There’s nothing like the grit and majesty of the Olympics, savored in sweatpants in front of the TV, to get you thinking about your own glorious sports moments.
I lived most of my life within blocks of perhaps the most tantalizingly tough ticket in all of sports—a ticket to the Duke/UNC basketball game at Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium.
Unlike the venues of college football—vast bowls that boast upwards of 100,000 seats—the home of the Duke basketball team has a capacity of just over 9,000. Even Duke students have to camp outside the stadium in tents (a shanty-town with Wi-Fi lovingly referred to as “Krzyzewskiville”) for more than two months to get a ticket.
It’s one of those rare sports venues that outlasted the notion it should be rebuilt just long enough that the idea of rebuilding became sacrilege. Without that stadium, there would be no Cameron Crazies, the place would be no legend, and Durham townies like me would have no dream.
The walls at my elementary school were painted Carolina blue. For six years, I refused to touch them. Mere contact with that cloying color would mean immediate ostracism. Blocks from Duke’s campus, within wafting distance of air thick and sweet with the scent of pipe tobacco from the downtown factories, I grew up on what they call Tobacco Road.
In the early eighties, there was some confusion in my mind as to whether Duke coach Mike Krzyzew-ski, UNC coach Dean Smith, or Ronald Reagan was the president of the United States. From my perspective, they were all very important, dignified men who were on TV almost constantly.
I could imagine no greater gift in life than to attend a Duke/UNC game at Cameron. Perhaps it says something about my character that, even at the age of 6, when naïveté and ignorance of my athletic shortcomings would have allowed me to dream big, the pinnacle of my ambition was to watch a really great athletic event, not win one. A future Olympian, I was not.
Nonetheless, it was with the single-minded dedication of a highly trained athlete that I pursued my goal. When I was 7, Duke player Brian Davis came to my school and joked that none among us could spell the last name of Duke’s legendary coach. I piped up, standing unbidden to recite the string of consonants with pride.
Visions danced in my head of Davis running back to basketball practice to tell Krzyzewski of a little girl like none other, whose dedication to Duke basketball was so great and so deep that she could spell Krzyzewski. I beamed, sure that my ticket was in the mail. It was not.
By the time I was 9, it was clear I had to work harder. Every year, the Duke Children’s Hospital held a holiday card contest, in which all the city’s grade-schoolers competed. The prize was to have your art printed and sold as a Christmas card to benefit the hospital.
The awards ceremony would be presided over by none other than Coach Mike Krzyzewski. In pursuit of a personal audience, I began to color as I had never colored before, the markers becoming truly magic in my little hands.
When the winners were announced, my jolly skiing snowman was indeed among them, the judges being suckers for secular, seasonal anthropomorphism.
I received a framed copy of my card from Coach K, signed on the back with a personal message, and told the local news anchor through the whistle of buck teeth about my “artishtic prothessh.” Surely, a ticket would be forthcoming, now. I had met the man himself and helped the children! But no. I never again heard from Coach K.
Several years later, my father came home with four tickets to the Duke/UNC game. He announced they were for him, my mother … and two Russian visitors from Durham’s sister city. I cursed glasnost. Visions of Ivan Drago danced in my head, delivering his famous threat: “I must break you.”
But I was not broken. I became mercenary, trying to buy tickets off the children of Duke professors for $100, which at the age of 13 was all the money I had in the world. Well-meaning parents with no understanding of the free market deemed the sacrifice too large for a young girl, forbidding their children to participate in this mutually beneficial transaction.
From that day to this, those tickets have remained mythical, as far as I’m concerned, but the dream will never die. On March 6, I’ll once again don my sweatpants and enjoy my sports spectatorship via satellite, chanting from my couch with the best of them, “Go to Hell, Carolina! Go to Hell!”
Mary Katharine Ham
