I am grateful to have lived long enough to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of a nonwhite guy to the presidency and the sellout of Duke football season tickets.
Thank you, Alabama.
I suspect some of those season tickets were bought by Bama fans who can't wait to get to Wallace Wade Stadium on Sept. 18 to see whether their beloved - and defending national champion - University of Alabama Crimson Tide can hold back my mighty Blue Devils, who are dying to avenge a 30-14 loss in Tuscaloosa back in 2006.
I predict Duke will beat Alabama in the upset of the year - provided the Blue Devils can get past Elon tonight in the season opener.
Duke fans have another reason to be grateful to Alabama, beyond bringing its premier football team and Heisman Trophy candidate, running back Mark Ingram, to Durham. The Yellowhammer State also produced David Cutcliffe, the head coach destined to lead Duke back to football glory. Coach Cut was born in Birmingham and graduated from Alabama in 1976. His first coaching gig was at Banks High School outside of Birmingham.
Cutcliffe went on to amass an impressive coaching resume in the Southeastern Conference, the nation's top football conference. When Cut left Tennessee as an assistant to take the top football job at Duke, a lot of folks - including me - thought Durham would be a way station until a prize SEC head coaching job opened up. But Cutcliffe surprised the football nation last year when he spurned an offer from Tennessee to remain at Duke.
That's not the first time Duke football has seduced an Alabama man.
Wallace Wade stunned the football world even more when, back in 1930, he left Alabama for Duke after winning the first three of Alabama's 13 national football championships. The third came in Wade's last season, when his Crimson Tide went 10-0 and crushed the then-undefeated Washington State Cougars 24-0 in the Rose Bowl.
In 16 years at Duke, Wade compiled a 110-36-7 record and won seven conference championships. In 1938, he led the storied "Iron Duke" team that not only went into the 1939 Rose Bowl undefeated but had never even been scored upon. Duke then lost, 7-3, to Southern California, with the winning touchdown scored during the game's final minute.
Wade never addressed why he left Alabama, but there was plenty of speculation. Some said the offer of a salary higher than that of Duke University President William P. Few was persuasive. Yet a former Duke archivist, William E. King, wrote that Wade got a good deal but that several university administrators made more money than the coach.
Imagine that - a major university president making more than the football coach.
King wrote that Wade disclosed late in life (he died in 1986) that education - physical education - is what peeled him away from Alabama. In addition to being football coach, Wade was director of physical education and intramurals.
Wade believed a fit body was fundamental to achieving a fit mind. The student newspaper, The Chronicle, reported that at one point during Wade's tenure, 700 Duke men were taking P.E. courses and 90 percent of undergraduates were participating in at least one intramural sport, with basketball and boxing the most popular. Wade believed that working at a private university (he was an assistant coach at Vanderbilt before going to Alabama) gave him the freedom to implement his programs the way he wanted and in a manner that proved popular with students.
Sounds familiar. Cutcliffe strikes me as another old-school Alabama guy who prizes his professional freedom. I've been told that he turned down Tennessee because the administration wouldn't let him take his assistants to Knoxville. If true, it confirmed to Cutcliffe that the opportunity to build a program that reflects his and Duke's institutional values can be just as rewarding as winning national championships.
That's not to say Duke football can't win a national championship. But first, we have to beat Elon.
