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That Championship Season
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SCOREBOARD
Preseason National
Invitational Tournament |
DUKE
87
98
95
63 |
Princeton 50
Villanova 85
Texas 69
Temple 61 |
| Regular
Season |
DUKE 91
78
93
102
104
97
83
108
99
115
84
103
97
98
85
98
83
100
81
101
89
91
98
82
80
95 |
Army 48
Illinois 77
Temple 68
Davidson 60
Michigan 61
Portland 64
Stanford 84
NC A&T 73
Florida State 72
Clemson 74
NC State 78
Virginia 61
Boston College 75
Georgia Tech 77
Wake Forest 62
Maryland 96 (OT)
North Carolina 85
Florida State 58
Clemson 64
NC State 75
Virginia 91
St. John’s 59
Georgia Tech 54
Wake Forest 80
Maryland 91
North Carolina 81 |
| ACC
& NCAA Tournaments |
DUKE 76
84
79
95
94
76
79
95
82 |
NC State 61
Maryland 82
North Carolina 53
Monmouth 52
Missouri 81
UCLA 63
S .California 69
Maryland 84
Arizona 72 |
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| Battier battles
down court. |
 or
some reason—abiding curiosity about the mix between academics
and athletics?—I made my way to Perkins Library the night of
the basketball championship game. A sign announced that the library
would be closing in about a half hour, at nine o’clock, “in
preparation for post-game festivities.” A half-dozen students
were in avid communication with the online catalogue. A lone reference
librarian, asked if reference business was slow, responded, with a
forlorn nod, “Very.”
  |
| Dunleavy's
three threes were assisted by good rebounding. |
Walking out of the library, I spotted
another sign, asking, “What Is Enlightenment?” The library
seemed the perfect enlightenment site—that is, a setting sure
to produce transformation. As did the evening’s destination,
Cameron Indoor Stadium.
In Cameron for the championship-game broadcast, the eyes
focused on the string of retired jerseys hanging from the rafters,
and just in front of that array, the eighteen-by-twenty-four-foot,
cinema-sized screen. A student sitting just in front of me, wearing
a baseball cap stylishly backward, was reading an issue of The Economist.
He was concentrating on a story whose substance I could not make out
but whose headline seemed perfect for the evening: “Let the huddled
masses in.” The student masses, if not exactly huddled, were
flowing onto the floor and into the stands.
There was something about the
Cameron dynamics that night that made it
a postmodern spectacle—fluid identities, the breaking down of
boundaries, the merging of the real and the unreal, and all that.
Just before game time, students clustered
around a Cameron camera crew for a live WRAL TV broadcast; the Cameron
masses watched themselves on the huge-screen TV and dutifully screamed
with enthusiasm at the image of their screaming with enthusiasm.
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| The Blue Devil's in the
house |
As the TV broadcast offered its “Prelude
to a Championship,” the baseball-cap kid gave up on his Economist
and led our section of the stands in bouncing up and down. Maybe the
up-and-down motion is a metaphor for approaching and connecting with
the basket. Or maybe it’s simply raw excitement expressing itself.
The Duke players were introduced, and each got an appropriate cheer
from Cameron—a long, appreciative “Boooo” for Carlos
Boozer, reverential bows in the direction of Shane Battier. In fact,
this was a virtual reality that came close to the Cameron home-game
reality. As Duke took to the free-throws line, the crowd hushed and
stared at the screen with arms outstretched to show the path to the
basket. As the situation reversed, Cameron’s faithful turned
energetically obnoxious, arms waving wildly, trying to distract the
beamed-in image of an Arizona athlete.
The Blue Devils found momentum four minutes or so into
the second half, and the roar of the crowd seemed intense enough to
rattle those hanging jerseys. People leapt up, and largely stayed
up. Sitting seemed too effortless in the face of a team effort. As
the TV showed a commercial for Enterprise car rentals, enterprising
students sparked an all-encompassing crowd “wave.” The wave
rippled through the floor, through the stands, and somehow it
traveled the distance to Minneapolis as an unstoppable
force.
At 11:11, the Cameron scoreboard read “2001 National
Champions,” and a News & Observer broadsheet with Duke-blue
inking and a “National Champs” headline—more enterprise
at work—was making its way through Cameron. A student sitting
behind me gave an exuberant hug to everyone around him. A Duke colleague,
happy if not out of control, found it too huge a hug: It dislodged
one of his contact lenses.
Back in the fall of 1997, one
particular student, later a religion major—a fine place, one
must think, for exploring issues of enlightenment—had written
his eagerness and his anxieties into his freshman-year journal (which
was excerpted in the pages of this magazine). “As I stand in
the corner of Cameron watching everybody file into the gym, I have
so many questions and so many hopes,” he said. And he wondered:
“Am I ready? Has my work paid off? Will college basketball be
everything it is hyped up to be and possibly more?” Shane Battier,
the best player in the nation this season and a three-time academic
All-American, now had his answers.
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