For you Dukies.....

Good article in today's CLT Observer on Cameron Indoor.

College basketball's Blue Classic

College basketball's Blue Classic

Cameron Indoor Stadium is shrine of college hoops

RON GREEN JR.

STAFF WRITER

DURHAM - A cynic -- or a North Carolina fan -- might say they've just about ruined Cameron Indoor Stadium.

They closed the building's big factory-looking windows a few years ago when they air conditioned the place, thereby shutting off a perfectly good indoor flying space for the pigeons who saw more Duke basketball than Mike Krzyzewski.

With no open windows, the squirrels can't get in anymore to eat the popcorn left over after games, and they long ago patched the holes in the roof so they didn't have to practice around water buckets when it's raining outside.

They even put up a sign outside the arena, a small dark blue sign in the little patch of grass in the traffic circle in front of the place, which identifies the most famous 94 feet in college basketball in plain block script -- Cameron Indoor Stadium.

Still, people who make the pilgrimage just to see where the Blue Devils play routinely walk by the old rock-covered building they've come to see, searching for something bigger or grander than the arena that practically hides in plain sight.

"I can't tell you how many times people have asked me where Cameron Indoor Stadium is and I tell them `That's it right in front of you,' " said Duke athletics director Joe Alleva, sitting in the same office and behind the same desk once used by Eddie Cameron, for whom the building was named.

Cameron breathes life

It is in that 65-year-old building of steel beams, brass rails and memories that Duke and North Carolina will renew their hot-blooded rivalry Wednesday night.It will be a thunderous occasion, the game played at a full roar, going so hard and fast that you'd swear the wind was blowing in the building. Every one of the gray wooden permanent seats upstairs will be filled and the bleachers on the lower level will be stuffed in some places with more than one rear end per seat.

It will be rowdy, warm and trembling like a teenage boy asking a girl out for the first time. The crazy towel guy will stand and wave his prop, whipping the students into a frenzy and the Duke band will play "Devil With The Blue Dress On" like Springsteen plays "Born To Run," -- music and moment heightened by energy.

If the hills can be alive with the sound of music, Cameron Indoor Stadium is alive with sound of "Go to hell, Carolina, go to hell."

What Fenway Park and Wrigley Field are to baseball, what St. Andrews is to golf and what Lambeau Field is to the NFL, Cameron Indoor Stadium is to college basketball.

There are similar places in college basketball -- Allen Fieldhouse where the Kansas Jayhawks play and The Palestra in Philadelphia come to mind.

But no place is quite like the place Duke calls home.

"Cameron has a soul. It has a spirit," coach Krzyzewski said. "Most buildings don't have life to them. Cameron Indoor Stadium breathes life."

Football paved the way

In a world where everything seems to be bigger or flashier or quicker, Cameron Indoor Stadium is much the way it was 65 years ago when it opened. It is still 262 feet long and 175 feet wide, its frame supported by nine steel beams spread at 26-foot intervals, just the way Julian Abele -- one of the first significant African American architects in America -- designed it.

It is dressed in the familiar gray stone that decorates the campus -- Duke stone cut from a quarry a few miles away in Hillsborough -- and it is tucked behind a slope on one side and just beyond one end of Wallace Wade Stadium, where the football team plays.

"Ironic isn't it that the football program at Duke paid for Cameron Indoor Stadium," said Johnny Moore, president of Moore Productions, which owns the radio rights to Duke athletics.

It's true.

The $400,000 project was paid off entirely after the Duke football team won the 1945 Sugar Bowl, though no one then realized it was the end of one era and the beginning of another.

Had the original plans been followed, the domed Dean E. Smith Center eight miles away in Chapel Hill might have taken on a different design.

The first draft called for a domed structure with 5,000 "sittings," but Duke President William Preston Few wanted bigger.

The dome disappeared and the building was complete in nine months with 8,800 seats, nearly 40 percent of them bleacher seats for students at courtside.

It is hardly different today. The capacity is now 9,314 thanks to a few more student seats, but when Duke and Princeton celebrated the 65th birthday of Cameron in January, the times had changed more than the building.

"When you walk in, you think `They play basketball there,' " North Carolina coach Roy Williams said. "You think about basketball. It doesn't have to look like you're going to the opera."

Preserving a masterpiece

Like the Mona Lisa, Cameron is smaller in person than you imagined. While the Mona Lisa is protected by walls of bullet-proof glass, Cameron is open to the world unless, of course, it's practice time or game night.It is not unusual for a bus to pull down the tight little road leading to Cameron and unload a troop of sightseers who walk through the arched wooden doors, through the modest lobby and into the arena.

"It's like a museum," Alleva said.

But museums are built on the past. Cameron lives for today and tomorrow and next season and the season beyond that.

Duke has no plans to build a new arena. If he had a magic wand, Alleva said, he would wave it and add another 1,000 seats or so. But Duke officials long ago realized they had in Cameron Indoor Stadium what can't be bought or built.

When renovation plans were announced in 1987, Krzyzewski wrote to Duke supporters endorsing the decision to enhance Cameron rather than mothball it.

"It would have been easy for us to get caught up in the recent trend to build ever bigger on-campus basketball facilities," Krzyzewski wrote. "For many schools, that is the right thing to do. For Duke, I think it would have been a mistake.

"It is one of the most famous basketball arenas in the country and one of the most feared by opposing teams. Why, then, should we change it? The answer, of course, is that we shouldn't change it."

Cameron has, of course, been improved but not in a massive way. It is still a place where people work, their offices lining hallways around the outer edge of the playing floor.

The basketball offices are now next door in a shiny glass six-story building that requires thumbprints for elevator access to certain areas. But inside Cameron, the busy work of a university's athletic department continues on a daily basis. Mail is delivered, concessions are unloaded and phones ring.

What you can't see on TV

There is an unmistakable smell to Cameron Indoor Stadium. Inside its hallways, it smells like an elementary school class room, the aroma of varnished wood hanging in the air.

On game nights, though, the smells of popcorn, pizza, sweat and adrenaline mix with the sound of squeaking sneakers and screaming fans beseeching the Blue Devils to take another victim.

On television, it looks like so many other places because the focus is on the floor, which gets stripped, painted and varnished every August. Viewers get glimpses of the dark wood paneling that trims the upper deck and the brass railing that gives the interior of Cameron much of its style. What a television screen can't convey is the breath-on-the-back-of-your-neck closeness of the fans to the playing floor.

"You feel like you're in a cauldron," Wake Forest coach Skip Prosser said.

 

Continued

From the worst seat in the house -- Section 9, Row Q, Seat 16 -- you're still only 17 rows up in the upper deck. Consider the bleacher seats along the side of the court are only nine rows deep and you can't be far from the sweat at Cameron.

It is not beautiful on the inside. Most of the seats are a dull shade of pale gray and the others are roll-out wooden bleachers like the ones you'll see in almost every high school gym in the country.

"I like the classic look of it inside and outside," Duke guard J.J. Redick said. "From the outside, you can't tell it's a gym. Then you go in and the seats are right on top of you. All these jerseys and banners are hanging in there. It's really old school."

Ghosts of Cameron

The history of Duke basketball is documented in the rafters of Cameron's low ceiling, spelled on white banners with dark blue lettering.There are 10 banners honoring Duke's women's basketball team plus Alana Beard's retired jersey, No. 20.

There are 11 retired men's jerseys, ranging from Dick Groat through Johnny Dawkins and on to Jason Williams. Seven banners honor the men's teams that finished the season ranked No. 1 nationally, 14 more banners commemorate each Final Four visit and 19 more honor ACC champions.

In the north end zone hang the national championship banners from 1991, 1992 and 2001.

"It's kind of like a field of dreams thing," Redick said.

The great ones have played Cameron. Eugene Ormandy conducted the Philadelphia Symphony there. Soprano Leontyne Price sang there.

So did Frank Sinatra, Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, Glen Campbell and Simon and Garfunkel, who were so unrecognizable in 1968 that they sat outside the building watching the crowd file in to see the two singers they didn't notice sitting on a bench near the entrance.

Walk along the concourse and the basketball memories are frozen in photographs. The great teams. The great players. Laettner. Banks. Hill. They're all there in striking new displays.

New windows went in on the concourse last summer, windows with a dark blue panel on each side, giving the effect of stained glass when the sun cuts through.

Even when it's quiet, the echoes seem to float faintly through the building. Maybe it's the lights that buzz when they're on and maybe it's more than that.

"Some mornings I'll be in here at 5 and I know there's no one but me in here and I'll hear something," Ronald "D.C." Williams, who for 16 years has been a Cameron custodian, said. "I hope it's not a ghost."

There could be so many. The ghost of Jack Marin or Jeff Mullins or even North Carolina's Bobby Jones stealing a pass and scoring a last-second layup to beat Duke and running straight into the locker room after scoring the winning basket.

"I come in at nights, maybe the night before a game, and just shoot by myself with the lights off," Redick said.

"There's enough light to see, but there's something about the mystique of the arena. It's so calming. So serene."

A place of communion

Cameron Indoor Stadium is a place where cheers live.

It is where the Crazies congregate. It is the warm place the students seek when they sleep outside on cold winter nights, sacrificing for those two hours when the game is on and what you get there can't be found in a classroom.

It is a place of communion, where believers gather to share what is uniquely theirs. It is a revival and a renewal, spiked by sharp humor and a shared will that invisibly but undeniably puts its imprint on the game.

Duke basketball without the Cameron crowd is not Duke basketball. It's what everyone else plays.

The outrageous moments are part of the building's story, coloring the experience, sometimes a little too brightly. At one point former Duke President Terry Sanford penned a letter to the students asking them to tone it down, saying in part, "We are, I am sorry to report, gaining an unequaled reputation as a student body that doesn't have a touch of class ... I suggest we change."

What endures is the spirit.

Of the fans.

Of the program.

Of Cameron.

Recently, Krzyzewski talked to his team about how long the season can be. To rejuvenate himself, Krzyzewski told his players he sometimes goes to Cameron when no one is around.

"Even empty, it feels like someone is playing and I never feel alone," Krzyzewski said. "That is its spirit."

 

I saw that. Gave me chills from the memories.

 

I have only got to go to one game there but it was awesome. Everyone was into the game and it was much more fan driven than anything I have ever been to, including Panther playoff games. They played some cupcake and beat them by 45 but when a scrub who never plays dived out of bounds chasing a loose ball they all cheered him even though there was less than a minute to play. It was great. I can't imagine what it is like when UNC is in town.

 

as much as I loathe dook, Im glad they have that place. I would love to see a game there just to check out the atmosphere. I wish UNC, State, Maryland would have all kept the old arenas.( of course I wish the acc didn't expand either...). and is Ron Green Sr. not the hardest working retired columnist youve ever read?

 

Yeah me too, I was in college for the last 2 seasons NC State had in "the old barn" Reynolds Coliseum. Saw a lot of great games in there and had amazing sideline floor seats for every game, usually in rows 1-3. I miss that place.

 

We must have graduated about the same time. (94 for me). I saw the last Duke game in Reynolds.

 

Great place to watch a basketball game. So was Reynolds. It kinda pisses me off that UNC moved to the Dean Dome. Charmichael was as loud and inhospitable as either one of those.

 

It's too bad UNC can't still play a few games a year in Carmichael - the throwback game with UVA in the next few weeks would be perfect.

I know it would piss off the fat cats that contribute all the money - but they should have several games a year in Carmichael and distribute more tickets to the students.

I never saw a game in Carmichael but the fan base at UNC is just too big to still be playing in front of 10,000 fans every game when they are selling out 21,000 now.

As popular as dook is they still don't have that huge local fanbase like UNC does so they are smart to keep their old traditional court

 

Carmichael was great. The dome just feels like another arena. Carmichael felt like home. It was cramped, hot and loud. Damn, I miss it.