My Dream Weekend In Duluth

The nightmare began taking shape when a Duluth. Minn. TV weatherman started tearing into me.

It was a week ago Friday and I was stretched out on my bed in the Duluth Holiday Inn. WJBR's meteorologist had just finished has forecast with the suggestion that everyone stay tuned for an interesting segment in the second half of the program about the young man whose newspaper article had caused so much controversy.

Although the young man in question was obviously not a good writer, the weatherman explained, he understood that all fledgling journalists dreamed of writing the Great American Novel or the Big Story. So when the locals measured in the young man's age and inexperience, he added, they should go easy on the misguided youth.

That's when I looked up at my pale green Holiday Inn ceiling and realized I was in trouble.

Serious trouble

The story actually begins two days earlier. On Wednesday, March 20, I flew to Duluth--a city of about 100,000 in upstate Minn--to begin covering the Harvard men's hockey team's NCAA quarterfinal series with the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) Bulldogs.

The flight went smoothly enough, I got a sporty little rental car in Minneapolis, and began the trek north into the heart of the Iron Range.

The scenery was pretty, too pretty I realize now, the sun roof was open, mindless pop music was blaring on the stereo and I didn't have another class for 10 days.

I just sat back and soaked it all in.

Three hours later, I plopped myself down on the bed in my hotel room and saw the TV came with a full range of cable channels, a good I don't even enjoy at home.

If only I'd known the price I was about to pay for being in such a good mood. I would have packed up and flown home--or even to Newark.

After talking to some friendly people over at UMD, I sent two stories back to The Crimson. One was just another regular hockey notebook. The other, written while Madonna performed "Like a Virgin" on the tube, was about what I had discovered in Duluth.

I commented on the level of hysteria surrounding the Bulldogs, and tried to show how different Duluth's attitude toward college hockey was compared with Cambridge's.

I wrote that the town had "little appreciable culture" and how "pathetic" I found it that an entire town's fortunes were tied to the success or failure of its hockey team. "Here, hockey is king and it is more than a little disturbing," I wrote.

It turns out that a young Duluth native who currently resides in Mather House didn't appreciate my comments. So that afternoon he read my master piece to his hometown newspaper, which in turn received permission from The Crimson to reprint it Friday morning.

That's the day the two-game, total goal hockey series was to begin. And that's also when the fun began.

A telephone call from a television reporter woke me that morning. The woman on the other end said she had read what I had written and would like an interview.

You don't have to ask me twice to be on TV, so I told her to name the time and place.

When she came by my room an hour later, I complimented her on her excellent research, impressed that a Duluth television station had tracked down my article in The Crimson.

"Wait a second," she said. "Your article was reprinted in the paper here this morning.

"Everybody's talking about it."

I wondered: it or me?

A little nervous, but confident that the 100,000 slowtalking, kind-hearted Midwesterners wouldn't hold a grudge, I consented to the interview.

We talked on the street in front of the hotel before the lights and camera, and the whole episode transpired pleasantly enough. I wondered briefly if the crowd watching my induction as a celebrity would have any reaction if they knew who I was.

Nah, not little old me.

I spent that Friday afternoon wondering around downtown Duluth, waiting for the evening news. Those few hours of innocence were the last I would spend that weekend without looking behind my back every few minutes for the mob. And its rope.

After the weatherman asked the public to restrain itself, the actual segment about my article ran. It started off with man-on-the-street interviews, as a seemingly endless series of Duluthians blasted me. Then they showed portions of my interview, with which, I must admit, I was pleased.

The crowd at the hockey game that night was less impressed with my on-air performance. The first hurdle was getting into and around the rink in my conspicuous cost and tie without being recognized. I told the attendant at the press gate my name, and he told me that there were a whole lot of people in the building who wanted to see me.

I slinked over to the press box, where I started to get the word on the day's events.

Harvard Coach Bill Cleary had publicly apologized to the city for me at a press conference that afternoon and, despite the fact that he and I had been enjoying a healthy relationship, I was warned that the article had really upset him. A fellow hockey correspondent told me that he had been stopped three times on his way to the press box and asked if he was Nick Wurf.

He also informed me of the things he had been hearing on the radio that day: "It's 25 today in Duluth, down 20 degrees from yesterday. That must be become that slime Nick Wurf rolled into town."

Once the game started, I thought I had finally feded into the background of the day's events.

Then the electronic scoreboard began to flash messages about me.

The trouble that I had recognized in my room, by myself, had now manifested itself, times 5637. The crowd began to chant: "Who's Nick Wurf?"

You get a sense of how repulsive your own name is when enough Minnesota wolves start howling it.

Ten thousand eyes turned to the press box and I recoiled into the background, praying for anonymity from the very spotlight, into whose glare I had gratefully jumped earlier that day.

After the game--a 4-2 UMD victory--each member of the press was briefly detained by the crowd as he or she left the press box for an identity check.

For my part, being without an identity that I could subject to public scrutiny, I hid. Like a yellow-bellied piece of preppy slime, I stayed in the safety of the press box, until my would-be welcoming committee was escorted out of the arena by decorum-minded ushers.

I ventured back to the Holiday Inn, my Bates Motel, where a visit by a member of the Crimson team furthered my anxieties about the town--several players had been grabbed by little old women in the nearby Macdonald's and sternly informed that they had attended the symphony last night.

The next morning, after sleeping through a bunch of horrific nightmares, involving me, Duluth and an endless coal shaft, I read the first newspaper column about myself and what was termed "THE article."

That afternoon, while driving around the city, I got pulled over for speeding. Just another episode in the Dream Weekend.

I didn't care about the ticket, the size of the fine, the justice of the arrest or anything else for that matter as I sat, annoyed, waiting for the cop to walk up to my window and ask for my license and registration. The only thing I was thinking about was how long it would take him to recognize my name and the amount of flak he was going to give me when he did.

These particular gentlemen had apparently missed the entire controversy and he led to the police station (standard procedure for out-of-state drivers receiving Duluth violations) without even the slightest comment.