Duke's headbands room is the coolest, and maybe cruelest, place at Cameron Indoor
Duke's home arena has a room few have seen, a pun-filled homage to games, years past
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3 min read
DURHAM, N.C. -- Get down to floor level at Cameron Indoor Stadium, then make your way toward the northeast corner's exit. As you duck out under section 9, push through the old wooden doors, passing the Legacy Room tucked away on your left. If you keep walking another seven or eight paces, you'll leave the cherished and cozy 77-year-old basketball tabernacle, exiting Cameron and walking right into diminutive Card Gymnasium, the original home of Duke basketball.
But we're not stepping out, we're going down. Drop 21 steps below, and head through the underground passageway that doubles as a bomb shelter. The rowdy Duke band used to store its instruments and equipment in this narrow hallway, a 25-yard safe space that connects Cameron and Card. Now it's completely empty, save for white piping that lines the wall. The Duke team found itself huddling in this space just last season, after Mike Krzyzewski failed to keep practice going while tornado warnings hit Durham County. (Duke AD Kevin White made the overriding call.)
As you break into the bowels of Card, you pass the old Duke locker room on the left, which hasn't been used for those purposes in eons; it's now basically a broom closet. Still, it remains labeled in faded black lettering as "BASKET BALL DRESSING" with a the "020" still showing on the wood. Pass that door, take a right, then a quick left, and now you're next to the equipment/laundry room, where game-ready jerseys are dangled on a rolling cart, being photographed. Opposite the equipment room, dip down nine more steps, and there it is. A big blue bin filled with Duke intramural pinnies rests next to an unmarked door. Behind it, the coolest room tied to Duke hoops and Cameron Indoor Stadium.
Plastered to the walls and ceiling, the messages are everywhere.
"GO TO HELL CAROLINA"
"ARM PITT"
"FORGET BENCHES, BURN DOWN WAKE FOREST"
"BEATING YOU ISN'T EVEN FUN"
"FORGET THE SPARTANS, I'M A TROJAN MAN"
"WELCOME ... NOW GET OUT"
"P.E.T.A. SENT ME"
Duke's secret room of history and headbands. There are hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of messages and slogans, many of them awful puns and generally pretty corny tag lines. That's the charm, though -- it's prideful, cheeky vandalism. And there's crap everywhere inside the dank, messy room. The ceiling is low, and you can spot signs and other memorabilia from past NCAA Tournaments, too. A pretty cool sight, a slice of Duke's past that most people don't realize exists.
The process is fairly simple, but over the years it's become a shrine to games gone by. The Devil mascot, a job given to a few students every season, takes some athletic tape, writes a message or insult, and slaps it on one of the devil heads. Sometimes it's relevant to the news surrounding Duke, but usually it's a jab at the opponent.
You've seen it with every Duke game, some sort of slogan plastered to the forehead of the mascot as the broadcast comes back from commercial. For last Thursday's game against North Carolina, the message was "Friends Close, Enemies cLOSEr."
The inspiration for the tradition? A football player. You can thank the Chicago Bears' punky QB and his infamous message to former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle for Duke's three-plus-decade ritual.
"The story is that it started after Jim McMahon started making his whole headband thing big in the 80s," the Devil mascot, who is not allowed to publicly identify himself, told CBS Sports. "So naturally, after it caught on here, we started saving them. Most of the ones in our current room are 15 years or younger."
This used to be the university's baseball locker room, but that was generations ago. Over the past 25-30 years -- no one's really sure when -- it became the dressing room for the mascot, in addition to the band storage area. Band uniforms, tubas, sousaphones, clarinets, a drum kit -- all the music stuff occupies one half of the room, while the headbands are plastered basically everywhere else.
Part of the charm of the room is how its origin story isn't entirely known. More than 30 years ago, one person who was acting as the devil, or perhaps a cheerleader who encouraged it, decided to take some athletic tape and make an addition to Duke's mascot uniform. Then, at some point after that, the first message was pressed up against the wall. Since then, it's been graffiti-like in how the room has been colored up.
Cameron Indoor Stadium might be the most famous of college venues. It's fun to discover how such legendary places can even still offer up hidden gems.
