The Sporting Life:
The Public Professor’s
Saturday Sports Column
When it comes to college basketball, only two kinds of people root for Duke: people who went to Duke and plastic, witless front runners.
Why? Because the program is at once eminently hateable and incredibly successful.
It all starts with legendary coach Mike Krzyzewski, who we’ll just lump into one big pile with the likes of Bill Belichick and Bobby Knight. They’re brilliant coaches, but you also get the feeling 
that, as human beings, they’re probably flaming pieces of shit. They come across as angry little bullies, full of hate and rage, the kinds of guys who are angling to become fascist leaders but don’t have the requisite charisma.
Now, is that reality? Are they really that awful?
Who cares? We’re not judging them on what kind of person they are. They’re entertainers. We’re judging them on how their public persona plays in the media. And based on that, most of America wants Krzyzewski and Belichick (Knight’s no longer in the spotlight) to die miserable deaths.
Is that fair to them? Of course it is. Just like it’s fair for me to love players like Thurman Munson, John Stallworth, and boxing’s John “The Beast” Mugabi, while despising players like Isaiah Thomas, Michael Jordan, and Ivan Lendl. Like it was fair for me to think Lynyrd Skynyrd and Jimi Hendrix were “cool” and that Aerosmith and the Beastie 
Boys were pathetic blowhards.
I didn’t need a goddamn reason. It’s entertainment, and entertainers are to be loved or hated for whatever reasons make sense to you, logic and reality be damned. Either you entertain me in a positive way and I like you, or you entertain me in a negative way and I hate you.
What’s really interesting is when an entertainer entertains lots and lots of people in a negative way; when an entertainer becomes a bit of a hate-magnet.
And that’s where Krzyzewski (a Knight protégée, by the way) and Duke come into play.
If this were Shakespeare, he’d be the conniving Iago. If it were professional wrestling, he’d be the steroidal Vince McMahon, leading a cavalcade of evil doers into the ring. Instead, it’s college basketball, so it’s Mike Kryzewski, “Coach K,” and he’s the head coach of Duke.
America’s hatred of Duke took center stage this week with the debut of an ESPN film that celebrates the University of Michigan’s Fab Five, a 1991 freshman class of basketball talent the likes of which has not been seen before or since. In the two years that group was together, they twice reached the 
final game of the NCAA championship tournament, losing to Duke in a blowout and the University of North Carolina in a nail biter.
Despite not winning a championship, the fact that five starting freshmen and sophomores made it that far is unprecedented and will probably never happen again. It’s a truly staggering achievement. But what was far more lasting about the Fab Five was their cultural impact. As a handful of 18 year olds, they ushered in a sporting fashion that is still with us twenty years later: long shorts, black socks, and a whole lotta sass.
I’ve not seen the film yet because I don’t have cable (40 bucks a month? Kiss my ass!). But in it, Fab Five guard Jalen Rose, who played for many years in the NBA and is now an ESPN analyst, said something that has set the sports media on fire this week. Back then, he and his teammates considered Grant Hill and the very few other black players who went to Duke to be Uncle Toms.
Hill, understandably taking great umbrage, responded in an open letter in the New York Times. He defends himself admirably. Being middle class and educated doesn’t mean you’re not black, blah 
blah blah, yeah, we get it.
But that’s not really Rose’s point. As Rose has made clear, he used that term when he was a teenager, had no filter, and didn’t know better. As a mature adult, he realizes that the term is not appropriate in this context. But the issue, he says, still is.
Duke is an elite private college for rich kids, the kind of place that grooms the children of the nation’s elite. They don’t recruit many blacks and they certainly don’t recruit poor black kids like Rose who go to public schools in urban slums, no matter how good or smart they are. They recruit mostly private school kids from well to do families.
Everyone knows it, and it’s one of the reasons everyone hates them: they represent the wrong side of class warfare. With Duke, it’s not about race, it’s about class. No one’s saying Krzyzewski’s a racist; it’s just that class is often reflected in racial terms in this country. Which is why Rose made the point that no matter how good he was, or how smart he was (remember, these guys went to Michigan, which is on a par with Duke academically), Kyzyzewski wouldn’t recruit him back then.
But as the now-millionaire Rose pointed out, Coach K might recruit his kids.
That wasn’t lost on the Fab Five back then, and it’s not lost on most Americans now, even if, like a teenaged Rose, they can’t always find the right words to express it.
It’s entertainment, people. I don’t need a goddamned reason to hate Duke.
But I got one anyway.