The day has arrived. February 6, 2008. The most anticipated day of every year for Duke and North Carolina fans. The day, this year, that #2 and #3 will face off. The day as glorious as any other day of the year, and more so then most. The first meeting between the Devils (19-1, 7-0) and the Heels (21-1, 6-1).
Why the first Wednesday in February - normally the day this game takes place - is not a national holiday remains incomprehensible to me.
In preparation for this game and the second half of the ACC season, I began reading Will Blythe’s book To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever : A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry last week. I bought this book nearly two years ago, but have just now gotten around to reading it. I always read at least one book on college basketball during January and/or February, and this is mine for this year.
Blythe is a UNC alum and, of course, hates Duke (thus the title.) Despite this character flaw :), this has been a very entertaining read thus far. Not only about basketball, but also family, society, and more, he writes with a lot of humor that has prompted me to laugh out loud on several occasions in the first few chapters. I look forward to finishing and expect it to be well worth my time.
Here’s a sample:
From time to time I have felt silly about this devotion to a college team and the concomitant hatred of its rival. Here I am, a grown man, huddled in front of a TV, hiding out from the world from November to April, watching students battle each other in games that shouldn’t mean more to me than to them. Right?
Not long ago, as I watched Carolina endure a particularly ugly sequence against Duke, I scared my girlfriend’s nine-year-old son, Harry. (I had already terrified the dog, the beloved Gracie, who had fled into the bathroom to avoid my raving.) Duke’s Dahntay Jones had just driven home a particularly obnoxious dunk and was now flexing his muscles like an insane bodybuilder. Was there no justice in the universe? Where was God?
I pounded my hand on the coffee table, stomped my feet on the floor, and exclaimed, with extreme eloquence, “Shit, hell, piss, damn it! And don’t say what I just said, Harry!” Indeed, I felt proud of myself that I had limited my profanity to just these few words. A virtual Zen master of self-control.
Harry, who had been watching me watch the game, asked, “Why do you have to get so mad?” Normally, he would have delighted in an adult’s swearing. But now he was edging backward across the room, the way people will when you have a gun pointed at them. His eyes were wide.
“Because I hate Duke,” I explained.
“Why do you hate them?” he asked.
Here I hesitated. A young boy had asked me a guileless question, and he needed an adult response. “Well, that’s an interesting question,” I told him, channeling Mister Rogers, “and it deserves an honest answer.” I paused for a moment, as I had seen his mother do when addressing an earnest inquiry by her son. Children are our future. We must teach them well, even when it is hard.
“The truth is they are terrible people,” I told him. “Detestable.”
“All of them?” he asked.
“Every last one of them,” I said. “Especially the coach.”
“I hate them, too,” Harry said, settling in next to me on the couch. And thus was born another soldier in the war. On the door of his room hung a chalkboard for self-expression, and I was pleased to note that now, scrawled in his child’s hand (with no assistance or prodding from me) was the unimpeachable sentiment, NO DUKE FANS ALLOWED IN HERE.
Blythe can likely make a long list of “detestable” players from Duke, no doubt (and has already named several so far.) Likewise, there are many UNC names I could list - like J.R. Reid, Rick Fox, Jeff McInnis and Rashad McCants, to name a few. And it’s beyond me how anyone could get behind a team which once included Rasheed Wallace, one of the biggest <bleep>s ever to step on a basketball court.
Clearly, I can relate to Blythe’s feelings here, albeit from the opposite perspective. I’m often overcome with such anxiety before a Duke game, especially a big game like Carolina, you’d think I was actually playing in it. Since the acquisition of my first DVR a few years ago, I now find it difficult to watch the games live, in real time. I usually record the game and start watching (from the beginning) later during the game so that I can watch it without all of the delays of timeouts, dead balls, free throws, etc. I can watch the game in about 45 minutes. The game still lasts around two hours, so the anxiety is still there while I’m waiting to start watching, but somehow starting it later and viewing it quickly makes me feel better. Sometimes, I just wait until it’s over and check the score online, then watch it in a much more relaxed state.
Yes, I’m pathetic.
Nevertheless, I look forward to the annual early-February meeting of Duke and Carolina tonight. Since it’s in Chapel Hill this year, the likely result is that Duke will suffer their first ACC loss. Carolina will be tough to beat at home, even if Ty Lawson isn’t playing (and I’ll believe that when I don’t see him on the floor.) Duke’s primary weakness is lack of inside players, of course, and while they’ve gone into Chapel Hill undermanned inside before and won (see 2001 when Carlos Boozer was injured), hope seems a bit more distant this time around. This time they’re not facing Brendan Haywood in there, but Tyler Hansbrough. But hey, the Giants weren’t supposed to win Sunday, either, right?
I will likely watch the game as I described above, starting from the beginning at about halftime. My wife and kids will probably already be in bed when I start, and it’s entirely possible that I’ll let a few things slip as Blythe describes above - probably at one or more of the many times Hansbrough lowers his head and bulls through a Duke player as the officials whistle remains silent or when Greg Paulus flops to the floor after someone breathes on him.
But regardless of outcome, there’s nothing else quite like the first Duke/Carolina game every year. It’s almost always just after the Super Bowl and seems to signal that the college basketball season has finally begun for real. And this year, it will also usher in the return of Dick Vitale and feature two of top three ranked teams. It just doesn’t get any better.
It’s often called the greatest rivalry in college sports for one simple reason: it is.