Dear Reader,
My most vivid memory of Carl Franks comes from my days as a sports reporter. It was, I think, a preseason practice and Franks and some of the team's beat writers were having a loose and easygoing conversation. As the reporters tried to find an interesting feature to write after a practice that produced little news, one reporter asked Carl about a letter he had sent out to incoming freshmen about walking onto the football team.
"Yeah, I sent a letter to each guy coming in, telling him about the football team and encouraging him to walk on," Carl drawled.
Seeing an opportunity to get a little joke in, I said wryly, "But Coach, I never got one."
His brow furrowed, and, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that I'm undersized for a college kicker--not to mention that I'm not much of a kicker and was obviously joking--he asked if I wanted to play. His face and voice registered concern and interest.
Stunned at being taken in earnest, I noted that I'm just 5-foot-6 and 140 pounds, fully dressed and carrying five pounds of weights in my pocket. He ticked off the names of comparably sized players on his team.
I replied that those guys were certainly faster than I.
He said that if I couldn't do anything else, he always needs people to give the quarterbacks practice with snaps on the sideline.
As visions of a fall spent hunched over with a quarterback's hand against my rear overloaded my brain, I finally succeeded in begging off on account of excessive schoolwork.
Carl again smiled gently and said, "If you ever change your mind..."
While this past season progressed, it became increasingly clear to everyone watching that Carl Franks was not the right man for the Duke football coaching job. Nevertheless, it was hard for me to root against a man who was always kind and funny around me. The worst thing I could say about him as a man--not as a football coach--was his tendency to act goofy, but if that were a crime, I'd have been jailed many issues ago.
No, Carl was a tough guy to root against. He reminded me of Doug Graber, an old coach at Rutgers whom I briefly knew--he worked with my dad on a project and then gave our entire family a personal tour of RU's football facilities--and who was as out of his depth there, as Carl was at Duke. For his last home game, the crowd greeted him with boos and sent him off wth an overwhelming chorus of "Doug must go!" I remember my dad putting his arm around me and my brother to protect us from the venom being directed at a genuinely nice man whom we knew and the critical mob did not.
Sure, both Franks and Graber needed to be fired, and if you'd asked me privately I'd have said so. But knowing each as men who were doing their best to suceed in difficult circumstances and watching them fail made me sympathetic and inclined to see their firings as sad neccessities and not causes for celebration.
In this issue, Robert Samuel looks back at Franks' tenure at Duke, how it began and what went wrong. Emily Almas opens the door to the world of Dukies with disabilites--the challenges of negotiating campus and the University's continuing non-compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Alex Garinger tells of some Blue Devils bringing Broadway to Duke and Duke to Broadway.
Lastly, Matt Sullivan introduces Giorgio Batsakias, the George of Garage fame and the mayor of dining and nightlife along 9th Street. Anthony Cross and Betsy McDonald offer glimpses of the 9th Street beyond Batsakias' properties in a photo essay.
Enjoy and have a fun, safe spring break.
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