The Home Team

Clichés are the bane of journalists and good examples are articles or reports involving Duke basketball.  Invariably they portray Duke as one of the most hated teams in the nation.

Harris, a national polling concern, is probably ramping up its annual survey of the nation’s favorite college teams in advance of “March Madness” the results of which it usually releases during the regional round of the 75th Annual NCAA Tournament which begins in earnest a little more than a week from now.

Duke’s men’s team has rated as the #1 favorite team in the nation in 9 of the last twenty years, #2 most favorite in four years and never lower than #3.  I’m not certain if Harris ranks the most hated teams but applied to Duke the cliché of “most hated” is misleading at best.

I always found it puzzling during my now-concluded 40-year career in destination marketing covering three different communities when people would ask me my favorite team.  The home team of course or in the case of Durham, where I served for more than two decades, “teams” because both Duke and North Carolina Central University are based here.

Even more puzzling was that so many of my counterparts in economic development failed to connect those dots, all the while holding their hand out to Duke for help facilitating projects.  My philosophy was that when you represented a community, you went all in and that included allegiances to local teams.

But then I remember that I chose to attend BYU over the University of Idaho in my home state, merely because the Cougars had won the National Invitational Tournament my senior year in high school, a period during which the NIT was the equal of the now much more highly regarded NCAA Tournament.

The challenge was clear as I arrived in Anchorage in the summer of 1978 to complete the start-up of the community’s destination marketing arm.  I found an immediate ally in Bob Rachel, the first basketball coach for the University of Alaska-Anchorage.

We needed to diversify summer tourism to be more than an overnight stop for highly-escorted cruise-related tours  and expand visitor-centric economic and cultural development across the other three seasons - including winter - something that made me “enemy number one” to a several individuals involved in Seattle-based tourism interests who felt they “owned” Alaska at the time.

Over Thanksgiving weekend that year, I ventured out for each session with 2,500 other souls to Buckner Fieldhouse on the U.S. Army’s Fort Richardson.  It was located across Ship Creek from my offices in downtown Anchorage and adjacent to Elmendorf Air Force Base from which I could break the monotony of long telephone calls by watching the almost vertical take-off of F-15s, often joined by a Snowy Owl perched outside the window.

Today, the two historic facilities bordering downtown Anchorage are known as Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, not quite the same ring.

Coach Rachel was soon gone, the victim of alleged recruiting violations.  He became an assistant at UMass but died of cancer in 1985.  But during his time in Anchorage, he was one of the first in the nation to jump on new NCAA rules permitting teams to add some exempt pre-season games. 

What was known as the Sea Wolf Classic soon became the Great Alaska Shootout and in 1983 moved to Sullivan Arena which I had played a minor role developing.  The Shootout always drew many of the top teams in the nation.  I met Bobby Knight that first year and watched North Carolina State beat Louisville in the championship game.

In 1980 I met Dean Smith, the legendary coach of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Watching the Tar Heels beat Arkansas in the championship, it would still be nearly a decade before North Carolina would be brought to my attention as a place to live when I would be recruited to Durham to jump-start the marketing arm here.

During the 1983 “Shootout” I met the late Jim Valvano whose “cardiac pack” team had won the NCAA Tournament earlier that year and North Carolina State beat Arkansas to win another title game.  North Carolina won again in 1985.

I don’t believe Duke played in the “Shootout” until the 1990s after I had been recruited to Durham and had already become friends with Coach K, winning it in 1995.  By then Trajan Langdon, a star at East Anchorage High School was playing for Duke, followed by Carlos Boozer in 1999 who had played high school ball in Juneau.

The Great Alaska Shootout continues to have a North Carolina flavor with UNC-Charlotte winning the tournament last November but the number of similar tournaments makes it difficult to draw the top teams as the “Shootout” did in the 1980s.

Who was “my team” when I lived in Alaska and marketed Anchorage?  The University of Alaska – Anchorage Sea Wolves, of course, even though those were the Danny Ainge years at BYU when during March Madness in 1981, he went coast to coast in the last eight seconds to beat Notre Dame.

NCCU won a national title the year I arrived in Durham, Duke won three during my tenure marketing Durham and a fourth a few months after I retired.

And the Durham home teams are still my favorites.

Organic vs. Manufactured Energy and Enthusiasm

Thanksgiving weekend for me has always been about football but not just because of the always-fierce rivalry games between universities in my native Idaho and adjacent states of Montana, Washington and Utah, first broadcast via radio and then later television.

It was also usually the last weekend of the year when one could get in one last game of touch of flag football, both as I was growing up and then continuing as an adult up through my late 40s.

Three things struck me last weekend, when on a spectacular but crisp fall day, I was the guest of some friends at a rivalry game in Durham, North Carolina, where I now live, between North Carolina Central University and North Carolina A & T.

When you enter O’Kelly-Riddick Stadium on NCCU’s campus from the southeast gate, where we did, you suddenly find yourself right at field level, just steps from the end zone, as shown in the photo in this blog.

I realized that it was the first time I had been at turf level on a field such as that since high school, even though in my part-time role with the office of tours and conferences while attending Brigham Young University in the early 1970s I had coordinated the President’s box.

The second thing I noticed was the organic energy exuded by the fans and university officials.  Unlike what so many places try to manufacture, both college and professional, this energy was genuine, authentic and contagious.

Finally, the game itself reminded me of something I miss from when I first moved to Durham more than two decades ago and the then-single-A minor league Durham Bulls were still playing in the city’s historic Durham Athletic Park (DAP) which coincidentally is now restored as the the home field for NCCU’s baseball team.

Back then, both the team and the facility still resembled what had been made famous twelve months earlier in the movie Bull Durham.  Nothing was taken for granted.  Every throw to first was an adventure compared to today’s smooth-playing AAA team whose players are only a phone call away from playing in the “Bigs” as they play in the city’s acclaimed, made-to-look-retro ballpark.

The only predictable parts of the football game last weekend at NCCU were the appearances of the acclaimed marching bands for both schools.  The game featured what seemed like half a dozen blocked kicks and missed snaps and the back and forth wasn’t settled until overtime, unfortunately in A &T’s favor.

It was great entertainment and proof once again that genuine energy and enthusiasm trumps manufactured enthusiasm and that quality entertainment is rarely measured by stadium size or skyboxes or being “major league.”

The Core Competency At The Heart Of Any Organization

It occurred to me that neither the core competency at the center of today’s community/destination marketing organizations (DMOs) nor even its terminology existed 40 years ago even in terminology when I began my recently-concluded career in that field.

Some DMOs, even though the concept has been evolving for over 11 decades now, are still obsessed with convention sales and yet even they require more than a smidgeon of this competency so critical to much more holistic and contemporary DMOs, especially those such as the one in Durham, NC, that have led the way in  accreditation to the highest standards and best practices.

Unfortunately, this core competency receives far too little, if any, emphasis in most business degree programs including schools specializing in hospitality degrees and very rarely does it appear in continuing education programs or on the agenda for annual meetings of related associations.

Graduate schools that teach this core competency exist in only 52 universities in the nation and one of these is is an historical black university where it first appeared in the name in 1984, at North Carolina Central University.  This, coincidentally occurred shortly after it was put at the center of the strategic direction at the DMO I then managed in Anchorage, Alaska.

This core competency that can make or break the success of any DMO today is the ability to:

• Create databases to store information
• Perpetually populate and update these databases in real time
• Make this information readily accessible on any platform including the worldwide web
• Make this information retrievable on demand and
• Make it retrievable as infographics.

Having skills such as these enables people with degrees in library and information sciences to have such a wide range of career choices today including in DMOs.

For information on how folks from the academic side are training people in this core competency, click here and wait for the Fall Issue of NCCU Now to download, then go to page 37.

Located where I live in Durham, North Carolina, NCCU is a hundred-year-old institution, one of the 17 campuses in University of North Carolina System and the first publicly-funded liberal arts college for African Americans in the nation.  Library studies, later to include information sciences, began there in 1939, second as a professional school behind the law.

Today it the study of library and information sciences thrives as essential part of the curriculum even to those in NCCU’s new doctorate program in integrated Biosciences but to none is it more essential than to those pursuing a career in community/destination marketing and visitor-centric cultural and economic development.

Looking Back To A Pivotal Secret Meeting

The violence that met the first Freedom Riders 50 years ago had been brewing by then for more than 50 years coming to a full boil as Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office as President 110 years ago and then promptly met in secret, late one night, with Booker T. Washington, a former slave and nationally recognized educator and thought-leader on race relations.

By then nearly 50 years of Republican power brokering, with heavy-handed partisan and racially driven patronage with Federal jobs, had given that party control of all but two elected presidencies following the Civil War era contributing to the hardening and re-dividing of the south nearly back to where it was at the end of that war.

It is possible that both Roosevelt and Washington agreed with the assessment of rival William Jennings Bryan that “the extremes of society are being driven further and further apart” – a statement that had been reiterated repeatedly the year before on the campaign trail.

That late night both Roosevelt and Washington were chilled by the recent news of another lynching of a black man in the south – news that had grown all too frequent over the past decade, but this time the man had been burned alive at the stake with pieces of his liver cut up and sold as souvenirs.

As Republicans are doing today in legislatures across the country, southern white Democrats had renewed restrictions on voting so that less than 1 in 1000 black men could vote.

Born just two years apart, Roosevelt and Washington were bonded even before that night by an explicit faith in the meritocracy favored and epitomized by some founders like Alexander Hamilton. Roosevelt proposed and Washington agreed to support:

• Quality vs. quantity in future distribution of patronage


• Appointment of racially moderate whites, Democrats where possible


• Extension of these practices for the first time north of the Mason-Dixon line.

To make good, Roosevelt’s first official act a few weeks later was to appoint, on Washington’s recommendation, Thomas G. Jones as a Federal Judge. Jones was a former Confederate Army Major (who had been wounded four times and carried Lee’s sword at the surrender of his army to then-General Grant) and a two-term former Governor of Alabama who was racially moderate for the time having promoted fair election laws and opposed lynching.

And then all hell broke loose.

The subsequent vitriolic condescension from the southern press back then rivaled today’s flood of the same by conservative pundits following the election of the first African-American as President. The vitriolic condescension today is thinly disguised by questioning his birthplace, his grades to get into Harvard and by reverse projecting, as psychologists would term it, using the ludicrous claim that President Barack Obama hates white people.

Politicians in Raleigh at the time of Roosevelt’s and Washington’s agreement were already looking down their noses at Durham for “doing things differently,” a long-held community personality trait, as they did again only recently over the issue banning digital outdoor billboards. A Raleigh newspaper editorial back then had already opined as paraphrased, “have you seen what they are doing in Durham? Whites and blacks are working side by side on the same street, like a wild west town.”

Five years before Roosevelt and Washington made that agreement, Duke University, then known as Trinity College had become the first white southern university to have a black man speak, let alone speak on racial issues, as Washington did on campus after receiving an invitation from the college’s students.

Then nine years after the meeting with Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington returned to Durham for the founding of what is now North Carolina Central University and lauded the approach the black business community was taking by making racial harmony a beacon for other communities, north and south.

Things certainly weren’t perfect in Durham then, nor today, but we’ve always done things differently and we were definitely going a different direction than much of the south.

Roosevelt and Washington, if they lived today, would each be just as controversial.

As he did just a little more than 100 years ago, Roosevelt today would be railing at members of his party who are attempting to dismantle environmental protections, strip consumer protections, disrespect labor, fuel anti-immigrant sentiments, enable greedy mega-corporations, limit early voting and in general make it harder for students and others to vote.

Washington’s philosophy would be far closer today to Dr. Shelby Steele’s as expressed in the controversial book The Content of Our Character, a title taken from Dr. King’s I Have A Dream speech, than to those who seem intent only on counting how many seats or positions they control only to discover, it doesn’t secure change.

Roosevelt and Washington firmly believed in government’s pivotal role in providing the foundation for social mobility.

Born in privilege, Theodore Roosevelt learned the importance of social mobility to making a nation great from his famously humanitarian father who believed, even in an era when the idle rich were truly idle, that everyone, regardless of a heavy work schedule, should devote one or two days a week to helping those less fortunate.

He was the first of the nation’s then 26 Presidents to be born and raised in a big city and he welcomed the cacophony of different cultures and ethnicities.

He was also the first President in the words of trilogic-biographer Edmund Morris “to mingle both Union and Confederate blood” and wanted the south, in his own words, back in “full communion.”

It is likely that during his 1896 ground-breaking speech in Durham, the first at a southern white university, that Booker T. Washington reiterated a metaphor he coined the year before and one still famously adapted today by four-time-national champion Duke Basketball Coach Mike Krzyzewski to describe the importance of teamwork: “we can be separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

Two years after the Roosevelt and Washington meetings set off such an uproar throughout the south, a white professor at the same southern white school here in Durham set off another by writing in a southern quarterly that “Booker T. Washington is the greatest man, save General [Robert E.] Lee, born in the south in a hundred years…”

Two years later, during a visit to Durham, Roosevelt praised Professor John Spencer Bassett’s courage and the university for supporting him in a speech noting the importance of academic freedom. The great man visited Durham one last time, accepting a rare honorary degree less than a year before his death in 1919.

Hopefully, we can emerge from the extremes in today’s society that seem to also be driving us further and further apart by adapting to today’s bitter partisanship and extremism the dream Washington articulated for blacks during a speech in Durham:

“We are to live in the South together, black and white, and it is sometimes helpful for us to speak directly and frankly to each other. When two races are to live in the same country, the sensible policy to pursue is to do everything that will promote good will and friendship rather than enmity and discord. In every part of North Carolina I want to see the Negro get to the point where he will not be merely tolerated in any community, but he will render such fine and valuable services that he will actually be wanted in every community.”

May God bless America with more leaders like Teddy Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington.

Durham’s Big Surprise For First Year University Students

Several years ago, when I was with DCVB, we worked through Dr. Mitch Javidi at NANOPHRADES and Dr. Larry Moneta VP of Student Affairs to conduct a series of focus groups with Duke First Year Students (appears freshmen is no longer PC.)

The feedback helped pinpoint sources of many misimpressions or misinformation and most importantly unwrap what would help first year students experience more of Durham during their brief four-year tenure (and hopefully longer if Durham continues to “brain-gain”.)

I’ll never forget how one group indicated that the biggest problem they had with getting out and doing more in the community is that everything seemed like a “silo”, e.g. Duke, Downtown, Northgate, Southpoint, RTP etc.

Sometimes they weren’t even sure what locations were in Durham vs. surrounding communities.

Remember, students aren’t permitted to have cars during their first year and they must live on campus, specifically, Duke East Campus, one of three arching around Downtown.

Results from that experience tell me that one of the greatest gifts for the new class of 2014 which just settling in today, will be the Bull City Connector. Everyone, including students, can just hop on or off one of the BCC coaches fare-free, every 15 minutes M-F from 7 am to 6 p.m., then every 20 minutes from 6 p.m. to Midnight. Saturday and Sunday, the buses run 7 a.m. to Midnight, every 20 minutes.

First year students will have easy access now to eight different dining, entertainment and shopping districts (click on the image above to open the interactive map) including the two that bracket the campus - Ninth Street District and Brightleaf District, not to mention the majority of Durham’s nationally recognized festivals and more than a dozen performing arts and sports venues.

Students from North Carolina Central University connect fare-free via a bus route from that campus to the Durham Transportation Center.

No more silos! Welcome to Durham – Where Great Things Happen!