The bells.
For the last four years of my life, the ringing of the Chapel bells has meant deadline. Recently, as my time at Duke has become more conveniently expressed in months, then weeks and now days, deadlines are becoming a way of life.
It's late now, midnight passed by hours ago and night is about to pull itself apart on the pink seams of another sunrise. It's silent outside, but in my head I hear the bells ringing like the gentle pitter-patter of rain reminding me that one final deadline is drawing near.
Seven years ago when I had my first deadline, I didn't know why sports had been so important to me growing up. In Warren County, a two-stoplight Pepsi-bench nook of northern North Carolina, still more dust and tobacco than anything else, it's simply what you did. The best days of my youth were watching the World Series with my grandfather, lying on the floor and pushing up baseball cards as runners advanced. He was a simple man, but he always had a smile about him that let you know he knew something about the world you didn't, and damn it was good. That smile was never bigger than those nights.
I didn't realize the significance of the great American ritual until years after he died. We loved each other, but there were 50 years between us, 50 years that kept us from being able to talk. In 50 years his world had left him behind, but baseball was unchanged. Sports were the only way he knew of including me in his life.
When I got to Duke, after a three-year high school stint as a sportswriter in Warrenton, N.C., I kept the profession. And while my job here took me to Sports Illustrated and now to ESPN The Magazine, I kept writing sports not because it was my career, but because it was what I Ioved.
In a dot-com world where even wars are no longer romantic, the only thing the world knows of romance is sports. There are no clashing swords or great causes to fight. Dulcinea died long ago and Donna Julia followed shortly thereafter. We became too sophisticated about life, it became an art of thinking, not feeling. Sports is the one burning ember the world has left.
Complain about the money athletes make and the commercializing of the games they play and you miss the point. Between the lines, Alex Rodriguez makes just as much as Luis Sojo, and that's the beauty of sport, a beauty that neither man nor money nor Scott Boras can destroy. When nets come down and teammates embrace, be it as Mike Dunleavy and Shane Battier did in victory or as Will Avery and Mike Krzyzewski did in defeat two seasons ago, something--victory or defeat or the mixed bag in between--is affirmed.
Sports has nothing to do with Allen Iverson's tattoos or Albert Belle's mouth, and if you think they make the game less than it was, then strike three blew by you a long time ago and you might as well leave the plate.
Show me Monet or read from Gray, but you'll never show me anything more beautiful than Jim Valvano running around the floor of The Pit in 1983, eyes wide and arms spread like he wanted to hug the whole world and was just searching for the person to start with.
He understood the power that sports has, the ability to bring together a society too hip for its own good, too deeply scarred--wise, I believe, is our preferred word--to let our guards down and connect with other people. Sports does that in those wonderful moments when flashbulbs pop like a million stars and an entire campus or city or nation stands together in celebration. They're part of something bigger than themselves, part of something special, part of something that's simply beautiful.
I wish I could tell you something about Duke, but the only thing I ever learned at Duke is that there's a lot more to life than just living. I'll never remember what I made in a single class, I'll probably forget most of my professors' names and I guarantee you I will forget where I lived within the next year.
But I'll remember the time I fell in love, the way my girlfriend's eyes stared back at me as I propped myself on my elbows above her, so deep and beautiful and endless, like the desert floor beneath a dark night sky. I'll remember the first time I met my best friend and future roommate as freshmen (who, for those who know him, it should be added that he made a remark about Star Wars, to which I then, as I do now, rolled my eyes, knowing that there had to be something more to that kid. I was right.). I'll remember a million trips to Big Beer night at Satty's, a million more to the gardens and I'll remember sitting up with my friends wondering if we'd down all our beer before the sun came up, running from the world just to discover that we'd tripped up and found it.
And I'll remember sitting on the steps of my Central Campus apartment in the middle of my last spring talking with friends, talking when all of Duke and all of the night belonged to us, the lone watchmen of a sleeping world. We talked openly and honestly, leaving words that would hang like Spanish moss around the edges of memories I don't think I could ever forget.
They were the rare times in life that fear took a back seat to truth and personal defense took a back seat to openness. I learned then that the only mistakes you can ever make aren't those you live to regret, but those you regret having lived. Those moments, like the beauty of sports, were the times that I was part of something special, something bigger than a hack writer from the sticks of North Carolina.
It's late and it's time to move on. But I'll smile, because somewhere out there in the darkness I know my grandfather's rooting for me and pushing my baseball card up one more base.
Safe at second.
Off in the distance the bells are ringing, less like raindrops now and more like the battle drums of time's unstoppable army.
So I will say only thank you all. And goodbye. The bells are ringing. It's deadline, one last time.
Ray Holloman is a senior associate editor and future sportswriting legend.
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