Greg Esses still had the sleeping bag, the one he used 30 years ago when he spent two nights outside of Cameron Indoor Stadium before Duke played against North Carolina.
Not long ago Esses gave that sleeping bag to his son.
Cameron Esses, a Duke freshman who shares his name with the building where Duke plays its home games, needed it for his first winter in Krzyzewskiville, the camp his father helped found in 1986. The sleeping bag, the younger Esses reported to his father, is the warmest in his 12-person tent.
"I was like, 'Your old man knows what he's doing,' " the elder Esses, a retired Air Force engineer, said during a recent phone interview.
All these years later, some of the details have grown a little hazy for Esses, a Duke alum was among the first inhabitants of a new village founded on a patch of grass outside the Blue Devils' basketball arena.
A lot of it, though, remains clear. Esses can still tell stories about the ascent of Duke basketball during the 1985-86 season and he can describe how the fervor on campus "was building," given the success on the court. The Blue Devils were No. 1 with North Carolina coming to Durham on March 2, 1986.
It was a Thursday, a few days before that game, Esses said, when "a ton of people showed up and started camping out" for seats to the game. He was among them.
Somebody scrawled a note on a piece of wood near the line of tents: "Don't even think about cutting this line. We've been here since Thursday. We'll kill you."
There was another sign not far away _ small and simple, the words written in big capital letters:
"KRZYZEWSKI-VILLE
POPULATION
3000(plus)"
And so it began. Krzyzewskiville _ one word now, no hyphen _ turned 30 this weekend with the latest Duke-UNC game at Cameron. Back then it was small-time, named after a young Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, then in his sixth season.
Now Krzyzewskiville is synonymous with Duke basketball _ a living, breathing, community that includes 100 tents, more than 1,000 students and about 30 line monitors who control the chaos.
"Seeing how it's all evolved and seeing what it is now _ it is just a huge thing," said Wendy Burr, a senior who is one of Krzyzewskiville's two head line monitors. Burr grew up attending Duke games with her parents, both alums, and so she has seen Krzyzewskiville evolve over the years.
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Before its creation in 1986, Duke students had pitched tents and brought sleeping bags outside Cameron. They had spent a night outside here or there waiting to claim the best seats in the student section. The UNC game that year, though, represents the true beginning of Krzyzewskiville.
What it was then was "nothing like what they do today," Esses, who lives in Santa Rosa Beach, Fla., said.
Indeed, Krzyzewskiville has passed through various life stages and into adulthood.
It's all grown up now: a nice, official-looking sign out front; a designated area, with physical boundaries, for all the villagers and tents; a 35-page manual of policies and rules that outlines everything from grace periods to tent checks to where to use the bathroom.
When Krzyzewskiville first started _ back before anyone was really even calling it that _ there were none of those things. No official sign marking the area, no real boundaries and certainly no formalized rules. People simply showed up on a Thursday, two days before the UNC game, and camped out.
The Krzyzewskiville of today doesn't resemble what it was when it began. It grew quickly, and soon students weren't camping out a couple of days before the UNC game but a couple of weeks before it instead. And that turned into four weeks, and then five, and with the increased time came increased regulation.
No longer was a crude and funny sign _ "don't even think about cutting this line ... we'll kill you" _ good enough.
"I think that would be the reaction at this point if someone cut us in line," Jake Wirfel, a junior who is majoring in mechanical engineering, said on Thursday.
He and 11 others _ Krzyzewskiville inhabitants can camp in groups as large as 12 _ set up their tent on Jan. 17, 48 days before Duke's game against UNC. That was the earliest anyone could set up camp.
Last year, Wirfel's group was in tent No. 2, which meant they were among the first people inside Cameron on the night of the UNC game. It was not good enough. So last April they began planning to be first in line.
"We named our group chat 'Tent One or Die,'" said Haley Amster, a sophomore philosophy major who is in Wirfel's group. "So we were pretty set on being tent one."
It's not as simple as merely showing up first. Line order is largely determined by a point system that rewards attendance at other Duke sporting events. A Duke basketball trivia test also plays a role.
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It was a Thursday night, one night after camping ended, and the tent that Wirfel and his group had used during the previous six weeks sat in a collapsed heap on the edge of Krzyzewskiville. It had served Wirfel and his friends well.
Wirfel and his group members hadn't spent every night in that tent. But it'd been enough _ and the farther away the UNC game is, the more often group members are required to sleep outdoors.
Camping is divided into three periods: Black Tenting, Blue Tenting and White Tenting. At the start, 10 members of a 12-person group are required to spend the night in tent. Then the requirement is six people and then, a couple weeks before the game, two people in each group must spend the night outdoors.
Throughout, at least one person is required to be with the tent at all times _ grace periods excluded.
"The average person did 23 nights in the tent and a total of 73 day hours," said Quinn Hosler, a senior in Wirfel's group who organizes the tent schedule. "I think the max person did 26 and the minimum was at 19 nights."
Either way, it's a lot more than the two nights Esses spent in a tent 30 years ago. Esses sometimes bemoans what Krzyzewskiville has become. It was more organic back in his time, more of an impromptu gathering.
"The bureaucracy now is just kind of crazy for all of it," he said. "It takes the fun out of it a little bit."
It has become necessary, though, among a mini-campus community that can grow as large as 1,200 people. The population of Krzyzewskiville is limited to 100 tents, each one with a 12-person max. There is an online check-in system nowadays, and line monitors walk through Krzyzewskiville at all hours of the night to ensure groups are occupying their tents in the proper numbers.
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Duke's annual home game against UNC is still an anticipated event on campus, but basketball doesn't have quite the same place at Duke that it did years ago. Empty seats in the student section for run-of-the-mill games aren't uncommon these days and the Cameron Crazies aren't quite as crazy.
"There's not as much hype around some of the games and it's hard to tell (there's a game), so it's disappointing when we have to tell students, like, hey, did you know there's a basketball game," said Burr, one of the head line monitors. "Like, come on, keep coming to the games."
In the days before a game against UNC the atmosphere in Krzyzewskiville is always festive, energetic, alive. It's not always that way in the weeks before that, though. Esses, one of the founding members of Krzyzewskiville, and Burr, the head line monitor, acknowledge a culture change at Duke over the years.
"Just with the academic pressures that have changed, I think Duke has become a much more academic school," Burr said. "Not that it wasn't before. And I think you can kind of see that, and parallel to basketball (interest has) dropped off a little bit."
The environment wasn't in question on Saturday night, though.
For much of the past six weeks Wirfel and his group's lives have revolved, to some extent, around Krzyzewskiville. They've had to have the right numbers in their tent, on the grounds, and they've had to plan it all around class schedules and other obligations.
Some nights the weather was awful. Some nights the wind howled. Campers are given a reprieve when the temperature falls to 25 degrees or below, but that doesn't help when it's 30 degrees and windy.
And then there's the fact that some Krzyzewskiville residents are living in a tent for a few weeks while their room and board costs more than $15,000 annually _ in addition to tuition that costs more than $47,000.
"I was sick the past two weeks," Amster, the sophomore philosophy major, said, "and my mom wanted to kill me."
There are portable restrooms set up. "Using the bushes," as it's phrased in the official Krzyzewskiville policy, is prohibited. The atmosphere isn't one of overt rowdiness, though crushed and flattened beer cans are a part of the scene.
In Wirfel's tent, people studied or watched Netflix or took naps. Other groups stayed up late singing songs. The basketball hoop at the front of Krzyzewskiville provides a place for pick-up games.
In its early years Krzyzewskiville was rustic. It is still, in some ways, but not like it was when Esses showed up two days before that 1986 UNC game and ran an extension cord to his tent from a window on the second floor of Cameron Indoor Stadium.
"I don't want to come off as, 'Oh we were so much better in the olden days,' " Esses said.
Yet in some ways he feels that way. There was less structure, maybe some more fun but far fewer nights outdoors.
"It's crazy," Cameron Esses, experiencing Krzyzewskiville for the first time, said of the differences between now and 30 years ago. "I'm having to do more than he ever had to do."
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