A long overdue thanks

So, like I do on every Wednesday in January, I just watched Duke beat up on some poor defenseless ACC team. Which tonight was Miami, who shouldn’t even be in the ACC in the first place but that is a complaint for another night. Instead I figured that I would answer the question that everyone at work asks me when they see my Duke Basketball mug, “Why in the world are you a Duke fan?” Well that and, “You mean there are schools other than Missouri, Kansas, and Kansas State?”

(Wait, I promised no Kansas jokes this week so I take that back. Those are all fine institutions. Though I do stand by my claim that Nebraska is the high school after high school.)

The short answer is this. My high school English teacher’s brother in law was one of the assistant coaches at Duke. So, we would talk basketball every day before class and I started watching the team and became a fan. As time went on he would be sent press guides and posters and coaching sweaters from his brother-in-law and he passed them on to me. The team kept on winning and I remained a fan, even though I never attended the school. Pretty simple, right?

Of course, that is not the real answer…

It’s really a lot deeper and more intense than that, obviously. You have to think back to what life was like in high school. I doubt that I was much different than most people in that high school was a difficult time in my life. It didn’t help that I was a really smart, tall, skinny, gawky kid with glasses. I was never the kid who was picked on, mainly because I was friends with all the guys on the football team, but it wasn’t like anyone really knew me or anything. I was just the smart kid in the front row who you never gave a second thought to.

Well, my English teacher did actually give a second thought to me and decided that he was going to break me out of my shell. He started with basketball. Kept on reminding me to watch the team, to be a fan before anyone else was. And I would watch the team and I realized that they never seemed to have the most talented guys on the floor but they always played smart and worked as a team and won. And he would use this to remind me that I could do the same thing, just because I wasn’t the star athlete didn’t mean that I couldn’t outsmart and outwork everyone else and still win in the end.

Here’s a story that explains it. My junior year he had a poster of the current Duke team up on his wall in the classroom. This was the ’89-’90 squad that would get blown out by UNLV in the championship game. I looked at that poster every day in class and was just shell shocked by the loss. At the end of the year I was talking to him after class and he went and took the poster off the wall and handed it to me, saying “Trust me, it’ll be valuable one day.” The next year I watched as those same players went up against UNLV again in the Final Four and pulled off one of the biggest upsets of all time. It was just a complete sense of knowing that no matter how bad things may have been in the past you just know that you can come back and win.

That poster is on the wall behind me right now. I’m pretty sure that in the last fifteen years I’ve never been away from it for more than two weeks. To other people it is a frayed and tattered poster, to me it is a price above rubies.

So I cheer Duke to constantly remind myself that if you work hard and are smart you can be the champion when the last game is played. To remind myself on dark and gray Wednesday nights in January that you can win. And to remember my old friend and teacher who passed away a few years back.

I’ve always said that my first novel is going to be dedicated to two people. I referred very obliquely to the first one yesterday. I promised that my first novel was going to be dedicated to her when I was sixteen and I’m keeping my promise (it’s just taking longer than I expected). The second one is my teacher, who was the first person to really encourage me to write and to show the world just who I really am. So, KLR, wherever you are, thanks man.