The scoreboard in Cameron Indoor reads 106-70. Duke forward and Stanford alum Neal Begovich has just slammed home a two-handed dunk to provide the exclamation point in the final minute. As the closing seconds tick off, the still-packed house eagerly awaits … something. I hurriedly try to send one last tweet.
Moments before the clock hits zero, the journalist to our right and the Sports Information Director on our left swiftly vault their middle-aged bodies over the media table and onto the court. They are gone faster than I can type out “Raynaud.” I look at fellow Channel Tree writers Sam Weyen and Jose Saldana, and we wonder what it is that we don’t know. Then we feel it.
A mass of students, dressed as mob bosses and competitive swimmers, is now on top of us. I try to shield my MacBook as my body is pushed into the media table. Cooper Flagg and Kon Knueppel are running by on their way to the locker room. And every one of their classmates wants a piece of them, extending their hands, hoping for some sweaty palm-to-palm contact. Head Coach Jon Scheyer follows suit and I start to realize why I never notice the media members when I watch Duke on television.
From the moment they were allowed in the arena, the former residents of a Hooverville called Krzyzewskiville have been intimately close to us. Every passionate flail of the two young men behind me makes contact with some part of my body. The journalist to my right had an iPhone dropped on him during one moment of excitement. Even getting out of my chair to stand for the Anthem proved to be a five-point turn and threatened to cut off circulation.
The hardest working adults in the place are not coaches Jon Scheyer or Kyle Smith. They are the men tasked with crowd control. Unlike Maples Pavilion or Haas Pavilion or any other pavilion we have come to know, this is a hands-on job with high stakes. Starting an hour before tip and continuing after the players are safely in their postgame showers, these men are barking orders and keeping the peace. On this day they do a masterful job, and Cameron Indoor, per usual, is an out-of-body celebration of basketball greatness.
We arrive on Friday for the Saturday game. Sam and Jose no longer live in the Bay Area, so they are intentional about representing Channel Tree for the biggest matchups and the best game day experiences. A game at Duke - in the year of Cooper Flagg - is a no-brainer.
Normally we approach these trips with great preparation. We are meticulous in our planning of our work, and also of our touristic duties. This time, our itinerary is blank and Sam the photographer is sans camera. So we look for answers where any good American would: a Walmart Supercenter.
You can buy most anything in a Walmart Supercenter. As long as your expectations of anything are tempered. The camera section features polaroids, small polaroids, knockoff polaroids, and digital cameras shaped like children’s cartoons. Naturally, Sam selects Bluey. The Bluey device is not only a digital camera with multiple pixels, but it also holds five games and plays MP3 files. The camera’s versatility is underwhelmingly overwhelming. That is, if you can find the screwdriver necessary to insert three AA batteries. Which we can’t.
At our hotel the front desk calls the building engineer to our room. His name is Brian, and he looks like one. Brian doesn’t love that he’s here, but he dutifully helps us power up Bluey before being the first of the dozens of photos that Bluey can hold in memory.
Before we step foot in Cameron Indoor on Saturday, we get ourselves hyped up for the game by learning more about General William Tecumseh Sherman. We know we are hours away from Duke going scorched-earth on Stanford.
We visit Bennett Place, a simple family farm near campus that Big Appomattox doesn’t want you to know about. Bennett Place is the site of the final surrender of the Civil War, whereafter Confederate forces numbering some 100,000 laid down their arms for good. We expect to find reenactors, but we soon find we read the wrong brochure. Instead, Jose and I pose at the Bennett family table, where generals Sherman and Johnston interrupted several Bennett family dinners and effectively ended the war. I buy Union and Confederate gnomes in the gift shop to commemorate the swift end of all hard feelings between the two sides.
We arrive at Cameron before the fans do. We take our pictures, orient ourselves, and remark how the arena feels way too small to fit more than 9,000 fanatics. The players begin to shoot around, and Duke walk-on Stanley Borden chats us up. He is a great kid, destined for success outside of basketball.
This is not just any Duke basketball game. Broadcasting legend Dick Vitale makes his return to the microphone after an extended battle with multiple flavors of cancer. I have listened to the distinctive tones of Dickie V for my entire life, partly because I have always watched too much college hoops. His voice, and his turns of phrase like ‘diaper dandy,’ and his enthusiasm and love for the game, are all key parts of many core memories for all fans of the sport.
There is a bell at center court before the game. After posing for selfies with the Cameron Crazies and shaking every hand he can, Dickie V makes his way to midcourt and triumphantly rings the bell. He is cancer free, and back in his version of heaven, he says. He makes sure that everyone in the media receives a flier advertising his charity gala, where many millions have and will be raised to fight pediatric cancer. His legacy on the mic is legendary, but his charitable efforts and contributions exceed all of it.
Duke gets off to a 6-0 lead and my Apple Watch warns me that I may never hear again. The Cardinal fight back, tying things at 13 apiece after an Oziyah Sellers three at the 14:57 mark. That proves to be the high water mark for the visiting Cardinal.
Sam crouches on the baseline, Bluey in hand, doing his best to use every pixel. Jose and I are close enough to the students that one of their cheer sheets falls in our lap. They have Instagram pictures and student email addresses for each Stanford player, coupled with fun facts and personal smears.
Maxime Raynaud has a strong first half to keep the Cardinal somewhat within reach, scoring 18 points and making 4 three point field goals. Early in the second half, the students target him with chants about his ex-girlfriend. Maxime is visibly upset, and gestures to the audience, telling them to cut it out. He will fail to score another point in the final 19 minutes, as her name uninhibitedly rings through the halls of Cameron.
Even Stanford walk-on Ethan Kitch is a frequent target of razzing. Kitch has not seen the court this season and will likely redshirt. That doesn’t prevent the Crazies from singling him out and attacking him with a diverse barrage of insults and putdowns.
Cooper Flagg is as good as advertised, but really, they all are. Cooper draws the attention for his highlight dunks and defensive firepower, but like every player in blue, he makes the right play each and every time. Duke racks up 23 assists against 5 turnovers, and finishes with shooting splits of 63/48/92. They bring fifth year grad transfers and five star underclassmen off the bench. There really are levels to this sport.
We miss our opportunity to talk to Flagg or Knueppel or Maluach by not making it into their locker room. But we still felt close enough to the players. Knueppel nearly wound up in my lap before the halftime buzzer. The journalist to my right showed me a picture of a hit he took years ago from a diving player, which cost him a laptop but scored him a laptop background.
Kyle Smith smiles in the press conference as he sees the microphone head my way. I ask him about the extended minutes for grad transfer Cole Kastner. Kyle is in fairly high spirits, and believes that Stanford did not play all that poorly. They ran into a buzzsaw in perhaps the toughest venue in the nation.
Duke graduate Jaylen Blakes failed to get going in his return to Durham. Perhaps he wanted to play well a little too badly, especially after shaking hands with Coach K. Whatever the cause, he finished with only 2 points on 1-10 shooting, undoubtedly his weakest game in what has been a phenomenally consistent campaign for the point guard.
As things draw to a close, we commit to meandering around campus. The gothic architecture is even more dramatic in the faint light of the sidewalk lamps. Duke Chapel is the most impressive of all, standing some 200 feet tall and every bit worthy of a Quasimodo. If there are ugly buildings on campus, we don’t find them. We eat dinner in a student union of sorts and realize how old we are quickly getting.
An unplanned Sunday in the Research Triangle turns out as well as any planned one. We explore the Natural History Museum of Raleigh, highlighted by paleontologists actively working on the “dueling dinos”, two remarkably well preserved and intertwined fossils of a tyrannosaurus and triceratops. The dinos buoy conversation as we stuff our bodies to the brim with platters at Sam Jones BBQ, before wandering around the downtown and looking at the mansions of various state politicians. We play HoopGrids on the drives, yelling out guesses of Ish Smith whenever possible.
We wander the UNC campus and find an unlocked gate to their football stadium, soon to be home to Bill Belichick. The campus is nice, but it’s not Duke. They are clearly the Berkeley in the Tobacco Road rivalry.
SNL 50 and the NBA All Star Game run concurrently in the night. We return to our hotel, with pantry freezers stocked with six kinds of complimentary ice cream, to watch both shows simultaneously. Sam and I realize we watched the 40th anniversary special together in our freshman dorm ten years prior. We wonder where we might be for the 60th, or in what conference Stanford will find itself by that point.
Jose departs early Presidents’ Day morning. Sam and I fit in a final hike in the Duke Forest, before stops at Zaxby’s and our traditional Krispy Kreme en route to the airport. We forget to top up our rental car as an overpass called the Can Opener distracts us. This overpass, just ever so slightly too short, has removed the tops of many a truck. We pose for a selfie as folks at a stoplight gawk at us.
It will take days before we can get any files out of Bluey. The images will prove to be on par with the headshots of Nessie. Still, our selfies in the arena, in front of Michael Jordan’s memorabilia at UNC, next to pterodactyls and in empty football stadiums, tell a story of sorts.
This trip wasn’t about basketball. They never are.