Anaheim, Calif. ? Several years have passed since the wife and I fulfilled our parental obligation by taking our two daughters to Disneyland. What kind of parents would we have been if we hadn’t shepherded our children through the Magic Kingdom?
Heck, the girls would have threatened to commit hara-kiri in the middle of the living room if we told them we were going to the Douglas County Fair instead.
Thus we experienced Walt Disney’s mid-20th Century dream firsthand. Fantasyland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, Adventureland, Concessionsland. We did them all.
Now I’m back in Anaheim and, instead of going to Disneyland, I’m headed for a place called the Arrowhead Pond which conjures visions of the home of the Kansas City Chiefs after a frog choker.
Mostly, the Pond’s floor is covered with ice because it is the home of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, a National Hockey League team. And that begs this question: Why does an area with year-round mild weather have two professional hockey teams (the Mighty Ducks and Los Angeles Kings) and not a single National Football League team?
If you can answer that, maybe you can tell me why everyone thinks Duke University, a four-year private school endowed by tobacco money — it is NOT named after John Wayne — is able to pick and choose its men’s basketball recruits.
Located in Durham, N.C., in an area called the Research Triangle, Duke does have an Ivy League-like campus replete with majestic trees and stately buildings. But you cannot see the campus until you are in it. You can embrace the vista of Kansas University’s campus from miles away on I-70, but at Duke you must follow the signs or you’ll wind up at a Krispy Kreme or in Kannapolis.
I’ve never seen a men’s basketball game in Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium, but I’ve been inside the unimposing structure and it’s basically non-descript — a floor, seats and banners … lots of banners signifying many, many championships. And although it is certainly steeped in tradition, I couldn’t envision Cameron Indoor Stadium as being in the same shrine-like category as Allen Fieldhouse.
Some people wonder why Duke basketball players don’t wear pinstripes. They are, after all, the New York Yankees of men’s college basketball.
Dispatched to Salt Lake City last weekend, Duke’s players learned even the Mormons don’t like them. When the Blue Devils played Colorado State, the locals heckled them. Later, when Duke met Central Michigan, the Utah folks derided them again.
Duke runs a classy program, yet is booed even at neutral venues. That’s what happens when you’re America’s Team and people are weary of you winning and winning and winning.
Kansas has just as classy a program as Duke, yet the Jayhawks are, like every other NCAA Division I program, Duke wannabes.
Asked this week about his relationship with Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, KU’s Roy Williams said, “We’re good friends.” What did you expect him to say? Of course, they’re good friends. They don’t have to play each other all the time.
I remember when Williams and Texas Tech’s Bob Knight were good friends. That was before Williams started beating Knight’s teams like a drum. The relationship between Williams and Knight has cooled visibly over the years.
Williams is also apparently not all that popular among some other Big 12 Conference coaches. In coach-of-the-year balloting by the media, Williams won. Yet the coaches tapped Rick Barnes of conference runner-up Texas as their coach of the year. The Big 12 office did not reveal the ballot count in its canvass of coaches, but Barnes received exactly one vote in the media poll.
Who can make sense of awards anyway? The Big 12 media selected Oklahoma’s Hollis Price as player of the year, but the conference coaches opted for KU’s Nick Collison.
Then, in a surprise, the Naismith Award went this week to Texas guard T.J. Ford. Go figure. Ford doesn’t win his own league award, yet he earns a national prize.
Everybody talks about parity in college basketball, but postseason awards, it seems to me, are more about inscrutability.