Editor’s note: We’re very happy to add Cameron Bray as a contributor to the blog. Cameron is also a soon-to-be alumnus of the College. Here’s his story of how Tribe sports, and especially basketball, have impacted his life.
For the first 18 years of my life, I lived in Phoenix, where I was born and raised a child of the Southwest. I grew up going to Diamondbacks games downtown, watching the Suns rock the city during the Steve Nash era and rooting for the Cardinals over in Glendale and on television, especially during their unsuccessful Super Bowl bid in 2009.
(The worst day of my life: Feb. 1, 2009. In Super Bowl XLIII, the Cardinals lost to the Steelers, 27-23, thanks to a 78-yard drive by Pittsburgh and a 6-yard touchdown catch by Santonio Holmes with 35 seconds remaining.)
And like most children born in Phoenix, I was raised by parents who weren’t originally from the great state of Arizona. My mom grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and my dad in Philadelphia. They met at Indiana University in Bloomington, and they moved to Phoenix in 1992 after my dad graduated from Cornell Law School.
Both of them graduated from Indiana in 1989, so they experienced the awesome triumph when the men’s basketball team won the NCAA Championship in 1987. With Bob Knight as the head coach, the Hoosiers beat the Syracuse Orange 74-73 thanks to a game-winning jump shot by Keith Smart. Indiana won its fifth national title that day and its third under Knight, who only returned to Indiana this past February after being fired controversially in September 2000.
Meanwhile, William and Mary has yet to make a single March Madness appearance, men’s or women’s, in its long D-I history. Along with The Citadel, Army, and St. Francis-Brooklyn on the men’s side, we are the Forgotten Four.
Tribe fans, together we are No Bid Nation.
Sorry, Tribal Fever — you may be the official fan club, but we’ve got the better name.
We are No Bid Nation.
And we’ve got a better story to tell, so let’s continue with mine.
When my parents told me the story of Indiana’s fifth national championship, I could only imagine the celebration that took place afterward. Classes canceled, students drinking, fans cheering all over the Bloomington campus — it seemed a far cry from the quiet life I knew growing up. And it seems a far cry now from the William and Mary campus I’ve known and loved over the past four years, our basketball struggles still proudly ongoing but improving over at Kaplan Arena.
Besides celebrating the 1987 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, my parents also experienced the 2001 World Series, in which the Diamondbacks narrowly beat the Yankees, four games to three.
My parents moved to Phoenix at a fortuitous time: Started in 1998 as an expansion franchise, the Diamondbacks won the 2001 World Series in only their fourth season of play. They watched on television as Luis Gonzalez, “Gonzo,” clinched a comeback win at home with a bases-loaded, walk-off bloop single in Game 7 against the Yankees.
WORLD CHAMPS, The Arizona Republic proclaimed the next morning. “D-Backs’ magical 9th inning ends Yankees’ reign.”
Only 4 years old, I was too young to remember the 2001 World Series. But I always thought of Gonzo fondly whenever my parents took me to a home game downtown.
I watched Gonzo and the Diamondbacks play in those old purple and teal colors before the team switched to red and beige (Sedona red and Sonoran sand) in 2006 — I actually liked the old colors better, even though they felt extremely retro.
With their roots in both Indiana and Arizona, my parents taught me my love of sports. And this love of sports saved me when I left the Grand Canyon State in 2016 to attend William and Mary with the St Andrews Joint Degree Programme. (Ed. note: Yes, Cameron is a WAMSTA. Continue…)
My love of Tribe Athletics (and professional sports in general) helped me survive two years at William and Mary and two years overseas at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Despite the challenges of uprooting myself and moving from one campus to the next, I found a home in William and Mary and put down roots in the community thanks to Tribe Athletics
An out-of-state student and a JDP one at that, I struggled to find community when I started at William and Mary as a freshman. I felt as though I didn’t fit in with the culture on campus, which centered upon high-achieving students from Northern Virginia (“NOVA”).
Although I’d visited William and Mary twice already — first when I was in seventh grade on a school trip to Colonial Williamsburg, second when I was a high school junior touring colleges — I felt I didn’t belong. I felt nothing like the TWAMPs (or, for the uninitiated, typical William and Mary persons) so many freshmen around me talked about.
And being from Arizona, I felt like I was already the butt of so many jokes. I shrank back each time I had to answer I was from Arizona and someone made a wisecrack at my expense.
“Where are you from?”
“Arizona.”
“Arizona? Why, it’s so hot there you could fry an egg on the sidewalk, couldn’t you.”
I heard these jokes countless times during orientation. They bothered me. But Tribe Athletics helped me make friends when I had no one.
Together, my friends and I attended all but one or two of the football games my freshman year. We tailgated on the lawn outside Monroe Hall, throwing footballs and eating Chick-fil-A (perhaps overindulging ourselves with some spicy chicken tenders).
We watched the Homecoming game against Delaware, in which the Tribe roared back against the Blue Hens to win the game, 24-17. Down 14-3 entering the third quarter, the Tribe scored 21 unanswered points in what became a remarkable comeback. Most of the fans had already left at halftime — hardly any students remained in the student section — but we stayed and enjoyed what was one of the best football games I ever saw.
That memory stayed with me during my sophomore and junior years, as I studied overseas at St Andrews, gazing out at the North Sea — so far away from home.
It gave me hope as I went through the process of orientation a second time, hearing the jokes about Arizona again and again — now from all the Scottish, English and European students at St Andrews. It helped me to know that I had a home somewhere when I felt so out of place at St Andrews, a culture steeped in Old World elitism, snobbery and privilege.
Again, I came to a place where I felt I didn’t belong: Not only had I arrived at a university where Prince William and Kate Middleton had studied, but I also studied among many high-class Europeans and Americans.
For all their supposed meritocratic and democratic values, these Americans struck me as particularly — obnoxiously — aristocratic, oftentimes more so than their British and European counterparts whom they tried to emulate. Mostly heirs and heiresses from rich states like California and New York, they loved polo, attended all the priciest balls on campus and drank themselves stupid most days of the week.
I avoided them as best I could, which proved difficult, since about a quarter of the St Andrews student population was American. And I found my place of belonging at Celtic Society, which taught me the art of Scottish country dance and helped me embarrass myself less at balls and ceilidhs (pronounced KAY-lees), which are traditional evenings of Scottish music, song and dance.
Away those two years at St Andrews, I knew I’d have trouble keeping the friends I made at William and Mary my freshman year. So when I finally returned to William and Mary my senior year, I decided to renew my interest in Tribe Athletics and try sportswriting for The Flat Hat.
Sportswriting had been on my mind for a long time. I’d written for my high school newspaper, The Roundup, and served as an editor-in-chief, but I never gave sportswriting a try. I felt too nervous to try it at my high school, which obsessed over football and basketball. I felt too nervous to try it with fans who were so impassioned and crazed about these two sports.
I’d also been to a party freshman year at William and Mary that put sportswriting on my mind. Taken as a date to a Flat Hat formal, I met Brendan and his friend Alyssa, who encouraged me to take up sportswriting. I said no at the time, since it was already late in the spring semester and I’d have to leave for St Andrews in a few months, but I returned to the idea my senior year.
Once I applied and earned my admission into The Flat Hat, I covered a variety of sports within Tribe Athletics: men’s basketball, men’s tennis, men’s soccer, women’s basketball and volleyball. I learned the art of sportswriting, combining colorful eyewitness observations with large quantities of data (in basketball: points, rebounds, assists, blocks, turnovers, shooting percentages, etc.). And I interviewed incredible William and Mary student-athletes such as Nathan Knight, Andy Van Vliet, Eva Hodgson, Victoria Reynolds, Julia Brown and many more.
I loved going to games, whether or not as a reporter, and writing recaps for The Flat Hat afterward. Tribe Athletics made me feel part of a community, especially when I went to football and basketball games with my friends.
That’s one reason why I was so devastated when Tribe Athletics suspended all winter and spring sports in March. I understood the decision, and I respected the athletics department for putting the health and wellness of its student-athletes first. I only wished the situation hadn’t warranted these drastic measures, but I knew it was the only option we faced with COVID-19.
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While I may not return to William and Mary before graduation, nor will many of the student-athletes I’ve interviewed, Tribe Athletics will return someday. I’m hopeful I’ll be in the stands of a renovated Kaplan Arena cheering on the Tribe in the years to come.
Go Tribe! And go No Bid Nation! Many thanks, Brendan, for letting me be a contributor.