About a minute remained in the 85th City Game on this Friday night, and Dave Harper, the new athletic director at Duquesne University, had been alerted by PPG Paints Arena's visibly fidgety security staff that the school's student section, already delirious that their Dukes were about to dunk Pitt for the first time this millennium, were now standing in the aisles, ready to storm the court.
Ha! I just used Duquesne and storm the court in the same sentence!
Try it yourself and see if your grammar software rejects it!
Anyway, Harper conferred briefly with security and sought approval for -- bear with me because I can't type this often enough -- Duquesne students to storm the court. And once he got that approval, the man seriously sprung into action.
He sprinted across the front wave of students, now probably 500-plus, and pretty much flung himself into the pack to gather a dozen or so at a time, then slide across and gather a dozen more. And each point, he pleaded -- no, positively bellowed above the din of the chanting, cheering and pep band -- that they proceed responsibly.
"They'll let you on the floor!" Harper burst out to one of those packs. "But tell everyone to be smart, be safe!"
Shortly thereafter, it happened. It was real.
No, not just the score: Dukes 64, Panthers 55.
No, not just the end of a 15-year run of losses so dispiriting for the fading Duquesne fan base that even they would laugh at the notion of a local rivalry with Pitt, no matter its rich past.
No, I'm talking about seeing Duquesne students storm the court ...
https://vimeo.com/194130553
"They came out on the court. Our fans, our students, our alumni, our people rushed the court" Jim Ferry, the Dukes' sixth-year coach would tell me in a quiet hallway well after it was all done. "I can't tell you how much that means to us. As a program. As a university. Those were our people."
No one who's made it this far into a column on Duquesne basketball needs a history lesson. Suffice it to say that, with the exception of a couple of the briefest patches ... well, you know. Similarly, no one, least of all those of us who went to school on the Bluff, needs any reminder that there have been more than a few false alarms. Including in Ferry's own tenure.
That undoubtedly explains why, when he took the podium at his formal press conference -- before our conversation -- he tried, at least a little, to downplay this.
"It's one game," he said.
"I'm not going to get too high or too low," he said.
He even offered, when I asked, a perfectly plausible alibi for his players not having been excessively pumped with pregame rivalry speeches:
https://vimeo.com/194125597
But sorry, I wasn't buying any of that, and that's spoken with all due respect.
Because at one point in the press conference, Ferry also said this in scanning the room of about two dozen reporters: "As you guys have all printed and wrote and said, and appropriately so, it hasn't been much of a rivalry. And I think it is now."
Yeah, it meant something.
And later, when it was just us and I pressed a bit as I've done with the man in the past, he loosened up: "It's a process. It is. But we have to take advantage of this. It's been a long time coming."
He paused a moment.
"The biggest thing to me was ... you saw that student body storm the court ... that's the turning point. Because it's been a long time since our school's seen that. So now, everybody's got to get behind that. The student body's got to come back for more games. The administration has to see what this can do for our university. The city of Pittsburgh has to see that we can have more than just one good basketball team in the city. It can be us. It can be Robert Morris. It's great when Pitt is good, but it's better when all of us are good."
Another pause.
"Look, when I came here, I knew it was a major, major rebuilding challenge. And we've taken steps each year. We have. And to have a win like this, that should open people's eyes to what this can be."
That, my friends, is the real Ferry.
That's the fiery coach hired away from LIU-Brooklyn, where he capped his decade-long tenure with back-to-back NCAA appearances, and the man who'd been entrusted by the Duquesne alumni, in particular, to lead the program ... if not to Atlantic 10 contention, at least to respectability. It hasn't happened. He's gone 54-79, and the progress, which he fairly identified, has been painfully slow year over year: 8-22, 13-17, 12-19, 17-17 and the current 4-5.
But Ferry's openly defiant, and he's got the right to be.
Talk to anyone inside the program, notably the boosters who remain strikingly active, and they'll complain bitterly, angrily about how little money the university's administration has put into the program. The Dukes, like the Tamburitzans and other university name brands over the past century, were allowed to rot from the head down under the frugal oversight of Rev. Sean Hogan, the bizarrely powerful vice president for student life who handled bean-counting all over campus for 27 years. And it didn't help that the school's president for most of Ferry's tenure, Charles Dougherty, cared even less. He collected a $700,000 salary, third-most among Atlantic 10 presidents, while watching the school's signature athletic program flail about in the basement. And that's to say nothing of Greg Amodio, the former AD whose job performance was easily the least of all three.
But all three are gone now. Hogan retired last summer, Dougherty this summer, and Amodio left for another AD job at Quinnipiac. And on that count alone, the future of Duquesne basketball has never been brighter.
Standing out is Harper, the bright, energetic 46-year-old new AD who came from the University of Dayton athletic program that probably serves as the ideal model for what Duquesne could be, in both scale and success, inside the Atlantic 10. Everything I've heard is that he's his own man and he's got all the gumption necessary to get what he needs from both Old Main and the alumni. While at Dayton, he collected a school-record $66 million in donations.
That would buy more than the annual new hot dog stand inside Palumbo.
Ferry's clearly aware of all this, even as he's clearly aware a new boss means a whole new set of eyes on his job performance. He's got to win, even as he impresses upon his superiors that he needs them to help.
Unless you glossed over it above when he told me, "The administration has to see what this can do for our university."
And to repeat, he might well prove absolutely right. On every one of those stances.
The university must see that the Dukes remain a vital part of the broader institution, if only because, as Friday night illustrated even before the victory with all the red-clad fans among the 10,977 on hand, their students and alumni could easily come to love them all over again.
Maybe this will help.
The AD, Harper, must appreciate that Ferry has been a winner before and can be one again. Even after losing his top two scorers by a mile from last season, Derrick Colter and Micah Mason, and even though Duquesne long ago lost its lure for big-time or even mid-level recruits, Ferry and his staff spent the past year beating down the bushes for talent anywhere they could find it, and they turned up -- get this -- four of their five starters Friday since the end of last season: Emile Blackman, Tarin Smith, Mike Lewis II and Isiaha Mike. Blackman, a graduate transfer led all scorers in the game with 21 points. Smith transferred from Nebraska. Lewis and Mike are freshmen.
Maybe this, combined with Harper's own experience with the crowd, will help.
And the city, in particular those who consider themselves part of the Duquesne family but also just the casual fan, must embrace that there's more in town than just the Panthers. Setting aside partisanship, as Ferry suggested, the local college hoops scene would be a blast if the Dukes could be a real thing in the Atlantic 10 or if the Colonials could get back to that early-round fun in the NCAAs.
Maybe this ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2jyoSW0Bq8
... and maybe this ...
Chilling out after a win...@DuqMBB pic.twitter.com/LbKipElSuO
— Duquesne Athletics (@GoDuquesne) December 3, 2016
THANK YOU to @duqedu @DuqAlumni @duq_thecrew for your support tonight. We'll need you the rest of the way.
— Duquesne Basketball (@DuqMBB) December 3, 2016
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