March 2010 Towerview

MARCH 2010

from the editors C

oming back from Spring Break, a heightened sense of immediacy permeates everything we do. Last Day of Classes looms six weeks away, and Commencement lurks just two weeks behind it. We graduating seniors are increasingly nostalgic. The time after spring recess becomes a never-ending series of lasts. The last time we sleep late for a Monday class, for example, or the last time we make an

TOWERVIEW Chelsea Allison and Ben Cohen EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

Lawson Kurtz

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Naureen Khan

Caroline McGeough

Will Robinson

Alex Klein

ASSOCIATE EDITOR EXECUTIVE EDITOR

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

EDITOR, TV ONLINE

ar t s & let ter s

Michael Naclerio, Chase Olivieri, Zachary Tracer CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Nim Barshad, Nathan Freeman, Cate Harding, Kevin Lincoln, Sam Schlinkert, Eugene Wang CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

business & produc t ion

Jonathan Angier GENERAL MANAGER

Chrissy Beck

ADVERTISING DIRECTOR

impulsive decision to picnic in the Gardens. But there are a whole lot more lasts, and in some ways, this issue is about embracing them before it’s too late. In this month’s cover story, TOWERVIEW contributing writer Nathan Freeman profiles fellow Duke senior Steven Galanis, taking us inside the growing world of Spar tan Enter tainment, the company Galanis co-founded as an East Campus resident almost four years ago. It began with Wednesday Night Beer Pong at Shooter’s, but now Spar tan lends its name— and Bull City bar connections—to any number of late-night events in the spirit of everything from raising money for charity to celebrating a new sorority pledge class. In shor t, the company has a stranglehold on Duke students’ nightlife in Durham. A monopoly over the last bull rides and breaths of air on the Devine’s patio. And in those lasts, it’s sometimes wor thwhile to reflect on firsts. In the beginning, Galanis envisioned a company that could even out Duke’s hierarchical social scene. Check page 12, and maybe head to Main Street, to see if the man’s accomplished that. This year’s seniors have already seen their last home basketball game in Cameron Indoor Stadium, the hallowed venue that celebrated its 70th bir thday earlier this year. Cameron’s been home to some of the average Duke graduate’s most visceral and pleasurable memories—some of the most painful, too— and seniors can leave campus assured that won’t change in the next 70 years. Cameron might look different, and so might Wallace Wade Stadium, but the deep play that the stadium houses won’t change. So enjoy this, your second-to-last TOWERVIEW. After all, not everything has to end so abruptly.

Rebecca Dickenson Barbara Starbuck

RETAIL SALES MANAGER

PRODUCTION MANAGER

Margaret Potter

Student Sales Manager

Mary Weaver

OPERATIONS MANAGER

Christine Hall

Creative Services Student Manager

TOWERVIEW is a subsidiary of The Chronicle and is published by the Duke Student Publishing Company, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Duke University. The opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of Duke University, its students, faculty, staff, administration or trustees. Columns, letters and car toons represent the views of the authors. To reach The Chronicle’s editorial office at 301 Flowers Building, call (919) 684-2663 or fax (919) 684-4696. To reach The Chronicle’s business office at 103 West Union Building, call (919) 684-3811. To reach The Chronicle’s adver tising office at 101 West Union Building, call (919) 684-3811 or fax (919) 684-8295. Contact the adver tising office for information on subscriptions. Visit The Chronicle and TOWERVIEW online at dukechronicle.com. 2009 The Chronicle, Box 90858, Durham, N.C. 27708. All rights reserved No par t of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the prior, written permission of the business office. Each individual is entitled to one free copy.

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TOWERVIEW

Contact us at towerview0910@gmail.com or send letters to Towerview Magazine, Box 90858, Durham, NC 27708.

VOLUME 11, ISSUE 6

syllabus

BLUE DEVIL CROSSING PAGE 5

As director of the Har t Leadership Program, ALMA BLOUNT helps trigger students’ passion for leadership. No wonder she’s so happy.

THE DEVIL’S DETAILS

PAGE 9

An ar t exhibit centered on the BALLAD OF BIRMINGHAM, a dialogue about Virginia Woolf starring REYNOLDS PRICE, rejected START-UP CHALLENGE ideas and a rogue DSG ELECTION.

THE MAYOR OF MAIN STREET PAGE 12

Over the last four years, senior STEVEN GALANIS, the co-founder of Spar tan Enter tainment, has held cour t over Duke in Durham nightlife. TOWEVIEW examines how Spar tan seized the social scene.

CAMERON TURNS 70 PAGE 22

Earlier this year, CAMERON INDOOR STADIUM celebrated its 70th bir thday. Since its opening in 1940, the arena has evolved into a cathedral for basketball. What do the nex t 70 years hold?

ROADSIDE WISDOM PAGE 30

Attend a bi-weekly Cokes with Cut with DAVID CUTCLIFFE, and he’ll teach you plenty about football schemes and strategies. Now, learn more about the man outside of Wallace Wade Stadium.

on the cover

When Spar tan Enter tainment founder Steven Galanis walked into the TOWERVIEW office, his BlackBerry was already beeping. “Yeah, it’s gonna keep doing that,” he said. Galanis is a pretty busy guy, but he made the time to step into the photo studio for TOWERVIEW Creative Director Lawson Kurtz, who had brought some toys for the session: a beer pong ball and a can of Busch Light. “My brand of choice,” Galanis said as he graciously accepted the can. Seeing as it’s his job to socialize, Galanis was a natural in front of the lens. (He also comes from a family of photographers.) But he playfully demurred while commenting on the pictures. “I picked this business ’cause I’m not that pretty,” he laughed. “I’m not usually in the light all the time.” Kur tz asked him to try spitting the ball into the air, so he could capture the whirling orb mid-flight. The first try sent the ball across the room. “I gotta quit going to the gym,” Galanis said, shaking his head. On the next attempt, the ball dropped not even an inch from his face. “I didn’t have my Wheaties this morning,” he laughed. At the end of the photo shoot, Kur tz had captured Galanis in poses with various beerrelated projectiles, a reproduction of the Spar tan Enter tainment Facebook page, as well as many, many others. See all this pictures, along with Nathan Freeman’s cover story on Galanis and his business, on page 12.

TOWERVIEW

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ALMA BLOUNT

DIRECTOR, HART LEADERSHIP PROGRAM

A

P H OTO B Y L AW S O N K U R T Z

lma Blount is someone who could tell you the sky was falling with a smile on her face. While I sat in Blount’s office one day in early March, she practically did, recounting grief she endured on her path to Duke. >>> TOWERVIEW

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P H OTO B Y L AW S O N K U R T Z

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But she narrates even her hardest stories with optimism and warmth. I had visited her office—a place where overflowing bookshelves and vibrant paintings from Latin America coexist within a meticulously organized work space—previously as a student in her Adaptive Leadership course. But this time I was there to hear her story, one that had only come out in bits and pieces in my one semester with her. After falling in love with Latin America during a trip to Mexico and graduating from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a B.A. in journalism, Blount worked for several human rights organizations tied to the Catholic Church in Nicaragua and El Salvador during the internal guerilla conflicts that plagued Latin America during the 1980s. She had heard stories of disappearances and murders; she had even known people who were direct victims of violence but continued with her work. In the fall of 1989, however, six prominent Jesuit priests and their two housekeepers—all of which Blount knew—were murdered by members of the right wing El Salvadorian government’s army. “I knew people who had lost their lives… but that [the murder of the priests and housekeepers] was a really big blow for me,” she told me. “I remember turning to my husband and saying, ‘OK, I’m going to take a break and go to divinity school.’” While still working in El Salvador, Blount received a full scholarship to Harvard Divinity School, where she studied religion in public life. There, Blount met her mentor, Ronald Heifetz, a co-founder of the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Heifetz introduced Blount to a new approach of tackling the complex and draining humanitarian issues she had faced in her human rights work in Latin America. TOWERVIEW

“The art of leadership intrigued me,” she said. “I felt the work I was doing was very much about leadership. It was about getting people to pay attention to these human rights violations and act on them and change policies. But to examine how it actually happens within cultures, organizations, systems and groups was completely fascinating to me.” She spent her childhood living in the mountains of North Carolina, and Blount credits her family—which has lived in North Carolina since the mid-17th century—with inspiring her to pursue a career that incorporated a love for politics, place

and religion. “Feeling deeply rooted to a place is very important in my family,” she said. “Over the years people in my family have always been very involved with the land, very involved with law and very involved with politics. That’s my tradition so ever since I was a little girl I have felt conscious of that tradition, and I’ve had a sense that I could do what I wanted from my life.” University initiatives like DukeEngage, the Duke Global Health Institute and Kenan Institute for Ethics have only recently become fixtures for many Duke undergraduates seeking meaningful community-based service learning experiences. But there has been institutional support for its precursors since 1987: The Hart Leadership program,

which includes programs like Service Opportunities in Leadership and the Hart Fellows Program, was endowed that year by Miledge A. Hart. In 2001, Blount became the director of the Hart Leadership Program emphasizing integrating experiential learning in the field through by steeping it in academic study. “This tradition is what I call integrative learning,” she said. “You know you have these experiences that are challenging, that open new horizons for you and then you have a context in a group with your peers and teacher and bring you understanding to a much deeper level because you’re studying it intellectually.” Blount—and the Hart Leadership program— also prizes the power of storytelling. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill, Blount was a founding staff member of The Independent. She spent three years covering stories around the state as its chief photographer. “Part of me has always been very much interested in doing and part of me is also interested in telling the story and making meaning and understanding the critical reflection aspect of what I’m doing,” she told me. “When you take my classes that’s what’s called the reflective stance. My great love of telling stories… is a beautiful complement to the part of me who is really interested in actions, goals, accomplishments.” Since the University’s expansion and coordination of its civic engagement programs, it’s become increasingly competitive to apply to Hart, and the demand has exceeded current capacity. But Blount, true to form, sees the good in this. “More and more students are not shying away from the intensity or demands of our courses, they’re embracing it,” she said. “They want to be challenged intellectually, and in terms of the difficulty of the field unique.” —CATE HARDING

THE GREEN LIGHT

FOOD OR FLEX?

Time is money. And as much as you might love listening to 15 minutes of those songs you vaguely remember from the 90s, waiting in the huge line at Alpine is a nuisance few schedules can afford. But fear the line no longer: If you’re willing to forgo the subtle crunch of freshly toasted bread, Alpine’s Graband-Go Sandwiches just may be your ticket to a delicious and eff icient lunch. —MICHAEL NACLERIO

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THE GREEN LIGHT

G

o in through the front door of The Regulator. Walk past the magazine room on the left, the register on the right, the fresh hardcover releases deliberately arranged in the center. Eventually, you’re going to take a left; you’ll know the turn because you’ll see a staircase going down. Descend.

The staircase takes you to the basement of The Regulator, the Carnegie Hall of Durham’s literary scene. It’s here that the word-inclined can see Wells Tower read “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned”—a witsoaked story about existential Vikings—and savor the warmth of Tower’s vir tuosic, conversational sentences spoken aloud. It’s here that Triangle music enthusiasts can catch Merge Records founders (and Superchunk bandmates) Mac McCaughan and Laura Balance, fresh from publishing a history of their nationally renowned label called Our Noise, talking about some of America’s greatest rockers—many of whom are Durham and Chapel Hill natives. And when the duo produce an acoustic guitar and bass and play together, watching the crowd simmer in gratified reverence is its own simple pleasure. Even when the lower floor isn’t under the control of a Nor th Carolinian ar t hero— though this is the ideal—it’s still the best par t of the store. The Regulator’s stock of fiction resides in the basement, spor ting a wider catalog than the Gothic Bookstore and a soul the giant book chains lack; local authors and widely translated giants are positioned side-by-side, the alphabet the only rule of law. Yes, the cooking section is nice, and when I’m a future gardener/homeowner I’m sure I’ll appreciate those colorful missives on domesticity. But downstairs, the shelves prize writers as they should be: the choice obscure novelists, today’s literary royalty, displayed alongside the canonical Roths and Updikes, no less than Pantheonic gods to those like me. The choice among stores, and even among The Regulator’s sections, is clear: I’m all about the basement. —KEVIN LINCOLN TOWERVIEW

P H OTO S B Y L AW S O N K U R T Z

ou’re class shopping, the night before you realize you’re about to miss the 7 a.m. draft the nex t day for ACES registration. You’ll casually poll friends, try your hand at what new evaluation gizmo Duke Student Government is peddling this semester and key one professor’s name into RateMyProfessor, or maybe Google. Google considers it for a second—or 0.16 of a second—and hands you a Duke.edu page where your potential professor is prof iled in all his academic glory. He’s got a background in intellectual proper ty law, it says, or maybe it’s a molecular biologist you’re eyeing. His headshot sits embedded in the upper corner of the page, looking down at you in a friendly manner. This man is in his 40s, if that, with professorially crinkly eyes, vaguely luminescent skin, a crisply ironed shir t and an 80-percent-full head of hair. You choose the course. Probably not because of the mildly attractive headshot set against that marbled background, but you’ve chosen him nonetheless. The future course forgotten as you f inish out the remainder of this semester, you troll his Web page later, to conf irm the location of the class or stalk his previous writings. Finally, you walk into class, this latent image of a chalk-in-hand middle-aged adonis, shamefully preserved in your mind, and you see: a wizened specimen of a professor, posed frailly behind a podium, microphoned so the lot of you can just barely hear him. He’s been aged many years—like a police sketch drawing of a kidnapped girl, except not from 5 to 16 years old, but from 40 to 65, it seems. His jowls sag beneath his chin, glasses slipping gradually down his nose as he orates. His hair clumps in downy tufts across his scalp. You’ve been deceived. Just like Paul Rudd was deceived in “I Love You, Man” when Mel Stein showed up to their diner date, several decades the senior of the pic he’d posted on Friend Finder. “It’s an old picture,” he says. Yeah. It is. After class, you move to endorse HEADSHOTS OF PROFESSORS THAT ARE AT LEAST 20 YEARS OUTDATED. —CAROLINE McGEOUGH

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EXHIBITIONISM

BEAUTY AND THE BALLAD “Mother dear, may I go downtown Instead of out to play, And march the streets of Birmingham In a Freedom March today?” “No, baby, no, you may not go, For the dogs are fierce and wild, And clubs and hoses, guns and jails Aren’t good for a little child.” “But, mother, I won’t be alone. Other children will go with me, And march the streets of Birmingham To make our country free.” These are the opening lines of “Ballad of Birmingham,” imagining the conversation between the four little girls who perished in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala. on Sept. 15, 1963 and their mothers. They also serve to frame the “Beauty for Ashes: Truth, Triumph and Tension” exhibit on display on the lower level of the Divinity School, which commemorates the bombing and celebrates Black History Month. Poet Dudley Randall wrote the ballad to express his rage and grief shortly after members of the Ku Klux Klan planted 22 sticks of dynamite in the

basement of the Baptist Church. “Beauty for Ashes” draws on the same complex emotions—rage, grief—that Randall put into print in 1966. “Life is hard, at times,” the exhibit quotes Martin Luther King Jr.’s eulogy for the four little girls: Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie May Collins and Carol Robertson, “as hard as crucible steel.” The exhibit is meant to probe the stillfresh wounds of a racialized and segregated past, its creators and organizers said. “It’s a history lesson, it’s a reflection on the work of the church in the Civil Rights Movement and it’s an invitation to think of how we fit into this picture,” said Joy Moore, associate dean for Black Church Studies and Church Relations. “We wanted for folks to encounter this moment of destruction, to see the irony of a burned out church in this kind of 3D reality.” Conceptualized and created by members of the Black Seminarians Union and the New Creation Student Arts Group—both student groups in the Divinity School— over the course of a frenzied weekend, “Beauty for Ashes” is far from a typical professional exhibit. Courtney Bryant, a second-year Divinity student and the program

coordinator for the Black Seminarians Union, is the first to admit that the Divinity school students who assembled the project are not artists in the typical sense of the word. “We used our ingenuity,” she said. The mixed-media, three-dimensional mural—made of construction paper, cellophane, wood, bricks, papier mâché and other assorted materials—takes up three walls: one each for Truth, Triumph and Tension. The most provocative of the three seeks to recreate the wreckage of the bombing from the inside of the church looking out—ironically, to a storefront emblazoned with the name “Liberty.” Papier mâché windows and an actual church pew are the focal points of this section of the exhibit, but its emotional center is more easily missed. Buried in caution tape, charred brick, broken pieces of wood and brambles, a little girl’s shoe rests. Viewing the exhibit evokes the trauma the attack must have caused in 1963, marking a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement and preluding the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But for some, the bombing is a very real memory. For those with no recollection of the event, the exhibit recalls the attack to public memory. “This is recent history,” Moore said. “This is something that happened in TOWERVIEW

P H OTO B Y L AW S O N K U R T Z

the devil’s details

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the devil’s details my lifetime and my parents’ lifetimes…. When we’re talking about having a black president—just 40 years ago, that was an impossibility. Part of this is just not to let that be forgotten.” The walls adjacent to the church diorama host an homage to the accomplishments of the black church and an illustration of the tension between revolution and reconciliation that, at times, still colors race relations in the United States. There, visitors can share their reactions to the exhibit on a piece of red construction paper mimicking brick—rebuilding the broken Church, piece by piece. “We wanted to really focus on the Baptist church as a lens through which to look at how the black church in America has contributed to the church universal and to the community at large,” Bryant said. “We also wanted to use the walls to provoke some questions about whether there is violence and revolution, whether there is a black church and a white church. Is the body of Christ broken?” The act of putting the exhibit together, in itself, resembled an act of reconciliation for the exhibition’s organizers. The 20 Divinity school students—black and white—who worked late into the night, chipping in to supplement the $150 budget, are a testament to the progress that has been made since September 1963, Bryant and Moore said. The exhibit will remain on view until March 22. “There’s hope here,” said Rebecca Turner, manager of the Cokesbury Bookstore, located across the hall from the exhibit, who said she was deeply moved by watching Divinity School students of all races assemble the murals. “We can acknowledge where we are and plan on moving forward…. We need to be reminded of the depth of the loss and the anger.” —NAUREEN KHAN 10

TOWERVIEW

FACULTY COMMONS

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

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t 7:10 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, Reynolds Price began breaking down Virginia Woolf’s renowned novel, To The Lighthouse. It’s like this, he said: autobiographical fiction meets stream of consciousness at a beach house in Scotland. Oh yes, and there is this lighthouse. “The lighthouse is dangerous [as a literary device],” he told me. “If [Woolf] had just pressed one gram of excess weight on that image it would have been so corny. You know, ‘There’s a lighthouse! Here comes the beam! Everyone face it and smile!’” Price and I weren’t even in the same room. He was live in a DukeReads online book club, broadcasted by the University on the video site USTREAM. The DukeReads show, which has aired five times this academic year, pits a Duke professor opposite North Carolina Public Radio personality Frank Stasio for an hour of Q&A on a book of the professor’s choosing. The participants have run the gamut of Duke academia, from Blair Sheppard, the mustachioed Dean of the Fuqua School of Business, to feminist theorist and literary critic Ranjana Khanna, professor of Women’s Studies. During the live broadcasts, would-be bookclubbers tune in to watch Stasio and his guest discuss the selection. It’s a free-form conversation and because it’s happening in real time, there is an endearing awkwardness to the thing, which is full of stammered questions, long, pensive pauses and technical snafus. (Twice during his chat with Price, Stasio dropped his microphone and had to halt everything to clip it back on.) But it was hard to faze Price, the James B. Duke Professor of English, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the author of no fewer than 38 books. And when he talked about Virginia—as he called her—there was a calm reverence in his tone. “She’s walking this tightrope so delicately yet never signals to you that she’s afraid of what she’s doing,” Price said, discussing Woolf’s stream of consciousness approach in the novel. To The Lighthouse, a work so dense and beauti-

ful that Price has returned to it several times over the course of his life, is on Price’s top 10 list of favorite novels. As Stasio read passages to him, he closed his eyes, leaning his head on his hands and rocking back and forth as he listened to the words. And then, in a slow, deep voice punctuated by rattling breaths, he slowly unraveled Woolf’s invented universe. For readers, he said, this literary landscape can be a difficult one to navigate; Woolf’s books are not for the easily distracted. “[Virginia] keeps trying to tell you quite courteously that you are reading something that deserves your full attention,” he said. And while the paths of her plots and the rise and fall of her characters can be difficult to comprehend, Price reminded us that, whether in life or in fiction, “almost nobody dies when we really want them to.” As Price sauntered on through his interpretations of Woolf’s novel, Stasio appealed again and again for audience participation—by e-mail, by Facebook, by Twitter—but the air (or Web) waves remained deathly silent. It was a bit like a large lecture class. We were all listening, but no one wanted to be the first to talk. —RYAN BROWN

THE FUNNY PAGES

START-UP CHALLENGED

T

o: Duke Start-up Challenge Executive Committee From: Duke Start-up Challenge Executive Committee Chair Date: Feb. 22, 2010 Subject: Elevator pitch competitors Well, here are the submissions. Looks like a rough year: DareDevil—Harvard had H Bomb. Boston

THE FUNNY PAGES

THE POPULAR VOTE

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SWEET 16: 70 MILLION RESULTS

ELITE 8: 90 MILLION RESULTS

University had Boink. We’re bringing the next generation of erotic student publications to Duke. But we cut to the chase. No artful compositions, no clever essays, no avant-garde gender deconstruction. Just naked-ass Duke undergrads, bundled with every Tuesday Chronicle. PostGame—We provide late-night logistical services for student revelers returning from a night out on Main Street or elsewhere. We slip in hassle-free, clean your leftover dishes, unclog your bathroom sink, brush your teeth if you’re unconscious and/or immobile and send prompt “JK” follow-ups for any regrettable texts found in your phone’s outbox. We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure you still kind of like yourself in the morning. (Plus: we’re now on Twitter! Tweet @PostGameInc with your campus address and late-night hours when your door will be unlocked!) EntrepreneurZone.org— Game-changing Holy Grail of high-profile entrepreneurial cross-collaboration that integrates rich Web 4.0 site architecture with dynamic content crowdsourcing and premium venture capitalistfriendly services to network the young leaders of today with the younger leaders of tomorrow with the less-young leaders from before. PartySalad—We’re shakin’ up the latenight food scene at Duke. Introducing the health-conscious option to challenge the reign of the 50-piece bucket: PartySalad. Imagine you and four friends stumbling from last call over to our cozy corner of the Bryan Center and tearing into an enormous bowl of arugula. I know what you’re thinking: pass the extra virgin! The Humanity Enterprise—A student initiative planning development and marketing of a fully effective AIDS vaccine by fourth quarter of 2010. Concurrent projects include switching the entire Duke campus over to renewable algae biofuels by the end of the spring semester and sending a student delegation to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by 2012. We only really need the award money to throw a sweet launch rager. duke[site].com—A Duke version of any Web site that was even remotely successful or attention-garnering in the last five years. Expect Duke YouTube, Duke ChatRoulette, Duke Sporcle, Duke New York Times, etc. Our working philosophy is that if there’s something on the Internet that some people use sometimes, make a Duke version. Frank—Yo I don’t have like a good name or a business model per se but I’m an entrepreneur and I’d like to propose a change to the FLEX system. Nobody on campus carries cash and it’s bad for the entrepreneuring. For students trying to make it happen, you can only charge to FLEX if you’re donating the money to charity. I’m just saying, if I have a DukeCard reader at Shooters this Thursday night? I’m flipping an oz in about two minutes without ever getting off the bull. Ten percent to Haiti, done deal. —NIM BARSHAD

FINAL FOUR: 136 MILLION RESULTS

the devil’s details

he Duke Student Government subcommittee on electoral reform met last night to discuss possible alternative methods for electing the next DSG president. Citing the success of the reformed Young Trustee selection process, a panel made up of members of the subcommittee presented the findings of their week-long research. The first idea attempted to respond to criticisms that candidates for DSG president don’t have the hunger necessary to get their hands dirty and that they are merely looking to pad their resumes. Thus the panel suggested the election process be simplified to a Pauly Dog eating contest. Plans were halted, however, when committee members could not agree which Thing would be the official Pauly Dog of DSG. The second method presented revolved around the emergence of social media as a replacement for news, entertainment and general human interaction. The panel suggested the candidate with the most followers on Twitter should win. The panel also recommended that Nolan Smith—known on Twitter as @ndotsmitty—count as three followers. Thirdly, the panel laid out, in great detail, what senators later would call the “committee method.” The plan calls for the current DSG president to select six of his closest advisers to make up the Ensuring Randomness Committee. These six would then go to the Plaza on a random day and time, to be selected by a random-number generator. Blindfolded, the committee would pick 10 people at random. (If a member of the staff is chosen, that person would not count.) This committee would then form the Meta-Nominating Committee,

which would further select a Nominating Committee of six members. While the members of the Ensuring Randomness Committee would be allowed to be nominated by the Nominating Committee, members of the Meta-Nominating Committee would not be. Still, everyone involved could add this accomplishment to their respective resumes. This plan, too, fell through after heated debate of whether or not nonunionized staff would be eligible to serve. After a member of the subcommittee made a passing criticism of President Barack Obama, a well-dressed student proposed a “smoothie party” caucus to be held in Wilson Recreation Center. Candidates would supply a selection of homemade smoothies while making soapbox speeches, all in an attempt to lure undecided voters to their corner of the gym. Unfortunately, Wilson Recreation Center was booked for intramural squash that night. A final alternative was presented that would award the presidency to the candidate whose name was most often printed in The Chronicle in a given week. Contributing to any section, in any form, would be permitted, as would being interviewed about something a candidate knows little or nothing about. Each subsection of the vague “Letters to the Editor” page would also count, but not as a full vote. Any mention in the crime logs would count double. After hours of debate the committee voted to hold a popular election to decide which method of election to use. The election referendum will be held four business days before the actual election. Next week’s meeting, the committee announced, will be dedicated to finalizing an election referendum procedure. —SAM SCHLINKERT TOWERVIEW

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Steven Galanis is

The Mayor of

Main Street by Nathan Freeman Photos by Lawson Kurtz

teven Galanis is hungry. “Starving,” he sighs, and then motions to one of the Taverna Nikos waiters—there’s a nod and he turns toward our table, with a sort of wink, too, as if the server knows Galanis personally—before placing an order for an appetizer. “Get us some Saganaki,” Galanis instructs the waiter. He reassures me: “It’s flaming cheese, which is great. Have you ever had that? It’s good.” At once he breaks into a big grin, glances to the waiter, and playfully slaps the table. “I know my Greek food pretty good,” he laughs. We’re eating a bit on the early side; Galanis has to squeeze in Club Hockey practice before Spartan Entertainment, the organization he founded and operates, hosts its weekly event at Shooters: Wednesday Night Beer Pong. It’s the middle of midterms, but Galanis is still expecting an impressive weekday turnout—about 400 to 500 people—simply because, well, that’s what happens every week. “We’ve had as much as 800 people there on a Wednesday night before,” he says, “which is just staggering. “Behind the scenes,” he says, “people don’t need to know how many nights I’m actually throwing parties, because it would kind of blow people’s minds.” Galanis—who, in his four years at Duke, has transformed Spartan Entertainment into the dominant force in nightlife 14

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during the post-Lacrosse era of Duke’s social scene—is slouching, but his expansive build still rises prominently from the table. His smile is generous and frequent. His speech is tinged with a lightness, and he peppers it with a “you know” every other phrase or two. He may have the reputation of being a Falstaff, but after just a few minutes with Galanis, it’s clear he’s much more of a Prince Hal. When you see him and talk to him, you eventually come to the same conclusion three years of Duke students have: if Steven Galanis is throwing a party, you want to be there. The waiter arrives with the Saganaki— a block of mixed Greek cheeses soaked in brandy and spices—and promptly lights it on fire. “Oooh-pah!” he yells over the woosh of the flames, and sets the platter down on the table. “So, Spartan Entertainment actually evolved out of a couple different things,” Galanis starts telling me while plopping a Mt. Olympus-sized chunk of seared Saganaki on my plate. But he’s interrupted by an imposing figure making his way toward our table: George Kastanias, Nikos’ co-owner and executive chef, who sports a fine-cropped goatee, and has an apron wrapped around his considerable girth. They know each other. Galanis throws Spartan parties at Nikos and, of course, they’re both Greek. Kastanias sits with us and asks what happened to my forehead. (It’s Ash Wednesday, and I stopped by Catholic services at the Chapel on the way to dinner.) He nods in understanding after I explain. “The Greek Orthodox”—he takes a quick glance at Galanis—“we do the olive oil.”

Kastanias articulates this ritual by flicking some imaginary drops of EVOO toward my head. Then he segues into a conversation about a recent party that Spartan held at his restaurant. It was a benefit party for Haiti—“We raised some really good money, raised about $800 dollars,” Galanis tells me after, “which was awesome”—and though Galanis had promised an impressive turnout, when 11 p.m. rolled around, Kastanias was still sitting in his office, fretting over the emptiness of his restaurant. “Then, all of a sudden, I come down here and it’s like 700 fuckin’ people!” Kastanias laughs. He’s happy—the recession has hit his restaurant, and he knows that packed wallets show up to Spartan events, and that they will become emptier as the night goes on. The Spartan Entertainment social calendar has become an increasingly feasible model for how Duke students can take advantage of local venues: high-end restaurants have found themselves in an unprecedented financial crisis and are forced to shift their identities accordingly. A bistro with $35 entrees is not the conventional venue for a packed dance floor full of browned-out and blacked-out college guys grinding on heel-wearing sorority girls until the wee hours of the morning, but with the sustainability of the establishment on the line, an extra burst of profitable transactions at the bar may prove too good to pass up. And even if places such as Parizade have ended their policy of hosting events that allow under-21-year-olds, thus ending the Spartan parties at their venues, Galanis believes that Spartan helped keep

THIS IS SPARTAN these places afloat. “With Parizade, that’s a restaurant,” Galanis tells me later in the dinner, after George has left. “Yeah, the parties are, like, huge there, and frankly, it saved some of those restaurants from going out of business. Like Taverna Nikos—if we didn’t throw parties here, it’d completely be out of business.” After joshing with Kastanias about the success of their recent party, Galanis casually polishes off his first piece of Saganaki, and he adds another generous portion to his plate. Then—confident that Spartan can both help venues weather the nosediving Dow and also give students drink deals that keep them from busting their budgets—he offers George a look of assurance. “At this point I think I have this down to a science,” Galanis says, juicing a lemon over his hunk of sautéed cheese. “I think I know how to do this.” teven Galanis grew up in a Greek home in Glenview, Ill. He played football at Glennbrook South High School, a public school with a student population of more than 2,500, and he insists that, as a result, he’s “one of the least elitist people you’ll ever meet.” He cites this upbringing—set against the posh prep school backgrounds that many Spartan Entertainment patrons, and Duke students in general, can own up to—as something that defines him, and something that carries over to his vision for the Spartan brand. “There’s always gonna be a place for elitism at Duke,” he says. “That’s part of what this school is built on—it’s a tobacco baron school. But I’ve tried to shape Duke in kind of my own image. I’ve tried to shape my Duke experience in my own image. It’s funny, in high school, when I was throwing parties at the house, it would be the same fucking criticisms. Like, ‘Why’re you inviting everybody?’ That’s

just me. I’m not saying that, ‘Oh, Duke is just a reflection of Steve Galanis,’ but on some level that social scene, which has been crafted by myself to some extent, has taken on my personality. I wanted to make Duke the most fun place for me to spend four years.” In Glenview, Galanis became close with a family friend, Zach Maurides, Trinity ’07. “He was a senior when I was a freshman, we lived in the same town back home, we’re both Greek, our families grew up together,” Galanis tells me. “I’ve known Zach my whole life—he’s always been like my big brother, so when I visited Duke, you know, I stayed at Zach’s house.” The visit as a pre-frosh convinced Galanis to matriculate to Duke the following year, but he was conscious of how his demeanor was at odds with Duke’s seemingly unshakable reputation as a school for the snotty. “The fact that I go to Duke is funny,” he says. “My football coach told me, ‘This is the complete worst fit for you ever.’ Because I didn’t grow up like that. My family is the most inclusive people. They meet someone for the first time and they take them in…. I don’t care who your dad is. I’m not here to fuckin’ schmooze. I’m here to find people I like and have a good time.” Galanis stuck to this mentality when starting Spartan Entertainment in the spring of 2007. Once the three-week bender that is rush transitioned to the blistering hangover that is pledging, the once-cohesive group of Galanis’s freshmen friends became instantly fragmented. Galanis—who, as a freshman, accepted a bid to join Delta Sigma Phi—wanted to carry on the populist spirit that thrived pre-rush, and he set the groundwork for an organization that could bring different campus organizations together. Social stratification is the stigma Duke just can’t seem to rid itself of. “The whole crux of it is this unaffiliated model,” he says. “And that was my dream—going back to foundations, what we started out with is beer pong, and that

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started up second-semester freshman year. What happens? You’re a freshman, and everyone’s going to Theta Chi Wednesday night at Erwin. Everybody’s doing the same thing. Then, suddenly, rush comes around and 60 older guys decide, ‘You’re gonna be in this frat and your boy’s gonna be in this frat,’ and you don’t have control over that. A lot of people just don’t cling behind their letters. It’s like, man, everybody liked each other first semester. So why don’t we all go to the same place?” Galanis enlisted the help of Maurides to form a campus organization that would throw parties reminiscent of those that went down pre-rush. In addition to his personal bond with Galanis, Maurides had another quality that would prove invaluable in getting Spartan Entertainment off the ground: He had spent his previous years at Duke garnering the respect of students and bar owners in Durham and Chapel Hill, making him the perfect person to partner with in such an undertaking. “Five years ago Zach was the ‘me’ before there was a ‘me,’ essentially,” Galanis says. “Zach was already known by this point. He was the one who founded Iced Out—he was the first one to do that. On his own, you know, way back, he had thrown the biggest party that Duke had ever seen, in Chapel Hill, that was over, like, three clubs or something like that—something ridiculous. So Zach was always the go-to guy with that. But at the same time, he was a senior.” Realizing that he would soon be leaving Duke, Maurides arranged for Galanis to carry on the same relationships he had established, starting with a partnership with Shooters II that would allow for weekly parties on Wednesdays. By shifting the mentality of weekend partying from fraternity-oriented events in sections or at an off-campus house, Spartan has made it possible for events to at least aspire toward an open-door policy. “It’s changed dramatically over the last seven years,” Maurides says over the phone. “We’re changing it from ‘This is a frat party’ to ‘This is a

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Duke party.’” The idea behind the first such event, Beer Pong at Shooters, seems reasonable enough, but at the time it came off as a bit cavalier for a weekday. But Galanis saw the un-colonized day on the social calendar as an opportunity. He knew the universal appeal of beer pong, especially if it was played with $5 pitchers of beer. “There had to be a concept that was just different than anything else going on,” Galanis says. “Taking Shooters—which up to that point was just the place where you’d go, a big sweatfest—and suddenly you’ve got beer pong tables out there, and the lights are turned on, so it’s a completely different feel.” At first, the event was a depressing caricature of what Shooters has come to represent in the minds of Duke students— on those first Wednesday nights the infamous dancefloor, with its denizens usually pressed closer than matches in a fresh matchbox, was turned into a cold and empty beer pong arena. But as the word spread, the crowd began to grow. “And it didn’t matter who you were, or what frat you were in, or what sorority you were in, or what color you were—if you go to Duke, you can come here, and there will be people you can play beer pong against that also go to Duke.” Since Wednesday Night Beer Pong took off three years ago, the Spartan name has become increasingly prevalent. The Facebook group has ballooned to reach more than 1,700 members—or about a quarter of the undergraduate population. The Spartan Entertainment events at Shooters can attract 800 people on a Wednesday and 1,300 people on a Saturday. And Spartan’s personalized planning services seem equally ubiquitous. Fraternities, sororities and even non-living groups such TOWERVIEW

as Dancing Devils and Hoof ‘n’ Horn have reached out to Galanis in hopes of tapping into his particular recipe for a good time. Any group that e-mails Galanis asking him to work his magic on its upcoming event— and many do: His BlackBerry rarely lasts a minute without that nagging buzz-buzz of a newly filled inbox—will be treated to a rager equipped with a reliable local venue, music provided by one of Spartan’s roster of crack DJs, limo services, catered food by one of the restaurants Spartan has a relationship with, and bulb-snapping photographers. Spartan was hired to host nearly every sorority bid night. Galanis is the center of this circus, combining his natural charisma with a breakneck work ethic in order to create a business that can succeed financially. But whether the model is sustainable in the future remains to be seen. The reality of Spartan may fall short of Galanis’ vision—a seismic force that does away with its caste system in favor of truly diverse open parties. And judging by the highly Greek makeup of some Spartan events, it seems likely the stratification will prevail. Maybe these Spartan events are doing nothing to bring a wider range of social spectrum into the mix. Even worse, maybe they’re contributing to the problem. I walk into Shooters for tonight’s edition of Wednesday Night Beer Pong and the place is filled with smoke. Cigarettes are everywhere—people are lighting up like it’s 2009. Looking around, I can sense the excess, the exclusion by cliques, the students obviously awash in affluence. Maybe that girl’s purse actually is an Hermès Birkin bag (retail value: $5,000) and not a knockoff, and maybe she flew up to the City last weekend to buy it. Maybe this girl actually is paying for 10 of her friends to go to the

BVIs for Spring Break, as she claims loudly in slurred syllables. Maybe Spartan isn’t combating the caste system that supposedly exists at Duke. Maybe it’s facilitating it. But there’s no doubt that Spartan Entertainment is providing exactly what it prides itself on: value. The value a guy gets when he strikes up a conversation with the cute girl who sits next to him in Shakespeare class. The value of $5 pitchers of beer— beer cheaper than bottled water, beer cheaper than soda. The value of debasing yourself at the dingiest bar in Durham on a night that should be spent in Bostock—and loving every minute of it. Maybe—hopefully—this is what matters. After a few minutes I find Galanis, drinking a beer in one of the wooden booths, surrounded by a revolving cast of skinny swooning girls in dresses, and sloppy-drunk guys edging their way in, trying to secure a seat, trying to talk to them, too. But the girls are talking to Galanis. He waves me over to the bench, and makes room across from him. “Not a bad turnout for midterms, eh!” Galanis yells in my ear. He’s holding court tonight at Shooters— letting the people come to him. We’re surrounded by girls, gorgeous girls, on all sides, and everyone’s smoking a cigarette. Galanis comments on the diversity he says he sees in the crowd. “This is the epitome of what we’re built on,” he says to all of us. I take out a cigarette and Galanis lights it for me. The ashtray is overflowing. He starts to say something else but a girl cuts him off, so he puts his arm around her. He takes a drag and finishes what he was saying. “I think this brings out the best cross-sections of Duke. This event. Period.” When Spartan Entertainment first held this event, three people came. The second

THIS IS SPARTAN week, seven people came. The third week, 15 people came. Now, despite the threat of midterms, there are hundreds of people at Shooters II. To ignore the skill with which Galanis runs his enterprise would be silly. “You know, it’s funny—my nickname my whole life has always been ‘The Mayor,’” he says. “That came from kindergarten. And no matter how hard I try to put that behind me, sometimes it just keeps coming back. I was the mayor of Glenview, and now I’m the mayor of Durham.” teven Galanis cut his teeth in the world of politics­—perhaps an unconventional path for a man who prides himself on his drink specials, but it was in the world of elections and ballots where Galanis began to find his voice. The summer after he graduated high school, Galanis joined the campaign team of Alexi Giannoulias, a community banker from Chicago and former professional basketball player in Greece, as he attempted to become the youngest state treasurer in the nation. That November, Giannoulias won the election. He is currently the Democratic candidate in the race for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama. “My aunt and [Giannoulias’s] mom were roommates in college, at U of I. For my whole senior year she was saying ‘Oh, you have to got meet Alexi!” Galanis said. “The first day I go in the office I expect, ‘I’m an 18-year-old, I’m gonna be stuffing envelopes, making phone calls.’ I go to the office, and the very first day, it turns out the night before his old driver had got too many speeding tickets so he couldn’t drive anymore. So suddenly it was, like, ‘Hey kid—take the keys. You’re my driver.’” Galanis became Giannoulias’s body man, the Reggie Love to his Barack Obama, and drove him around in a Yukon XL Denali— “black tinted windows, everything like that”—to every one of his campaign stops. The non-stop exposure to the candidate gave him the chance to not only meet with many of the high-ranking personalities that Giannoulias worked with—including Obama, who Galanis claims is Giannoulias’

“best friend in the world,” having been the president’s frequent basketball companion since they met on a pick-up court in the late 90s—but he also found a mentor in Giannoulias. “It was a short time, but it also happened to be a big time in his life,” he says. “He found out his father died while we were in the car together. He had a heart attack in Greece. I drove him to his dad’s funeral. There were a lot of things like that where you really get to have this close bond. I think the other similar thing is you have this older Greek mentor.... Obviously, it’s like if I screw up my job my thea Kiki is gonna know about it, and she’s gonna tell my mom and my yiayia and everybody’s gonna be all ‘Alexi said you did bad things!’ But on the good side if you do a good job, then that gives you a leg up and suddenly it’s like ‘Oh yeah, this kid was loyal to me, he was great, he helped me at a great time in my life.’” This deep involvement in Chicago politics gave Galanis a chance to have real conversations with some of the most influential people in the world, including the sitting commander-in-chief. Galanis had attended the Next Generation Initiative forum, a prestigious meeting where select students from each archdiocese of the Greek Orthodox Church meet with Greek leaders on The Hill. After meeting with John Negroponte, George Tenet and other important players in government, Galanis saw thenSenator Obama boarding the same plane back to Chicago. “He’s walking down, and he ends up sitting right across from me on the aisle, and he’s w e a ring his sunglass-

es—I swear to God h e ’s weari n g these

black sunglasses—and even then that guy had this aura. I’d seen him—I’d seen him at the East Bank Club, I’d seen him at fundraisers, we had small talk, but here we are sitting on a plane, he’s right across from me, and the one thing I was able to say was, like, “Barack, how you doing?’ And he’s, ‘Oh, how you doing?’ He knew I looked familiar and I’m, like, ‘Oh, I’m AG’s body man, you know Alexi.’ He went ‘Oh,’ and we just went on in conversation.” Galanis says he’s planning to adapt the skills he’s developed while running Spartan to organize fundraisers this summer for Giannoulias’ campaign for Senate. The service would be akin to a thank-you to the Senatorial candidate, as Galanis says that the poise and calm with which he rules the Spartan empire can be traced back to his exposure to Giannoulias’ political acumen. “It’s a lot of the same skills,” he says, comparing working on the campaign to his role at Spartan. “I’m driving around and he’s on the phone the entire time, doing fundraiser calls. I don’t have to make those fundraiser calls, but I listened to how he talked to people, I listened to how he’s cold-calling people. When he’s out in a crowd with strangers I watched him, I saw what he did, I saw how he interacted with people. Frankly, I think a lot of that stuff is natural—you either have it or you don’t. Then again being around someone that’s polished, and being around people who are better at that than you, at that point in your life, can only help.” arrive at Shooters on Wednesday, a few hours after my dinner with Galanis at Taverna Nikos. It’s just before midnight. The lights are nearly blinding until I realize that they are simply on, and, having never been to Shooters this sober, I can see the dirt climbing the walls. A few people are scattered around, and the row of booths—usually hot property—are totally unoccupied. This isn’t exactly surprising—it is, as everyone knows, entirely gauche to arrive this early to Shooters—but I can’t help but think that perhaps the night would be a failure. It is, after all, midterm week. Still, Galanis predicts a big night. The scene doesn’t exactly bode well for the evening’s prospects. The radio pop that always wails across the dance floor has lost its vitality, pathetic and formless without the presence of AristoTOWERVIEW

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crat-empowered ids to embody it, and so the songs become just a cheap reminder of those majestically hazy Saturday nights when the music somehow had so much more meaning. And the beer pong tables, flanked by T-shirted bros tossing pong balls back and forth, are weirdly desolate, surrounded by piecemeal clumps of bored-faced coeds in dresses. Instead of a Technicolor blur of faces—the predominate impression of a typical night at the notorious bar—the turnout makes possible the existence of the “individual” at Shooters and enables the patrons to appear as something more than a cog in the undulating amorphous dancefloor. I immediately go to the bar and purchase a $5 pitcher of beer. Galanis is there, of course, but he hasn’t yet joined the burgeoning party—he’s held up with Kim Cates, the manager of Shooters II, and a white-bearded local with a Southern drawl that bubbles from his mouth like molasses. Galanis has his BlackBerry in his hand, and it’s buzzing. It takes no longer than five minutes for the rest of the party to arrive, and when it does, it’s a cavalcade of girls who move their feet timidly, wobbly like sailors on shore leave, just off the boat and still not over their sea legs, and they sport prominent “P’s” on their hands etched in black Sharpie. It takes a few more minutes for Shooters to completely fill up, and when it does, it has the distinction of attracting what can only be called a beautiful sample of Duke students. In the course of 10 minutes’ time the landscape has changed, and the Wednesday night Shooters identity begins to emerge. And then the whole club erupts—it’s soon no different than a Saturday night. Girls dance with each other in the cage or on the platforms, while the guys hover by the beer pong tables, waiting in line, and being watched by the girls who watch them. The playlist segues to a new song, and everyone mouths the words to themselves. Galanis is only nursing his beer. He says he rarely gets drunk at Spartan events; he has to help tie up financial matters after the last attendees leave. As he posts up next to the beer pong table that I’ve been playing on, a girl hovers by him, until she leaves, when another takes her place—they come and make quick sloppy conversation with the man who made this all possible, before moving on to someone else. They all have mixed drinks in hand, limes groping the rims of their cups. “Kim was yelling at me earlier, like, ‘Why didn’t you tell me it was midterms!’ and I was, like, ‘Don’t worry,’” he told me in a voice loud enough to be heard over the music. Popping all around are the clinks of a pong ball hitting the floor and the clunks of a pong ball splashing into a Solo cup. Another girl makes her way toward Galanis. The DJ switches to something new and the crowd responds with a feverish high-pitched roar. “People will come,” Galanis says to me. phenomenon like Spartan Entertainment could not exist if not for the Facebook Generation. Galanis wields the power to simultaneously contact more than 1,700 students—all of whom joined voluntarily, unlike, say, the recipients of a DSG blast e-mail—giving Spartan a wide advantage over the fraternities and sororities who spread word of their parties via less-inclusive means. “Facebook is the single best way,” he says. “And this is the other thing, too—we were completely ahead of the curve on this. Frats used to do Evites. That was the big thing. They have their own, like, e-mail listservs, right, and they’re sending out things during the week…. There’s certain targeted people these frats want at these parties. And there are certain people who aren’t on that list.” Facebook also acts as a barometer to measure the buzz surrounding a certain event, and the raw number of people connected

THIS IS SPARTAN to the Spartan group helps ensure that this buzz is louder than anything else in the Duke network. The capital Spartan has built up on Facebook, and on campus in general, has made it possible for Galanis to plan events even when he is thousands of miles away from Durham. “I can make a Facebook event from Namibia,” he says. “I’ve done it before. That’s what I did on [Semester At Sea]. I literally made an event in Namibia and got 1,000 people there at Shooters on a Saturday night.” Some consider this modus operandi the antithesis of the ultra-selective parties frats are wont to throw. And it is just one of the ways that Spartan Entertainment has rubbed some members of the Greek scene the wrong way. A common perception persists among students: Many believe that Spartan Entertainment is some sort of extension of Delta Sig, started by one of its brothers as way to do little more than get the frat drunker than they usually do. Galanis assures me this is not the case. “If you go back to the old Delta Sig fratmail, you’ll see the animosities the older guys had for my attempt to make things more accessible and less exclusive,” he says. This sort of response to the affiliationblind approach to nightlife extended beyond Galanis’s frat, as well. Senior Steve McAlpine, a member of Delta Tau Delta fraternity, sent an e-mail Oct. 16, 2009 to more than 75 chapter presidents and IFC council members warning them of the threat that Spartan could pose to the Greek-based method of organizing social life. The e-mail was prompted by a message McAlpine had received from Maurides about how Spartan’s services could help with fraternity and sorority events. “Spartan Entertainment began a couple years ago just hosting a few events here or there, but now has grown into an organization hosting multiple events each week, constantly rivaling the events of all our groups,” McAlpine wrote. “I like a future where a pseduo [sic] professional party promotion organization does not have complete control over all the offcampus venues, taking a financial and social cut away from Greeks.” This last concern has some merit. Spartan Entertainment is pulling in a significant amount of money—Galanis won’t disclose exactly how much—some of which could have potentially gone to frats. For booking a semi on behalf of a group, Spartan will charge a planning fee. For hosting an open party at, say, Shooters or Parizade, Spartan will receive a marketing fee from the venue in return for bringing the people who pay TOWERVIEW

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THIS IS SPARTAN the cover at the door. Galanis insists that he did not create Spartan Entertainment as a way to increase his net worth. “Frankly,” he tells me, “You couldn’t do this business if you just wanna make money. “Do we do well for ourselves for college students? Absolutely,” he acknowledges. “I’ve got a great little piece of disposable income. Could I survive on what I’m doing right now? No. I couldn’t be paying my tuition; I couldn’t be doing things like that.” Galanis opted not to disclose his personal income from Spartan Entertainment, as the company is working on its tax returns for its first year of being incorporated. “You will not get that out of me, and there’s no way to sugarcoat it,” he laughs. arry Moneta is a family friend of the Galanis family. The vice president for student affairs stays with his parents when he stops

venues. “It’s funny because a lot of people think ‘Oh, Larry’s gotta be your arch-nemesis. No, it’s the complete opposite,” Galanis tells me. “Larry’s one of our biggest supporters, because as dean of students, he recognizes that there’s something inherently safer about these kids going to these offcampus bars instead of parties off-campus at the house. If I’m gonna throw a triplekegger at my house every night, he’s gonna be my worst enemy. But if I’m throwing Shooters, if I’m throwing Devine’s, if I’m throwing George’s, where you have statecertified people whether it’s cops whether it’s ALE guys there regulating it, checking IDs…. You look at the stats, in all the parties I’ve thrown at Shooters I can’t recall more than one hand of people that had to go to the EMS. How many go on LDOC? On Tailgate?” Spartan has, however, run into its fair share of hurdles en route to establishing dominance. On Wednesday, March 3,

suffered little damage: the bar is as packed as ever. Kim Cates says she folded up the tables this week at the request of ALE, but she’s expecting to have pong balls flying when students get back from Spring Break. “I’m hoping it will go my way,” she says. “No, it’s not a state law, but we shut it down for the sake of ALE. They can give me a violation.” Senior Jack Wilkinson, a columnist for recess, spent time with Galanis during the Semester at Sea program last fall, and he wowed him with his extensive music collection. Upon returning to Durham, he began DJing for Spartan Entertainment. A year later, he’s the highest-paid DJ in the Research Triangle, a success he says is “all thanks to Spartan.” He started spinning at Devine’s every Tuesday night, and when Spartan began throwing 18-and-up parties at Parizade last semester, Wilkinson became a fixture behind the booth. “There was a couple of times when there were fights right next to me,” he says of his ex-

“You know, it’s funny—my nickname my whole lif “That came from kindergarten. And no matter how it just keeps coming back. I was the mayor of Gle in Chicago. Moneta says his conversations about Spartan Entertainment have been relatively limited. “My familiarity with Spartan was quite ‘sparse’ until a sit-down I had with him and Zach a couple of weeks ago,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I wouldn’t characterize this as ‘discussions’... we’ve had but one conversation with any detail and I’m just learning about Spartan’s programming model. How and if Duke might collaborate is still in consideration.” The relationship with Moneta has been a beneficial one for Spartan Entertainment, Galanis says. By focusing its efforts on privately owned bars, Spartan is encouraging students to spend their weekends at venues where ALE officers and police can more easily monitor dangerous amounts of drinking. For these reasons, Galanis maintains that Moneta is in favor of pushing for a concentration of nightlife at off-campus 20

TOWERVIEW

hours before Busch Light-seeking students descended upon the Shooters dancefloor to attend Spartan’s marquee event, Galanis sent an e-mail to the members of the Facebook group informing them of a slight change to the night’s agenda: there would be no beer pong at Wednesday Night Beer Pong. The e-mail placed the blame on “legal complications with ALE,” but Galanis says he’s confident the games will not be stopped for good. “Over the last couple of months there have been empty threats,” Galanis tells me as guest begin to enter Taverna Nikos for Senior Wine Night, a weekly event organized by Spartan. “They had a violation and had to stop beer pong for a week.” Unfettered, Spartan soldiers on, and hosts Shooters sans academia’s favorite pastime. Upon arriving, I realize they’ve

periences at Spartan events. “I got a punch in, then I got my headphones back on, and kept on going.” It’s not surprising that Spartan events can inspire this level of debauchery. Galanis has even been contacted by Playboy to be the point-person in its search for the top 10 party schools. (He’s currently working on the application. “That would be my crowning achievement,” he says of earning a spot of the list.) And when you look at the themes of Spartan parties, and how successful they’ve been delivered, this midsized, academically minded institution may actually have a shot. They’ve hosted a foam party, a Jersey Shore party and last spring, an April Showers party. “We made it rain in Shooters,” Galanis says. “I mean—massive. We set these massive sprinklers systems up and every 15 minutes we’d literally make it rain in Shooters. We had girls in bikinis

THIS IS SPARTAN and wet T-shirts.” Wilkinson says he could tell “stories for days” about working at Spartan events, and about his time abroad with Galanis. “The last time we did Parizade two chicks offered to make out if I played ‘Sexy Bitch,’ he recalls with a wistful smile. “So I did, and they got on the table and did it. The bouncers had to break it up—yeah, that was awesome.” And the vivacity that defines Galanis has made appearances well beyond the borders of the City of Medicine, Wilkinson explained in his e-mail. “It must be all the olive oil because he can grease any axel,” he says before recounting how effortlessly he could operate with people in all corners of the world during their Semester at Sea. “There were a number of times Steve would meet a local during the day, that person would tell us about a bar or club, Steve would spread the word, and next thing you know all of SAS would be there and Steve and I would be sitting drinking champagne

its holder the ability to bring a friend with him in the VIP line. Galanis says only 21-year-olds will be eligible for the Spartan Card and the Spartan Elite Card, and that they will cost somewhere around $50 and $70, respectively. “If we start doing something in Chapel Hill or if we start doing something in Raleigh, we’ll find a way to make those cards vital,” he says. “The cards are here—they’re printed. We’ve already contacted a lot of the people who will eventually be buying them, so we’re waiting to see how the dust settles.” Spartan is also helping relaunch Senior Wine Night, which was held at Parizade every Wednesday last semester, catering to any member of the Class of 2010 with enough spare cash to fork over $240 for the series of nights. When Parizade decided to cease all late-night events, Galanis arranged for the wine tasting to be hosted at Taverna Nikos. Instead of the hefty subscription fee, admission will be reduced to $15 per night, with no obligation to attend

Duke students to Chapel Hill or Raleigh, and he says he is still trying to find the best way to develop it. Maurides is optimistic that Spartan can replicate its success other local colleges. “If you create value, customers will come, so I think it’s possible to do this at UNC and N.C. State,” he says. “You can do this at any college, so it’s certainly something we’ve been looking into.” As for Galanis’s future with Spartan Entertainment after graduation, he says he is still undecided, though he is interested in possibly participating in Teach for America (at press deadline, he had been granted a final round interview), preferably in Durham, where he could keep an eye on Spartan operations. But he does not know what he wants to do. He talks in abstractions, but he appears to be at peace with his lack of solidified post-graduation plans—which isn’t the typical reaction from a student at a pre-professional/pre-banking powerhouse such as Duke. “How do all these stars align? How do all these dots connect?

ole life has always been ‘The Mayor,’” Galanis says. er how hard I try to put that behind me, sometimes of Glenview, and now I’m the mayor of Durham.” as the owner was trying to give us his daughters. How he arranges deals like this, I have no idea.” he future of Spartan Entertainment, like the future of Galanis himself, is currently up in the air. Some developments are more immediate—and more set in stone—than others. First, Galanis plans to roll out “Spartan Cards” and “Spartan Elite Cards” in March. Spartan will invite its most “loyal customers” to purchase these VIP passes, which will allow them stand in their own private line at all Spartan events, receive discounted meals at Durham restaurants and be privy to nightlife tips via text message. The Elite card will additionally grant

every week. “This was a situation where the new ownership came into Parizade— [Wine Night has] always been at Parizade, for years. But suddenly the new guy comes in and he’s not too keen on doing any late night events at Parizade… suddenly this place doesn’t have a home,” he tells me. Another project in the works centers on a two-day music festival that would feature a slew of well-known local and college acts, as well as a major act to headline each night. The mini-Bonnaroo would be virtually unprecedented in the world of the Duke social scene, but Maurides says more planning must be done before anything can be finalized. “We haven’t set a date,” he says. “Our projected date is early fall or late spring. We’re not going to rush—we want to do it right.” Galanis has also mentioned the possibility of starting a bus service that could take

I don’t know, and that’s why it’s been a really interesting ride,” he says. “I’m a pretty unique person, and if someone doesn’t want me to be there, then that’s not the right place for me to be. If I can’t find the right place for me to be, at this point in my life, I’ve figured out that I will make something for me.”

TOWERVIEW

21

Came

By Ben Co

eron

n Cohen

Seventy Years

P H OTO S CO U R T E S Y D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y A R C H I V E S

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n Saturday, Jan. 6, 1940, about 8,000 people walked through the doors of Duke Indoor Stadium, situated about 40 feet from Card Gymnasium, for the inaugural game in the new arena. The stadium was hailed as the largest basketball venue south of Philadelphia’s Palestra, and it was described by the University in the game program, given out free of charge to all spectators, as “one of the most modern and complete physical education buildings in the country.” The president of the Durham Chamber of Commerce, Marion Fowler, called it “so colossal and so wonderful it leaves me speechless.” The crowd was thought to be the biggest ever for a basketball contest in the South. Originally sketched on a book of matches by Wallace Wade and Eddie Cameron in 1935—as legend would have it, anyway—Duke Indoor Stadium had transformed, in about five years, into something tangible and magnificent. For the three years of planning, officials from the University had toured the country, admiring architectural designs and engineering structures. The funding for the new building came, ironically, when the 1939 football team, nicknamed the Iron Dukes, returned to Durham from the Rose Bowl with enough money to kick off construction, which started three months later. The Philadelphia firm of Horace Trumbauer, Architect—the same one that designed a New

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York townhome for James Buchanan Duke and built Duke’s campus in 1924—won the bid, and Julian Abele, one of the first black architects in the United States, drew the plans. The exterior brick was to be taken from the Duke quarry near Hillsborough, the source of the stone for the academic edifices on the other side of West Campus. They sketched a domed building with 5,000 seats, which was considered extravagant by Trumbauer’s standards. “For your information Yale has in its new gymnasium

It is fitting to rejoice in this adequate and beautiful temple which here we dedicate to youth and to democracy.

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Robert House, 1940 a basketball court with sittings for 1,600,” Trumbauer wrote to President William Few. “I think the sittings for 8,000 people is rather liberal. The palestra at the University of Pennsylvania seats 9,000.” Eventually, when Trumbauer lost the argument against decadence and the design for the stadium was finalized, the stone

was laid in warm weather to avoid freezing the mortar. It took nine months and $400,000—adjusted for inflation, about $17 million today—to finish the construction, and it was fully financed in 1945, when, again, the Duke football team won the Sugar Bowl. Duke Indoor Stadium measured 262 feet by 175 feet, with nine steel frames at 26-foot intervals. The capacity of 8,800 spectators included room for 3,500 folding chairs—exclusively for use by undergraduates, then as now. The stadium itself had space for three fullsized courts, narrowed down to one when temporary seats were installed. At the formal opening and dedication of the arena, the pep band kicked off the pre-game affair, followed by presentations and speeches from Dean William Wannamaker and Few, both of whom marveled at the physical beauty of the building. From there, a number of dignitaries—including the head coach of Princeton, the opponent—were introduced before Robert House, a dean at the University of North Carolina, addressed the crowd. House was not the public official meant to give the final remarks before the game’s tip; the University had planned for N.C. Gov. Clyde Hoey to be the keynote speaker. Earlier that week, however, Hoey had sent a Western Union telegram to Henry Dwire, a University vice president, informing him that “it will be impossible for me to attend meeting Saturday night. Am very sorry.” So the remarks fell to House, who doubled as a representative of the Southern Conference. “I am a Methodist, I aspire to religion, I endorse erudition and I use both tobacco and water,” he began, with three micro-

Seventy Years phones amplifying his words. “I should like to be a scholar and a gentleman. Hence, I claim to have good personal grounds for being a friend and well-wisher to Duke University.” The crowd must have laughed, and House continued, congratulating Duke on the latest addition to its “supremely beautiful plant,” before philosophizing on the meaning of the building—which, 70 years later, is now known as Cameron Indoor Stadium. “Here will be on parade not only Duke University, but also in sportsmanlike rivalry, other colleges and universities through their teams and supporters. Youth will be on parade here. Education will be on parade here. And here the values of a great and democratic people will be on parade in that most dramatic of modern exercises—the tension of communal rivalries transcending itself in terms of courtesy and sportsmanship. Herein lies the beautiful possibility we celebrate. For modern intercollegiate athletics, despite its many unsolved problems, is transcendent in dynamic appeal to the brain and character of youth, the skill of teachers and the response of the public, which rises unfailingly to fine examples. Modern games preserve for us the athletic glory of Greece, the executive efficiency of Rome, the courtesy of the age of chivalry, and in terms of sportsmanship and effective teaching, they add dramatic psychological and moral values of their own. It is fitting to rejoice in this flowering of this whole phase of education and to rejoice in its adequate and beautiful temple which here we dedicate to youth

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and to democracy.” That night, Duke beat Princeton, 3627.

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he first time I sneaked into Cameron, in 2004, the stadium looked different from the way it did in 1940. In more than 60 years, the building itself had witnessed two major renovations, separated by about 10 years. The first substantial tuneup arrived in the late 1970s, prodded by a stern letter from

then-head coach Vic Bubas to Tom Butters, the school’s longtime athletic director. The stadium needed a fresh coat of paint. The old, original floor had been decimated by more than 30 years of play, and it was replaced by a new court, rest-

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ing on 30,000 hand-laid slats of wood over 1/16th of an inch of cement and thick foam padding. New seats awaited the students, and new baskets were suspended from the roof. The renovations, all told, cost $650,000 then, and they effectively brought about a new era of the arena. The change that preceded this first renovation, were perhaps even more significant to the modern manifestation of the building. In 1972, a new nameplate adorned the campus-side stone entrance. With eight lines of raised text, Duke Indoor Stadium became Cameron Indoor Stadium, dedicated by the Board of Trustees in honor of Edmund McCullough Cameron, Duke’s head basketball coach from 1939 until 1942, its head football coach from 1942 until 1945 and its athletic director in that period and then again from 1951 until 1972. On the day of the dedication, Cameron posed for photos with Terry Sanford, the University’s president, and Carl James, his replacement as athletic director. The other administrators wore dark suits, while Cameron, whose hair had grayed on the edges, sported a tan checkered coat. “Eddie was almost shocked when they told him that they were going to name it for him,” recalled Bill Brill, a 1952 graduate, longtime sports writer and namesake of Cameron’s media room. Ever since, Cameron’s name has been synonymous with the building, transcending generations. The Cameron Crazies are, of course, indirectly named

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Seventy Years

in his honor, and when students refer to the basketball stadium in conversation, it’s never as Cameron Indoor Stadium, but just Cameron. The first renovations to the newly christened stadium held for about 10 more years, by which point it had become clear, yet again, that the old gymnasium needed more than just fresh paint. In February of 1986, for a Sunday game between Duke and Georgia Tech, the famed sportscaster Dick Enberg came to Cameron for the NBC telecast. After extolling the building’s charm, he proceeded to speak of imminent changes to Cameron—the second of such upheavals. “They’re not going to raise the roof,” Enberg said. “They’re going to spend money to renovate it, complete with brass railings and stained glass windows. They’re going to make a real sports antique out of it, and I salute them for it.” Cameron, indeed, was about to be embellished with decorative wood paneling and brass railings, a new scoreboard and a new sound system, stripping the upper bowl of the sound buffers it had sported since 1940. The athletic de-

in Cameron

partment planned to install 750 new student seats, bumping the arena’s capacity to that famed 9,314 figure. The lobbies were to be refurbished, the restrooms spruced up. Basketball in Cameron is a kind of religion, practiced by the worshipping masses of Cameron Crazies. They bow to Mike Krzyzewski when he walks on the floor, and one could even interpret their incessant bouncing as a kind of prayerful meditation. Even for a university founded on Methodism, however, the installation of stained glass windows never was part of the renovation plan. Cameron’s status as a pseudo-cathedral, rather than a literal shrine, would have to suffice. Enberg had simply misinterpreted a conversation with an athletics official. So when Butters walked into his office the next morning, only to be greeted by phone messages from multiple stained-glass window companies looking for business, he had to tell them he wasn’t interested. Over the next 20 years, Cameron was the subject of more change—the constructions of the Schwartz-Butters

Athletic Center next door and the adjacent Michael W. Krzyzewski Center for Athletic Excellence were major capital projects; adding air conditioning in 2001 was less costly, but just as necessary—but it was the arena transformed in the late 1980s that I, like so many others, saw when I first walked into Cameron. The summer day I came to tour the campus as a prospective student was sunny and sticky. We started at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, sweating our way up Chapel Drive, looking for some shade that never surfaced. We turned right at the Chapel, stopping in large semi-circles on the academic side of the quad before finding air-conditioned refuge in the Perkins lobby, near a von der Heyden Pavilion that was still under construction. My father and I saw another high schooler and his father, about five feet away, whispering in each other’s ears. Soon enough, they had walked away from the group leader, prattling on about the collected total of books in the libraries. The tour wended through West Campus before ending, finally, by

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Seventy Years

Towerview Road, across the street from Cameron. The guide told us she wasn’t going to escort us into the stadium, but we should feel free to cross the street and find our way in. My father and I walked, quickly, through the parking lot, past the Krzyzewskiville sign and the student-side entrance, and we hit the graduate-student-side lobby. The doors to the court were locked, so we climbed the stairs and ducked under obstacles guarding the ramps from visitors. He let me go first. I half-expected to see Coach K look up and scold me for watching practice, but instead, the court was being re-lacquered. The gym seemed no bigger than my high school’s, the air more musty. It was beautiful. We walked back down the steps, after about five minutes of admiration, and there, looking around the lobby, were the father-son duo that had left the tour. They had been in Cameron the entire time.

I

n November of 1986, just several months before Mike Krzyzewski was to win his first national coaching honor, Tom Butters, Duke’s athletic director, began a study to examine the feasibility of expanding Cameron Indoor Stadium. The study resulted in a proposal to add 6,000 seats to Cameron at a hefty $15 million price tag. A 15,000-seat stadium would bring in almost $1 million extra in ticket revenue each year, plus another estimated $1 million in contributions from boosters; even at $15 million, adding to Cameron would have been less pricey than building an entirely new stadium for an estimated $25 million. The charm of the building would have been lost, destroyed

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in favor of the need to keep up. High-level University administrators—the Board of Trustees, President Keith Brodie and, most important, Butters himself—nixed the plan, choosing instead to tweak Cameron subtly, maintaining its quaint charm. In a three-page memorandum dated Nov. 1, 1987, Butters offered an explanation of the strategic process before validating the University’s eventual decision. “In exchange for 6,000 additional seats, we would sacrifice the intimacy of Cameron Indoor Stadium and perhaps alter forever its unique character,” he wrote. “Certainly it is one of the most intimate basketball arenas in the nation. Additionally, the building has as much national acclaim as any arena associated with a university. Wrigley Field is not The Astrodome—but then—does it need to be? Given those feelings, we continued our conversations with the administration and recommended strongly that for the long foreseeable future, Duke University basketball be played in Cameron Indoor Stadium.” On the same day, Krzyzewski also wrote a letter addressed to fans of Duke Basketball. The young coach, still just 40 years old and a few months removed from his first Final Four, was still building his now-legendary career at Duke. His primary office was still in an auxiliary hall of Cameron, blocked by an ornate door that didn’t quite fit the decor of the cinderblocked hallway. (Even then, an athletics official told me, Krzyzewski was a believer in something he calls the Blob Theory: decorate the door, and the rest of the area will follow in grandeur.) Krzyzewski’s note was markedly shorter than Butters’. Typewritten and dotted with the coach’s loopy signature, the let-

ter consisted of just two paragraphs. He began by expressing his support to renovate rather than expand, proclaiming that it would have been a “mistake” for Duke to get caught up in the pressure to build instead of perfect. “I have played and coached in many facilities but for atmosphere, tradition and home-court excitement, none can match Cameron,” he wrote. “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.”

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ast Christmas Eve, Kevin White, Duke’s second-year athletic director, went for a run in Melbourne, Fla., where his family has a vacation home. “They have all these beautiful cars down there, these yesteryear cars,” White recently recalled, “and I’m jogging so slow I’m almost going backward. I go down a sidestreet, and there’s an MGB—candy-apple red with a tan interior, and the hood was down. It was a beautiful day. I just looked at it, and it looked, to me, like it was late 50s, early 60s. I actually stopped and looked at the car. I’m gazing at it, and I’m thinking, Holy God, it’s beautiful. It could be in a showroom. It’s, like, 50 years old, and it’s unbelievable.” White resumed running soon after stopping, and it wasn’t long after that when a thought hit him: That’s what we need to do to Cameron. White and I talked in his new digs on the third floor of the Schwartz-Butters Athletic Center; the office of his predecessor, Joe Alleva, had been nestled in a TOWERVIEW

27

Seventy Years

side office of Cameron. Since White arrived in May 2008 from Notre Dame, Cameron has already undergone several changes—both to preserve the authenticity of the arena and to enhance the actual game experience. A new suspended scoreboard, complete with a video board to show video montages and delayed highlights, was the major addition of White’s first hoops season in Durham. This year brought more facelifts. The gray walls of the upper bowl endured a powerwashing, and the seats, once an off-white, were painted dark blue. The media saw an installation of a new press row—with aisles!—and a long, horizontal LED screen on one side of the court complements the traditional CAMERON INDOOR STADIUM lettering on the scorer’s table. Even the student seating, long a hallmark and priority of the stadium, saw minor adjustments, with graduate students trading their seats in the back corners of the undergraduate section to a prime location next to the band, under an end zone. That shifted boosters to newly installed padded seats behind the scorer’s table, displacing a handful of rogue undergraduates. “We don’t want to change the feel of what makes the Cameron experience,” said Mike Cragg, whose duties as an associate athletic director and director of the Legacy Fund include facility planning. “We had a major change from this time a year ago to now—a lot has happened. And outside of Michael

in Cameron

Buffer as the P.A. announcer, no one’s complained. Cameron looks better, and it feels better.” In 10 years, it’s almost certain that Cameron won’t look the way it does now, nor will the changes of the past two years feel like anything more than prologue to a more thorough Cameron operation. For the last several months, the athletic department has worked on its master facilities plan, which could be presented to the

collect data about the demographics of Cameron spectators, and ISP Sports, the athletic department’s Web partner, is studying the value of naming rights for certain amenities in both venues. HNTB Corporation, an architectural firm in Raleigh, was hired to draw phase-based blueprints for the new buildings. Meanwhile, White and Cragg have remained in constant contact with officials from the Allen Building, in addition to a Roy Bostock-led nine-person external consulting committee, which has met twice in person. None of these potential changes would be as dramatic as, say, knocking down Cameron and building over it. They would probably take place in the immediate and in the long term, based on urgency, but some of the ideas being thrown around for the basketball stadium include an expanded lobby, a team store in the stadium and suites in the upper deck, which could be installed without lifting Cameron’s roof by possibly removing the top two rows of seats and building outward, primarily. If anything, the changes that are likely to be proposed would decrease the number of seats in the arena. Mostly, the renovations to Cameron would involve building around Cameron, not inside of it. There’s not much to do in the bowls themselves, after all. The most significant shift—for the time being, at least—is philosophical rather than tangible. White likes to tell people that the

The car was, like, 50 years old, and it was unbelievable. And just then, I thought: That’s what we need to do to Cameron.

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Kevin White, 2010 Board of Trustees as early as the Board’s May meeting. The cornerstone of the plan is a joint renovation of Cameron and Wallace Wade Stadium—that is, the two venues that can drive and generate revenue. “One is a facelift plus amenities, and the other’s a reconstruction,” White said. “We’re putting the conceptualization of all that under one umbrella and looking at it as a singular project to enhance revenue-generating sports, because as those sports go, generally speaking, so goes the financial health of the department.” PricewaterhouseCoopers is on board to

best thing about the two athletic facilities is their proximity to each other, and the worst thing about the two athletic facilities is their proximity to each other. One of the entrances to Cameron has a fairly decent view into Wallace Wade; if the windows in Cameron’s upper bowl were transparent, the panorama into the football stadium might be even better than it is for basketball. It’s not surprising, then, that the two stadiums, erected long ago, are going to evolve together. Athletic officials envision pre-game and post-game basketball receptions in the suites above Wallace Wade, which, unlike Cameron, needs something more than a lift. “We need to build our football business,” White said, “and to do that, we need to reinvent the whole Wallace Wade scene, because antiquated is the nicest thing I can say about it. It’s 50 years out of date.” The athletic department, as Cragg put it, is a kind of custodian for Cameron, protecting its authenticity and aura but also putting the stadium in a position to sustain itself for its next era. The University itself has more than 70 years’ worth of return out of its initial investment, but the need to modernize Cameron has never not been urgent. “There’s always something that needs to get done, and we’ve always got to have the money to be able to do it,” Cragg told me.

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n a recent Sunday afternoon, I visited Cameron for the interlude between a rare doubleheader. The women’s basketball team knocked off Maryland at 1 p.m., and the men were hours away from topping Virginia Tech in a vital ACC showdown at 7:45 p.m. Five min-

in Cameron

utes after the women’s game had ended, a maintenance staff emerged from the stadium’s bowels, prepared to turn over the arena and make it new again. EventOne staffers, wearing painfully bright yellow jackets and standing with their hands clasped behind their backs, rolled out spools of rope to protect the court from curious spectators. The cleaners—the stadium’s actual custodians— went to work in the upper bowl. They walked lethargically, some horizontally and others vertically, through the seats, picking up trash by hand and stuffing it into oversized black trash bags, most of which seemed light. They carried spare garbage bags in the back pockets of their jeans. A few carried their haul over their shoulder, like Santa Claus lugging a bag of toys, while one let it drag behind him. They kicked up the chairs as they passed them, allowing the men’s ticketholders the visceral pleasure of setting the seats back down in front of them. Some of the staffers finished with their assignments and moved to cleaning Sections 17 and 19, the bleachers sandwiching the width of the court. They paced through the nine rows of 108 seats on the undergraduate side, bagging water bottles, popcorn buckets, soda cups, Chickfil-A wrappers, crumpled programs, straws, band sheets, Gatorade cups, skittles, copies of that day’s Herald-Sun and, by the tips of their fingers, solitary crusts of Domino’s. One of the EventOne staffers, reasonably confident, by that point, that no one was going to walk over his part of the court, asked me to pass him a copy of the Sunday paper behind the visitor’s bench. A janitor was sweeping the floor with a three-foot broom, shaking out the lint in the end zones. The din of

quietness was distinct, and yet there was an echo of cacophonous voices, as if the people jabbering were much farther away than they actually were. Peace laid in this sense of place. At that moment—standing in the corner of the wooden bleachers, waiting to be asked to exit the stadium—I thought back to a memo from the alumni office I had read, dated 1940. It was most likely written by Dwire, the official whom Governor Hoey had contacted to express his regret for not attending the opening ceremony. “On behalf of the General Alumni Association and the Alumni Office, I desire to express appreciation of the enlarged facilities for the program of physical education and athletics made possible by this building,” he started. “It will be a source of constant satisfaction, I am sure, to the alumni when they return to the campus for athletic and other occasions.” Just more than 10 years later, when Brill worked for Eddie Cameron on the men’s basketball staff, he was tasked with overseeing one such occasion. On Saturday nights, prompted by the legendary two-sport star Dick Groat, the players would play pickup in Cameron. Brill sometimes was responsible for leaving a door or a window slightly ajar, making room for the players to sneak in around midnight. They made their own arrangements to activate the arena’s lights, leaving themselves just enough to see. Campus police must have seen them, Brill reckons now, but back then, no one paid notice. The players would start at midnight, fooling around in the gym that must have felt so new and mammoth and wonderful, but Brill still doesn’t know when they stopped. He never did see any of those games end. TOWERVIEW

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Seventy Years

29

roadside wisdom DAVID CUTCLIFFE

HEAD FOOTBALL COACH AGE: 55 Since arriving at Duke in 2007, Cutcliffe has changed the perception of his football program. He returned to national news in January, when he flirted with another job, but by remaining at Duke, he proved he’s here to stay. What else have we learned from him? What do you consider your greatest achievement? Being a good husband and father are the two most important jobs a man could ever have. What do you most value in your friends? I value friends that say what they mean and mean what they say. Who is your hero of fiction? Superman, definitely. Who are your heroes in real life? I admire many people of accomplishment— Paul “Bear” Bryant, John Wooden—but my mother, Frances L. Cutcliffe, is my hero.

What is your greatest fear? I fear not remaining healthy enough in my older age to enjoy my wife, children and their children.

P H OTO B Y C H A S E O L I V I E R I

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? I can talk too much and tend to say things at times I shouldn’t have said. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Laziness and poor awareness to what’s going on around them. Which living person do you most admire? 30

TOWERVIEW

What is it that you most dislike? Littering. How can a person be that arrogant? My wife, Karen. She balances everything she does with great character and humility. What is your current state of mind? Positive energy about Duke Football. What do you most dislike about your appearance? I don’t like my eyes! Too small and baggy. What or who is the greatest love of your life? My wife, Karen, is my soulmate. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? I would have a healthy heart.

What is your greatest regret? I don’t carry many regrets—I’ve been fortunate! Maybe as simple as not playing quarterback my senior year in high school. We would have been state champs if I had! How would you like to die? I would rather die in my sleep, but any nonviolent death is OK. Just don’t want to have the family face a tragedy of sudden death. What is your motto? Either you do, or you don’t. No gray! It’s all black and white.

R E A D M O R E O F C U TC L I F F E ’ S R E S P O N S E S AT WWW . D U K E C H R ON I C L E . CO M / TOW E R V I E W .

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