My favorite player: Juan Dixon (2024)

It’s easy for me to remember the day I committed to the University of Maryland.

There wasn’t a ceremony with a table, five hats and a local television camera crew, but I had made my decision: If Maryland accepted me into the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism, I was committing on the spot. So the day my acceptance letter arrived in the mail — Feb. 9, 2000 — I celebrated immediately. I hadn’t heard back yet from the other two contenders, Penn State and Syracuse, but it didn’t matter. I was going to College Park.

That evening, a wiry sophom*ore guard from Baltimore was on my television screen, eviscerating the mighty Duke Blue Devils at Cameron Indoor Stadium. The day I committed to Maryland, Juan Dixon dropped 31 points in front of the Cameron Crazies and Maryland stopped Duke’s ACC-record 31-game conference winning streak.

I was smitten. Dixon became my favorite athlete and helped define my college experience.

When I arrived at Maryland in the fall of 2000, I had never attended a Division I college football game and had seen just one high-level college hoops game in person (Georgetown, the year after Allen Iverson left, beat Pitt at Civic Arena). Three things drew me to College Park after I visited the campus just before Thanksgiving in 1999:

1. The journalism school

2. The weather

3. Cole Field House

Cole was a sea of red seats inside a massive airplane hangar, basically. It was right in the middle of campus. Students would sit in those red seats and study when it was empty. One day during my first week of classes, I stopped at Cole on my way from class back to Cumberland Hall and a few of the Maryland players were doing some shooting drills.

Once the season began, you could walk in and watch the team practice. It was incredible.

Maryland began the 2000-01 season at No. 5 in the preseason AP poll. The Duke game was a national coming-out party of sorts for Dixon. I had read as many stories as I could find about him after that game.

Dixon’s origin story was defined by tragedy. Both of his parents died from AIDS-related illnesses when he was a teenager. He has a tattoo of Juanita, his mother, over his heart.

He was slight, even for a shooting guard, but fearless. The thing that drew me to him was not just how good he was, but how he played. Dixon was constantly moving, cutting and slashing and scoring in a variety of ways. When I stopped at Cole one day during a practice, I spent nearly the entire time watching Dixon darting around the floor during drills.

Maryland coach Gary Williams believed in the flex offense, a staple of the Terps’ playbook. It was also an element of every team I played on from middle school through varsity. I was a ball boy for my high school team in fifth and sixth grade and could diagram our version of the flex offense on a whiteboard the day of our first organized practice in seventh grade.

It fit Dixon’s skill set so perfectly. He did not have Steph Curry’s range, but imagine a 164-pound guard with the purest jump shot in the country — that was Dixon in his junior and senior seasons. Dixon would score on jumpers from the elbow after a well-placed screen on the weakside block. He found openings among the giants in the paint when he cut across the lane. He punished defenders who knew the cuts were coming and tried to cheat, flaring in a different direction.

Dixon was always moving and just needed a sliver of space to make something happen. His release was so smooth and so quick. He wasn’t only a spot-up shooter; he was also lethal if he needed a dribble or two to create the opening.

Midnight Madness was amazing, a much better “welcome to college with big-time sports” experience than anything the disappointing football team offered, as it sputtered to a 5-6 record and fired the coach. It was so loud inside Cole Field House that night. It was half-party, half-sports and unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.

I bought a bootleg Dixon T-shirt on my way into the building that night. I wore it to every Maryland basketball game I attended as a fan over the next two years, and it sits on the T-shirt rack in my closet today.

The 2000-01 schedule was quirky. Maryland’s first six games were not at Cole. They had three at the Maui Invitational, one at Wisconsin for the ACC/Big Ten Challenge and then two at what was then called the MCI Center in Washington, D.C. for the BB&T Invitational.

The mighty Terps had lost three games by the time I saw them in person. The first two games I saw them play were at an NBA/NHL arena, with the first big game at Cole coming against Wake Forest. Dixon poured in 30 points and the Terps beat a top-10 team.

It was still a bumpy road that season. Maryland led No. 2-ranked Duke by 12 points with 1:15 left, but with 21 seconds remaining it was tied, and the Blue Devils won in overtime in a stunning Cole collapse. At one point, Maryland lost at home to Florida State and dropped to 15-9. Students booed them off the court and a few chanted ‘”N-I-T.”

Something else happened the day I received that acceptance letter from Maryland. When the Terps toppled Duke, thousands of students celebrated on Fraternity Row. It’s a horseshoe of frat houses with a big grass field in the middle. If you’ve seen “St. Elmo’s Fire,” you’ve seen frat row in College Park.

It wasn’t just a party, though. One of the goal posts from Byrd Stadium ended up down there. It was a riot.

When Maryland went to Cameron and won again my freshman year, behind 28 points from Dixon, the students in College Park rioted again. The, uh, tradition was secured. I watched the game in Cumberland Hall and joined the other students on frat row. Byrd Stadium was locked that night, but someone improvised and snatched one of the soccer nets from Ludwig Field instead.

The Terps lost only twice the rest of the season — to Duke at the ACC tournament and to Duke in the Final Four, both in brutal fashion. I watched the Final Four game at Cole Field House, and Maryland collapsed again, this time after leading by 22 points in the first half. The mood changed from jubilation to concern to shock, and as we streamed out of the building, to anger. There was another riot in College Park that night, but this one led to property damage all over campus.

It was no longer a matter of college kids being college kids. Two more riots broke out the following year. Being a student at Maryland in the early 2000s meant you “went to the school that rioted all the time.”

ESPN’s microphones in 2004 picked up the student section chanting, “f*ck you J.J.,” at Duke’s J.J. Reddick at the end of a loss at Comcast Center. As much as that period should be remembered for what the football and basketball teams achieved, the students’ bad behavior will always be part of the story, too.

I didn’t see as many games in person my sophom*ore year. Maryland was a top-five team in the preseason again, with Dixon and Lonny Baxter back for their senior seasons and both All-America contenders. I became the women’s basketball beat writer for the school paper, The Diamondback, and covered games in Ames, Iowa Dayton, Ohio and Tallahassee (for a college paper, the travel budget was insane).

I was sitting in the media room at University Hall in Virginia when Steve Blake stole the ball from Jay Williams.

The last home game in 2002 was also the final game at Cole Field House. Back then, students picked up free tickets to games on a first-come, first-serve basis. Students would have to wait in line for the biggest games, but they were nothing like the ones for the last few games in 2002. Thousands of students lined up the day before the tickets were scheduled to be dispersed for the final game against Virginia.

There was a lot of confusion about when people should get in line. At one point, someone made a decision to start handing out the tickets early and chaos ensued. That was the last day Maryland gave out men’s basketball tickets on an in-person, first-come, first-serve basis. I didn’t rush the doors with the mob, so I had no chance.

The final game was March 3, 2002, which also happened to be my birthday. I was crushed at first, but my mom came through — I bought two tickets on eBay and they became my birthday present. It became the second-to-last game I watched at Cole.

I was back at Cole Field House for the championship game against Indiana. It was one of the sloppiest title games of this century, as both teams struggled to make open shots. As the game wore on, the nervous energy in the building was palpable.

Dixon didn’t score for nearly 20 minutes, but the fans in Cole erupted when drilled a 3 midway through the second half to get going again. As the final seconds ticked away, the roar inside Cole was a combination of joy and a release.

Finally.

The year before, Maryland shed the label of the best program never to make a Final Four. That night, Dixon and Williams sealed their legacies.

Maryland has produced the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft before. The program has an almost mythical figure in Len Bias, whose missed potential and tragic end defined Maryland basketball before Dixon and Baxter arrived. For me, Dixon is the greatest player in Maryland basketball history.

Dixon did not become a star in the NBA, but he spent seven years in the league and a few more playing in Europe. I would have loved to see what he could have become in the current NBA, where teams move the ball more than they did 10-15 years ago. His affinity for mid-range jumpers might not have been a fit, but he also might have spent more time developing his range.

Dixon’s career story includes a significant postscript. He found out in 2016 that his biological father was not the man who died in 1995, but rather a corrections officer in Baltimore and his mother’s former boyfriend. Nearly four decades later, they embraced that relationship.

He will forever be a part of my introduction to college and to rooting for a college sports team in a way that is far different than my childhood fandom experience.

I spent my last two-and-a-half years at Maryland consumed with working at the school paper, and being around the football and basketball teams in that capacity changed my outlook. The 2002 team was the last time I rooted for anyone with the sort of unfettered passion that draws so many people to sports.

Dixon was a skinny kid from Baltimore who helped me celebrate one of the most important decisions of my life and became the heart and soul of a winding two-year journey filled with success, disappointment and eventually redemption. It ended with Dixon throwing the ball toward the rafters and my favorite image of him — the one with a cut-down net from the Georgia Dome around his neck.

(Photo: Doug Pensinger/ Getty Images)