Despite the cold January downpour outside, Amy Unell, Trinity ’03, recently entered the Alumni House, calm and collected. Her relaxed, engaging nature came as quite a shock, considering how large a project Unell has been quietly but firmly captaining over the past five months, an enterprise that has slowly expanded across Duke’s campus. Unell is finally achieving a dream she’s had ever since she took a class as a doe-eyed freshman from the Midwest. She’s telling the world the story of former Duke track head coach Al Buehler.
Most would recognize Buehler’s name from the trail enclosing the grounds of the Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club, but any athlete or Duke official has a different impression of the Duke icon. Having won six ACC cross-country championships and coached multiple Olympians, Buehler is a sports legend, and his 45-year coaching stint, which ended in 2000, was one of the University’s longest. In 2005, Buehler, a professor and former chair of the Health, Physical Education and Recreation department, was elected into the Duke Sports Hall of Fame.
During her days at Duke, Unell took “History and Issues of Sport” with Buehler—whom she affectionately calls “Coach”—and was immediately struck by his singular character. “[The class] really inspired me,” she said. “He’s so passionate about teaching, sports, life, philosophy and how social and historical events have led to different parts of our lives. He was always a mentor, a listener, someone who followed his heart. He was the perfect subject.”
Unell, who co-ran her own Cable 13 show while at Duke, kept Buehler’s story in the back of her mind, hoping that one day she would be able to do it justice. After graduating, Unell went straight to work as a producer for NBC’s “The Today Show,” based in Los Angeles. Throughout her seven years at NBC, she kept in touch with Buehler. During one of their phone calls this past summer, Unell happened to ask Buehler how old he was. He told her he would turn 80 on Oct. 10—or, specifically, 10-10-10—and Unell found the circumstances too fateful to not roll out the red carpet. She was finally ready to tackle her dream story, to spread her own creative wings. Duke was there to lift her off the ground.
Almost as if it was meant to be, Unell soon got a call from the Sanford School of Public Policy’s Ken Rogerson, who invited her to be a media fellow in the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. She received permission to leave “The Today Show” on sabbatical, originally only believing she would be gone for two months. When she arrived in Durham this past October, diving headfirst into the work, she soon discovered how ambitious her documentary actually was. “It took a while for me to really understand the depth of it,” Unell said. “Carrying on his legacy is carrying on other legacies. From Eddie Cameron who hired him, to the couch in his office—it’s Wallace Wade’s—and his friends whom the quads are named after.”
To help her capture footage and navigate through massive amounts of archival data, Unell pulled in a Raleigh-based freelance photographer, Gregg Hoerdemann, and his crew, with whom she had worked previously. Unell also began to compile a student-team—mainly track students close with Buehler—to assist with the project.
Amidst the flurry of initial planning, a sobering fact shockingly emerged: Buehler revealed to Unell he had a benign brain tumor. Unell noticed something amiss when Buehler began to feel light-headed and lose balance in a scheduled interview. In his calm, Buehler-like fashion, the coach showed the X-rays to his class and to Unell.
“It’s all going to be OK,” Buehler told everyone. “We’ll just run another race here.”
The documentary absorbed this new narrative, especially when Duke Medical Center granted permission for cameras to enter the operating room. The news infused an increased sense of urgency and purpose into Unell’s project, which was morphing into a documentation in the truest sense of the word. Unell and her team filmed the doctors treating the tumor, and they also documented Buehler’s wife, Delaina, and two children, Beth and Beau, in the waiting room and in the moments immediately after Buehler left the operating room. Buehler’s first walk was especially enthralling, Unell said.
Even as Buehler’s medical troubles became a major storyline, Unell remained focused on telling Buehler’s life story in its entirety. Buehler watched racial and gender barriers in sports break down. He helped fight for civil rights through a close friendship with N.C. Central’s black track head coach, LeRoy Walker. (Buehler used to invite Walker’s athletes over to the segregated Duke campus, and on trips through the South, the teams would travel together—often being forced to eat in different restaurants.) Buehler even witnessed the massacre at the 1972 Olympics in Munich from a window 100 yards away. “He was there for all these moments,” Unell said.
So far, Unell has done more than a dozen interviews for the film, including sessions with Mike Krzyzewski and Nan Keohane and, memorably, NBA stars Grant Hill and Shane Battier, both of whom took a class with Buehler. (“There’s no Duke without Coach Buehler,” Battier said at one point.) Unell’s interviews have taken her from Raleigh to Atlanta to Miami, and to meet the demands of the growing project, she got approval from Josh Gibson, interim director of the Arts of the Moving Image department, to teach a seminar this semester.
“Basically I thought, ‘Well I’m doing all this, students should come along on this process, have this be fun and informative,’” Unell told me. There are 16 students in the class, with varying experience in film, and all the students, grade-depending, will receive credits on the documentary. Unell introduced her new team to the project by walking the students through Buehler office in Cameron Indoor Stadium, exposing them to the history written in the images that adorn his walls.
The class is also linked with Scott Yakola’s sports marketing class, as well as with Fuqua marketing students, who will develop and implement a marketing plan for the film’s release; Unell has even approached the computer science department about designing a Web site. She’s working with the Alumni office and the Varsity Club, not to mention the Allen Building, for the documentary she hopes to feature at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival before it gains national exposure. “Well, that’s what a university is all about,” Unell said of the synergy. “But you know what? That’s Coach Buehler.”
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