krzyzewski (/ʃəˈʃɛfski/ shə-SHEV-ski; nicknamed "Coach K"; born February 13, 1947) is an American college basketball coach and former player. Since 1980, he has served as the head men's basketball coach at Duke University, having taken over the program from Bill Foster. At Duke, Krzyzewski has led the Blue Devils to five NCAA Championships, 12 Final Fours, 12 ACC regular season titles, and 13 ACC Tournament championships. Krzyzewski is also the coach of the United States men's national basketball team, whom he led to two gold medals at the 2008 Summer Olympics and 2012 Summer Olympics. He was the head coach of the American team that won the gold medals at the 2010 FIBA World Championship and the 2014 FIBA World Championship. He was also an assistant coach for the 1992 "Dream Team".

Krzyzewski was a point guard at Army from 1966 to 1969 under coach Bob Knight. From 1975 to 1980, he was the head basketball coach at the same school. Krzyzewski has amassed a record 88 wins in NCAA tournament games, while averaging 25 wins per season. He is a two-time inductee into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, in 2001 for his individual coaching career and in 2010 as part of the collective induction of the "Dream Team". He was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006, and the United States Olympic Hall of Fame in 2009 (with the "Dream Team")