Skeletons in the closet

Skeletons molder in most of our closets. They certainly do in mine, and there are some real beauties, and the ones I can actually share with you include the truly odious—I proudly pulled the lever for Jimmy Carter in the first election I was legally allowed to vote, for example, and stayed up late watching the returns to jeer and hoot along with my friends as Gerald Ford was turned out of office. Just look how that turned out.

There are also the simply embarrassing and those referable to indiscretion and the foibles of callow youth. I once paid nearly 10 dollars to hear Bad Company and Ted Nugent in concert. But worst of all, growing up in suburban Washington, D.C. I was, in my larval state, a Maryland fan.

Back then, the only things I knew about Duke was that it was the alma mater of the parents of some down-the-street friends of mine and that it was situated even more to the south. Years later I would hear my chief of Medicine at Georgetown sonorously intone recollections of his colleagues at Mr. Duke’s Hospital and life at the medical school back in the day, but my first exposure to a Dukie was in the form of my friends’ dad, who’d sit in front of the TV in his shorts, drinking beer, shouting and cursing at the perennially hapless Redskins.

I preferred the Terrapins, revered Terp basketball, coach Lefty Driesell and above all else, the university’s outstanding lacrosse team. Maryland’s Cole Field House was also the home court for a number of games for the local NBA franchise, the Baltimore Bullets, and as a kid, I saw all the legends play there: Wilt, Kareem, Havlicek, Jerry West, Earl Monroe, Walt Frazier, Willis Reed and Duke’s Jack Marin who played for the Bullets. Fine times.

The last time I pulled for Maryland was on a cold winter night in a nearly deserted roadhouse at a Delaware beach in January of 1988. That particular night the Terps were taking on Duke in Cameron, and Maryland, still reeling from the death of Len Bias and what amounted to the dismissal of Lefty in its wake, managed to upset the Devils 72-69. Duke would survive the loss and advance to the Final Four that Spring and finish out the 1987-88 season in the AP poll at number five.

Maryland now plays its home games at the Comcast Center, an even more beastly hive of thuggery and loutish behavior than its predecessor, as witnessed by the spectacle of swarms of police in riot gear, quelling the brutes with billy clubs and pepper spray following the Terps victory over Duke up there last March, snapping as it did their six-game losing streak to the Devils. Any lingering affection I may have had for Maryland athletics is long since dissipated. Sojourns as an undergrad at the University of Vermont and later as a medical student and house officer at Georgetown didn’t foster any particular loyalty to athletic teams either. At Vermont in my day, it was all about men’s ice hockey with the choice seats in the drafty field house reserved for the local business community. I didn’t stand a chance. My years at Georgetown fell during the era of John Thompson and its attendant and McCarthyite Hoya Paranoia. Despite having a Cameron-esque arena on campus, the Hoyas played most of their games at the Capital Centre in Landover MD, thereby splitting the distance between D.C. and Baltimore, but thumbing most students and those of us who lived adjacent to the University in the eye.

Science has struggled to explain why people develop such fierce allegiances to sports teams. Some believe the psychology of the sports fan is rooted in group identity, a vestigial remnant of primitive tribal and warrior culture. Others point to the biochemical and hormonally mediated events experienced as fans cheer on their teams. And some believe intense interest in a sports team serves as a buffer against depression and fosters a sense of belonging and self-worth. It is likely that the combination of profound sociologic, emotional and physiologic phenomena all contribute to the explosion in the popularity of sports events over the past several decades. Collegiate and sports rivalries can also strip pretense and infuse familiarity into otherwise sterile workplace relationships, sometimes at the expense of politesse. Learning my wife had attended Auburn, a colleague who was an Alabama alum recoiled in shock and revulsion. The difference between Alabama and Auburn, she sniffed, is the difference between culture and agriculture. Well now.

We are all works in progress in an endless cycle of experience, enlightenment and rebirth. For me, I have been in Durham now for nearly eighteen years and my metamorphosis, at least in the sphere of institutional and team loyalties, seems complete.