Search The Site
 
More options | Back issues
Home
News
Opinion & Forums
Careers
Multimedia
Leadership Forum
Technology Forum
Resource Center
Campus Viewpoints
Services
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle Review
A weekly special section
Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind John L. Jackson Jr.

Go Duke Blue Devils!?!



I’m still addicted to Duke women’s basketball, and I’m not quite ready to give up the ghost on that yet.

It has been almost two and a half years since I left Durham, North Carolina, for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I spent four years teaching cultural anthropology and African-American studies at Duke (2002-2006). During that stint, I occupied just about all of my spare time rabidly cheering for the Duke women’s basketball team, the Duke Blue Devils. This included season tickets at Cameron Indoor Stadium and even a few trips to check out the team on the road.

I’m a native New Yorker, and as a sports fan part of what that means is that I was raised to be a serious anti-Dukie. And I definitely didn’t watch women’s basketball at all before I moved to North Carolina. But when I first got to Duke, I wanted to check out some games in the school’s historic basketball facility, Cameron Indoor (even though I was all set to adamantly root for any school Duke played against). Cameron is a small arena, and men’s basketball tickets are as precious as platinum on campus. But you can still land seats to the women’s games.

The first person I saw play was Alana Beard, the team’s All-American. She had already helped take them to a Final Four the year before I got there, but that wasn’t the thing that got me hooked. It was watching her singular exceptionalism with the basketball. No matter what team they played, Beard was always the best player on the floor—and by far. The basketball seemed like a prosthetic extension of her hands. She worked with it effortlessly, like wielding it had truly become second-nature to her, as easy and automatic as breathing, blinking. She was poetry in tube socks.

She also absolutely broke my heart each of her final two years in Durham. The team was always good enough to win the national championship (in my opinion), but they kept finding ways to lose it anyway—and usually quite dramatically: two missed free throws with no time left in regulation, a just-short jump shot that would have meant the difference, an opponent’s three-point dagger only an inch above a Duke defender’s outstretched hand during overtime in the national championship game. (Just thinking about that last one makes my eyes want to water.)

After Beard graduated, then-coach Gail Goestenkors (now at the University of Texas) didn’t allow her team to slip an inch. They were still dominant, even if perennial powerhouses like Tennessee and Connecticut always seemed to outlast them down the stretch.

As I continued to teach courses at Duke, some of the new recruits ended up taking my classes, which only gave me newfangled reasons to root for them (especially because they were often some of the most committed students in my classes). Given how much Division 1 schools ask of their athletes, the kids end up pulling off a kind of Herculean double-duty, full-time students and full-time athletes. And it is almost impossible to do both things rigorously and consistently over four years. Something often has to give. And after Title IX (federal legislation requiring schools to provide its female athletes with the same caliber of resources that their male counterparts receive), expectations were raised even higher for women’s collegiate sports.

My first year at Penn found me continuing to follow the Blue Devils. I watched all the Women’s games that I could catch on ESPN, and I even checked out an away game at Rutgers (the same team that would end their bid for a national championship that same year). But I still had several students from my classes who were on the team then. Now, two years later, only one player remains who has spent any time in one of my classes, Chante Black.

The team has some great new players (and a couple of fantastic veterans), but I didn’t teach them anthropology. I wasn’t able to watch them negotiate a first semester at college. So, my investment seems less substantive now, more mediated, farther removed.

I can still get myself worked up about them, made crazy by bad officiating or sloppy ball handling. Just yesterday, I watched Duke try their best to lose a game to a highly skilled Stanford squad. Duke did get the win, helped by a questionable call in the final seconds, and I was just glad to see that they could hold their own against a legitimate top-5 team.

Duke’s new coach, Joanne McCallie (formerly head-coach at Michigan State), is still trying to figure out what Duke women’s basketball is going to be in the post-Goestenkors era. (I was so disappointed when Coach G. left. It felt like a betrayal. Even though we’d never met, I took it personally. And the insult to injury is that she has already gotten Texas back to top-10 status, ranked higher than the Blue Devils, and in just two seasons. Ugh!)

But I’m still going to watch the Duke women this year—and drive myself batty in anxious anticipation of every single possession. But this might be my last season doing it: Chante Black’s last season—hopefully, finally, Duke Women’s Basketball’s national championship season!

That’s the dream. But it is hard to keep dreaming of Cameron from way up here in Philadelphia, especially when Penn’s storied Palestra has its own basketball dreamscape that’s just now starting to weave itself around me.

Photo: Duke’s Chante Black takes a shot over Stanford’s Jayne Appel, DWHoops.com

Posted at 10:49:32 PM on December 17, 2008 | All postings by John L. Jackson Jr.

Comments

  1. as a Stanford alum ’81…i have enjoyed your blog till now…and this must be something we will be opposites on…go Cardinals…but keep up the good work…bruh

    — WAG · Dec 18, 07:01 PM · #

  2. We understand the addiction completely, and are glad to hear from their former professor that these young women also impressed you as students. You may hear us rooting for the same dream, from the mountains in NH.

    — Fan in New England · Dec 19, 07:42 AM · #

  3. As a Durham native and Duke Women’s Basketball fan living in Washington, DC the last five years, I too understand your addition. It was a treat to watch them on ESPN this week.

    — CAW · Dec 19, 08:24 AM · #

  4. I am very doubtful that WAG is “a Stanford alum ’81” given the “go Cardinals” comment.

    — Christopher Shinkman · Dec 19, 09:39 AM · #

  5. actually Chris…i am…and enjoyed watching the game live…just a friendly exchange of words over two very intense and well coached teams…keep your eye on the ball…you are missing a good game, my friend.

    — WAG · Dec 22, 10:41 AM · #

  6. I’ve tried. God knows I’ve tried. But it’s no use. Women play basketball like men did in the 1950’s. That’s not to say anyone of them couldn’t whip my butt, and I’m pretty good, but as a spectator sport, it’s just such an inferior version of the men’s game. Kind of like women’s tennis was before the the Williams sisters butched it up a notch or two.

    — More cruel, more unusual · Dec 23, 02:00 PM · #

  7. Actually, women don’t play b’ball like men did in the ’50s. Compare film/tape. Or just look at the photograph at the top of Prof. Jackson’s post. The only people in the 50s with jumpshot form like that were Oscar and Jerry. And hardly anybody in the ’50s played belly-to-belly defense like the Stanford player. Or in the ’60s, either; just take a look at the tape of the famous Houston-UCLA game with (then) Lew Alcindor and Elvin Hayes—an awful lot of standing-around, straight-up defense with the offenses trading easy jumpshots.

    Most any men’s team on a given level can easily beat any women’s team on the same level, true; men are bigger, faster, stronger and can jump higher. But women play as well as men: They understand the game as well (if not actually better, because physical talent doesn’t mitigate stupidity as much as it does in the men’s game), they execute as precisely, and they play with more dignity and sportsmanship. They also move the ball better and adhere to the “fundamentals” better (see physical talent and stupidity, above).

    Because of these things, a women’s college game is often a lot more enjoyable (to real b’ball aficionados, that is) to watch than a men’s game, dunks notwithstanding. Fewer tattoos, too. And because the WNBA isn’t the pipe dream that the NBA is, fewer one-and-done players. Which means that such teams as Stanford, Duke and Tennessee develop a little continuity and seniors and juniors display what they’ve learned during the previous seasons.

    Finally, if not enjoying watching a sport unless it’s played at the absolute competitive top level, then the only kind of b’ball to watch is the NBA, followed by the Euro leagues. Their teams could crush even Final Four men’s college teams. And the three women’s college teams mentioned above could beat most boys’ high school teams, even some big-city finalists.

    Try again.

    PS: For a long time, women’s tennis—with longer rallies, more shot strategy than just hitting winners—was a lot more enjoyable to watch than serve-and-volley men’s tennis.

    — LuckyJim · Dec 23, 02:41 PM · #

Commenting is closed for this article.
Copyright © 2009 by The Chronicle of Higher Education | Contact us
User agreement | Privacy policy | About The Chronicle | Site map | Help
Subscribe | Advertise with us | Press inquiries | RSS | Today's most e-mailed
Home | Chronicle Careers | The Chronicle Review