![]() ![]() "We didn't want to do anything that would interfere with what Coach K's trying to accomplish," Hemmerich says. Anyone wishing to post a comment would have to be sensitive both to the other posters and the aims of the Duke program, including the players and the players' families. Even "woofing"-baselessly declaring one's team to be superior to another, as in, "The Sixers are going to destroy the Celtics tonight!"-would be discouraged. There would be no "flaming," as it's known in cyberspace, no ranting or bashing. Theirs, unlike the majority of fan message boards, would be a controlled forum. "It was a joke on my name." Hemmerich and King may not have taken themselves very seriously, but juliovision, they decided, would adhere to a certain standard. The first incarnation of the DBR was called "," a standard, no-frills page with a bulletin board for comments. ![]() We could just make our own website.' And I said, 'Okay, great.' " "So one day, we were talking-this was '96, Wojo's first season-and Julian said, 'You know, there's this thing called the World Wide Web. "Prodigy had started raising its rates," says Hemmerich. '94 is president of the Dilweg Companies, a Research Triangle-based commercial real-estate firm, which he co-founded with former Duke and Green Bay Packers quarterback Anthony Dilweg '88. ![]() "Boswell," on the other hand, had not only gone to Duke, he'd stayed as long as he possibly could. King, though not an alumnus himself, is the son of two alumni and the grandson of the late Deryl Hart, the former Duke president and chair of the department of surgery. "Julio," it turned out, was Julian King, an IT consultant living in Raleigh and a lifelong Blue Devils fan. After a series of electronic interactions on the Duke basketball board, they decided to meet in person. It was the early-Nineties and they were posting on Prodigy, one of the first Internet service providers, where, for a daily rate, a user could sign up for membership on a bulletin board of his or her choosing. "Julio" and "Boswell" (screen names) met, appropriately, online. They meant to build, as one puts it, "a neighborhood pub on the Internet." Instead, they built the neighborhood. And although they're quick to disavow any official relationship with the university, the site's creators have accomplished something they never saw coming. As much as it is hoops newsletter-stats, schedules, game analysis, recruiting news, links to stories-it is cyber campus, a Duke away from Duke. But seven years and 130-million hits later, the DBR has outgrown itself. The acronym stands for the Duke Basketball Report, which is what the site's founders had first intended it to be, a website where anybody anywhere could go for information on Duke basketball, a fan site for the Blue Devil faithful. Before a day full of meetings and deadlines, they'd meet up at their favorite virtual hangout, a website known simply and widely as the "DBR." Photo: Noah BergerĪctually, they would "post." They'd wake up in the morning, have coffee, walk their dogs, head to the office, and then, once settled in front of the computer, they would do what people everywhere were just beginning to add to their morning routines-they would log on. They were strangers in nearly every sense of the word, separated by age and profession and, in some cases, hundreds and hundreds of miles. They weren't friends at Duke-some didn't even go to Duke-and if they were in the same class or the same dorm, as some were, they had only discovered this years after the fact. They didn't work together or live together. Five years ago, none of those present had ever laid eyes on one another. What was even stranger than the sight itself was how it came to be. They got quiet during free throws and went "Whoosh!" afterwards, and when it was all over, they weren't going home after a crushing defeat-they were going to the Final Four. It was as if, to them, it was quite unexceptional to be forty-something and cheering on a team that wasn't just destined to win but that had, in fact, already won, as if the surest antidote for a tough loss was to simply rewind time and watch a great win.Īnd this appeared to work. "It was sweetness."Passersby stopped and squinted at the screen. Can we rewind back to Henderson's dunk on Mourning?" "Okay, this is our biggest lead, and then we go cold for about five minutes." "This Laettner kid's gonna be something special, people!" Site inciters: King, left, and Hemmerich. ![]()
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