Feb 2012 Towerview Issue

TOWERV IEW t h e

c h r o n i c l e ’ S

N e w s

&

c u l t u r e

m a g a z i n e

Plus: John Feinstein

K

1984 VOLUME 13

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ISSUE 5

The story of a sports writing Legend

{Q+A with Fredric Jameson}

Lemurs Paint!

Watch art in action at the Duke Lemur Center

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TOWERVIEWMAG.COM

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FEbruary 2012

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Dear Readers, New Year’s Eve passed weeks ago, but with this page, Towerview begins 2012. It is a middle, not a start for a magazine whose editors change by the academic calendar. Still, in this first issue of the year, an unprecedented phenomenon occurs. Four Chronicle sports editors put their voices to the page.

Current editor Chris Cusack recreates a game that changed Duke basketball.

Former editor Andy Moore profiles writer John Feinstein, who held his position nearly 40 years ago. Ben Cohen, Trinity ‘10, who now writes for the Wall Street Journal, shares his Wisdom on college sports. They share their love of sports, faculty share their love for each other, and, in two stories, we have the chance to express our love of animals. Lemurs and mustangs are not native to North Carolina, but our primate relatives are icons of this University as wild horses are to Shackleford island. Please enjoy.

Your Editors,

Special Editors’ Note: In our October issue, we published a Halloweenthemed spread that featured photographs from the Chronicle’s archive. We chose to accompany the photos with their original, historical captons. Below a 1985 picture of a black student in Perkins library ran the words, “Duke spooks: Students crawl out of their dismal holes in Perkins to celebrate Halloween.” During editing, with a cultural unawareness that is unacceptable of editors, we interpreted the word “spooks” as a halloween-spirited description.

When Towerview hit the stands three weeks later, a former editor and an attentive reader informed us of the terrible use of “spook” as a racial slur. It is our duty to recognize such a derogatory term and we take full responsibility for its appearance in our magazine. It pains us to know that the caption might have hurt any of our readers. Please understand that it was not written by anyone on our current editorial staff and its appearance is a result of ignorance of which we are ashamed and deeply sorry. Towerview does not condone racism or any form of intolerance.

TOWERV IEW t h e

c h r o n i c l e ’ s

n e w s

&

C u lt u r e

m a g a z i n e

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Christina Peña & Rachna Reddy PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR ONLINE EDITOR EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Nathan Glencer Madeline Lieberberg Andy Moore Lindsey Rupp Toni Wei Melissa Dalis & James Lee Sanette Tanaka

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Lauren Carroll, Ben Cohen, Brian Contratto, Chris Cusack, Betsy Klein, Jack Mercola, Andy Moore, Rachna Reddy, Connor Southard CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Libby Busdicker, Nathan Glencer, Madeline Lieberberg, Chelsea Pieroni, Margie Truwit CONTRIBUTING STAFF Matthew Chase, Ben Cohen, Tom Gieryn, Sonia Havele, Nicole Kyle, Ciaran O’Connor, Julian Spector PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Lindsey Berlin GENERAL MANAGER ADVERTISING DIRECTOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR OPERATIONS MANAGER RETAIL SALES MANAGER

Jonathan Angier Chrissy Beck Barbara Starbuck Mary Weaver Rebecca Dickenson

Towerview is a subsidiary of The Chronicle and is published by the Duke Student Publishing Company, Inc., a non-profit 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 cartoons 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 advertising office at 101 West Union Building, call (919) 684-3811 or fax (919) 684-8295. Contact the advertising office for information on subscriptions. Visit The Chronicle and Towerview online at dukechronicle.com 2010 The Chronicle, Box 90858, Durham, N.C. 27708. All rights reserved No part 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.

TowerviewMag.com @TowerviewMag towerviewletters@gmail.com

2|TOWERVIEW

CONTENTS

February 2012

Up Front Q & A with Fredric Jameson

By Brian Contratto

4

Literature professor talks philosophy, pop culture.

The Office

By Lauren Carroll

10

6

Tallman Trask will see you now.

Sweethearts

By Betsy Klein

What are Duke’s faculty couples doing for Valentine’s Day?

6

8

Prosimian Paint Job

By Jack Mercola

Meet some of the Duke Lemur Center’s resident artists.

10

Features

Wild Horses of Shackleford

By Rachna Reddy

12

The world of the Outer Banks herd.

Coach K, 1984

By Chris Cusack

18

22

8

Look back at a turning point for Krzyzewski and Duke Basketball.

John Feinstein

By Andy Moore

22

From Duke student to sports writing legend.

Cover Illustration by Nathan Glencer

Parting Words Numbers

By Connor Southard

28

Unlock Perkins’ chamber of secrets.

Wisdom

By Ben Cohen

30

12 TOWERVIEW|3

Q&A

A Conversation with

Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson,William A. Lane Jr. professor of comparative literature and romance studies, is one of today’s preminent voices on literary theory and Marxian cultural analysis as well as author of Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In an office with a typewriter, no computer and floor-to-ceiling books in at least five different languages, Towerview’s Brian Contratto sat down with the professor to talk about trends in philosophy, Duke and Ke$ha.

You studied in Europe at an influential time. How did your theories of philosophy integrate themselves into literature departments at American universities?

It was a time when—in the ’50s—English departments were not reading anything modern. At my college they didn’t even teach Joyce and Ulysses; in French departments we were reading all kinds of new stuff and my background was in Sartre and Sartrean Existentialism. I think what I was interested in was the link between literature and philosophy. For me, Sartre was such an example—both a philosopher and a literary writer. That seemed to me a much more interested way of putting together an intellectual field of thought than literary specializations that focus mainly on poetic texts.

What were the major differences in focus between Continental [European] Philosophy and the literature studies in the United States?

In English departments over here the topic was really literature in a very narrow fashion. It was not mass culture and it was not even film. It was only tangentially “philosophy.” In those days what they called interdisciplinary studies was when a philosopher and a literary critic came up to either side of the fence and exchanged views with each other.

And how were the controversial figures, Freud and Marx, revitalized?

The ’60s and ’70s saw a “Freudo-Marxism” that was concerned with both the analysis of the individual and theory of society. There was a whole “popular Freudianism” in the ’60s.

With Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, a pop Freudianism. And this was a country of therapies—more even now than then. You had Woody Allen’s jokes about his analyst, and so forth. Everyone was interested in this kind of therapy.

4|TOWERVIEW

But this was also a prosperous period in American life—there were not, essentially, economic threats for the country, though the ’60s brought all kinds of revolts against authority and constraints and so forth. There were not very many Marxists in the university—it was a very narrow and specialized thing. The Communist party had really lost its authority since the Stalin-Hitler pact. No one expected interesting new philosophical perspectives coming from the Soviet or Communist parties, but in the ’60s there was a new kind of interest, a very intellectual relation with the Frankfurt School.

And now you see Marxian and Freudian linguistic influences in a bunch of academic departments, including social sciences and philosophy.

You don’t need the slogan of ‘interdisciplinarity;’ it’s all become more open. And this reflects in that some of the biggest drawing theory courses are film courses. It’s only with the ’60s that the barriers broke down between these things. As for popular culture, our first television sets were in the late ’40s. The programs began to get much more sophisticated and there began to be arguments about the influence of media culture: Was it a force for conformity? Would it be possible to have within the culture of the media and television things that were more radical politically and subversive? There were a lot of examples [to the contrary].

When the Nazis pioneered a lot of media experiments—television use in the Olympics in 1936—the Left felt that the impetus was reactionary.

In the ’60s people began to think that it could be liberating—the fact that the Vietnam War was televised. The most striking thing was to see a Vietnamese commander killing a kneeling Viet Cong. It became clear that the media could have the effect of shock and transformation.

So the political potential might have vindicated television, but what about pure pop and commercial art? You have philosopher Slavoj Zizek who’s apparently friends with Lady Gaga, and Vanity Fair joking about a friendship between you and Ke$ha.

Well with Zizek’s mind, everything is grist for his mill — he just published a huge book on Hegel — all subject to his philosophical investigation. I think the objections to popular culture [as an object of analysis] were in those days that it was too simple, formulaic… You wouldn’t say that about Hollywood films but television was much more primitive. But it isn’t anymore. Nobody has to apologize for studying The Wire.

event?

If you talk about sit-ins, the occupation of a factory — well there aren’t any factories any more — but the Occupy movement is kind of a variant. And the Wisconsin union protests — these are two very important moments. All that is building up and now there are — what do you call these new things with your cell phones — flash mobs. All those are political possibilities that haven’t been fully explored. As in Egypt, you can win with mass crowds but what after that? That’s the point: We can’t really predict where it will end.

Photo by Chelsea Pieroni

What do you mean when you speak of postmodernism, and does the title still apply today?

I’m thinking of it as a period, not stylistically. It’s not just a fashion, but a whole new historical moment. You could describe it in terms of the computer, or globalization — or in terms of deregulation by Reagan and Thatcher in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Little by little that spreads to the whole world. Computerization is certainly a sign: It’s changed our relationship with language and consumption objects. That’s one way of describing it. It’s hard to see what this could turn into. We’re seeing a lot of convulsions in the system—does it mean we’re at an end? Systems can evolve, but do they really change without some cataclysmic

TOWERVIEW|5

beware the lollipop of mediocrity. lick it once and you suck forever.

<

By Lauren Carroll

<

F

Chicago Bulls nesting dolls from St. Petersburg, Russia. He bought them years ago for a friend, but hasn’t seen that friend since. You can buy Blue Devil ones too.

or a man with serious responsibilities, Executive Vice President Tallman Trask knows how to keep it light in his Allen Building enclave. Towerview’s Lauren Carroll and Nate Glencer ventured into his corner office and found a treasure trove of personal keepsakes, relics and trophies.

Tallman Trask III is known by some as T3—as in the Terminator. So this cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger serves as another stand for his various knickknacks, and also as a sign of the times. “Literally, the day Jerry Brown took office as the governor of California, it fell over.”

66|TOWERVIEW TOWERVIEW

At UW, administrators decided they needed a “computing czar” to organize their operating system. The plaque says Czar Trask in Russian. And the CCCP doesn’t stand for the Soviet Union, it stands for the Campus Committee on Computing Policy.

The “Memorial” or “Suicide” Squirrel.

“Every two or so years, the power goes out because a squirrel jumps on the switch.” You can guess what happens next.

A money bag, representing the $2.79 million saved by changing the telephone system - “The IT people gave it to me by turning off the switch 3 or 4 months ago”

>

>

<

A little less than life-sized cardboard cut-out of Trask, a parting gift from the University of Washington. The cutout, adorned with basketball tickets, leis, a doctor’s coat, among other novelties, was the only object in Trask’s office when he first arrived at Duke. “I just hang stuff on it”

>

A fuzzy red bust of Chairman Mao, a gift from a friend, “for reasons I never understood.”

This emergency button was previously required by state code for the data center in the Fitzpatrick building, but “some idiot contractor pushed it, so we got permission to remove it.”

Apparently, Trask is sometimes more than just a little grumpy.

“My daughter gave me that.”

Trask wore this wig in a going-away event for Duke’s former President Nan Keohane. It sits on top of a bust commemorating phrenology, the outdated pseudoscience that uses skull measurements to assess intelligence personality traits. “The bust has little maps to tell you where to feel for what.”

TOWERVIEW|7

Duke

With Valentine’s day approaching, Towerview’s Betsy Klein interviewed some of Duke’s faculty couples.

Michael Malone Professor of the Practice of Theater Studies

&

Photo by Libby Busdicker

Engaged

Maureen Quilligan R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English

Martha Reeves

&

Visiting Professor of Markets and Management and Women’s Studies

How they met: Graduate school at Harvard University.

Copy editor: “One of the treasures of Maureen for me is

that she is such a superb literary critic, so as a novelist, I have someone to read my work out loud to me. I watch her and listen to her. We’ve done that through 14 books of mine.”

Valentine’s Day Plans: “For Valentine’s Day we have had parties where you come as your favorite couple of lovers, and once Maureen and I came as silent film stars, and we never spoke during the party.” They often host concerts, musicals and plays in their living room. “Once we had a concert of love songs,” Michael said.

Photo by Libby Busdicker

Photo Special to Towerview

Married 37 years

Alex Rosenberg R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy

Married 13 years

How they met: Jogging in Oxford, England.

Study abroad: Despite very different academic interests,

they collaborate by teaching complementary courses on globalization in the Duke in Geneva program. “There are many issues that overlap and inform one another, and that’s where our own backgrounds synergize,” Alex said.

Valentine’s Day Plans: Working out at Wilson Gym.

Lori Leachman Professor of Economics

&

Peter Lange Provost

Married 13 years

How they met: At an institute for globalization and domestic policy at Stanford University when Lori asked Peter for directions during a lunch break.

Course eval: “So many students take Econ 51 [with Lori], and they don’t know we’re married. So I always ask, how do you like Professor Leachman?”

8|TOWERVIEW

Valentine’s Day Plans: Traveling in Italy.

Photo Special to Towerview

Photo Special to Towerview

Jane Richardson Andrea Katz Duke Lemur Center Colony Manager

&

Charlie Welch Duke Lemur Center Conservation Coordinator

Married 25 years

How they met: Through an arrangement to cross-breed lemurs between the DLC and a zoo in Louisiana. “We were down in the main building catching the lemurs we were going to transport, and I thought, ‘That guy is really cute!’” Andrea said.

Field notes: Lived in Madagascar for 15 years to advise the

development of a lemur conservation center. “Neither of us could have done it alone,” Andrea said of living in a small house with no electricity or running water.

Valentine’s Day Plans: “We’re together all the time. We

Photo Special to Towerview

don’t have to make a date for Valentine’s Day, but she always gets flowers, even in Madagascar,” Charlie said.

David Richardson

& Professor of Biochemistry

James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry

Married 50 years

How they met: “Love at first sight” in the physics library at Swarthmore College.

Lab report: On working together in the Richardson Laboratory, “It has been addictively enabling and has defined our lives—professionally, as a family and in outside fun, backpacking, building houses, reading, traveling and debating wild ideas about molecules.”

Valentine’s Day Plans: Sightseeing in Santa Fe between a

biophysics meeting in San Diego and a workshop in New Mexico.

John Hart

Kim Rorschach & Adjunct Professor and Mary

Visiting Associate Professor D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher of History Museum

Married 25 years

How they met: At a party thrown by Art History graduate students at Yale University. “He asked me to dance, he made me laugh, we fell in love,” Kim wrote in an email.

The art of marriage: Working in different areas at Duke has enabled each spouse to understand each other better. “John is a steadying force in my life. I’m in constant motion.”

Valentine’s Day Plans: Traditionally celebrated with flowers for Kim, candy for John and dinner at a favorite restaurant.

Daniel Schmitt

& Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology

Christine Wall

Associate Research Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology

Married 19 years

683-DUKE

How they met: The first day of graduate school at Stony

Brook University; their positions as anatomy teaching assistants precluded them from taking a honeymoon.

Happy hour: “We became really good friends over really bad

nachos,” Christine wrote in an email about bonding at chain Mexican restaurant.

Valentine’s Day Plans: Taking a long walk around East Campus, followed by dessert, coffee and good conversation at Francesca’s.

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Check out our sister bar, The Roxy • TheRoxyDurham.com TOWERVIEW|9

Paint By Lemur

By Jack Mercola

>>>>>>> Pedro and I only realized each others’ beings upon eye contact. What could have been the detached, rote inter-species interaction in which I normally engage, became an intense primate-to-primate recognition of “I am like you” as he challenged me to a staring contest.

His eyes, a pair of clementine pearls, sat totally transfixed in wonderment. I liked him. He made me feel interesting and important. As his gaze tried to unriddle me, mine worked to understand him.

I broke eye contact to examine Pedro, noticing his ruffled auburn beard (which was handsomer than my scraggly black one). I was especially drawn to his feet, amazing enablers of agility—rubbery grippers and grabbers used to scale or pluck anything within arms’ reach. They were distinctly primatal in form.

Pedro is a mongoose lemur, a pairbonded species hailing from northwest Madagascar. He lives at the Duke Lemur Center with his companion, Guadalupe— they have been roommates for more than a year, said Niki Barnett, the education 10 TOWERVIEW

program manager at the DLC. Today, the two were to be commissioned artists for me and my fellow journalists as a sort of pilot to the DLC’s new “Painting with Lemurs” tour, a program that allows visitors to experience lemurs as they bestow masterworks on the canvas­.

My attention briefly left Pedro and shifted to Barnett as she explained the painting process. She emphasized the importance of enriching animals in captivity to ensure their healthy development.

“The animals are in captivity, but they are not to be pets. They need stimulation,” Barnett said. “It gets them thinking. Any sort of enrichment provides them with stimulation and helps them engage in their natural behaviors. Plus they get extra treats!”

In this case, the treats were craisins, my childhood, by-the-fistful afternoon snack.

Pedro and Guadalupe were ready to paint and prepared themselves to impress us. They watched carefully as Fallon Owens, their primate technician, assembled their workspace. Owens lined the floor of

the 13 foot by 13 foot cage with a dirty tarp and placed three small canvasses at its center in a sort of Stonehenge arrangement.

As Owens readied the materials, Barnett familiarized us with what it means to be a mongoose lemur. “[Mongoose lemurs] are a docile, gentle and curious species,” she said as Owens dumped globules of paint on the periphery of the canvasses.

We chose gold, a martian-skin metallic green and Duke blue.

“Pedro—he’s more outgoing,” said Owens, reminding of me of my aforementioned stare-down with the male lemur.

“He’s an in-your-face kind of guy. And they’re very compatible.”

Admittedly, I was only half-listening.

As knowledgeable as the women were concerning the primates, I could not break my focus from the curious interactions between Homo sapiens sapiens and Eulemur mongoz. The seven of us (two lemurs, two specialists and three journalists) were engrossed in an interesting fluctuation

millennia past—dragged through the insatiable hunger drove them. paint. The tails were most amazing: As Owens tossed more berries and the anatomical paintbrushes with heightened feast continued, Pedro and Guadalupe mobility and dexterity. traversed the Soon, their teeny canvasses repeat“Pedro––he’s more mouths became glazed edly, applying with color as they outgoing. He’s an in- more and more covetously shoved the with their your-face kind of guy.” paint craisins in their faces. extremities and Like all great artists, an underbellies.

Photography By Madeline Lieberberg

between subject and object of what would unfold to be a beautiful piece of performance art. It became hard to discern who was captive and who was captor.

“They’re experienced artistes,” Barnett said, noting the fact that this was not the first time Pedro and Guadalupe had tried their hands (and feet) at painting.

Crouched on the ground, Owens invited the lemurs to the canvasses by

scattering craisins over the work area. Some landed atop the blank canvasses, others found themselves comfortably bathing in (nontoxic!) blue or green or gold.

I was delighted when the performance began. Pedro and Guadalupe dismounted from their perch and descended to devour the constellation of dried fruit that awaited beneath them. As they foraged, they painted. I cannot help but believe that they, too, knew they were producing art.

The black undersides of their hands and feet transformed into color-coated painting tools. Their long, gray tails—something that we observing humans lost in

What formed beneath them was an interpretation of a Jackson Pollock.

Owens put away the bucket of snacks and retrieved the finished paintings from the cage floor.

“I think they look great,” she said.

I stared at my painting in the same manner than I had stared into Pedro’s eyes upon our first impression. It looked something like a hurricane in a desert or perhaps more like the contents of the gutter at the swimming pool I work at in the summers. Regardless, it was art and it was beautiful. Pedro and Guadalupe could not give it a title, so I did.

Behold: “Sunflowers and a Field Mouse on a Rainy June Afternoon.”

TOWERVIEW 11

WiLD Horses

by Rachna Reddy

Photography by Chelsea Pieroni

12 TOWERVIEW

Of Shackleford T

he Outer Banks have a strange geometry.

They seem to operate in two dimensions.

Flat land, flat water. Dolphin backs move like pinwheels on the sea’s surface, rising higher than the island soil. I have never seen a shore so flat. My companions are Chelsea, a photographer, and Sue Stuska, wildlife biologist for CLNS. As our boat’s nose bumps the dock, we see bubbles of washed-up jellyfish on the yellow beach. We have arrived on Shackleford Island, a part of North Carolina’s Cape Lookout National Seashore, and home to 118 wild horses. These horses are likely descendants of those that escaped shipwrecks in the 1500s. In 1974, Dan Rubenstein, then a Duke Ph.D. student of zoology, began a study of their social lives. At the time, many Duke researchers were studying the societies of primates and other

animals that live with their kin.

“One of the key questions that we wanted to understand better was why animals cooperate and live socially,” said Rubenstein, now chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. “I thought if we really wanted to understand why animals would come together, we needed to look at a species where there wasn’t kinship.” Horses form groups with non-relatives, he explained. Such a system provided an excellent opportunity to learn why individuals formed groups. In horse society, both males and females leave the group they are born into for a new one. These groups, called harems, typically consist of one male and several females with offspring. Younger males form bachelor herds.

TOWERVIEW 13

In the early years of his research, Rubenstein saw that Shackleford horses strayed from a typical social pattern. Usually horse groups have home ranges that they share with other groups. “But on Shackleford, because of the structure of the island, they defended territories,” Rubenstein said.

Keeping a territory allowed harems to feed more “wisely,” and to ensure that food remained in winter months. If you do not finish all the grass in a patch, someone else will come and eat it, Rubenstein explained.

“If you control it, you can let it recover and rotate.”

Stallions fought to maintain territories and to guard mares from other males.

Rubenstein said research has shown, however, that these are not male-dominated groups. “If females don’t like the males they can vote with their feet. They can leave the group.”

The island has undergone a transformation since Rubenstein first began his research—and so has horse behavior. In 1974, only a small patch of maritime forest stood on the island. The horses shared Shackleford with feral cows, sheep and goats. In 1986, the Park Service moved to restore Shackleford to its natural state, forested, without any hoofed herbivores, Rubenstein said. They removed all sheep, goats and cows. Horses remained, as they were considered part of the region’s history.

“Over time, the territoriality has been eroded on the island,” Rubenstein said, “because the physical structure of the island has changed.” As trees spread in the

14 TOWERVIEW

absence of browsers, like goats, grassland reduced. Food for horses decreased and with woodlands, males had less visual access to their territories. Over time the horses became less territorial, though males still guard their females from other stallions. After the other feral animals were removed, the horse population lived relatively unmanaged for a decade. By 1996, more than 200 horses lived on the island, and the Park Service worried that the hurricane-plagued habitat was too fragile to support such large animals.

The Park Service removed around 80 horses from Shackleford, but many tested positive for equineinfectious anemia which

by North Carolina law requires them to be euthanized or live quarantined from other horses. Quarantine placement proved difficult to find, however, and the animals were put down. Stuska, who began working for the Park Service in 1999, three years after the removal, described the situation as very emotional. The action caused a public outcry from Outer Banks residents and horse lovers. “They didn’t look sick,” Stuska said of the horses. “There was a lot of distress.” As a result of the incident, the state of North Carolina passed legislation in 1998 to created a partnership: the Cape Lookout National Seashore would manage the horses jointly with the Foundation for Shackleford Horses, a nonprofit organization run entirely by volunteers.

Rubenstein, whose students continue to study the herd, said the co-management seems to be working well. The Foundation,

founded in 1996, works to “To preserve and protect the Shackleford Horses and to ensure that their place in history is continued into the future.”

Its president and chairperson, Carolyn Mason, said she grew up in the Outer Banks knowing wild horses lived nearby.

“When I was a little girl—I’m 68 years old—there were horses on Core Banks,” Mason said. “I just felt like they belonged there.” Mason said while leading the Foundation she has learned to be a “parrot,” soliciting and communicating the advice of Rubenstein and other scientists to best manage the herd. “Without fail, the experts would say, ‘How can I help you?’” she said. “I feel like I’ve been in graduate school for the last 15 years.”

Currently, the horse management plan calls for a population between 110 and 130 horses. The Park Service and Foundation maintain this range by two mechanisms: removing horses for adoption, and administering contraception to mares. At the start, a number of horses were removed in a series of “roundups,” the last of which occurred in 2005. The most recent plan calls for removal of two to four foals each year by darting.

Porcine Zonae Pellucidae vaccine, or PZP, is delivered by dart to selected mares as birth control. The vaccine has been administered to zoo residents as well as other wild populations living in restricted space, such as elephants in South African game parks. When injected into the muscle of a mare, PZP alters sperm receptors on the

membrane of her eggs, preventing fertilization. Mares must have booster shots annually. After five to seven consecutive years of injections, mares typically become infertile. This differs by individual horse, however. Stuska noted that one mare, Sabrina, foaled after seven years on PZP. Cassandra Nuñez, associate research scholar at Princeton, who began researching the horses as Rubenstein’s Ph.D. student in the mid 1990s, began a study, supported by the Park Service and Foundation in 2005 to examine what effects contraception was having on horses’ behavior. After this initial project, she continued her own research on the subject. Nuñez found that mares who had received PZP were more promiscuous and left their harem groups more frequently for new ones. This dispersal disrupted group stability, Nuñez said, as mares usually stay in one harem for many years. She added that switching groups can be stressful for mares. PZP also seemed to alter female cycling. Contracepted mares were more likely to give birth later in the year, indicating that they were ovulating during what was the non-breeding season.

“We definitely think that [immunocontraception] is the most humane method out there, but if you can use it in a way that mimics the natural biology at all that would be best,” Nuñez said.

O

n Shackleford Island with Stuska, we hope to collect dung samples to check mares for pregnancy. This knowledge will drive decisions such as how many

mares and which mares to contracept.

Earlier that morning, in Stuska’s office, we saw Shackleford lineages listed on a Velcro board. The Park Service adheres to a naming system initiated by Rubenstein.

“Youngsters have the first letter of their mother’s name,” Stuska said. The Park Service later began to choose names from a theme for foals born in the same year.

This way, a name can tell you the age and family of a horse, she said. Dance, was one such theme, and resulted in Swing, Jitterbug and Cha-Cha. Harems on the Velcro are organized by home range, with the mid-island harems at the middle of the board. Relationships are determined

by DNA analysis through blood samples during roundups and by dung samples for all new foals. Stuska tallies the numbers for each family line. This helps to determine which horses can come off the island. Less well-represented lines get to stay. In a small population, genetic diversity is extremely important. Stuska meets with the Foundation on all horse removal decisions. She spends two to three days a week out with the horses.

Stuska has a history with horses. Before working for the Park Service, she taught horse science or horse technology at community and private colleges, worked as a groom for competition animals and was a wrangler at a guest ranch in Colorado.

“Wild horses take care of themselves,” Stuska said, contrasting her current charges with her previous, domestic ones. She added that visitors sometimes seem to not

understand that the Shacklefords are wild, that they should not be bothered and that they can be dangerous. “They are wild animals and feral animals and that’s the whole reason they’re here,” Stuska said. “For us to do anything that would make them less wild, that’s not the reason that they are there.” She added, “Here, you see horse society as it really is.”

W

e climb into an ATV, stored in a Park Service shed near the dock.

Chelsea and I ride in a cart attached to the back of Stuska’s vehicle. The wheels press into the wet sand. Foam bubbles from the sea. The landscape parallel to us turns to marsh. Driftwood stalks rise in places and sometimes pools of marsh water reach the sea. It is unlike any marsh I have seen. A flat and dry jungle at the sea. The trees grow shorter than most, but seem tall on the flat land, and birds are above them, black triangles of cormorants. An egret flies from dark marsh reeds to forest behind.

Maritime forests are defined as live oak trees at least 15 feet high, Stuska said. And they are rare. Here was a mix of forest and marsh. We entered a marsh playground, its driftwood structures and water pools, thin as plates over the sand. Off the beach and into the grasses, we saw him, our first horse.

“Judd,” said Stuska. His back is to the dunes. Judd gives a snort, a flutter of his nostrils, as he brings his mouth to the grass. He has a white spot on his forehead and, like most Shacklefords,

TOWERVIEW 15

long fur above his hooves. He, and a nearby horse, Zim, are bachelors who have traveled together for several years. Their anatomy shows evidence of Spanish ancestry. They are built like A-frames, with their front legs close at the top. Stuska tells us we are in a maritime shrub and brackish marsh habitat. Judd is eating cordgrass and Zim is eating centipede grass.

Stuska says that in island exclosures, plots of land fenced off for research purposes, you can see the impact horses have on their landscape. Plant density, height and species composition are all different.

We ride through the dunes and meet white-maned Clapton and his dark-maned mares. We need dung samples from mares in Clapton’s harem for pregnancy tests, as well as one from a new foal.

The foal is white and tan like Clapton. His name is Havana and his mother is called Hercules and her older daughter, Hip-Hop. Havana is resting in the sand now, his legs bent underneath him.

“When he gets up, he’ll poop,” Stuska tells us. And she is correct.

We move forward slowly. They turn their heads to us and pause, then walk, bowing as they push their knees forward. Havana puts his nose under his mother’s chin and keeps close to her as we approach.

Stuska notes that we are too near the horses. Visitors to the island, she reminds us, should not interfere with the animals. “Once they move away, it’s too late. They are already bothered.” She tells us the best way to watch horses is when you can see them all in one glance.

After Stuska collects the dung, we go on and suddenly the dunes are so high that there is no sea, only sky and in it flocks of birds.

Their colors and shadows pierce the monocolored dunes.

We come across three more mares: Gray and white Dusty, tall, chestnut Zelda and Helena. Stuska says Zelda is scared of her—she darted her once. She tells me to watch for Zelda’s dung and for Chelsea to watch for Dusty’s. We, then, see Toro, a stallion. He is shorter, broader than the mares—younger than them too—with a black mane and brown fur. We stay near the harem when they disappear for a time in the marsh. When they come out of it, we follow them to a sand floor, where they stop. Helena begins to brush her front hooves on the ground.

“Helena’s gonna lay down and roll—see how she’s pawing!”

Stuska says. And then the mare drops, her knees, then back on the sand, rolling like a beetle, dust clouding to the top of her raised hooves. Toro goes down too, then snorts out the sand in his nostrils, shakes grains off his cheeks.

The mares begin to walk west, and suddenly Toro wishes to change their direction. He quickens the switch in his front legs, nose down, ears back, herds them eastward. Like a parade caravan, they move over a dune. They stop to feed and we stay with them for nearly two hours, finding separate waiting places atop the dunes, seeing the sea in two directions, careful not to come between Toro and a mare when we collect their dung. From the top of a dune, they seem too large for their landscape. Giants in a land where they mow grasses to beneath ankle height. Small trees, bare hills. In November, their coats are the richest colors in the landscape.

“They’re charismatic megafauna,” Stuska said earlier of the Shacklefords. “I think people just like wild horses whether it’s here or out west or wild burros in the Grand Canyon or manatees.” Not all species are treated with such concern. “If we set out to decrease 16 TOWERVIEW

raccoons there would probably not be an interest group made to save the raccoons,” she said.

Pages 12-13: Clapton’s harem grazing.

Pages 13-14: Helena, Dusty and Zelda walk through the dunes.

Pages 16-17 (Clockwise): Carolyn Mason with horse; Two horses at the adoption ranch; Helena rolls in the sand.

W

e sailed back to Harkers Island Visitor Center later that afternoon and went to meet Mason at her home, which also serves as an adoption farm for the foals brought off Shackleford. It is nearing dusk when we arrive. A gravel road winds through fenced enclosures up to the house. Cats climb on fenceposts. Mason and her young granddaughter meet us.

The ranch has 13 horses now. Eleven are Shacklefords, though not all of them are up for adoption. Sophia, for example, is a mare Mason decided to keep when she became attached to her, and Dima, a young male, has angular limb displacement, likely from premature birth.

“When we first get them, we’re dodging feet and teeth. Even the little ones will try to kick us,” Mason says. A team containing two veterinarians sets out to dart foals on the island. “They go down

in the sand like ballerinas,” Mason describes. She goes with vets to meet the horses. When they are awake, they bring them to the

adoption farm, give them clean hay and water and leave them alone for some time. Later, they hold them down and squirt feed in their mouths—a mixture of pellets, white Karo syrup, mineral salt and a few grains of de-wormer.

“They spit all over you,” Mason says. “On the third day, they open their mouths.”

Once the horses are eating properly, they begin work with a trainer. After they can be hooked up and

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lead, they are ready for adoption.

“Until the past year or so, if we had five horses, we had 48 applications,” Mason said. Since the economy crashed, the Foundation has had few requests and is trying fostering. Since adoptions began, Mason said about 70 horses have been placed in homes, as far north as New Hampshire and south as Florida.

Foundation members typically visit a farm before sending a horse to it. Most Shacklefords are pets, but some are ridden.

Owners of adopted horses say the Shacklefords are exceptionally smart.

Mason walks toward a pen and the horses in it come forward before we even reach the fence. She kisses their noses. “With horses, you move your hands like you’re underwater,” Mason says.

I cannot recall ever seeing horses so tame. It is hard to believe they were born feral. The two nearest us are both male, Soprano, Mason’s “blondie,” and Adagio.

It grew darker and mosquitoes began to bite. Mason got repellent for us and for the horses. She says she had little experience with horses before she started the ranch. “When I was little someone put me on a Shetland pony. He tried to bite me.”

Mason, who was a teacher and librarian, now applies for equine-related grants, or grants for non-profits to operate the farm and further research on the herd. She has some volunteers, but during the week, it is usually just her with the horses.

“It’s a lot of work. Once I get out here and get the work done, they’re very funny. They have a sense of humor.” She tells us about the dynamics of her ranch residents. The hierarchy in the young males has shifted. Belaro is the youngest, so he had a hard time at first. Soprano and Adagio are the most dominant. Diego was dominant but now he’s laid back.

As she speaks, I’m sandwiched between Soprano and Diego who are both nuzzling my shoulders. I move to avoid having my feet stepped on, as Mason warns, but both horses want to be close.

Chelsea and I tell Mason about the horses we saw that day, especially Toro’s harem. She tells us Dusty has changed colors.

“When Dusty was a baby she was almost white with gold stripes on her legs. When she shed, she had a black face with a white star.”

As affectionate as her Shacklefords are, Mason maintains the wildness of horses still on the island. “They can kick your knee-caps off before you can blink. The adult horses can take the muscle out of your arm,” she says. n

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TOWERVIEW 17

Chronicle archive photo

18 TOWERVIEW TOWERVIEW

A new legacy ACC

1984

by Chris Cusack

B

ack in 1984, when conference tournaments mattered, the ACC was the crown jewel of them all. Back when teenagers like Tommy Amaker headed to gym class at Wilbert Tucker Woodson High School in Fairfax, Va. to find students and teachers alike packed around a television set watching the games­ —the three-day, eight-team event was a March staple from Maryland to Atlanta, and everywhere in between. Back when back-to-back NCAA championships by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University turned the Research Triangle into college basketball’s Mecca, Mike Krzyzewski had yet to win a game in the fabled conference playoffs—and Duke fans were growing increasingly restless.

Before he came to Duke in 1980, Krzyzewski went 73-59 in five years at Army. He built the program from the ground up, adding a fresh coat of Cadet gray to the decaying wooden bleachers on his days off. But his team had regressed to win just nine games in 1979-80, the worst season of his young career. Making matters worse, any coach taking over the Blue Devils was in for a brutal assignment. Bill Foster

had led Duke to a 73-24 record in the three years prior, even reaching the 1978 NCAA Tournament championship game.

“If [Foster] leaves, Duke has nothing left,” Durham Morning Herald sports editor Art Chansky told The Washington Post in 1979. “Its whole athletic program is down the tubes. He’s the only winner they have over there.”

Much to the shock of Duke fans and local media, Athletic Director Tom Butters hired Krzyzewski after Foster’s departure. Krzyzewski beat out Bob Wenzel, then a Duke assistant, Bob Weltlich, the reigning SEC coach of the year at the University of Mississippi, and Paul Webb, head coach at Old Dominion.

“Certainly the Duke community did not expect that when they were replacing Bill Foster they would replace him with a guy whose record [was 9-17 in his final year at Army],” said Mickie Krzyzewski, who married Mike in 1969. “There was some animosity... before we ever came here, that this guy can’t succeed.”

Butters was intrigued by himself when he kept Krzyzewski around through the interview process, but the 29-yearold had one major advantage: the support of his former 19 TOWERVIEW TOWERVIEW 19

Graphic illustration by Nate Glencer

Quarterfinals, 3/9/84

Chronicle archive photos

1 North Carolina 78 8 Clemson 66

20 20 TOWERVIEW TOWERVIEW

4 Duke 5 Georgia Tech

67 63

2 Maryland 7 N. C. State

69 63

3 Wake Forest 6 Virginia

63 51

coach, Bob Knight, who had hired him as a graduate assistant in 1973. “Butters, you’ve always liked the way I coach,” Knight, who was then Indiana University’s head coach, reportedly said, “Mike has all my good qualities and none of my bad ones.”

But three years later, Butters struggled to hold the hordes of Krzyzewski dissenters at bay.

The Blue Devils had not made an NCAA Tournament appearance since Foster’s departure.

They had won just 11 games in 1982-83, including a pair of losses to the Tar Heels by a combined 45 points. Duke limped through conference play with only three wins and was blown out by Virginia in its only postseason game.

“Certainly the early years were tough. We didn’t win as much as Duke was accustomed to winning, and we were naïve in terms of those expectations,” Mickie said. “The expectations [at Duke] are that we will win every game.”

The embarrassing loss to the Cavaliers stayed with the quartet of freshmen—Johnny Dawkins, Mark Alarie, Jay Bilas and David Henderson—the talented recruiting class that earned Krzyzewski a contract extension prior to the 1983 season.

In their sophomore season, joined by freshman point guard

Semifinals, 3/10/84

1 North Carolina 75 4 Duke 77

ACC 1984 2 Maryland 3 Wake Forest

Tommy Amaker, they won 24 games—more than the previous two years combined and the most in program regular season history. But the team still lacked the firepower of the juggernaut eight miles down Tobacco Road, which had lost only two games all season. Plus, the Tar Heels had Duke’s number.

Michael Jordan, who would be named Naismith Player of the Year, had singlehandedly, it seemed, beaten the Blue Devils twice by leading improbable rallies. In the teams’ first meeting, he scored six points in a late-game 90-second stretch to lead the Tar Heels to a 78-73 win. Six weeks later in Chapel Hill, it was Matt Doherty who led North Carolina back from a late deficit with an off-balance leaner at the end of regulation to force overtime. Two extra periods later the Tar Heels celebrated, Jordan most of all, after scoring a team-high 25 points.

Entering the 1984 ACC Tournament, though, Duke had amassed a 24-11 record and a national ranking but remained outside the conference elite. An opening win against a rebuilding Georgia Tech was nice, but the game that the sold-out Greensboro Coliseum crowd was waiting for was a rematch between the Blue Devils and the

Championship, 3/1/84

4 Duke 2 Maryland

62 74

66 64

Tar Heels.

“It’s a big deal now, but it was a monumental deal then,” Amaker said. “It was the premier conference tournament in the country, and everything else followed that.”

Greensboro was unseasonably cold the night of the semifinal. Duke’s youthful team faced a taller, more seasoned Tar Heel squad that boasted eight future NBA players, including Michael Jordan, Kenny Smith and Sam Perkins, who were on the court that night.

The game’s first half deviated from the teams’ regular season matchups—both one-point games at the break—with Duke jumping out to a 40-32 lead.

The Blue Devils’ hot start was not altogether surprising based on its season-long tendency to explode out of the gate before fading down the stretch as opponents began to take advantage of their undersized lineup.

But North Carolina played the opposite, led by Jordan, who had become the best closer in the college game. And true to their reputation, the Tar Heels rallied after the break, going on a 16-5 run to take a three-point lead with 16 minutes remaining.

The undersized trio of Alarie, Bilas and Danny Meagher struggled to contain Perkins and 6-foot-11 Brad Daugherty. The

three were prime examples of the recruiting shadow cast by Dean Smith and N.C State head coach Jim Valvano throughout North Carolina. Krzyzewski had gone to the Southwest for Bilas, who was recruited out of Rolling Hills, Calif., and Alarie, who hailed from Scottsdale, Ariz. A year prior, the head coach had found Meagher in Ontario, Canada.

But the Blue Devils’ biggest contributors came from the Washington, D.C. area.

Dawkins, a high school All-American, was Krzyzewski’s first blue-chip recruit. A spidery 6-foot-2, he lacked physical intimidation, but had deceptive athleticism that allowed him to get to the rim and dunk with two hands. Dawkins held Duke’s career scoring record until J.J. Redick broke it in 2008—and Dawkins had just one year with the 3-point line.

Perhaps the most important addition, however, came a year later. As Krzyzewski recruited Dawkins at a McDonald’s AllAmerican game in Virginia, the head coach was struck by a shifty junior point guard named Tommy Amaker. Amaker was initially more interested in Maryland, where his older sister went to school, but Krzyzewski’s promise of immediate playing time was too much to pass up, especially after watching the Blue Devils’ improvement during his senior year of high school.

“Playing time... is always a factor,” Amaker said.

From his first game, it was clear that Amaker was the piece the Blue Devils were missing. Krzyzewski’s squad featured a number of players that could pull the trigger— Alarie, Bilas, Dawkins and Henderson—but none that could load the gun. Despite barely reaching 6 feet and weighing just 155 pounds, Amaker could draw double teams through the lane, leaving Dawkins and Henderson free to shoot.

On the court, Amaker met an old high school opponent, Smith. The former was a defensive specialist, the latter would go on to be the sixth pick in the 1987 NBA Draft.

“I thought I was quick but not necessarily that fast,” Amaker said, “and he was fast and quick. He was a tremendous player.”

In the ACC semifinal Smith could hardly touch the ball before Amaker arrived to hound him into giving it away, and he was held to just six points and three turnovers.

Despite Amaker’s stifling perimeter defense, though, North Carolina’s run to start the second half kept the two teams knotted tightly through much of the second half.

The turning point for the Blue Devils finally

came about a minute later, when Jordan tried to post up David Henderson, Duke’s sixth man. The pass inside came in high enough for Henderson to reach, and the sophomore leaned over Jordan’s shoulder to poke the ball away, bumping him in the process. As the ball bounced back toward the perimeter, Henderson recoiled and grimaced, raising his arms over his head as if accepting an impending foul call, but none came. Smith was apoplectic on the sideline, berating all three officials as Duke took the ball down the court.

Dawkins cut through the lane as an Alarie jumper arced toward the hoop. His eyes never wavered from the ball, which bounced high off the rim away from him along the baseline. The sophomore leapt high in the air past Perkins, spinning as he extended upwards, and turned the ball back at the hoop. He landed as his tip fluttered down off the backboard and through the netting, giving Duke a 69-67 advantage. On the Blue Devils’ next possession, a defensive miscommunication left Dawkins wide open on the wing for a 17-footer. The score was 71-67, with under three minutes to go.

In the next 70 seconds, Doherty and Dawkins traded jumpers before Perkins’ baseline jumper rimmed out, leaving Duke with the ball in a spread offense with time ticking down. The Blue Devils passed the ball around the half-court for just short of a full minute, employing an ironic twist on Smith’s world-famous Four Corners stall offense. Finally, the Tar Heels broke down and fouled Alarie. Both teams alternated free throws for three possessions before Doherty cut the Duke lead back to two yet again with a pull-up 8-footer in the key. When North Carolina finally got the ball back after another dose of the stall offense, it was down four points. Tar Heel guard Joe Wolf hoisted up an errant jumper, but Jordan was there for a tip-in with five seconds left.

Henderson was fouled immediately on the inbounds pass, sending him to the freethrow line for a one-and-one. Meagher stood just down the lane as Henderson walked to the line. Meagher had missed the potential game-winning free throw in the waning moments of the teams’ meeting in Chapel Hill just the week before, giving North Carolina the opportunity it needed to rally.

Meagher’s stomach dropped as Henderson’s shot clanked harmlessly off the rim and into the hands of a Tar Heel big man, while Smith neared an embolism screaming for a timeout.

“I was thinking deja vu,” Meagher

admitted in a post-game press conference.

“I remembered my miss last week and I thought, ‘Is the ball going to take another Carolina roll today?’”

In the huddle, Smith drew up a play for a last-second shot, deciding to use Jordan as a decoy. Doherty would pass the ball in, guarded by Meagher. When the referee’s whistle blew, Jordan found himself trapped in a double team, as Smith had anticipated.

The Duke bench, positioned directly behind Doherty, counted down the five seconds loudly as the senior struggled to find an open teammate. The seconds ticked as the Blue Devils covered the Tar Heels downcourt, and Doherty finally tried to force a pass into traffic, overthrowing his teammate and sending the ball out of bounds into the North Carolina bench.

The Blue Devils inbounded the ball from the baseline to Dawkins, who was immediately fouled. Both squads traversed the length of the Greensboro Coliseum floor so the sophomore could shoot a one-and-one.

With a make, Duke would have a three-point lead with two seconds to play, assuring that North Carolina could do no better than overtime on a last-ditch shot. He bricked his first effort, though, and the ball fell directly to Perkins, who heaved a full-court shot at the hoop.

As the ball arced the length of the court, Krzyzewski’s career hung in the balance.

Butters said in a recent interview with former Chronicle sport’s editor Ben Cohen that he came close to firing Krzyzewski in the coach’s early years and another loss to North Carolina in the ACC Tournament might have pushed him over the edge. But Perkins’ shot smacked harmlessly off the top of the backboard, falling to the floor along with a pile of Blue Devils in celebration of the 77-75 win.

The Blue Devils lost the next day in the ACC Tournament final to Maryland. Although Duke had a 30-27 halftime lead, the Terrapins took advantage of an emotionally spent Duke lineup in the final 20 minutes, scoring 47 points en route to a 74-62 win.

Two seasons later, Krzyzewski led the Blue Devils to the national championship game, putting the memory of his early years behind him.

“It’s evolved from people being against us, to people appreciating that we were winning, to people believing that maybe this is a pretty good thing after all, to people then being devoted to what’s going on at Duke and the direction that Mike was leading them,” Mickie said.n TOWERVIEW 21

ON THE BRINK INSIDE THE MIND OF JOHN FEINSTEIN STORY BY ANDY MOORE n PHOTOS BY MARGIE TRUWIT

I

n the 1970s, a young reporter, new to the newsroom of The Washington Post, caught the eye of the paper’s most celebrated journalist. He had watched the young reporter snag five bylines in a Sunday issue as an intern and break a story about the Washington Diplomats, a soccer club, firing their coach. A year later, he had watched the rookie cover the Prince George’s county court system, delivering some of the nation’s best trial coverage on a 15-year-old boy who killed two police officers. The young writer wrote “long, perfect stories with perfect pitch” while covering the incident, the celebrated journalist noted. He gave the reader the relevant facts and added in just the right amount of courtroom color. Most impressively, he did this all on deadline.

Now, this young reporter, John Feinstein, wanted to become a full-time sports writer. The celebrated journalist, Bob Woodward, was stunned. Woodward actively encouraged Feinstein to not go into such a silly thing as sports journalism.

“You have a chance to do something in this business,” Woodward warned.

“You’ll never be heard from again.”

“And he said, ‘Fuck you. This is what I want to do, this is what I am,’” recounts Woodward, laughing.

Feinstein’s choice was a brash move.

22 TOWERVIEW TOWERVIEW 22

“

I get upset when TV people say they’re journalists.

They’re not.

”

TOWERVIEW TOWERVIEW 23 23

Just a few years earlier, as a Duke undergraduate, Feinstein had joyfully run down the hallways of Wannamaker dormitory upon hearing the news of Spiro Agnew’s resignation, brought on by the reporting of Carl Bernstein and Woodward himself. Now, he was spurning a personal appeal by Woodward himself to stay in “hard news,” and he was doing it to become a reporter in what some in the journalism business call “the toy section” of the newspaper.

O

n a snowy January afternoon, in one of the dining rooms of Congressional Country Club, Feinstein tears into a hamburger cooked medium rare. He is wearing a black Bethpage Black sweatshirt and sitting near a roaring fire, which is keeping the powerful patrons of one of the nation’s most exclusive country clubs in Washington, D.C. warm. He is looking back on how he ended up here, how he made it in a profession that so many have envied over the years.

“[My job] sometimes means stopping him from saying something that will get him fired.” —Dave Maraniss Thirty-four years later, Feinstein is one of the most successful sportswriter of his or any generation. He has written 28 books. His first work, A Season on the Brink, is the second-best-selling sports book in history. His seventh book, A Good Walk Spoiled, is the first. His millions of printed words reveal a man who is one of the most prolific writers not just in sports but anywhere today. “John’s brilliant,” his friend Mike Krzyzewski told me. “He’s one of the great writers in our country.”

Feinstein’s friend and mentor at the Post, Dave Kindred, put it this way: “He’s the John Grisham of sportswriters.”

Feinstein has been more than merely prolific, though. As is made clear in his most recent offering, the professional memoir One on One, he has kept that fiercely independent streak of his youth.

Feinstein remains outspoken, unflinchingly confident, never one to shy away from his opinions. In an age when many of his colleagues have retreated from the written word, enamored by the bright lights of television or chummy relationships with high-profile athletes, Feinstein is at heart a sportswriter, even with the traditional definition of the word melting away.

24 TOWERVIEW TOWERVIEW 24

In almost every way, Feinstein’s childhood showed the signs of the sportswriter he would become. He exhibited an unusual passion for sports, going so far as to write about them while he watched them.

He started drinking coffee, that stalwart institution of the newsroom, at the age of 13. And he showed a remarkable confidence and fearlessness to all who came into contact with him.

Feinstein matriculated to Duke in 1973. At the time, Duke was a pre-

19 73 Matriculates

“To do this day, I feel comfortable at a ballpark, at a game,” he says. “My wife says I always come home in a better mood after I go to a game whether it’s baseball, basketball, football. I just enjoy myself there.”

Feinstein was born in New York City in 1956 to two parents heavily involved in the arts scene. His father would one day become head of the Washington National Opera and executive director of the Kennedy Center, and in his household, various acting and music luminaries came and went at all hours. As a kid, he always had the best seats at the ballet, opera and theater. But he took the train to Shea Stadium and Madison Square every chance he could, sitting in the cheap seats by himself when none of his friends would join him. He kept meticulous notes of the contests he watched and always kept score at Mets games. In fourth grade, he even created his own elaborate scoring systems for hockey and basketball, keeping the records in binders called his “Sports Records.” (He would one day show them to his first wife. She did not, he was surprised to note, immediately run from him.)

to Duke

19 77 Joins The

Washington Post

dominantly Southern university, not the national power it would soon become.

A self-described “liberal Jew from New York City” did not fit in well “landing on Planet Duke.” But near the end of his first semester, he summoned up the courage to wander up three well-worn flights of stairs into the hallways of The Chronicle, looking for a writing assignment. The editor, Ann Pelham, was a smart Southern belle, barefoot and wearing cut-off blue jeans.

Feinstein took a look at her and thought, “This is a good place to work.”

Pelham told Feinstein he would have to report about more than sports if he was serious about journalism. Feinstein agreed, but he soon talked to The Chronicle’s sports editor anyway about covering games. The editor told Feinstein to cover a wrestling match in Chapel Hill, so Feinstein drove to the meet. He was in for a surprise when he arrived. The wrestling coach looked at him with one question: What are you doing here? “I didn’t know that I was just supposed to call him and get the scores,” Feinstein says, laughing.

Feinstein rose rapidly through the student paper. He covered the basketball beat essentially by himself as a sophomore. He

was elected sports editor of the newspaper as a junior and re-elected the next year.

He also began stringing for local papers, including the Durham Morning Herald, picking up so many assignments that there were Duke games for which he wrote four different stories. Before he even left Duke he considered himself a full-time reporter and worked tirelessly to make his Rolodex mimic a professional’s.

He knew what he wanted to do next: He was aiming for The Washington Post.

to be opinionated when I talk, so my writing is opinionated. When I was writing straight news in the news section, I had to back off from that. But in sports obviously even when you’re not a columnist, you have more liberty to voice your opinion.”

Not everyone responds well to those opinions. Feinstein has probably angered every one of his regular readers at least once. It’s not just them, either. He and former Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson held screaming matches with

20 - 20 09 10

19 reporting 85 Begins A Season on the Brink

Publishes A Good Walk Spoiled

W

hen you ask any of Feinstein’s friends to describe his personality, brace for the inevitable chuckle, then an explanation.

Jim Cantelupe, a captain of the Army football team in 1995 and one of the protagonists of A Civil War: “John’s very opinionated, not afraid to give his opinion. He’s real.”

Krzyzewski, Duke head basketball coach: “John has great passion for what he does; that makes him very out-spoken.

He’s very opinionated.”

Dave Maraniss, another of Feinstein’s mentors at the Post: “[My job] sometimes means stopping him from saying something that will get him fired. I think he’s been fired three or four times. He’s an incredibly outspoken, argumentative, wonderfully colorful guy.”

Woodward: “He’s an independent horse in journalism and sports coverage. He writes and says, ‘This is what I think.’

There’s no hedging. He very much believes that sports should be pure. He goes after whoever is not doing it properly.”

Feinstein himself: “I’ve always been fast.

I was fast when I was at The Chronicle.

And I think in writing like I talk, I tend

“The general consensus is that it was one of the five worst movies ever made,” he wrote. He accused an ESPN executive of trying to blackmail him and refuses to return to ESPN to this day. He won’t even appear on his old friend Tony Kornheiser’s radio show anymore, because it is an ESPN affiliate.

He also has no problem lighting into television analysts. “There’s a difference between TV and what I do,” he says.

“There’s no question. If there was ever

Survives heart bypass, marries second wife, Chris

19 95

each other over various things he wrote in the Post in the 1980s. He and Tiger Woods no longer speak. He and Krzyzewski have clashed over things he’s written.

After Krzyzewski’s third year, Feinstein wrote that if he did not show improvement, a lot of people did not think he’d come back. “Mike said, ‘I get it from these Carolina assholes! I don’t need to get it from you,’” Feinstein recalls.

“He has many opinions that I have not agreed with,” says Krzyzewski, “but that doesn’t mean he’s not a good friend.

He’ll listen to reasons why you have that opinion. He might not change it, but he’ll listen.”

Feinstein never appears on ESPN, even though the Worldwide Leader in Sports has become a forum in recent years for regional writers to find national exposure.

Feinstein has resisted this sea change. “The last time anyone tried to exert control like this was the old Soviet Union. Misbehave at ESPN and they send you to the Gulag,” he once wrote. “ESPN is, for the most part, a celebration of mediocrity.” His difficulties with ESPN began, he writes on his blog, with a disagreement over the movie treatment of A Season on the Brink.

a battle for TV people to behave like journalists, it was lost long ago. They do commercials. They’re not allowed to say certain things on ESPN. I get upset when TV people say they’re journalists. They’re not.”

In a world of broadcasters doing Applebee’s commercials, Feinstein refuses to even “back-up,” or talk about, promotions that are read by the play-by-play man while broadcasting games on the CBS College Sports Network. As Maraniss puts it: “John doesn’t pick fights with people who won’t handle themselves. He doesn’t pick fights with the weak.”

I

n his junior year at Duke, Feinstein applied for a summer internship at the Post. He didn’t get it. He spent the next year working to prove the Post wrong and succeeded, partly based on an article he wrote for The Chronicle in which he called every coach in the ACC to get a quote. “I admired that story,” says Ken Denlinger, a sportswriter at the Post who helped make the decision. “I felt at that age it required initiative and a great deal of confidence.”

Upon getting the job, Feinstein broke TOWERVIEW 25 25 TOWERVIEW

up with his girlfriend, telling her he was going to work too much to have time to date. His unusual move paid off. He was hired as a night police reporter at the end of the summer, calling it “the greatest moment of my life.” The only problem was that the sports section was filled, and the Post’s leaders weren’t sure if he wanted to leave sports. “I said, ‘I’ll wash the floors here,’” Feinstein recounts telling his editors. “‘It’s The Washington Post, for crying out loud.’” He worked two years outside of sports, then got the opportunity to make his declaration to Woodward and move on from news.

But Feinstein’s ambitions weren’t limited to the ink-stained pages of the Post. One day while on the sports desk, he visited the newspaper’s cafeteria with Kindred and told his colleague that he wanted to write books. Then he said something else that took Kindred by surprise. “I want to be the James Michener of sports books,” he told him. Michener was a Pulitzer Prize winner known for his historical epics. Kindred responded to the young man: “Huh. James Michener.”

Come 1985, the opportunity to do that fell in his lap.

Feinstein had grown close to Indiana’s famous, inflammatory coach Bob Knight during the Hoosiers’ 1981 run to the

national championship. According to Feinstein, Knight was trying to get one of his assistant coaches a new job, and he solicited Feinstein because he represented the national media. The two slowly developed a mutually beneficial relationship, and Feinstein soon came up with an idea. What if he spent every minute possible with Knight and the team? What if he became a completely embedded reporter, one who the coaches and players would soon even forget was there, allowing him to see the team as it really was, not the face it wanted to present to the media?

The seeds of the book were planted by his time as a police reporter. “You’d ride along with the cop, and that was about as real as it gets,” he says. “A lot of it was drudgery, but I was there for a shooting one night. It was the first time a female cop shot someone. It was a big story.

We were riding back to the station and I remember being pissed when the homicide detective cut me off, made me leave....

That stuck with me, that loss of inside access.”

He pitched it to Knight while visiting him in a hotel room after the Final Four dinner in 1985. Incredibly, Knight agreed.

Once the door was firmly shut, Krzyzewski, who had been in the room for the conversation, stared at his friend. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” he said.

F

einstein survived the season and wrote the book, A Season on the Brink, over seven weeks at his parents’ vacation house in Shelter Island, N.Y. It’s a classic, one of the most illuminating sports books ever written.

To read it even 25 years later is to read a study in fluid, direct, uncomplicated writing that never overshadows the subject. Knight unquestionably propels the narrative. His tragic flaws and terrifying demeanor are on full display, and Feinstein dutifully recounts the ups and downs of his electric personality. “It was a very honest portrayal of Knight,” Kindred says. “It was also an act of friendship. I had been around Knight enough to know that what he used in the book was one-tenth of what he had actually done.”

A Season on the Brink became a sensation. It shot to No. 1 on the 26 26 TOWERVIEW TOWERVIEW

New York Times bestseller list and earned the distinction of being the best-selling sports book in U.S. history. Knight immediately disavowed the book, angry at the inclusion of the profanity as well as other instances that put him in a bad light. The two, who had grown so close, didn’t speak to each other for many years. As Feinstein tells me, “You have to be ready for the battles that come afterward.” (Knight declined to comment for this story.)

With A Season on the Brink, Feinstein essentially invented a new genre, one that has been copied countless times: Reporter spends time with team, then writes down what happens. What’s surprising about A Season on the Brink is how new the idea was at the time. “What John did was much harder than [The] Boys of Summer and Ball Four,” Kindred says, referring to two of history’s more iconic sports books. “It was an up-close and personal book that had never been done.”

Woodward added: “He has the capacity to win the confidence of people he writes about. A Season on the Brink, the classic example of that, was like The Selling of the President was about Nixon.”

Feinstein’s ease in gaining trust is even more remarkable because high-profile athletes and star coaches often feel burned by the media. How does Feinstein establish such unabiding trust? “You have to develop relationships,” he says. “I think I do my best work frequently without a notebook out. I go to the driving range, and I’ll never ask a golf question. I might ask about their families, the game. They see you as a person, not a notebook. Then I’ll always ask if they want to go to lunch or dinner.”

Feinstein does not press questions.

Frequently during Krzyzewski’s early days, he would go and sit in his office after losses, not saying anything. “It’s unusual to develop those types of relationships,” the coach says. “You have to trust somebody that much to let them into those relationships. They understand what to write because they understand the situation.”

T

he success of A Season on the Brink more or less ensured that Feinstein would be able to do whatever he wanted for the rest of his career.

Frequently, those hunches paid off, even when most publishers would say the subject he chose didn’t have mass appeal.

Feinstein found his most success in 1995 with A Good Walk Spoiled, a book about a

seemingly boring subject, the PGA Tour in a time after Jack Nicklaus but before Tiger Woods, when golf was far from the major sport it is now. The book still outsold A Season on the Brink. Feinstein’s ability to turn subjects that interest maybe only him into nationally appealing figures is the subject of envy for even successful writers.

“Publishing is not easy,” says Sports Illustrated’s Seth Davis, Trinity ’92. “When you have the kind of success he’s had, the only thing you ever crave is freedom. John has been able to write about what interests him.”

In the mid-1990s, Feinstein took a chance on something other than writing: He taught a weekly journalism seminar at Duke. Constantly pacing across the class, full of energy, Feinstein clued in his students at the beginning of the course that he wasn’t a typical journalism teacher.

“There is no such thing as objective journalism,” he would say. “Everyone has their biases that they have to deal with.”

Davis, who was a student in Feinstein’s class, remembered one time, while planning aloud the course schedule for future weeks, when Feinstein mentioned a conflict of his own. He was in the middle of reporting yet another book, and a class conflicted with a major interview.

“Oh, man, I am really fucked,” he said.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard a professor say that,” a student responded.

“You’ve never had a professor who’s fucked like this,” Feinstein said.

One of the books that Feinstein wrote after his teaching gig was A Civil War, his first book that focused on lesser-known athletes: the Army and Navy football teams.

The book is full of Feinsteinian stuff. As a reader, you’re in class with the players, the locker rooms for rousing speeches, even players-only get-togethers in which the only people in the room are the cadets and this liberal Jew from New York City, who graduated from Duke and spent a year with Bob Knight. It sold well, even though it represented the least-known subject Feinstein had written up to that point. “I think Army-Navy was more about being tired of the bullshit,” he said, referring to the unpleasant truths that sometimes come

with high-level athletics. “To this day, I’m still saying, How can I do another book like that?”

F

einstein writes easily and works tirelessly. He’s published books that took him two years to write. But he’s equally proud of Caddy for Life, about Tom Watson’s longtime caddy Bruce Edwards, who was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease. That book was born and hit stores in one year. Feinstein sticks to a strict routine while writing. He wakes up early to take his 18-year-old son to school, then comes home to read over what he wrote the night before. He typically edits that for two

disdain print journalists—or worse, ignore them. Then there’s the fact that athletes are able to communicate with their fans without the middlemen they once needed.

“The basics of reporting have been changed by the Internet, sports talk radio, the power of television and ESPN, to be specific,” Feinstein says as he orders a cup of coffee.

“They never get asked a real question.”

Feinstein now has a 15-month-old daughter with his second wife, Chris, whom he married in 2010. And he’s also three years removed from a septuple bypass surgery, required after doctors found multiple heart blockages during a routine checkup. The procedure was successful. He now swims enough to sneak in the occasional burger and fries, but he admits he still needs to lose a bit of weight.

Still, despite the odds, it doesn’t seem like he’s going to slow down anytime in the near future. He is currently reporting a book on the minor leagues, in the tradition of A Civil War. He has two new books of fiction coming out in the next few months. Rush for the Gold, the latest in his successful children’s sports series, comes out in May. A new fiction series, about two highly-ranked high school basketball players, debuts early next year.

And he has many ideas for future projects. One book, which he calls his dream assignment, would be to go to New Hampshire a year before its primary, then write about what he sees in the leadup to the Granite State’s moment in the spotlight. He doesn’t think his family, nor publishers, though, would comply. There’s also an elusive project that would bring him back to North Carolina once more.

He wanted very badly to write the definitive book on a personal hero of his, Dean Smith, but the former Tar Heel coach’s battle with dementia has rendered that impossible. That leaves that other North Carolina coaching legend to write about: Mike Krzyzewski.

Krzyzewski says he doesn’t want to comment on a possible book with Feinstein.

But Feinstein doesn’t want to leave that door shut.

“I could see, after he’s retired, sitting down with him and doing the biography I wanted to do with Dean, when it’s all over and you can be totally honest about things,” Feinstein says over a second cup of Congressional coffee. “And I can say, ‘Fuck it.’ I’m old, too. So what?’” n

“I’ve never walked away from a book thinking I gave it a half-hearted effort.” ­—John Feinstein hours before breaking for lunch. Then he picks back up writing at 1 p.m. and works until the late afternoon. “I’m 68 years old,” Woodward said, “and he’s already written much more than me.”

This quest to turn around books quickly has met criticism. Blogs like Deadspin and The Big Lead have been critical of his gradual shift toward writing more golf books, and a few reviews of his later books haven’t been kind. “Sometimes he’ll catch a little flak for writing too often,” says Maraniss. “At times the prolific nature has hurt the writing. But at the same time, the body of work—it’s Feinstein.”

Feinstein doesn’t buy the criticism. “I am able to write fast,” he says. “I’ve never walked away from a book thinking I gave it a half-hearted effort. If someone were to read all 28 of my books, I would be surprised if someone came away and said he didn’t do his reporting job here.”

One would think that Feinstein would slow down soon. He isn’t pleased with much of the current sports media landscape, in which many professional athletes

TOWERVIEW 27

6 Things You Didn’t Know...

by Connor Southard

Is print really dead? If you’re skeptical of that morbid conclusion, you have an ally

in Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and vice provost for library affairs. Jakubs notes that the number of patrons entering Duke’s libraries has steadily increased even as digital media becomes more dominant. Duke Libraries continues to acquire more than 80,000 hard-copy volumes in a typical year, and Jakubs doesn’t think that number will get smaller any time soon. Of course, Duke Libraries is also growing its collection of e-books and other digital materials. But the library space itself can’t be reduced to a downloadable file—last year’s $13.6 million gift from David M. Rubenstein is girding an upcoming renovation effort that will turn a western chunk of Perkins into the new David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Perkins as we know it is the place students tell Jakubs they “come to get serious,” but the building moonlights as the biggest party venue on campus. The next Library Party is on the horizon (“Heroes and Villains,” February 24), and last year’s “Mad Men & Mad Women” is widely and fondly remembered. Here are some things you should know about the multi-talented Duke Libraries system.

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WISDOM

THE STAKES OF THE GAME

By Ben Cohen

30|TOWERVIEW

ranks, nor will it be even if these athletes are paid someday, or if the college level is officially designated the minor leagues in some sports. There’s still no comparison for the camaraderie of the modern student section, or the feeling when everything for your school’s team breaks the way you want just when you least expect it, or the undying thrill of a bonfire that burns into the wee hours.

As much as I cherish reporting on its insanities and inanities, I also can’t get enough of watching and debating college sports with many of the same people I did when I could actually call these athletes my peers. Every year that ends with a cruel thud, we wonder if we’ll be foolish enough to care so much the following year. By the next opening day, we’ve already forgotten that we ever entertained such a question.

This might ring sentimental or, worse, naive. Those are two words that can terrify a reporter into surrendering his notebook.

And yet I hope, more than anything, that I’m telling the truth.

You might think so, too, if you know what it’s like to tiptoe through the Krzyzewskiville mud to watch Duke rout some cupcake that has about as much chance of winning as I do parasailing on the moon. The experience is never not worth it.

Ben Cohen graduated from Duke in 2010 and was the sports editor of The Chronicle and co-editor of Towerview. He writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal. Follow him on Twitter at @bzcohen.

Special to the Chronicle

Not long ago, I asked my mother if she could name five current or former Duke basketball players. Of course she could.

She started with the two Paulus brothers. Then there was Jon Shyler. Who could forget that tall, bearded national champion: Brian Zebra? And what about Lance Armstrong? Or that boy who sweated a lot—who was he, again? Oh, right. Something Singer? The Wedding Singer! That was it. It might not come as a surprise that I don’t often analyze basketball with Mom. But even someone who might confuse Andre Dawkins for Andre the Giant understands that this wasn’t exactly a banner year for college sports. In fact, for a while this year, trying to explain the allure of NCAA athletics was a lost cause.

This was abundantly clear the last time I visited Duke as a journalist, a few weeks before the allegations out of Penn State made other examples of impropriety look like parking tickets.

Even then, the future of college sports was still a tricky subject that seemed to dominate all my conversations. As it turned out, it was no longer possible to yak about sports in the familiar parlance of prediction, hyperbole and the occasional bit of measured reason. Instead we discussed the economics of compensating college athletes beyond room and board. There was idle chatter about the appropriate penalty for such a heinous crime as accepting a free tattoo. And we were (and still are) exploring how NCAA sports can exist without the NCAA. A popular theory contends that the ruling body of college sports might soon give way to four self-governing super-conferences.

Poof! Just like that, the NCAA would disappear.

Right when I began looking for excuses to chat about anything other than college sports—politics seemed tame by comparison—something even more bizarre happened. Basketball season tipped off. Football segued into the bionic mode of bowl season. It wasn’t long before I realized, much to my surprise, that the way I consumed college sports hadn’t changed in the slightest.

Between all the black eyes and body shots, from Miami to Oregon and too many places in between, the games somehow remained the same. They still satisfied those of us loony enough to plan our lives around them.

Of course there’s some cognitive dissonance here. How could the sports themselves maintain their appeal while everything around them went so rotten? There are more reasons than ever to be cynical about the merits of college sports. Cases of athletics bringing out the worst on a campus abound—and not just in faraway places. But what this past year has taught me is that the part of college sports that we truly appreciate has a remarkable way of redeeming itself.

The quality of competition isn’t what it is in the professional

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