If you're anything like me, you've wondered what it's like to be a Duke athlete.
You've pondered the possibility of donning free t-shirts, sweatshirts, warm-up shirts and every other type of shirt you can imagine. Of hearing personal jeers from jealous wannabes with too much free time and too little dignity. Of trekking to practice after class and waking up early for mandatory study hall.
Doesn't the athlete's life seem so good? How could we commoners resist tempting ourselves in this alternate reality? But all kidding aside for a moment, it's difficult to walk around Cameron and not fantasize about pulling a Jeff Capel. Unfortunately, such a fantasy has become as likely as a Duke kicker making a field goal. (Thank you, thank you, I'll be here every other Wednesday.)
That's why last week's open kicker tryouts were so intriguing. Or so everyone thought.
Unless you've been trapped under Vince Oghobaase for a week, you've heard that the football team has turned to the student body for a kicker. Unhappy with the Blue Devils' 20 percent field goal conversion rate, head coach Ted Roof invited several athletes not in season to showcase their kicking talents. The next day, The Chronicle ran an ad that extended the invitation to the entire student body. Game on.
Naturally, there was a legitimate buzz on campus.
After all, this was an unprecedented opportunity for 5-foot-8 English majors like me. It was the golden ticket we've all been waiting for, even if our ideal Willy Wonka is Mike Krzyzewski.
But unlike Charlie and his comrades who wolfed down those Wonka Bars, the Duke students didn't exactly come out in droves.
Eight showed up.
Wait. Only eight kids tried out? There are more people in the stacks on Friday night. Don't we all dream of kicking in front of hundreds of students? Well, yeah. But the 4 p.m. tryouts were leaked to the general public around 2:30 p.m. last Monday, and by the time the supplementary ad ran in your favorite campus daily, the list of candidates had already been sliced to four. Game over.
Had Roof selected the student favorite, laxer Bo Carrington, this bizarre story might have stayed alive on campus. It might have hit Deadspin. Instead, he chose some rugby-playing freshman who was first identified by number. The kid didn't even travel to Miami last week. Apparently, Continental doesn't accept golden tickets.
But that's not the point. The reason these kicker tryouts were appealing was not because it offered us a potential outlet for our far-flung fantasy. After all, Coach K hosts walk-on tryouts every year, and that's not a story-at least not one that's read online by more than four times as many people as any other article.
No, it wasn't the tryouts that attracted our notice. The appeal was that the team needed, of all positions, a kicker.
Yes, a kicker.
We can dream of taking the field for a revenue team, but dreams can only take us so far. We know that we will never make a 40-foot runner to force overtime against North Carolina on ESPN2. We know that we will never elude tacklers and flip into the end zone for a touchdown.
But kicking is different. How hard can kicking be? The job is simple: jog, kick, stare and either celebrate or cry. It's like third-grade soccer.
Except for, you know, that whole end-of-game situation, when a seemingly non-athletic athlete has to make a kick in front of screaming fans whose Saturdays depend on whether he boots a ball through two metal spires.
That's where it gets tricky. And that's also why this story proved fleeting.
We plebes realized we won't be on the football team because kicking ain't easy. So much for those free t-shirts.
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