Former Duke basketball standouts and now full fledge NBA stars Shane Battier and Grant Hill were once named to the list of the Smartest Athletes in Sports by the Sporting News. Battier, the 2001 National Player of the Year and Academic All-America of the Year, placed number seven on the list. He graduated from Duke University in 2001 with a major in Religion, graduating with a 3.5 overall GPA. He can dabble quite well in history, math, finance and religion. He is also fluent in two languages, English and German, and could be considered as a geek in the true sense of the word. The two-time Academic All-American player from Duke is known around the NBA as the biggest tech and gadget geek. He also once served as a reviewer for new tech products for HOOP Magazine. Battier is also one of the favorite players of Blue Devils head coach Mike Krzyzewski.
Grant Hill, a seven-time NBA All Star, came in tenth on the list of smartest athletes. The 1994 Duke graduate comes from a strong academic background with his father, former NFL Pro Calvin Hill graduating from Yale University, while his mother was college roommates with former US First Lady Hillary Clinton at Wellesley College. Hill is also a proud winner of the NBA’s Sportsmanship Award, having won it three times in his career. But both basketball stars aren’t the only product of Duke University who can boast of being one of the smartest people to have come out of Durham. Vanessa Rousso, who is currently a top professional poker player, is considered to be one of the smartest players on the circuit today. She was consistently on the Dean’s list while at Duke, and she graduated early in 2003, after spending only two and a half years with a Major in Economics. She also helped elevate the game of poker while competing at many major tournaments and is one of poker’s more bankable and recognized stars. Poker enjoyed a boom in recent years, largely because of the introduction of online poker. Online poker sites like partypoker, are at the forefront when it comes to online poker. Partypoker offers and provides one of the biggest rooms with tremendous player action at anytime of the day. It is so easy to join their poker games. One just needs to sign up on their website. No matter what level of play you have, whether you’re a pro or a complete beginner, you will surely find poker games to suit you at partypoker. Rousso was a strict student of game theory, becoming an expert at both Rubik’s Cube than chess. Her collegiate duration of two and a half years was the shortest time to graduate in the history of Duke.
Battier, Hill and Rousso are but a few examples of Duke alumni doing good at their profession. Not only do these athletes excel at their current field, but they also serve as good role models to current generation of students currently enrolled at Duke. It clearly shows that a good quality education is still important in order to become successful in today’s world.
