I am not a Cameron Crazy, but for several decades I’ve been crazy about Duke basketball.
Like most children reared in North Carolina without any particular familial affiliation, I became a fan of the state’s flagship public university. I blame this on media brainwashing, the kind that easily takes hold of a young and vulnerable minds.
I attended an “elite” private college in North Carolina, though not Duke. It was there that a close friend and future professor of philosophy convinced me of the moral imperative of shifting my allegiance away from Chapel Hill. We non-alumni fans have the privilege of starting out as part-time loyalists. The first sign that I was changing my shade of blue was when I cheered somewhat surreptitiously as a vastly more talented Carolina team four-cornered away the National Championship to Marquette in 1977.
The Duke team of that era—the cerebral Jim Spanarkel, the acrobatic Gene Banks, the hulking G-Man—were of local origin but, to most North Carolinians, still strangers in their own state. Now that was a team I could get behind.
Law school took me to a semi-elite private college—still not Duke—and the early K years were forgettable until the 1984 Dawkins/Alarie team upset UNC in the ACC tournament semifinal. A nascent romance was rekindled.
Well, the rest is history. How many people can point to the happiest single moment of their lives outside the birth of a child? Mine was on March 28, 1992, when two seconds transformed despair into the greatest possible euphoria thanks to Grant Hill and Christian Laettner.
I was fortunate to visit Cameron several times without a ticket by walking into the lobby and sneaking onto the court through serpentine hallways where I watched the game standing in the end zone bleachers next to the pep band. The intensity of those experiences was unforgettable; I wish that I could take the compressed emotion of two hours in Cameron and let it wash over me for a week.
Of the four championships that pre-dated this year, there was something especially rewarding about 2010. UNC had just taken the national title and had won out over Duke for the nation’s top recruit, Harrison Barnes, who was long rumored to be heading to Durham. The basketball bipolarity in the state looked to be in danger with Carolina dominance as far as the eye could see. Going into the season, the 2009-10 Duke team was expected to be good but not generally thought to possess championship mettle.
2010 represented the sacrificing of individual skills for the greater good, and that group of players was all that a team should embody. Jon Scheyer played the point, not his natural position; Brian Zoubek, who in his early years was consigned to the deep bench, just kept getting rebounds and doing dirty work; Kyle Singler put off the riches of the NBA to come back for his senior year. It was not the most talented team Duke had ever had—not by a long shot—but it was the anti-Kentucky, a team of tested veterans with will and poise and guts.
Notwithstanding my regard for Duke, it was Wisconsin that won my admiration over the last two years. If you want to feel good about college athletics, read Frank Kaminsky’s statement about coming back for his senior year and what being at Wisconsin meant to him.
So then, prior to playing Duke for the title, Wisconsin just happens to beat the two teams whose exit from the tournament is cause for my own celebration. Like Duke in 2010, Wisconsin won with guys who might not have been the most talented, but they competed with a tenacity and intelligence borne out of multiple seasons of playing together. If I didn’t live in a state where college basketball bragging rights are a zero sum game, I would have been torn about whether to root for Duke or Wisconsin.
There can be no blame placed on Coach Krzyzewski for taking advantage of a system whose benefits are open to all. Any major program would have taken Jahlil Okafor in less than a heartbeat.
Still, the existence of “one-and-done” is anathema to the archetypical “student athlete” which the feckless NCAA likes to propagate in its commercials. It is a Faustian bargain between the NCAA and the NBA that permits one semester of class attendance to serve as the scholastic nexus that ties a player to an academic institution. When I hear references to Duke and Kyrie Irving in the same sentence, it has a bit of a hollow ring.
All honor to Jah and Justise and Tyus for bringing home a championship. I can’t blame them for speedily accepting the millions that will be offered to them. But I can’t feel the same way about the 2015 freshmen that I do about Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley, Grant Hill, Shane Battier, Jon Scheyer and Kyle Singler. The victories by those who endured, who committed to a program, mean more to me.
Duke has a nice class coming in to join some talented veterans. Maybe these players will stick around for a while. And if they win a national title, they will be able to say the sweat they gave for Duke did not wash away as storm water but seeped into the Cameron floor. And we will be able to say, unlike this year, that we grew accustomed to their faces.
Joe Pearlman is an attorney living in Charlotte, N.C.
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