“We tend to offer each other no shortage of reactions and opinions,” he said.
That all sounds familiar to Mark Williams, a Bank of America managing director who was the basketball team manager for his four years at Duke, graduating in 1992 after back-to-back NCAA championships.
The Blue Devils are a community, Williams said, one that includes friends, family, co-workers and colleagues in the financial-services industry.
“If I look at the clients I work with, one of those touch points -- if you’re a fan of the sport -- then Duke basketball is a connector,” he said.
Williams said he’s been present at all five Duke championship-winning games, and that he doesn’t intend to miss No. 6. Tickets won’t be a problem. “I’m still a friend of the program,” he said, chuckling.
Riche McKnight, a former in-house counsel at Morgan Stanley, is already planning for possible hurdles to his making it to the Final Four. He was supposed to go to the Syracuse-Duke game earlier this season, but work prevented him from making the trip to Durham, North Carolina. He was supposed to go to the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament but, yet again, work got in the way.
“If we make the Final Four, I think I’m just gonna turn my phone off and go,” said McKnight, global head of litigation for Endeavor. “If I get a message saying I can’t go, it’ll be too late.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.