It was halftime of the Belk Bowl in Charlotte on December 27. I was freezing my buns off, so we decided to walk around the concourse of the lower-level of Bank of America Stadium. When we reach the Cincinnati Bearcats side of the bowl, one of their fans, a guy clearly older than me, approaches:
“Hey, we had a question for you Duke fans. A bunch of us were wondering who maybe the best player in the history of your program was. We weren’t able to really come up with anyone.”
Sigh. There was a lot of sub-context at play here.
Duke has probably the worse record of any BCS team since the mid-90s. Duke football has a real small fan base. There is also the impression that Duke has a bunch of basketball-only fans that follow the team only because they basically always win – similar to the so-called UNC “Walmart fans” that come out of the woodwork for Carolina basketball, but couldn’t find Kenan Stadium if you dropped them on Franklin Street. So this gent from Cincinnati was probably out to bust my chops, interrupting me to get his jollies at my expense while I was minding my own business. Probably was being an asshole, but I couldn’t be 100% sure. So I decided to consult my Lesser and Better halves. Naturally, they had a difference of opinion.
BadChep definitely thinks the glass is half empty. No doubt the dude assumed that I had to be one of these fair weather bandwagon fans that hadn’t been to a Duke football game since they last made a bowl in 1994, couldn’t find Wallace Wade Stadium on a map, and that I would be left dumbfounded by this brain maze of a question that he had just had dropped on me. For BadChep, the options were simple: I could have just kept on walking and ignored the troll or told him to eff off, with a parting shot. Cincinnati has built a nice little program, but they aren’t really one of the Blue Bloods in College Football History such that their fans should be talking that junk. (Yes, I realize they have blocked my Alma Mater from two BCS bowls in the last five years, but Come On Man!)
So because Cody ‘N'™ raised me correctly, I was going to split the difference. I took the somewhat high road and gave my new Cincinnati acquaintance the benefit of the doubt - but he wasn’t getting off without a little friendly nudge. Kept it classy, but with a little bite on the off chance he is having some fun with me:
“Oh, really? There are quite a few. If I had to pick one, I’d say Sonny Jurgensen. [I start to walk away but turn back toward him.] You might have heard of him? Played QB for the Eagles and the Redskins for about 15 years – he is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton. Dude was a pretty good player.”
The tone I used was a pseudo-polite one, comprised of equal parts “that’s a strange question” and “you dumbasses call yourself college football fans?”. A month later, I am still not sure whether BadChep or GoodChep was right – my counterpart had a surprised look and replied in response: “I didn’t know that, yeah he was good.”
I came this close to adding: “But certainly Sonny was not in the class of a Mardy Gilyard or Isaiah Peed.” BadChep really wishes I would have. GoodChep would have definitely regretted that.
