Andy Berndt grew up the kind of American kid who, by his own later admission in the pages of the Duke Chronicle, used to stand alone in his driveway as a child holding a cold, dirty basketball, doing the universal announcer voice, narrating the imaginary moment in which the imaginary national-television cameras turned to him and the imaginary clock ran down to imaginary zero and the imaginary buzzer-beating jump shot fell through the imaginary net. He was, like every other six-year-old who has ever held a basketball in a driveway, rehearsing the moment. The detail he would write about, four decades later, was that the announcer voice in his head was using his actual last name. Berndt has the ball. He fakes left, goes right. Yes, he has done it. He has won it all.
He went on to be a real Duke basketball player. Not in any of the senses that matter to the box score - the line of his single Sports-Reference season is six games, nine total minutes, two field goal attempts and no makes, no points, three rebounds, in the 1986-87 season under Mike Krzyzewski. He was a walk-on. He was 6'6", a forward by listing, and one of the eight freshmen and sophomores on a Coach K roster that had been crowded by the program's 1986 senior-class graduation. He was, by his own framing in the December 2021 Duke Chronicle essay "Walk-on Rewards: Great Seat, Great Lessons," excerpted from The Chronicle's book "Coach K: The King of Cameron," the sporting equivalent of a glitch in the space-time continuum. He made the team. He played the season. He played nine minutes across his entire Duke college basketball career. He did not play in 1987-88 or 1988-89. He stayed at Duke. He joined the Chronicle editorial board. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in English Literature with the Class of 1989. And what he carried with him out of Cameron Indoor Stadium, into a career that would, in time, take him to some of the most consequential corner offices in American advertising and technology, was the front-row seat to the world that Coach K created and the message that he kept hearing in the locker room at halftime.