Dr. Price's Duke
(01/26/11 10:17am)
Let’s begin like this: When discussing Reynolds Price, I don’t have a unique vantage point.
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Let’s begin like this: When discussing Reynolds Price, I don’t have a unique vantage point.
When I was an undergrad, I used to have this recurrent dream.
Over winter break, I was listening to a radio broadcast of the Outback Bowl between Florida and Penn State.
As I write this column, I’m sitting in my apartment, which I have not left for the last 80 or so hours.
Let me be the first to say it in public: Thank you, Larry Moneta.
Let’s cut straight to the point. The only reason I’m writing this column—and the only reason you’re reading it—is to answer one question.
I have spent the last four weeks rotating through Duke Hospital’s medical intensive care unit, or, as it has so often seemed, The Saddest Place on Earth.
October marks the beginning of Graduation Speaker Picking season. Most years, that hasn’t meant much to me, since I wasn’t graduating and I didn’t really care what lame-o speaker the school convinced to deliver trite generalities to several hundred graduates and their assorted family members. But this year is different. This year I am graduating. And if the designated celebrity speaker is anything like the speaker the first time I graduated (the eminent and eminently unemployable Richard Wagoner), I will be sorely disappointed.
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.
I was talking to a former Duke athlete over the weekend, and she summed up the entire Karen Owen sex list PowerPoint better than anyone else.
Sometimes I think that one of the most important goals of medical school is to gradually inoculate future doctors against death.
The powers that be allowed me out of the hospital and into the wild this Saturday.
During Rosh Hashanah services, the rabbi at the Freeman Center (himself quoting another member of the Duke community) provided one of the more apt descriptions of students at this University that I had ever heard. “Duke students,” he said, “are always interviewing.”
Recently, while discussing the case of a dying patient who was, despite the reality of her situation, far too young to die, I was struck by the overwhelming sadness of the hospital. Aloud, I said to the intern standing next to me, “Every day, we see multiple patients whose stories are actually too sad to be true.”
For 20 years, I had a ritual. Every year, the night before the first day of school, I couldn’t sleep.
So this—finally—is the end.
Midnight. Bonfire. National champions. 61-59.
In the national media’s (grossly oversimplified) Final Four narrative, every team has a storyline. Butler is the homecoming Cinderella; Michigan State’s Tom Izzo is the greatest Tournament coach of this or any generation; West Virginia’s Bob Huggins is the local boy returned home and made good. Duke, of course, is the big bad villain.
Perhaps it took an outsider to really see this Duke team for what it is. In Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle, sportswriter Ray Ratto performed the autopsy on a year of California Basketball shut down decisively by Duke.
While in the line to get into the Duke-Carolina game, I had a conversation with a group of grad students about Duke’s chances to win the NCAA Tournament. Since I’m a sports columnist for The Chronicle (and Coach K had just called me out in front the entire student body), they asked me how I thought Duke would do in the postseason. When I told them that I’d give Duke a 40 percent chance to reach the Final Four and a 10 percent chance to win the entire thing, they told me I was crazy.