Two years ago, as I stood an arm’s length away from Tyler Hansbrough in Cameron Indoor Stadium, I wondered out loud how much my seat would be worth at auction. The question was rhetorical, but soon, everyone might know the answer.
If you’ve been living under a tent—with no wireless connection!—for the past week, you might have missed the announcement that Cameron will undergo some seating changes this season. Some graduate students will now sit next to the band behind the end zone near the visitor’s bench, opening up room in the corners of Section 17 and bumping the guests who used to sit, silently, under one hoop. The change hardly affects the Cameron Crazies as we know them, and forcing opponents to shoot into waving hands and Speedo Guys in the second half seems likely to enhance Cameron’s aura. It might even make the bandbox a more intimidating venue.
But that’s overlooking the side effect of moving graduate students—namely, that the undergraduates who sit behind the scorer’s table will no longer be there. While they’re standing on the top row of the section and watching from the corners of the non-TV side, they’ll be replaced by members of the Legacy Fund, the boosters who donate at least $1 million to Duke Basketball.
That is, the people on the padded seats will sit on their hands, and on one side, they will be closer to the court than boisterous undergrads who want to do no such thing.
Before I proceed any further, let’s stop and stereotype the students who watch basketball games courtside in Cameron. There are the undergraduates who go to Section 17, better known as the TV side. They stand 90 minutes before the game. Some wear face paint and most leave with aching calves. There are the graduate students who sit behind the end zone and distract opponents from making free throws, sometimes by reading this very newspaper. (Hey, at least that makes someone!) Then, there are the undergraduates who choose to watch the game from the non-TV side, between the scorer’s table and the visitor’s bench, where, if the Crazies are quiet enough, it’s possible to hear Mike Krzyzewski profusely compliment the referees.
Full disclosure: When I’m not on press row, I’m one who prefers the non-TV side. So do a lot of other students. We wait for those seats, and we choose to sit there even when there’s plenty of room on the other side. Everyone has different reasons, but I would guess that most do it because they like watching basketball without jumping up and down for two hours, and they like watching Duke without sitting next to people who are green enough to get excited about summoning Crazy Towel Guy. It’s not required that students sit on the TV side to watch Duke play basketball in the best college arena in the country, and at least for me, that unadvertised break from conformity is a point of pride.
Call these people the unsilent minority, because some of Duke’s most ardent fans sit in Section 19. In 2005, after he was ejected from a game, Virginia Tech head coach Seth Greenberg publicly bemoaned the Cameron Crazies—the ones sitting behind him, not across. Last season, in the post-game handshake line, Georgetown freshman Greg Monroe kindly requested to a group of students behind the scorer’s table that they pipe down, please. (Except, you know, the request wasn’t so kind. And he didn’t say please.)
Perhaps the most diehard undergraduate basketball fans in the last 30 years—the students sometimes credited with being the first Cameron Crazies—haunted the non-TV side. They belonged to a selective living group called Bunch of Guys (BOG), and while you might not remember them from the 1980s, Krzyzewski certainly does. There’s a BOG sweatshirt hanging somewhere in his closet, he told me last year.
This is all to say, fans who sit on the non-TV side also have a practical effect on the game. And sticking them in the back corners of the TV side just to make room for some alumni seems counterintuitive in a stadium correctly recognized for its commitment to undergraduates. I’m not naïve enough to advocate for giving students every seat in Cameron’s lower bowl, mostly because students come nowhere close to filling Section 17. For years, undergraduates have been threatened with losing seats, and for years, they haven’t responded, excluding a few notable games every season. Plus, it’s obvious that there needs to be some sort of revenue stream for Cameron’s courtside seats.
So, if there is one, let’s try to come up with a solution!
Everyone I’ve talked with has trouble coming up with a viable answer, one that accommodates boosters, sponsors and the loud, loyal undergrads, the ones who routinely fill their section regardless of the attendance on the other side. That is, after all, why I’m writing. If there were a markedly better plan, it already would have been implemented.
One idea would be to not change anything at all. It would accomplish nothing, but not moving anyone wouldn’t make Cameron any worse, and it’s not like Duke was at any competitive disadvantage the way things were. Eight ACC teams played the Blue Devils in Cameron last year. In their seven other conference road games, those teams shot free throws at a 70.7 percent clip in the first half and a 70.6 percent rate in the second half. In Cameron, they shot 70 percent in the first half and—get this—67.6 percent in the second half. Shooting into the boosters, they performed worse, at least last year. That statistic is dependent on plenty of variables and, of course, graduate students could make that second-half percentage even lower. But it’s not like Duke was hard-pressed to change in the first place.
Doing nothing isn’t going to happen, though, so it’s worth trying to think of something that might. (And if you’re as impassioned about this, e-mail me your best ideas, and we’ll crowdsource this bad boy, just like they did in the old days.)
My plan: reserve a strip of seats—six to a row, eight rows up—for undergraduates directly behind the scorer’s table, where they used to be. Such a strategy rewards those who wait in line for the seats they cherish, and it does nothing to take pads away from the Legacy Fund, which can simply move one section closer to the lobby. More than anything, it puts students front and center on all sides of the court. It’s not perfect, and it requires flexibility on a game-by-game basis, but it just might work.
In the meantime, I’ll see you at gas stations around town scratching off lottery tickets. I hear that’s the quickest way to make $1 million.
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