AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. (AP) — At a time when college athletic departments are desperately looking for new revenue sources, Duke “came up with something creative” and landed a three-game deal with streaming giant Amazon, Atlantic Coast Conference Commissioner Jim Phillips said.
Phillips praised the Blue Devils for working with ACC television partner ESPN to secure a first-of-its-kind contract that could set a precedent for future cash grabs around the league and maybe the country.
“If there’s other opportunities that are out there that schools bring forward, we’ll look at it,” Phillips said Wednesday while wrapping up the league’s three-day spring meetings inside a posh resort in northeast Florida. “I think it’s innovative by Duke.”
Phillips offered some insight into how the deal came together and said negotiations never undermined the ACC’s current TV contracts. Duke agreed to future scheduling commitments with ESPN in exchange for the three games on Amazon Prime Video.
“I’m not worried about it because ESPN was in every one of the conversations,” Phillips said. “To Duke’s credit, they came up with something creative, and they brought it to ESPN and us. Where it finished and where it started maybe wasn’t exactly the same spot, but at the end of the day, they also get negotiated.”
Amazon and Duke announced an agreement last month for Prime to exclusively air three Duke men’s basketball games during the 2026-27 season. The trio of games will be marquee matchups inside professional sports arenas and feature one of the biggest brands in college hoops: Duke.
The Blue Devils will play UConn in Las Vegas on Nov. 25, defending national champion Michigan in New York on Dec. 21, and Gonzaga in Detroit on Feb. 20. The three-game slate signifies the start of Amazon delving into live college sports.
It won’t be the last, and everyone in the college sports landscape surely took notice and started scheming up ways to find something similar to create more money. Several ACC administrators and basketball coaches said the deal provides a potential path toward additional financial resources.
“I still have some questions on it, going back and forth,” Florida State athletic director Michael Alford said. “Not just questions, more knowledge than anything. I want to see how that impacts us, what can that mean for us in the future and how do we look at things differently if given those opportunities or present those opportunities to the league that we have a game that maybe we want to look at moving and doing in our favor.
“But I do have a lot of questions about it still — about how it all worked out.”
The Big Ten does, too.
The league reportedly has notified ACC and ESPN officials that it owns the rights to the Duke-Michigan game at Madison Square Garden because it's scheduled to take place in “shared territory.”
The Big Ten and ACC TV partners agreed to alternate broadcast rights to neutral-site games between members played in shared territory like New York City, according to Yahoo Sports. Since ESPN televised last season’s Duke-Michigan game in another shared territory, Washington, D.C., Fox believes it owns this matchup.
“Duke liked getting this little deal with Amazon,” Phillips said. “Duke can talk to the Big Ten about it. The commissioner is not part of that one. I’m not involved in it. It’s one less thing I got to deal with.”
Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here and here (AP News mobile app). AP college basketball: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-basketball-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-basketball
FILE - Duke head coach Jon Scheyer calls a play during the first half in the Elite Eight of the NCAA college basketball tournament against UConn, Sunday, March 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough,File)
FILE - Duke cheerleaders and band members cheer during the first half against UConn in the Elite Eight of the NCAA college basketball tournament, Sunday, March 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr,File)
PARIS (AP) — Bernadette Chirac, the steel-willed former first lady of France who spent 12 years at the Élysée Palace from 1995 to 2007 beside President Jacques Chirac while building her own political power in rural Corrèze and turning a children’s hospital charity into a national institution, has died. She was 93.
President Emmanuel Macron confirmed her death Saturday, saying he and his wife Brigitte had learned with “great sadness” of the passing of a woman who marked French history beside Jacques Chirac, who died in 2019, and changed the lives of millions of patients through her charitable work.
“A great lady of the heart has departed,” Macron said.
For more than half a century, Chirac was the fixed point in her late husband’s restless climb — through Parliament, two terms as prime minister, 18 years as mayor of Paris and, in 1995, the presidency.
She appears in the official photographs with her chin lifted, blond hair lacquered into place, a small handbag on her arm, looking less like a spouse than like an institution.
But the caricature never quite contained her.
The Chanel suits, dark glasses, nasal voice and withering judgments became part of the national image.
Beneath them was a relentless worker and a cold-eyed political operator who, almost alone among the wives of French presidents, built a base of power that was her own.
She was born Bernadette Thérèse Marie Chodron de Courcel on May 18, 1933, in Paris, into money, lineage and Catholic duty.
Her father’s family included soldiers, industrialists and diplomats; an uncle had served as an aide to Charles de Gaulle in wartime London.
But her life would be most marked by her time at the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris, where she met Jacques Chirac, a handsome and much-courted young man whose appetite for politics would come to define them both.
They married in March 1956. The union lasted 63 years and was, by her own account, a long lesson in endurance.
Jacques Chirac was famous for his warmth, appetite and instinctive connection with crowds. Bernadette’s gifts were different, observers said.
She was controlled, socially formidable, devout, exacting and sometimes devastatingly funny.
The Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton called her the “last queen of France,” and she did little to discourage the idea.
Her husband’s reputation as a womanizer was an open secret she chose, after much pain, to meet with dry humor.
Swarmed by photographers in Corrèze in 1998 — after rumors that Jacques Chirac had been unreachable the night Princess Diana died because he was with an actress — she stepped from her car and deadpanned: “Calm down. I’m not Claudia Cardinale. Or Lollobrigida.”
“At first, it was hard. I was very heartbroken, and then I got used to it,” she said years later in a television documentary.
“I told myself that was how things were and that I had to accept it with as much dignity as possible.”
Sent to tend her husband’s rural stronghold in Corrèze while he pursued power in Paris, she did far more than tend it. In 1971, she was elected municipal councilor in Sarran. In 1979, she became a general councilor in Corrèze and held the seat until 2015.
Her influence grew after Jacques Chirac became president in 1995. The role of first lady in France has no constitutional power, but she made the Élysée a place where her approval mattered.
She could be loyal, cutting and unforgiving, and understood that campaigns are made not only of speeches and polls but of debts, slights and resentments.
Yet she also carved out a space for female authority inside a male political culture that had little interest in sharing power — making it quietly clear that she would not be reduced to “the wife of.”
Her deepest grief stayed mostly private.
The Chiracs’ elder daughter, Laurence, developed severe anorexia after meningitis in adolescence and attempted suicide more than once. She never fully recovered and died in 2016 at 58.
That ordeal pushed Chirac toward the charitable work that reshaped her public image.
In 1994, she took over a medical charity that collected coins for children in hospitals. To millions of French viewers, the woman once mocked for hauteur became the face of hospitalized children and families living around hospital beds.
She continued running it until 2019, when she handed it to Brigitte Macron, the wife of France's current president, and became honorary president.
By then, she had long since become a political force in her own name.
“My husband no longer does politics, but I do,” she said to journalists, after Jacques Chirac left office in 2007.
She famously nicknamed Dominique de Villepin, the Élysée official she distrusted, “Nero,” yet also reportedly helped engineer her husband’s reconciliation with Nicolas Sarkozy, the former protégé who had betrayed him politically.
Her 2001 memoir, “Conversation,” written with journalist Patrick de Carolis, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and introduced the French to a franker, funnier and more independent woman than many had assumed.
After Jacques Chirac left the Élysée, his health declined and his public voice faded. Hers remained sharper for longer. Asked how he was, according to French media, she answered in her flat, unmistakable voice: “He keeps the dog.”
Age and grief eventually drew her out of public view.
By the time Jacques Chirac died in 2019, she was too fragile to take part in the public farewell where France and foreign leaders honored him.
FILE - Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy speaks with former first lady Bernadette Chirac during the inauguration of the Foundation Claude Pompidou, Centre teaching and research on Alzheimer's disease, Monday, March 10, 2014, in Nice, southeastern France. (AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau, File)
FILE - French President Jacques Chirac and his wife Bernadette arrive at the airport in Hanover, Germany on Sunday, June 25, 2000. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer, File)
FILE - From left: Cherie Blair, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair Bernadette Chirac, wife of French President Jacques Chirac, Lyudmila Putina, wife of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and First Lady Laura Bush, converse as they walk to a press conference site at the G-8 Summit on Sea Island, Ga., Wednesday, June 9, 2004. (AP Photo/Ric Feld, File)
FILE - French President Jacques Chirac, center left, and his wife First Lady Bernadette Chirac are surrounded by the crowd after addressing New Year wishes to the inhabitants of the region of Correze, in Tulle, southwestern France, Saturday, Jan. 14, 2006. (AP Photo/Bob Edme, File)
FILE - Bernadette Chirac, wife of former French President Jacques Chirac attends a ceremony to pay tribute to Simone Veil in the courtyard of the Invalides in Paris, France, Wednesday, July 5, 2017. (AP Photo/Michel Euler, File)
