NEW ORLEANS — Even after all the renovations at Cameron Indoor Stadium, there's a door on the east side of the building that has been there for a long time, probably forever. Twenty-three years later I remember that door. It was a beigish-gray. More important, it was cracked open, barely.
Who needs a ticket to Duke-Carolina when there's an open door on the side of an old stadium?
This week here in New Orleans, I've been thinking a lot about that door, and the places it led. I was 17-years-old then, a high school senior. It was 1999. A Duke fan at the time, I admit, the way many my age had become Duke fans, through those Hurley and Hill and Laettner teams. For years I'd fantasized about attending a Duke-North Carolina game, especially in Durham, and for weeks during my senior year I checked the classifieds in the newspaper, the one where I now work, for tickets. They were pricey, I recall. Two, three-hundred dollars. Tough, making minimum wage at Ace Hardware.
And so a close pal and I devised a plan: We'd simply sneak in.
Looking back it was like one of those memes making fun of an ill-conceived idea:
Step 1: Show up in the vicinity of Cameron.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Watch the game, after somehow finding a way in!
It felt like the day of the game, Jan. 27, 1999, would never arrive. When it did we put the plan into action and drove to Durham and waited. The time drew near.
———
It's the final week of March now, 2022, and the plane has just landed in New Orleans on a windy Wednesday morning. The airport is full of coaches in their school-logoed gear, on the way to the coaching convention attached to this event, and there are plenty of journalists arriving here, too, to cover a Final Four unlike any in history.
If the 17-year-old version of me could glimpse this moment, he'd find at least two things impossible to believe: there's the beard, for one (Patience, young Andrew). And then there's the reality that I'm here covering a Final Four with Duke and UNC playing one another in a national semifinal.
The Duke-UNC basketball rivalry is a lot of things to a lot of people. It's a competition in pride, especially for the alumni of both schools. It's public vs. private. It's the oldest public university in the state, and the country, vs. the old money of North Carolina's dying tobacco industry. It's a student body made up primarily of those from this state vs. one with more geographic diversity.
It's Dean Smith vs. Mike Krzyzewski; Phil Ford and Michael Jordan and Tyler Hansbrough vs. Christian Laettner and Grant Hill and J.J. Redick. It's two campuses separated by eight miles of pine trees and two shades of blue, as the melodramatic old ESPN promo went and, for me, it's something that always takes me back to my childhood and adolescence, for better or worse.
In those years, college basketball — and especially local ACC basketball — was both a passion and a diversion. I'd devour the coverage in The N&O, watch the broadcasts on Saturday afternoons on Raycom and turn up the radio — either Woody Durham, for a UNC game, or Bob Harris, for Duke — when they weren't on TV.
My home life was complicated in those years. My grandmother raised me alone, and she developed health problems. We often lacked money. Sometimes she'd stock the pantry with donations from a church. It's strange to say, but college basketball became a steadying influence, something like a hobby and a devotion.
Undoubtedly, it shaped my desire back then to become a journalist, to write about the ACC the way that Caulton Tudor and Chip Alexander (who's still with us at The N&O) did. For no particular reason at all, other than how much I paid attention back then, I can name a lot of random mid-90s ACC players, guys like Exree Hipp (Maryland) and Greg Buckner (Clemson) and Harold Deane (Virginia) and just about everyone who played for Duke and UNC and N.C. State.
When things became worse at home, my closest friend's family took me in in 1998, and about 15 years later his parents legally adopted me. Back then, though, I suddenly had some structure, and three brothers to watch games with. Along with another friend, we set our sights on the ultimate experience: finding a way into Duke-UNC at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
———
We got there hours early and hung out in the woods between Cameron and the baseball stadium. It was a late game, I remember, a 9 p.m. tip-off. We hung out amid the trees for a while, like spies on a recon mission. We identified the weak spots. Finally we made our move, two heroes in the night. Well, late-afternoon, at least.
I'd like to say we owed our entrance to sheer brilliance or fortitude; that we rigged a zipline from one of those trees and through a window, or popped up inside out of a sewer line like Andy Dufrense. That'd be a lie, though. In reality we checked every door. There was one on the side near the television trucks that was open just a crack. We checked our left, our right. We walked inside.
Suddenly we were in Cameron. We acted like we knew what we were doing.
We did not know what we were doing.
There was a locker room, the visitors' locker room, it turned out, and some stairs and, up those stairs, the court. It was still more than three hours before tip-off. We needed a place to hide, from which we'd appear, like a butterfly from a cocoon. A bathroom? No. A closet? Too predictable.
Then we noticed it: a vending machine at the bottom of a staircase. Behind that vending machine was a dark little crawl space filled with electrical wiring and pipes and who knows what else. We contorted our bodies and crawled in. We sat there in the dark for who knows how long. An hour? Two hours? After a while a horde of people began walking past, on their way into the locker room.
It was the UNC basketball team. We could hear Bill Guthridge's pregame speech. The players complaining about the temperature of the room. We kept an eye on our watches. When the Tar Heels departed for the last time, up those stairs next to us, we made our move, up the same stairs. A police officer awaited. He looked confused at the sight of two high school boys who'd appeared out of nowhere.
Where are your bracelets, he asked, because the Duke students in attendance were all wearing them.
We stammered, trying to find an excuse for our bracelet-less wrists.
The policeman didn't buy it. He escorted us out. Threatened our arrest.
It was cold, I remember. We watched the first half on a video board at Wallace Wade Stadium, then devised a back-up plan: We'd find a ticket stub, somehow, at halftime. This one worked. An elderly couple walked out. They happily gave us their stubs to get back in. We took in the second half from seats along the sideline, about halfway up, in disbelief that we were there. Duke won, I remember, but I had to look up the score (an 89-77 Blue Devils victory).
I more remember the sensory experience. The shine of the brass railings. The noise. How much smaller Cameron is than I thought it was, and how hot it felt. Somewhere, I still have that ticket stub, proof of the night.
—
Whatever led me through that beigish-gray door, I continued to follow. I went off to college, became a sports journalist and spent more than 10 years covering ACC schools, first Florida State and then UNC. The job has a way of beating the fan out of you, for better or worse, and for me that happened a long time ago, even before I began covering Bobby Bowden and FSU in 2007, back when I was a 26-year-old kid.
It's easy and probably appropriate to become cynical covering college athletics, given the inequities at the root of the enterprise; the fact a lot of coaches make millions while some of the athletes struggle to get by; and then there's the educational component, or lack thereof. There's a lot wrong with college sports, but there's also a lot of stories of hope, too, and opportunity.
Every time I covered a Duke-UNC game at Cameron, I walked down those steps to get to the UNC locker room for postgame interviews. I'd pass that old vending machine and crawlspace and smile and shake my head at my teenage foolishness. I spent the lead-up to my first Duke-UNC game there, amid the cobwebs and asbestos (probably), and somehow didn't get arrested.
This week, I've thought a lot about that night more than 23 years ago. It's hard to believe that Duke's coach then is still Duke's coach now, in his final days on the job. Mike Kryzewski has been in Durham now for 42 years, longer than I've been alive, and it has been strange to cover the end of something that has been a constant.
Everyone here in New Orleans has a story this week. Krzyzewski is seeking his sixth national championship, and in his final season. Hubert Davis, UNC's first-year head coach, is in his first Final Four. Duke and UNC's players are about to play on the grandest stage of their lives, in a game that will be remembered and talked about for eternity.
The folks on the periphery have their stories, too — the students in the bands and the fans making the trip here and anyone else, even us grizzled and jaded journalists. Me, I think about that night a long time ago, when I walked through a door on the side of Cameron Indoor Stadium, and 23 years later walked through another at the Superdome, ready to cover a Duke-UNC game unlike any in history.
This time, they gave me a press credential.
