This article was in the New Yorker about the joys of hating Duke. Enjoy ^&grin
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MARCH 19, 2015
The Joy of Hating
BY REEVES WIEDEMAN
The Duke basketball team is one of the most hated franchises in sports, and if there is a Blue Devil loathed above all others, it is Christian Laettner.
“Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies,” William Hazlitt, the British critic, wrote in his 1826 essay, “On the Pleasure of Hating.” “Without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action.” Hazlitt was in his forties when he wrote the essay and had suddenly realized that he hated a lot of things—more, it seemed, than he loved—and for reasons that didn’t seem very good. He hated people for how they dressed; he hated books, even some that he had once liked; he hated himself. Were Hazlitt born two centuries later, in this country, the chances are good that he would have added the men’s basketball team at Duke University to his list.
Few modern hatreds are as widespread, superfluous, and pleasurable as those held by sports fans. I first encountered Hazlitt’s essay in Will Blythe’s memoir, “To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever,” which is partly about how much Blythe adores the basketball team at the University of North Carolina, but more about how much he hates the one ten miles away, at Duke. The rivalry between those schools is among the most extreme in sports, and Blythe is not alone in his ill feelings. Last year, researchers at the University of Kentucky found that Kentucky fans felt a sense of Schadenfreude when reading about Duke players getting severely injured, and a sense of Gluckschmerz (irritation at the good fortune of others) when the players got better.
The hatred of Duke is directed at the institution more than at any one individual, but if there is a Blue Devil loathed above all others, it is Christian Laettner, whom Blythe honored with the “Christian Laettner Dishonorary Chair of Most Despised and Accursed Blue Devil.” I was reading Blythe’s book last week, just before sitting down to lunch with Laettner, who was in town for the premier of the new ESPN documentary “I Hate Christian Laettner,” which is about exactly what its title suggests. While playing in Durham, from 1988 to 1992, Laettner was the best player in the game, but he was also kind of a jerk. Against Kentucky in the 1992 N.C.A.A. Tournament, he hit what is perhaps college basketball’s most iconic shot of all time, but he probably shouldn’t have been playing at all: earlier in that game, in retaliation for a perceived slight, Laettner intentionally stomped on a Kentucky player who was lying prone on the ground. “Kentucky fans hate me because we beat them, that’s as simple as it is,” Laettner told me. “Second reason might be because I stepped on some kid’s chest during the game.” Even today, Kentucky fans wear “I Still Hate Laettner” T-shirts. Laettner himself markets “I Still Love Laettner” shirts, which sell out, as long as he keeps the print runs small.
The vitriol directed at Laettner can be chalked up to a variety of factors, some more reasonable than others: he could be obnoxious (when he wasn’t stepping on opponents, one of his favorite on-court gestures was a flick of his hand from neck to chin), and he had annoyingly all-American good looks (he was one of People magazine’s “Fifty Most Beautiful” in 1992), but, most significantly, he played for Duke. No American sports franchise (save the Yankees, perhaps, and it’s high time we put college and pro teams in the same category) receives as much scorn. Mostly, people hate Duke because they win; they have more Final Four appearances than all but three other teams. “ ’Cause they jealous,” Charles Barkley, another notable heel, said last week, when I asked why fans hated players like himself and Laettner, and programs like Duke. “They don’t get mad about the worst player. They only get mad about the great player.”
And yet the three programs with more Final Fours—North Carolina, U.C.L.A., and Kentucky—have never inspired as much loathing. Most of that has to do with a perception of privilege: Duke is stereotypically populated by wealthy, white students from out of state—the University of New Jersey at Durham, as it has been called—who seem to see positions in major law firms and financial institutions, Charlotte to Boston, as their right. And yet such presumption is rarely true of its basketball players. Laettner might have looked the part of prepster—floppy hair, an aura of invincibility—but he grew up in a middle-class family outside Buffalo. Prior to his arrival, Duke had never won a championship; its reputation of privilege and prestige had begun to build, but it was cemented under Laettner. He personified what everyone thought they hated about Duke, even if he didn’t actually embody it.
When I asked Laettner if he hated anyone as much as people claimed to hate him, he said that there were plenty of players he felt competitive with, even angry at, but none whom he could bring himself to hate. “I’m not gonna say I’m the greatest guy, but the reason I don’t hate is I know what it feels like to be hated,” Laettner said. “So I always pull for Tom Brady. I root for John Calipari. I always pull for the best of the best.” Here’s a fact that most sports fans prefer not to acknowledge, but which might bring them closer together: the players themselves often do not share their disgust for the opposition. “The Carolina guys used to come over and play pickup ball in the summer, and it was a lot of fun,” Laettner acknowledged, with a shrug.
After Laettner moved on to the N.B.A., where he had a successful if unremarkable thirteen-year-long career, most fans forgot that they hated him. (Personally, it has become harder for me to have ill feelings toward players since graduating from college, when all the players suddenly became younger than I was.) In the college game, the institutions remain the same but the individual villains change. “My freshman year, the hate was all directed toward Danny Ferry,” Laettner said. “And every year there’s some new poor sucker at Duke who draws the ire of everybody.”
Most fans, I suspect, like hating Duke because hatred itself is fun, as Hazlitt realized, and because it’s even more fun to hate alongside likeminded others, as Blythe details in his book, where he describes finding kinship with, among others, a man who recreated a “Lord of the Rings” poster with the heads of various Duke players plastered onto the bodies of Orcs. This year’s Duke team is, by most accounts, a relatively likeable bunch. (Though Laettner pointed out that if Grayson Allen, a Duke freshman who fits the stereotype—white, from a private high school—stays for three or four years, he might inspire some T-shirts of his own.) In fact, no one I spoke with could identify a modern-day antagonist who garners so much antagonism. Still, if and when Duke, a No. 1 seed, loses in this year’s tournament, a wave of Schadenfreude will inevitably come rolling through again. The camaraderie of hate is simply too fun to pass up.
