The Joy of Bucketing
My wife and I were a hundred yards from Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke University when I heard the question, whispered: “Hey! Wanna sell your ticket for tonight’s game?”
A sound erupted from my throat involuntarily. Was it a snort? A guffaw? No, I think it must have been a “chortle,” a word I’d never understood till that moment. Now I know. It is the sound you make when someone asks you the most preposterous question ever. Seriously? Would anybody sell a ticket to the Duke-Carolina men’s basketball game at Cameron? Ever?
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I’ve never made an official “bucket list” – the kind of list some people keep of things they would like to do before they “kick the bucket.” But if I had, going to a Duke-Carolina basketball game would have been on it. The game has been consistently voted the “biggest rivalry in men’s basketball,” and finished #3 on ESPN’s ranking of the greatest rivalries in the history of sports (somehow behind Michigan-Ohio State in football and Ali-Frazier in boxing).
It's a tradition 105 years and 263 games in the making, between two schools 8 miles apart. Public vs. private. Dark blue vs. light blue. Legendary players, coaches, games. Bad blood; big drama.
True fans will never forget the blood that came from this play in 2007. Gerald Henderson broke Tyler Hansbrough’s nose. Hansbrough “hated” him for 10 years; more recently they’ve done a podcast together.
The students attending had been camped out for weeks in “Krzyzewskiville” – a tent city erected on Duke’s campus to wait in line for tickets. Fans were dressed to impress. And I was (big props to my brother-in-law) actually, finally, there.
Mixed couples were a rarity in the game’s crowd. It was 99.9% Duke fans.
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A study by Choice Mutual Insurance of 2000 Americans last year tried to determine what items are most often on the bucket lists of those who keep them. Maybe it is no surprise that 8 out of the top 20 involve travel, including the top 2, visiting landmarks in Europe and North America; another few of the top 20 would probably be considered travel-adjacent – learning a new language, buying a vacation home, skydiving. Another few have to do with personal goals – starting a business, retiring early, writing a book. And of course there is #16, getting a tattoo.
Your first glimpse of Petra comes as you emerge from “the eye of the needle” (Photo Dan Ojserkis)
Looking back at the things I’ve done that would be on my retrospective bucket list (things I was amazed to seen during my lifetime), I find that what they had in common was that they filled me with a near explosion of wonder. I didn’t know how gobsmacked I would be by the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem, the cathedral of Notre Dame, the carved city of Petra or the Great Wall of China - till I was there. And then I was there, speechless, stunned that some human being had imagined that building this thing was possible. Then I tried to fathom how a gazillion other people had carried the projects out (over years or, in some cases, centuries) with an attention to detail I couldn’t imagine. I still can’t understand any of them.
A trip through Norwegian fjords will stay with me for the rest of my life.
California redwoods; the Austrian Alps; the Grand Canyon; the Norwegian fjords. When I saw them I couldn’t conceive of ever being in a moment where I would experience anything more beautiful. How did God come up with any of those? God knows.
I thought I had mentally prepared in advance for the awe of watching my bride walking down the aisle toward me or my children coming into the world. I was wrong. My tears could’ve filled, well, a bucket.
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Events are an entirely different category for a bucket list, but they are like the others in one way. At their best they make us feel truly, madly, deeply alive.
Inside the stadium at the Duke-Carolina game there was an immediate invisible kinship connecting me and 9313 other people. We were, all of us, amazed we were even there.
Then there was the noise. It should have been roof raising, but the roof somehow stayed on, so it became deafening instead. I parked my ambivalence (my children are Carolina students; my wife a lifelong Duke fan; I’m an NC State fan) and gave myself over to a movement of mass hysteria. Over the next two hours it was as if an invisible conductor took us through a manic sound symphony. We sang together. We hummed. We chanted. Fans behind the basket did some choreographed harassment ritual while Carolina players tried a free throw (a Duke grad student did a two-year study (I’m not kidding) of which of 9 different free-throw-heckling techniques was most effective in making opponents miss — it was a “fish swimming” maneuver). We went dead silent when a Duke player shot one. Then we instantly unmuted; cacophony returned.
Opposing players miss 34% of shots when Duke students do “the fish.”
If it weren’t impossible to get tickets, psychiatrists who worry we are living lives of increasing loneliness would prescribe the Duke-Carolina game instead of drugs. During the game we became (with the exception of +/- 40 Carolina players, coaches and player parents) a giant joyous tribe united with superglue behind an almost-completely-meaningless cause.
This is not a place you want to play if you are wearing light blue.
Finally, two hours later, it was over. We unplugged from the dopa drip, unstuck ourselves from the solidarity superglue and staggered out, ears ringing, victory achieved. We returned to lives that vibrated at a distinctly lower frequency, but, maybe, with a renewed appreciation for what it feels like to be fully present and alive for a few moments.
The doctors studying bucket lists (yes, there are such doctors) tell us those lists are important for a few different reasons. For one thing, they help us to acknowledge something we don’t like to think about – that we will die. They give us an excuse to consider what we really care about and believe in. And, particularly for people in the second half of life, they give us a future orientation that helps give us energy and purpose.
Yes. And. They make us REALLY happy.
Long live the bucket list. Go blue!
Notes:
Rivalry rankings: https://www.espn.com/endofcentury/s/other/bestrivalries.html
Medical value of bucket lists: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/jpm.2017.0512
Survey of what’s on people’s bucket lists: https://www.forbes.com/sites/irenelevine/2024/09/19/whats-on-americans-bucket-lists-according-to-a-new-study/
Duke statistical analysis of success of free throw harassment techniques: