Sports Illustrated has a little article in their NCAA basketball preview about how everyone hates on Duke, more specifically, how everyone hates on JJ, and all the other successful white players who have been/come out of Duke. It's an interesting article, and while this isn't the point of it at all, I've said it before and I'll say it again -- Maryland fans suck! They're incredibly rude and a lot more "rowdy" than the article claims Cameron Crazies to be (when was the last time the Crazies rioted after a game??). In two years of attending almost every single home game at Duke, I found that the kids very rarely hated on the other team without provocation, they were mostly just really supportive of their own players. So for those of you who lose to Duke this year, please stop hating on our boys, just drive home safely.
posted by neverecho at 9:33 AM
2 Comments:
i think college fans can be extremely cruel to each other; but i think the reason dukies can be so calm is that they are like the yankees (sorry, i know)-- always on top.
for maryland fans, when they actually win a big game, it's enough to make them lose their blame fool minds. for duke, they are, admittedly used to it.
and actually, in a way similar to the yankees (though slappy mcbluelips aka play-rod is a tool), it's not so much the fault of the dukies or the team itself that they have this pristine image...
it's dickie vitale's fault. his loud fawning-- and the subsequent fawning of the other bandwagoning media tools-- creates an aura of the perfect program, the technically sound players, the actual "student-athletes," whereas almost every other program is made to look like a bunch of hoods off the street without discipline.
there may also be an issue about how duke is one of the few top tier academic schools with an excellent basketball program. i know it influences me-- i feel like "those nerds are me," a little bit. and i bet it influences the decision makers... i haven't thought about how that all works, but it's a feeling.
then of course... there's the poetry.
I don't necessarily think it's fair to say that fans of the opposing team hate on Duke's white players. They hate, more appropriately, the whining that comes from certain Duke players' mouths. The pouting, the "who, me?" cherubic innocence.
Fact: the players play in front of the best fans in college basketball.
Fact: the academic institution is second only to Stanford in terms of academic excellence of all major college programs.
Fact: Duke plays and regularly wins in what is usually the best conference in college basketball.
Fact: Duke has one of the five greatest college coaches of the post-Wooden era.
One could argue that there is also a certain mystique that surrounds Duke to such a degree that on a subconscious level, even the referees have been known to, uh, choke on their whistle at Cameron. Or let the "inadvertent" chest stomp go unseen. Aside: would anyone else other than Laettner get away with something like that on camera, unsuspended, ever?
So why the pouting when a perceived foul didn't go their way? You can even trace the whiny boy nature down through history: Alarie to Ferry to Laettner to Parks...and so it goes. The tradition itself is a part of Duke basketball, like it or not. The entitlement, the whining, the arrogance. It's like they're all somehow the illegit children of Bill Walton...How the gene transfered from LA to Durham is anyone's guess.
There is a certain sense of entitlement that some Dukies appear to have with regard to their hoops, and personally, I find it really obnoxious. Send them to live with Daddy Walton on a island in the South Pacific I say...
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