Cass Technical High School sits in midtown Detroit, two miles from the Renaissance Center, on a campus that's been producing professional athletes since the 1920s. Donovan Peoples-Jones, the Detroit Lions wide receiver. Jalen Graham, the 49ers linebacker. Lewis Nichols, Eagles running back. Kalen King, Penn State All-American cornerback. Dyontae Johnson. Donald Tabron. The list runs back through every era of Detroit football. In the late 1990s, Cass Tech also had a four-sport letterman who, by his senior year, had become one of the most decorated multi-sport athletes in the city's history.
D. Bryant — known publicly only by that initial, the way some athletes go by Magic or Iceman or Pop, except in this case it was Cass Tech and his name was just D. — was the son of Marvin and Brenda Bryant. He attended Cass Tech, where he lettered in four sports across his prep career: football (quarterback and safety), basketball (guard), baseball (third base, only as a sophomore), and track and field. The football resume alone was elite: All-City twice, All-State as a senior, named to Michigan's 'Dream Team' senior year. He played both quarterback and safety in an era when two-way Class A football players were already an endangered species. On the basketball court he averaged 18 points and over seven rebounds across his prep career, was twice named All-City, and led his team to the City Championship as a senior in 1998. On the track he claimed the City Championship in the 4x100 meter relay, and his 4x200 meter team finished fifth in Michigan in 1998.
What 17-year-old D. Bryant had in the spring of 1998 was the rarest of recruiting profiles: a Detroit kid with Division I scholarship interest in three different sports. He chose Duke. Duke, at that moment, was the basketball program in America — under Mike Krzyzewski, coming off back-to-back ACC titles and looking, with the arrival of the most-hyped freshman class in college basketball, to make a serious run at the program's third national championship. Duke football, on the other hand, was Carl Franks' rebuilding project — three years removed from its last winning season, in the basement of the ACC, looking for talent any way it could find it. They both wanted D. He'd be a dual-sport athlete in Durham. Football year-round, basketball during the winter. The most ambitious recruit Duke had landed in either sport in years.