Coach K, condoms on the court and the long evolution of Duke’s Cameron Crazies
At his home in Yorkville, Illinois, Herman Veal saw the clip, the one that played over and over on ESPN. He saw Mike Krzyzewski scold the Duke student section. He saw Krzyzewski scream “shut up” and watched Krzyzewski approach the Cameron Crazies, beating his chest and gesturing while he admonished students who want few things more than to please him.
It was Jan. 29, during Duke’s victory against Pittsburgh at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Eight-hundred miles away, at his home in Illinois, Veal couldn’t help but drift back to Jan. 14, 1984, when he entered the lore of Cameron, and that of the Cameron Crazies, amid a hailstorm of lingerie and condoms.
When Veal recounted the story last week, during a phone interview, he laughed several times. If there were any lingering scars of what he experienced that day in 1984, it sounded as though they’d long healed. Back then, Veal was a senior forward at Maryland. He’d been accused, a little more than a year earlier, of making improper sexual advances on a female classmate.
Veal was suspended for a time, but no charges were filed. Eventually, the university cleared his record and he was reinstated to the team. The Terrapins, with Lefty Driesell as their coach, and with a rising star in sophomore forward Len Bias, were ranked fifth when they played at Duke during Veal’s senior season. He knew a hostile greeting likely awaited. He warned his mother.
“I called her and I told her, I said, ‘Mom, don’t be surprised (with) what you see tomorrow, during the introductions,’” said Veal, now 58 and a retired prison sergeant. “... I said don’t be surprised, because the Duke fans have vivid imaginations as to what they possibly could do.”
When Veal described what happened next, and what happened when his name was announced in the starting lineup, he made a kind of sound to indicate a rapid, repeated noise — a constant tap-tap-tap. He still remembers that sound. It was the sound, he said, of the students “throwing condoms out on the floor, man. It sounded like rain falling.”
In addition to condoms, students also threw women’s underwear in Veal’s direction. They chanted things, throughout, that were too crude to be included in newspaper stories about the game. The next day, after Maryland’s 81-75 victory, the Washington Post published a column from Ken Denlinger, in which he lambasted the Duke student section.
Denlinger opened his column like this:
“Life gets ugly sometimes; pray it’s never worse for Herman Veal than today.”
Later, Denlinger included this observation, about the retrieval of all that’d been thrown:
“One fellow was seen tucking pink underwear inside his shirt.”
The Herman Veal incident became something of a line of demarcation, and a referendum on the behavior of the Duke student section. Before, there were no stated boundaries. A line couldn’t be crossed, because there was no line. In the aftermath, though, Duke’s leadership, amid damning media coverage, for the time, began an attempt to sanitize the student section.
“We have a problem,” Krzyzewski said after that game, according to a Jan. 16, 1984 story in the Washington Post. “I don’t think it’s a big one, but it is a problem, and we should address it this week. Certain things are clever and funny, but I would never condone the throwing of condoms.”
Coach K yells at Duke student section
More recently, and 36 years after the Veal incident, Krzyzewski again found himself addressing the behavior of the Duke student section. This time, during the game against Pitt, they had not chanted anything profane. They had not heaved things onto the court. They only directed a chant at Jeff Capel, the Pitt coach and former Duke guard of the mid-1990s.
The chant was “Jeff Capel, sit with us,” and the “sit with us” part of it was a normal cheer for the Cameron Crazies, who often direct it at former players or high school prospects who might show up in the building. No matter. The mention of Capel, a player Krzyzewski coached, mentored and then hired as a Duke assistant, was enough to send Krzyzewski over the edge.
Afterward, he acknowledged that he wasn’t sure what the students were chanting. He told reporters: “I thought it was something personal,” and then Krzyzewski offered an apology. He also offered suggestions to the kind of cheers he wouldn’t mind hearing, and punctuated them, while he spoke, by softly pounding the table in front of him.
“Let’s think of a different cheer,” Krzyzewski told reporters after the Pitt game. “Like, ‘Defense.’ You know, ‘Let’s go. Come on, Duke’’ You know, ‘Let’s go Duke, come on.’”
For about a day, the clip of Krzyzewski’s in-game tirade circulated on the highlight and debate shows on the sports cable television channels. The clip of him offering cheer suggestions, meanwhile, circulated on Twitter, where people made fun of Krzyzewski in the way they make fun of anything on that platform.
The latest public interaction between Krzyzewski and the students became another chapter in the unique dynamic among the coach, the basketball program and the student section, which continues to evolve from its cruder origins. During the first decade of Krzyzewski’s tenure at Duke, it became clear that the student section at Cameron could become a valuable asset.
Coach K’s relationship with students
By the time Mike Cragg began working with the Duke athletic department in 1987, he said Krzyzewski had long become active in building a relationship with the student section.
“He takes very seriously, and the whole department takes very seriously, that they’re a part of the basketball program,” said Cragg, who left Duke to become the athletic director at St. John’s in 2018. “I know coach K feels like when he’s meeting with the students, it’s a team meeting.”
Duke basketball is different in a lot of ways from most in college basketball and one of those differences is the dynamic between head coach and the students who, over the past four decades, have come to support his teams. Every year, a number of those students spend weeks, or sometimes months, living in the tent city that bears Krzyzewski’s name.
The day after the Pitt game, Krzyzewski sent word to the leaders of Krzyzewskiville: He wanted to meet with students, in part to explain himself and in part to offer some guidance for what he expects out of them. Derek Saul, a junior at Duke and the sports editor of the student newspaper, The Chronicle, happened upon students leaving that meeting.
“The overwhelming sentiment there among the students,” Saul said, “was, ‘Oh my God, I just talked to Coach K, this is the best moment of my life.”
That sentiment underscores something else unique to Duke: the extraordinary reverence, on campus, for Krzyzewski. When he walks onto the court before home games “you quite literally bow down to Coach K,” Saul said. If the outburst during the Pitt game did anything to damage Krzyzewski’s relationship with students, Saul didn’t sense it on campus in the days afterward.
“Honestly, people didn’t respond to it on campus as much as I think they expected or should have,” Saul said. “I think most people on campus are pretty willing to forgive Coach K and forgive the basketball team for anything. There definitely was some chatter about thinking that it was ridiculous but, overwhelmingly, people forgave him.”
Tales of the Cameron Crazies
Perhaps the oddest part of Krzyzewski’s recent eruption was that it came in response to a relatively innocuous cheer — an invitation for a former Duke player to sit with the student section. In rare moments, Krzyzewski had addressed the Cameron Crazies during games before, in effort to tame their behavior. But never in such demonstrative fashion as he did before and during halftime of the Pitt game.
It brought to mind all the moments in which questionable behavior was met, in the moment, without much of a response at all. In the 1980s, around the time Veal was serenaded with condoms and underwear, the Duke student section also threw pizza boxes at N.C. State’s Lorenzo Charles, who’d been arrested after an incident with a pizza delivery boy.
Over the years, the Cameron Crazies have jingled keys amid the sight of players who’d found any sort of trouble involving cars. They threw Twinkies at Georgia Tech’s Dennis Scott. Before Maryland’s trip to Cameron during his senior year, Veal expected the worst. And then received it.
It had been a while, he said last week, before anyone had brought it up.
“It didn’t stick with me in a negative way,” Veal said. “In fact, that was probably one of the best all-around games I ever played. You’d have to check me on this, but I think, yeah — I had a double-double that game. I had about four or five, six assists. Took about three charges.”
Indeed, Veal’s memory was correct. He finished with 12 points, 10 rebounds and five assists. The next day, Michael Wilbon’s story in the Washington Post began like this:
“The Duke fans screamed obscenities and Herman Veal made free throws as if the arena were empty. … They chanted the unprintable and Veal took charging fouls.”
Looking back, Veal said, his teammates were more upset than he was at the reception he received. Some told him, afterward, that Krzyzewski should have intervened right then, when the crowd began tossing condoms and underwear.
“Everybody was upset that Coach K didn’t tell them to knock it off,” Veal said. “But he thought that would be something that would help them to victory, man.”
More than 35 years later, Veal said the taunts and jeers provided some motivation. He was “so geeked up” at the start of the game, he said, that on one of Maryland’s first possessions, he threw a pass in the direction of Bias and “zipped it out bounds.” Driesell took Veal out of the game and told him to calm down, Veal said.
The Cameron Indoor Stadium scene
Three days after Maryland’s victory, Terry Sanford, then the Duke president who was endearingly known as “Uncle Terry,” released a letter to the Duke students. Sanford suggested that “we change,” and encouraged students to create a classier environment at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
“I don’t think we need to be crude and obscene to be effectively enthusiastic,” Sanford wrote. “We can cheer and taunt with style; that should be the Duke trademark. Crudeness, profanity and cheapness should not be our reputation — but it is.”
In the years after, Cameron became something different: loud, still, but tamer and calmer, at least relative to the game that prompted Sanford’s letter. The recent confrontation, though, provided some evidence that it’s still a work in progress, 36 years after Veal received perhaps the harshest welcome anyone ever has in the building’s storied history.
Veal still attends plenty of college basketball games. He said he and his wife often attend Maryland’s Big Ten games in the Midwest. He hasn’t been back to Cameron Indoor Stadium since the game there his senior season in 1984. He wants to return someday. He sounded excited about the prospect of bringing his wife along.
“I told her, I said, I have to get you down to Durham and to Cameron Indoor Stadium,” Veal said, “so you can see a Duke game. Preferably against North Carolina. I said, that’s an experience of a lifetime.”
This story was originally published February 10, 2020 at 12:00 AM.
