The Cal 100: No. 87 -- Adam Duritz
We count down the top 100 individuals associated with Cal athletics, based on their impact in sports or in the world at large – a wide-open category. See if you agree.
No. 87: Adam Duritz
Cal Sports Connection: He is a devoted fan of all Cal sports, has given pre-game talks to the Bears' football and basketball teams and even once did radio sideline reporting
Claim to Fame: Duritz and his band, Counting Crows, have sold more than 20 million albums
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Adam Duritz ended his undergrad days at Cal one class shy of earning a diploma for his English major. He was struggling with a senior thesis in a poetry course and decided he didn’t want to exit with a C-plus in his final class. So he took an incomplete.
Frontman for the Counting Crows the past three decades, Duritz has no regrets after walking away without a Cal diploma. “My whole college experience was great,” he said in an Oakland Tribune interview in 2002. “I learned an enormous amount. I learned about learning, about writing, about thinking.
“It formed me very much into what I am today.”
Adam Duritz at Haas Pavilion.
Photo by Kelley L. Cox, USA Today
Now 58, his band has released 13 albums that have sold more than 20 million copies, and Duritz’s net worth is said to be in the range of $60 million.
His role as a super-fan of the Bears’ sports teams is what lands Duritz a spot in The Cal 100. “The Cal thing is a little sick,” he said. “But it’s good.”
He attended his first Cal sporting event as a 12-year-old in 1977. It was the inaugural Joe Roth Memorial Game, honoring the Bears’ quarterback who died of cancer, and Cal came from behind to beat USC 17-14.
“In the memorial game for the guy who died of cancer, we didn’t let ‘em beat us,” Duritz said. “I thought that was really cool. That was the entrance of being a Bear.”
Duritz arrived on campus the same year as basketball star Kevin Johnson, and the two became friends. Since then he has shown up to cheer on not just Cal football and basketball, but also women’s basketball, volleyball, rugby and water polo.
At least once he tailored his tour schedule around a game he wanted to attend and he has criss-crossed the country to be on hand when the Bears played in the NCAA basketball tournament. In 2006 he drove all night to Knoxville, Tenn., on an off day to take in a Cal football game vs. Tennessee.
KGO radio let Duritz handle the sideline reporting gig for Cal’s 2003 football opener against Southern Miss. Later that season, coach Jeff Tedford invited him to address the team the day before home game against No. 3 USC, and the Bears scored a 34-31 victory.
Steve Kerr, Adam Duritz and Justin Wilcox at Haas Pavilion in 2017.
A few months later, basketball coach Ben Braun asked Duritz to provide his team with similar inspiration before facing No. 12 Arizona. Duritz told the Bears he’d been on the phone with his friend and former Wildcats star Steve Kerr, who told him “Arizona was going to kick our ass.”
Turns out, Duritz made up the entire story, but the Bears didn’t know that and they responded by beating Arizona 87-83.
Cal head coach Justin Wilcox, a Counting Crows fan during his undergrad days at Oregon, was coaching linebackers on Tedford’s staff two decades ago when he told the San Francisco Chronicle how Duritz would randomly show up to take in a mid-week workout at Memorial Stadium.
"It's not every day you get a rock star coming out to practice," Wilcox said.
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Cover photo of Adam Duritz by Ron Elkman, USA Today
Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo