DWHoops File Photo by Orin Day

The late Bill Brill (left) with colleague Barry Jacobs on Cameron press row during the January 28, 2008 Duke vs. Tennessee clash. The Lady Vols won on a late Candace Parker jumper.

Bill Brill: June 21, 1931 - April 10, 2011

I was a fan of Bill's before I was a colleague, which I imagine was true for many who were familiar with his work. I actually started reading him in his "retirement", after he quit the Roanoke paper and returned to Durham to help start Blue Devil Weekly. I immediately found a role model as a writer, one with firm opinions who relied on well-composed, rational argument based on facts rather than the emotive, snarky shouting that's been the vogue in sports journalism for the last couple of decades. Bill literally wrote the book on Duke basketball, writing its first official history (published after 1986) and chronicling its first national champions.

In later years, when I started covering the women's basketball team at Duke and ACC women's basketball in general, I got to know Bill a bit. He followed the scene casually but keenly, paying very close attention to what Duke was doing long before the Devils were a player on the national scene. He was always a bit bemused by my focus on the game, which is funny because I patterned my research methods and thoroughness of analysis on what he did with the men's game. You knew that it was a big game in Cameron when Bill showed up, and he always managed to cut to the chase rather quickly when Duke was playing poorly. And, his opinions on certain opposing coaches caused those in the press room to chuckle more than once.

He was a man who got paid to do what he loved and did it his whole life. He was years ahead of his time in the sophistication of his understanding of the game; indeed, modern metrics have only started to catch up with Brill's level of analysis. Brill did it with humor, style and a sense of press room camaraderie that extended to everyone. We have lost a link to the very roots of the ACC, but his legacy lives on in the books he has written and the stories he has told. That ability to turn details into stories is what endeared him to so many, and those stories will be passed down as part of the rich legacy of the ACC and college sports in general.