Site meister: Armstrong Photo:Noah Berger

Actually, they would "post." They'd wake up in the morning, have coffee, walk their dogs, head to the office, and then, once settled in front of the computer, they would do what people everywhere were just beginning to add to their morning routines--they would log on. Before a day full of meetings and deadlines, they'd meet up at their favorite virtual hangout, a website known simply and widely as the "DBR."

The acronym stands for the Duke Basketball Report, which is what the site's founders had first intended it to be, a website where anybody anywhere could go for information on Duke basketball, a fan site for the Blue Devil faithful. But seven years and 130-million hits later, the DBR has outgrown itself. As much as it is hoops newsletter--stats, schedules, game analysis, recruiting news, links to stories--it is cyber campus, a Duke away from Duke. And although they're quick to disavow any official relationship with the university, the site's creators have accomplished something they never saw coming. They meant to build, as one puts it, "a neighborhood pub on the Internet." Instead, they built the neighborhood.

"Julio" and "Boswell" (screen names) met, appropriately, online. It was the early-Nineties and they were posting on Prodigy, one of the first Internet service providers, where, for a daily rate, a user could sign up for membership on a bulletin board of his or her choosing. After a series of electronic interactions on the Duke basketball board, they decided to meet in person. "Julio," it turned out, was Julian King, an IT consultant living in Raleigh and a lifelong Blue Devils fan. King, though not an alumnus himself, is the son of two alumni and the grandson of the late Deryl Hart, the former Duke president and chair of the department of surgery. "Boswell," on the other hand, had not only gone to Duke, he'd stayed as long as he possibly could. Mike Hemmerich '80, J.D. '85, M.B.A. '94 is president of the Dilweg Companies, a Research Triangle-based commercial real-estate firm, which he co-founded with former Duke and Green Bay Packers quarterback Anthony Dilweg '88.

"Prodigy had started raising its rates," says Hemmerich. "So one day, we were talking--this was '96, Wojo's first season--and Julian said, 'You know, there's this thing called the World Wide Web. We could just make our own website.' And I said, 'Okay, great.' "

The first incarnation of the DBR was called "juliovision.com," a standard, no-frills page with a bulletin board for comments. "It was just a gag," says King. "It was a joke on my name." Hemmerich and King may not have taken themselves very seriously, but juliovision, they decided, would adhere to a certain standard. Theirs, unlike the majority of fan message boards, would be a controlled forum. The language would be clean. There would be no "flaming," as it's known in cyberspace, no ranting or bashing. Even "woofing"--baselessly declaring one's team to be superior to another, as in, "The Sixers are going to destroy the Celtics tonight!"--would be discouraged. Anyone wishing to post a comment would have to be sensitive both to the other posters and the aims of the Duke program, including the players and the players' families. "We didn't want to do anything that would interfere with what Coach K's trying to accomplish," Hemmerich says. "We just wanted to create an atmosphere where everybody--our fans, fans from other schools, whoever--could share opinions, get insights, exchange thoughts on the team, and so forth."

As word spread and juliovision grew, the site came to serve another function, one the tech world was then only beginning to fully grasp: A website like Hemmerich and King's that drew on a community of people spread out all over the world but connected through a common interest could be more than a virtual outlet or a source of news. By connecting those people digitally, and by having in place some means of verifying identity, it could connect them physically. It could move them--as it did Cary Willis Weems '77--to pack their bags and drive from Atlanta to Tampa to meet someone they'd never seen or talked to but who had--as Mike Rosen '70 did--an extra ticket to the game.

Soon, people who had met online were meeting outside stadiums, in restaurants, at picnics and parties, and sometimes for no other reason than to eat pizza and watch Grant Hill dunk in slow motion over and over again. They were shaking hands and trading cards and, like members of a secret club, calling one another by their screen names. But juliovision wasn't secret in the least. In fact, it wasn't secret enough. It was free (still is), and it was quickly becoming more than Hemmerich and King could handle. By 1997, they'd decided to all but give up the hobby. Then juliovision made perhaps its most crucial connection. It put Hemmerich and King in touch with their future partner.

James Armstrong '82 was born in Washington the day before a blizzard. He likes cats. He has a four-year-old, seventeen-pound Russian blue named Gremalkin. He attended high school in New Jersey and was expelled his senior year, but Duke let him in anyway. He majored in computer science and minored in mathematics and physics and, unofficially, basketball. All of this information you can find on his personal website.

What you can't find is that Armstrong is an expert website maker, a software engineer. Or that, upon discovering juliovision, he offered his services to Hemmerich and King for free. Or that, as a Cameron Crazy in the early Eighties, he originated the once popular "key-chain jangle" tactic for distracting the opposing team: "Clyde Austin, N.C. State's point guard, had these two really nice cars, which smelled strongly, to many of us, of illegal inducement. We threw aspirin at Mo Rivers [alleged to have stolen aspirin]. We threw underwear at Tony Warren [alleged to have shoplifted underwear]. Those were easy. But how were you going to throw cars on the floor? So I told everybody to start shaking their keys. He missed all eight free throws that night."

And it was just that sort of genius for defensive tactics that Hemmerich and King were looking for. Because, at the time, juliovision's defense was terrible. Without a firewall, they couldn't stop penetration (by hackers), and without a big man in the middle (an administrator like Armstrong), they couldn't regulate trash talking. When, in 1997, dozens of Kentucky Wildcat fans flooded the juliovision bulletin board, insulting Duke and its fans, Hemmerich and King decided enough was enough. "If we were going to keep it up," says Hemmerich, "we had to get help with the tech side of things." They took Armstrong up on his offer.

"They wanted accountability for posts and initial oversight," recalls Armstrong. "So I wrote some software for a basic bulletin-board system. People would have to include their e-mail address when they wanted to post something. We would read their post, and if we approved it, we would e-mail them an ID code and URL, which would enable them to actually put it on the bulletin board."

Armstrong, then vice president of engineering at The Internet Mall, a dot-com in California, had the know-how, and he also had the hardware, fast machines with oodles of bandwidth that could appreciably enhance the site: "At the time, J&B [Julio and Boswell] were getting bills for juliovision. So many people were visiting the site, it was busting its bandwidth quotas." So Armstrong asked his boss if they could run the site on The Internet Mall's machines. "He said, 'Well, if it doesn't cost us anything, why not?'" Juliovision didn't cost The Internet Mall anything, but it may well have cost other companies employing Duke fans. "A lot of people told us they were checking it out at work, so we were probably a great contributor to the American productivity drag." In 1999, juliovision acquired the domain name "dukebasketballreport.com," and while Hemmerich and King weren't taking themselves any more seriously, 100,000 hits a day for a three-year old site was no joke.