Wallace Who?

According to what my friends were telling me upon arriving at their house Saturday to watch the game, during pregame some Duke students were asked if they knew who Wallace Wade was. According to my friends the students typically had no clues as to who Wallace Wade was aside from the fact that their stadium is named after him. Answers varied from “old football player” to “rich booster” according to those telling the story to me.

This to me is a perfect example of how sport is religion in the south. Ask any knowledgable Alabama fan and they’ll tell you that Wallace Wade won the first national title at Alabama, he took us to the Rose Bowl, he was even the coach when the nickname “The Elephants” began being used referring to the Alabama football team. Wallace Wade has a statue outside of our stadium as well as a road that runs alongside the stadium named after him.

What I find interesting is how simple differences change all of this. Alabama is a football school, Duke is a basketball school. While Alabama football fans may snicker at the idea of not knowing who your stadium is named after, conversely Duke fans would probably laugh at the notion that most Alabama students have no idea who Coleman is (from Coleman Coliseum) and very few of us could name even three of the projected starting five basketball players for the next season.

The parallel was not lost on me. For Duke fans the greatest moment they probably had on Saturday was not when the team took the field, or scoring a touchdown, seeing old friends, etc. For them, I imagine, the greatest moment was when Mike Kryzewski entered the stadium. After all, he is their version of The Bear, Stallings or Saban.

Likewise, most Alabama fans would stop paying attention to a basketball game, particularly one that wasn’t much of a game, once Saban walked into the arena. We’d be more interested in what he had to say about football, than what players were actually doing on the court.

However, the odd part to me is an almost jealous feeling I had while watching part of the game on Saturday. Duke had success under Wallace Wade in football, including a Rose Bowl win.

For those that don’t know, in the earlier days of college football the Rose Bowl was the end all be all for football. There was no BCS, no AP poll, no Sugar Bowl, everyone wanted to play in the Rose Bowl. It was the pinnacle of achievement for the first three or four decades in the 1900’s.

And there, on lowly Duke University’s (lowly in a football sense, not basketball or academics) campus rests a rock with a plaque on it which describes the time that Duke hosted the Rose Bowl. It is the only time the game has been played away from the West Coast, and surrounding the rock were rose bushes from the Rose Bowl grounds themselves.

Comparatively Alabama Football has everything, titles, trophies, coaching legends while Duke has none of that from a football standpoint, and yet there I sat, wanting that for my program, wanting to add that feather to the collective Alabama hat. Why I couldn’t just let it be and be happy that Duke had something to be proud of is something psychologists and god knows who else would be happy to debate. But for me it only reaffirmed that my love for Alabama football borders on and often crosses that imaginary border into the religious.