Possibly the best Coach K ad, and certainly the funniest, was one that he did for Bud Light that ran during the 1994 NCAA tournament.
The basic gag was that this character saw three limo drivers at the airport with a sign that read Krzyzewski, which he naturally mispronounced. He asks if any of the drivers is going to the Final Four, and one of the other guy points to his left and says, “he is.” The sign is directly in front of his face, so we never see who it actually is.
The limo driver picks him up, and the actor, a guy named Eddie Jemison, is having a great time in the back of the limo. There’s a basketball in the back seat, which he bounces off the windows, and then he realizes there is a phone too, which was not very common in 1994.
So he makes a number of prank calls, including Billy Packer, Grant Hill, Jason Kidd, and Big Dog, aka Purdue star Glenn Robinson. In Kidd’s case, he suggests a transfer to Duke; with Robinson, he instructs a hotel clerk to make a 4 AM wakeup call.
Eventually, the driver asks if this is his first time in a limo, and his passenger realizes he’s been had. He asks, “aren’t you…coach Kroozawooski?”
Coach K corrects his pronunciation and then says, “yes, I am.”
If it happened today, we’d say the ad went viral, because it was a huge hit. Making it even better: the background music was “Running with the Devil.” For some reason, it never caught on in Cameron. You’d think it would have.
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