It is, perhaps the toughest college basketball arena for a road team. The small, jam-packed Cameron Indoor Stadium is filled with rabid fans squeezed together, creating an atmosphere that can intimidate even the top players and coaches in the NCAA.
Yet the Terrapin men’s basketball team never seems to blink when it plays Duke in Durham, N.C.
Tonight, the Terps will square off against the second-ranked Blue Devils in a nationally televised game at Cameron Indoor Stadium. But unlike so many other teams that let the hostile atmosphere influence the game, the Terps will not be affected. Since 2000, Duke has only lost 11 times at home, and Gary Williams has coached the Terps to four wins inside the famous arena, the most by any team in the country.
“I really don’t have an answer to why we’ve had success there,” Williams said. “The only thing we try to do is not change anything, just play our game. Hopefully it’s good enough to be competitive there. That’s the only thing we’ve done – really.”
Williams wouldn’t admit it, but his players said the coach gets amped up a little more when he gets ready for the trek down to Duke.
“For these huge games like this, Coach Williams makes sure he’s more ready than anybody out here, including us,” senior forward James Gist said. “He studies tape, night in and night out. He studies so much of the game, and he just makes sure we’re ready, and he wants us to be focused for this game. Nobody’s more ready than Coach Williams for this game.”
Until 2000, the Terps played the part of just about every other team in the country and couldn’t buy a win in Cameron Indoor Stadium since 1995. As coach of the Terps, Williams started out 1-9 in road games against Duke.
But then the victories came, one after another after another. And they weren’t victories against bad Blue Devils teams, either.
The past four times the Terps have won at Duke, the Blue Devils have been ranked third (2000), second (’01, ’05) and 14th (’07).
“I think each year starts like flipping a coin,” Williams said. “Each time you flip a coin, there’s a new opportunity. This is a new opportunity. Last year – we’re not about that; they’re not about it. They’re certainly a different team and we’re certainly a different team, so it’s two teams. We’ll see how well we play down there this year.”
To the Terps and their fans, it’s undoubtedly a heated rivalry, one that has developed because the Terps have been successful in Durham. ESPN has been promoting tonight’s game with the build-up of a possible upset because of how well the Terps have fared at Duke. Some Terps supporters have even dubbed Cameron Indoor Stadium the Terps’ “home away from home” and “Comcast of the South.”
But many Blue Devils fans still fail to acknowledge the Terps as a rival, given Duke’s proximity and history with other teams in North Carolina.
“I’m not a big rivalry guy,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “We have a rivalry with everyone. I don’t know when things take off. Unless you try to play your best every game, you’re never going to win in this league. To have a rivalry with one or two people, to me, is not very smart. You have a rivalry with everyone.”
The Cameron Crazies have a reputation for being one of the loudest, most intimidating student sections in the country.
But for years, the Crazies have struggled to get a leg up on the Terps.
“They make me smile,” junior forward Dave Neal said. “You can’t let them get to you – that’s what they’re there for.”
In 2005, the Crazies were directed to chant “Myra Piggy” at forward Nik Caner-Medley, who was one of the Terps’ top players at the time. A random person had duped the cheer sheet creators into thinking that Caner-Medley had a girlfriend named Myra and that one of her nicknames for Caner-Medley was “Piggy.”
Neither was true, but the Cameron Crazies screamed, “Myra Piggy!” throughout the night, and it sounded like “Myron Piggie,” the name of a former basketball coach and crack cocaine dealer who pleaded guilty to a scandal in which he gave money to college basketball players. One of the former players was former Duke player Corey Maggette. The prank received some national media attention and forced Duke to change its system of creating chants.
Terp sophomore forward Landon Milbourne called the fans crazy, but he also said “it’s not really a scary environment or anything like that.”
When Gist plays at Cameron Indoor Stadium, he hears the chants of “Mama’s Boy,” which dates back to his freshman season.
“Prior to that game, my mother had come in. She walked to the bleachers, and I gave her a hug and a kiss, and I guess the whole crowd saw that,” Gist said. “So when I was shooting my free throws, they just all started chanting, “Mama’s Boy!” So that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard playing there.”
Last year, Greivis Vasquez was the recipient of chants directed at him in Spanish. He responded by playing arguably his best game of the season, coming one rebound shy of a triple-double.
“They’re very smart down there,” Williams said, with sarcasm dripping off his tongue. “They figure that Greivis is from Venezuela, so that means he knows Spanish, so they say stuff in Spanish. Amazing.”
Vasquez never hides from opposing fans, and, like Williams, he’ll probably get more fired up to play tonight than he did in road games in the last two weeks at Georgia Tech and Boston College.
“Like I’ve said before, I love playing on the road,” Vasquez said. “So we’ll see what happens.”
Tonight the Terps will be much more concerned with the No. 2 Blue Devils than with the surrounding atmosphere.
And as Williams has done so many times in the past, he will have his team prepared for what’s to come.
“I think it’s a great place to play,” Williams said. “I would much rather play in a place that’s loud than a half-empty gym. I’ve always felt that way, whether it’s our place or on the road. It just seems if you’re a player, you enjoy that environment. Teams play better with more emotion in those environments.”
For the Terps in Cameron Indoor Stadium, that couldn’t be more true.
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