Essay: What Madness Makes Us Hate Duke?

(March 18) -- It's that time of the year again -- March Madness -- and just as dependable as the office pool and the Cinderella run is that other accompanying pleasure of the tournament: watching basketball fans across the country unite in their hatred of the Duke Blue Devils.

It doesn't take much poking around the Internet to find Top 10 lists purporting to explain this near-universal hatred.

Duke's an elite private school, and its fans, the Cameron Crazies, come off as entitled rich kids (much like James Blake's "J-Block" followers at the U.S. Open). There's something about Coach Mike Krzyzewski -- "Coach K" to his acolytes -- that reminds one of a phony politician, a snake -- never mind the fact that he's a West Point graduate and recently led the United States to Olympic gold. (I met Krzyzewski at West Point last year and still came away with that impression.) Duke gets all the press and all the calls. They're too white.

All of the above, to varying degrees, may indeed be true, and yet it doesn't sufficiently explain the phenomenon. As ESPN's Bill Simmons and his pal Chuck Klosterman pointed out in a recent podcast -- all of the above (save the part of the coach) could be said about Stanford.

And if it's just an anti-elitist thing, why is it that the country roots each year for the Ivy League's representative to the dance? OK, Cornell's a huge underdog, and Duke's a No. 1 seed -- but it's not as though Duke hatred can be explained (as some have) simply by jealousy over the team's success. Sure, the Blue Devils have won three national championships. But the University of North Carolina, Duke's arch-rival, has won five. So has Indiana. Kentucky has won seven, and UCLA has 11 titles. None are as universally loathed as Duke.

There seems to be something irrational, then, in this mass hatred. I think of my friend Jason Zengerle, a senior editor for The New Republic, who has made a professional sport of hating Duke (and to a lesser extent, loving UNC) with numerous columns. But Zengerle grew up in Washington, D.C., and should be a Georgetown fan. He comes to his Duke passion with the outsized fervor of a convert.

But I think in a blog post from last year, Zengerle does, in passing, come up with the real basis for Duke hatred: "[T]he presence of so many white players on Duke's team creates the somewhat unusual dynamic of white fans taunting white athletes," he wrote. If that's an unusual dynamic, it's also, despite the particular instance of homophobia he cites, a relatively safe one. No one's going to hold it against you for rooting against a school that's largely rich, white and successful.

It's only when the story line becomes more complex that passions shift.

We saw this with Duke's lacrosse team, when three of its white players were accused in 2006 of raping a black stripper during a team party. Before the facts were in, many media outlets criticized the players (and also the team and school) on the basis of its position of white privilege.

"You couldn't invent a story so precisely tuned to the outrage frequency of the modern, metropolitan, bien pensant journalist," a former New York Times senior employee said of his paper's tilted coverage.

But the team also had its staunch defenders, who were vindicated when the stripper's accusations were shown to be false and the charges dropped. Make what you will about the "scandal," but rooting for or against Duke's lacrosse team took on new and loaded meanings.

In contrast, rooting against Duke basketball remains a simple, harmless pleasure -- one shared by myself, an aggrieved University of South Carolina fan, who is now throwing his support against Duke's first-round opponent. Go University of Arkansas-Pine Bluff!