Duke Graduate Alex Wade to Take on Pre-med Classes, Opponents Defense

Alex Wade doesn't want to be thought of primarily as a football player.

At face value, that might seem odd for someone about to begin his final season on a Division I-A football team, especially when you consider that the running back was named Duke's most valuable player last season and is arguably the team's anchor for the upcoming season.

Until the middle of last season, though, he was ambivalent about coming back for his final season of eligibility.

"I pretty much decided I wasn't coming back," Wade said.

He said it is not that he's had a bad experience at Duke, but it's not been what he had expected.

"We're almost separate from other students," he said. "Physically, we spend so much time way on the other side of West Campus."

But then, Wade said, he looked at the job market, and didn't necessarily like what he saw. Medical school, a long-term goal, was also out of the question because he hasn't yet taken the MCATs. And the prospect of transferring to a I-AA school, another option he considered, would have almost certainly dashed any chance of an NFL career.

Suddenly, one more year at Duke, to finish some of the physics courses necessary for medical school and to take one last stab at success as a Blue Devil, didn't seem like such a bad option.

Wade seems more proud of his academic track record than his football prowess. He's won the football team's Nannerl O. Keohane Award for highest GPA among offensive players, and holds several ACC's academic all-star accolades. A pre-med history major, Wade graduated with high honors in May after completing an honors thesis on ufology -- the study of unidentified flying objects.

But don't ask Wade whether or not extraterrestrial life exists and whether Earth is being visited by little gray men (gray, he said, is the traditional color of alien life forms in UFO lore, not green). His research examined correspondence among several astrophysicists, including Carl Sagan, between World War II and the 1970s, and how their views on the possibility of extraterrestrial life were received in the scientific community.

Wade said he ended up as a history major almost by accident. "I was going to major in chemistry," he said. "Due to scheduling conflicts, chemistry was not a major accessible to me."

Plus, he already had four AP credits in history, found the subject matter interesting and knew it was fairly flexible in its requirements.

It was during a seminar on the history of science, with longtime Duke history professor Seymour Mauskopf, that Wade began considering a senior thesis.

"He took the senior seminar and clearly established himself early on as a very able student," Mauskopf said. "I asked him in the course of the seminar whether he was interested in the history honors program."

With the football commitment on his shoulders, Wade was less than gung-ho at first about the idea. He said the longest paper he previously had written was 18 pages, a far cry from the eventual 115-page piece he would create.

Wade, however, eventually became intrigued by the idea of working on a research paper, and was accepted, with Mauskopf's recommendation, into the program.

The thesis was awarded high honors by the review committee. Now Wade is considering getting the work published in some format, and Mauskopf, who disavows interest in athletics, said the two have lunch on a regular basis.

"My interest is promoting scholarship," Mauskopf said. "It's interesting and nice that he's a football player, but what's most important to me is that he's a very able scholar, and he really is very good."

Carl Franks, Wade's football coach, said his star running back's academic pursuits add luster to his program.

""Alex is a very intelligent young man," Franks said. "I've had a lot of very good conversations with him. He is one of the top student-athletes in the ACC, and he certainly is an important member of our football team. Being elected captain by your teammates says a lot about a player and the respect that player has earned."

Wade is hoping to use his final year to gain Duke some wins -- the season opener is Aug. 30 at Virginia -- and he said he'd like to pursue professional football if he has a good enough season. But he doesn't take the notion too seriously and is fully aware of such intangible factors as injury. In the meantime, he'll be taking cell biology classes to give himself "a leg up on the MCATs" and pharmacology.

Wade admits it hasn't been easy playing football on a team that has amassed a 2-32 record since he first took the field as a Blue Devil. Despite the record, Wade himself has become a respectable force on the gridiron and last year was named a second team All-ACC running back. He noted, however, "I'd rather go to a bowl game every year than being named all-ACC."

This article was written by Kevin Lees