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Somehow, they knew.
Call the Cameron Crazies anything you like — it won’t hurt their feelings one bit.
On a cold winter night three years ago, they helped turn a freshman basketball player into a legend of extraordinary proportions. All with one silly little catch-phrase concocted in a couple of tents outside Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium.
Who’s your daddy, college basketball?
Shane Battier.
“It all started my freshman year the night before the North Carolina game,”the Duke senior recalled last week in Philadelphia. “We were walking through Krzyzewski-ville and everyone was out there having a good time.
“We walked by one of the tents and someone goes, ‘Who’s your daddy?’ Someone else from the other tent goes, ‘Battier!’
“ ‘Who’s your daddy?’ ‘Battier!’ The whole Krzyzewski-ville started doing that chant,”Battier remembered with a smile. “For a freshman, it was a pretty big honor.”
More tangible rewards have followed since that night.
Battier came to Duke as the nation’s top high school basketball player, but he spent plenty of time as merely one good player on a great team.
Those teams always won, though. Or nearly always.
As the BlueDevils get ready for the Final Four this weekend in Minneapolis, Battier’s eyes are fixed firmly on the only prize he’s yet to claim.
The national championship.
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For three straight years, Battier’s title dreams have been put on hold.
In 1998, Kentucky bounced the BlueDevils in the regional finals with a heart-wrenching 16-point comeback in the final 10 minutes. The next year, Duke lost the title game, 77-74 to Connecticut. Last year, Florida did the honors in the Sweet 16 on its way to the national championship game.
Battier returned for his senior season despite the opportunity to leave early for the NBA. He came back because he enjoyed college life. He wanted to graduate. He wanted a ring.
The questions came long before this season started, and they haven’t abated with Battier and the Blue Devils just a weekend away from the championship.
Will Battier’s career go unfulfilled if the Devils don’t dance on the court in Minneapolis on Monday night?
“If I don’t win the national championship, will I be disappointed? No question,”he said. “Will I be unfulfilled? No. I’ve been very lucky to play at a place like Duke and see the things I’ve seen.”
It’s not hard to see why Battier can view his career in a positive light. Just voted the top player in all of college basketball, he’s won the most games (129) in Atlantic Coast Conference history. Three of his Duke teams earned 30 or more wins in the last four seasons, and with two more victories, this crop of Devils will own the best four-year record of any team in NCAA history: 131-15.
Battier’s personal accomplishments mirror his team’s. The 6-foot-8 forward is one of just four players in NCAA history to have more than 1,500 points, 500 rebounds, 200 steals, assists and blocked shots in a career.
“I think there have been more people satisfied with less than I’ve accomplished in my career,”Battier said. “I’m extremely proud and honored to have the career I’ve had.
“But, that said, it’d be pretty sweet to go out on top.”
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Battier has worked hard in this year’s tournament to achieve that happiest of endings.
He’s averaging 23 points and 10.5 rebounds a game. Both numbers are up from the regular season, but he still isn’t Duke’s leading scorer. That honor falls to explosive point guard and showman Jason Williams.
Big deal, said Southern Cal head coach Henry Bibby, whose team fell to Duke in the Elite Eight last Saturday.
“The guy on the team is Battier. You don’t see these guys come through basketball very often,” Bibby said. “This guy plays with a determination on his face that he doesn’t lose games, and he makes everybody play around him.
“I would love to have a guy like Battier who will not let his team fold. It makes it a lot easier on the coach,”Bibby added. “The silent killer is Shane Battier on that team.”
Silent killer? Don’t let that one get around.
One of Battier’s primary tasks during March Madness has been responding to all manner of crazy questions from the national media.
About coaching. About his religion major. About playing the trumpet for the first time since high school.
And yes, about becoming President. Of the United States of America.
“If you were to ask me that, I’d kind of smile and laugh it off,”Duke sophomore Casey Sanders said. “You ask Shane the same question, he’d ponder it.
“He’s got the personality for it. I’d vote for him depending on what his platform was, but we’ll have to see,” Sanders added with a laugh.
Especially if any more of that “silent killer” stuff gets out. That could really turn off part of the electorate.
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Battier insists that he holds no long-range goals beyond playing in the NBA. Ideally, he said he’d enjoy helping people in some way, like coaching at the high school level.
That goal comes straight from dealing with Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski.
“We have a very strong relationship. It has many levels,”Battier said. “Obviously the coach-player relationship is very strong, father-son relationship is also there, a friend-friend relationship.
“In the press conferences, he can joke on me and I have no problems joking on him — although not too bad. We have a great relationship that I’m very honored to have.”
The closeness developed over the past four years, but Krzyzewski saw something different in Battier as a freshman.
He arrived at the gym early and stayed late. He hit the floor for loose balls in practice. He got so worked up before games that he became physically ill just before every tipoff early in his career.
“He’s really been attentive every second, even as a freshman,” Krzyzewski said. “His mind never wandered. It’s one of the reasons he’s a good player, his attention to detail.”
It also didn’t hurt that Battier learned to quell his emotions somewhat, to the point he didn’t have to throw up before every game.
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The final days of an amazing college basketball career are fast approaching, and so too the final months of an incredible four years at Duke.
“It’s very difficult to have the normal college experience. You really have to go out and seek it, and that’s what I’ve tried to do,”Battier said. “Although basketball and school take up a good chunk of my time, I really enjoy the fact I can go out and be part of shows on campus, hang out on the quad with my friends and do extracurricular activities.”
The whirlwind that is the NCAA Tournament hasn’t allowed many opportunities for reflection, but Battier doesn’t regret anything from the past four seasons. Not from his time on campus and certainly not from his time in uniform.
“The way I look at it is, this is it,”Battier said. “That’s the best motivation I could ever have, knowing every time I put on my jersey, if I don’t come to play and my teammates don’t come to play, it’s the last time I’ll put a Duke jersey on.
“It’s amazing that, in less than two weeks, I’ll be an ex-Dukie.”
Actually, only one thing could be more amazing than that — being an ex-Dukie with a newly minted national championship ring.
“The most amazing thing for him would be to win a national championship,”said Krzyzewski. “His career has matched anybody’s, except for that. He is deserving. You would like to see it happen.”
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