Duke Sucks: A Completely Even-handed, Unbiased Investigation into the Most Evil Team on Planet Earth
By Reed Tucker and Andy Bagwell
3.5/5
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About this ebook
In the ranks of NCAA college basketball, Duke University is like something scraped off the bottom of a shoe. It's like a nasty virus you catch from a door handle at a public toilet.
No team in sports is as uniquely hated as those smug, entitled, floor-slapping, fist-pumping, insufferable Blue Devils. The loathing has almost reached the level of a religion. Christian Laettner is a punk. Amen. The Cameron Crazies are obnoxious. The Plumlees are worthless times three. Coach K is a jerk. Kumbaya.
The team is dogged by an intense hatred that no other team can match—and for good reason. Millions of hoops fans and March Madness aficionados around the world are not imagining things. Duke really is evil, and within the pages of Duke Sucks, Reed Tucker and Andy Bagwell show readers exactly why Duke deserves to be so detested. They bruise and batter the Blue Devils with fact after fact, story after story, statistic after statistic. They build an airtight case that could stand up in a court of law.
So sit back in your "I Hate Duke" t-shirt, and in true Duke fashion, force someone poorer than you to do your work as you crack open the ultimate guide to Duke suckitude.
Reed Tucker
Reed Tucker is a staff features writer at the New York Post. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is co-author of Duke Sucks: A Completely Evenhanded, Unbiased Investigation into the Most Evil Team on Planet Earth.
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Duke Sucks - Reed Tucker
INTRODUCTION
Let’s get this out there in the open.
We, your humble coauthors, are horribly biased. We are both graduates of the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, and we have been perfectly engineered, much like a cyborg in a bad sci-fi movie, to loathe everything in royal blue. We have owned anti-Duke T-shirts portraying Coach Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K) as a rat. We have screamed horrific slurs at Christian Laettner that have made small children cry. One crisp fall evening, we found ourselves driving around Durham with a burlap sack, some rope, and a shovel, looking for J. J. Redick’s house. Allegedly.
So, okay, fine. You got us. We don’t like Duke.
But the strange thing is, the more we investigated the hatred of Duke’s basketball team, the more we discovered that we were not alone. This is not some pocket conspiracy cooked up by Tar Heels fans. Duke hatred is a truly global phenomenon—an unprecedented worldwide outpouring of ill will toward five dorky guys who dribble a basketball.
According to Google, users searched for variations on Hate Duke
or Duke Sucks
more than 8,300 times in March 2011. Cruder fans searched for Fuck Duke
an astonishing 18,690 times per month.
On Facebook, a group called I Hate It When I Wake Up and Duke Still Exists
has (at last count) 17,028 likes. Another, called less poetically Duke Losing,
has 6,757.
There’s more.
Back in 2005, MSNBC conducted a poll of the most hated team in college basketball. The Blue Devils came out on top with an unbelievable 53 percent. Landslide doesn’t even begin to describe it. The second-place team, UNC, pulled well up the rear with just 18 percent.
In 2010, cable channel Spike TV anointed Duke as its number one least likeable team,
fuming, I’m pretty sure Duke is the official team of both child murderers and Asian dictators.
Bottom line: Unless you went to Duke, you don’t like Duke. It’s as simple as that.
No team in all of sports—college or professional—is as uniquely hated as those smug, entitled, floor-slapping, fist-pumping, chest-thumping, insufferable Blue Devils.
ABD!
(Anybody But Duke) goes a popular mantra. Please, God, Jesus, Buddha, and Tom Cruise OT Level VII Scientologist—anybody but Duke.
According to a USA Today poll, 49 percent of viewers actively rooted against the Devils in the 2010 national championship game.
A Match.com survey discovered that 5 percent of hard-up singles still wouldn’t date someone who rooted for the Blue Devils.
In 2010, even Fox’s TV show Glee—not exactly a show for sports fans—got into the act when one of its characters exclaimed, I hate Duke like I hate the Nazis!
An Esquire writer touring through a remote part of Zaire in 1996 reported that he came across a young boy wearing a DUKE SUCKS T-shirt.
This is hardly just a Duke–North Carolina thing. Something else is going on here.
The most common explanation is that people dislike the Blue Devils because they succeed. I think the guys in the past have put that upon us,
Duke forward Lance Thomas explained at the 2010 Final Four. Just with the success they’ve had.
Coach Mike Krzyzewski himself offered the same rationale when asked in March 2011 why his university seems unusually loathed.
We’re as popular of a team as there is in the United States,
he told a radio show. But we’re also a hated team because we have won.
Okay, not to nitpick, but he only said two things in that quote, and he got both of them wrong.
Duke is not as popular of a team as there is in the United States.
If you want to go by merchandise sales, and that seems as clear as any method to measure something abstract like popularity, Duke is about as popular as dengue fever. According to the Collegiate Licensing Company, Duke in 2010 did not even finish in the Top 25 when it came to sales of T-shirts, workout gear, and other licensed goods. It was beaten soundly by conference-mates UNC, Florida State, and even Clemson.
But on to the more important point: K’s reasoning for why Duke is hated.
This tired we’ve won
argument has been offered over the years by hundreds of fans and a handful of deluded sports columnists, but it crumbles under the barest of scrutiny. College basketball is loaded with teams that win, both historically and season-to-season. UCLA has by far the most championships, but you don’t see anyone printing up anti-Bruin T-shirts by the millions. Kentucky is the winningest program in college basketball history, and it hasn’t exactly spawned a cottage industry worth roughly the GDP of a small island nation aimed at tearing it apart.
No, something else is going on to explain all this hatred, and we humbly submit that so many people hate Duke because Duke deserves to be hated.
Where there’s smoke, there’s