News item: High school senior Tyler Adams, a center verbally (and informally) committed to play for Mike Krzyzewski in the Fall of 2011, attended Georgetown University’s Midnight Madness celebration last weekend instead of Duke’s Countdown to Craziness.
Predictably, the corner of the internet devoted to Blue Devil Basketball exploded with speculation.
Why would a player committed to attending Duke attend another school’s big recruiting event? Was Adams still planning on being a Blue Devil? And what gives with those no-good Hoyas recruiting a player who had already given his word that he would go elsewhere?
I don’t have the answers to those questions. Given my personal experience being 18 years old and trying to choose a college, I’d bet that Adams himself doesn’t even have the answers to those questions.
It’s not uncommon that I find myself clueless when it comes to divining the innermost thoughts and desires of the teenage basketball phenom du jour. It is, however, rare that I find myself, not only clueless, but also completely and utterly uncaring.
I got an e-mail with the news of Adams spurning Countdown to Craziness from a predictably outraged friend of mine, a lawyer when he isn’t trolling message boards for Duke Basketball news. Another friend (also an attorney) followed up with the latest rumors from “people who know things on the internet.”
My first thought (as I received these e-mails in between saving human lives, or something like that) was that my lawyer friends obviously don’t work as hard as they say they do. And bizarrely, my second thought was nothing at all.
In six years as a columnist, I have written close to 100 columns. A plurality of those columns were about the Duke Basketball team. Many of them touched on recruiting; more touched on the future prospects of the team. Pumping out opinions about the men’s basketball team is what I do. I am a Duke Basketball Opinions Haver.
But this time: Nothing. Blank. Zero. Eric Montross.
Perhaps it’s because I don’t know anything about Tyler Adams’ game. Or that what I do know about his game doesn’t excite me. While it’s true that I don’t know much, it wasn’t unexciting to think about another wide-body manning the paint in Cameron Indoor. And not knowing much about a particular player’s ability didn’t affect the excitement I felt when Lance Thomas, for example, committed.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve gained perspective. Seeing sick people all the time would have to make one pause before assigning so much importance to a silly game played by kids younger than I am. Of course, I’ve been hanging out with sick people for two years now, and it didn’t stop me from analyzing Harrison Barnes’ recruiting blog posts like they were smoke signals from the Vatican.
Instead, I think that at some conscious or subconscious level, I don’t think that my favorite team could possibly do anything to make me any happier. I don’t think that it could possibly lose enough games to make me sad either. For the first time since Art Monk, Gary Clark and the 1991 Redskins won the Super Bowl when I was six years old, my team won.
All of a sudden, Tyler Adams doesn’t mean as much. Even Austin Rivers didn’t mean as much. And who knows if Duke vs. UNC or Duke vs. Michigan State or Duke vs. Hypothetical NCAA Tournament Opponent will mean as much this year?
Maybe this is the hangover. For seven years, I wondered if Duke Basketball would win a championship before I left Durham. Now they’ve won, and I’m blissfully numb.
Maybe this is just what it’s like to root for a team that has won the big one. Maybe I’ll still cheer just as hard, but I just won’t sweat the small stuff, like where a high school big man chooses to spend an October Friday night.
Sounds good to me.
Alex Fanaroff is a fourth-year medical student. His column runs every Wednesday.
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