Don’t worry, you get to find out who I am next week, you lucky skunks! Last year Brett Aresco took this space in his penultimate column to announce he was a Baldwin Scholar to throw us off the trail. Would it confuse you if I dropped the hint that I’m a dude?
Alright, on to the business at hand. I’ve been fielding complaints varying from “Monday Monday is divisive” to “Monday Monday is not funny” to “Monday Monday is divisive and not funny,” and I thought I’d address those concerns by singing a tune we can all sing along to: Carolina basketball and football both lost in the past couple weeks. What a glorious thing.
Nothing makes me happier than watching the Orange and the Wolfpack for knocking UNC below Duke in the rankings and (presumably) off the rankings, respectively. Teach those ugly baby-blue fans and athletes a lesson.
Now, the more I think about it, the more I realize what a strange pull this rivalry has on you and me. In the name of bleeding Duke blue, I find myself watching a lot of Carolina athletics, obsessing over Carolina’s rankings and privately lamenting the little things, like UNC’s 2-0 Rhodes Scholarship edge over Duke this year. I’ve actually spent time caring about the Tar Heels, and I’m supposed to hate them. Isn’t that weird?
You and I first learned the art of rivalry when our parents thrust our good guys and bad guys upon us. Our daddies dressed us up in the Raiders blanket after mommy’s job landed us in Oakland, and the job has been ours to suffer through a lifetime of awful management and coaching, and just all-around terrible football. We had no say in the matter.
Like the predestined selection of our pro teams, all of us, save those Exeter and Andover and The Waspy McWasperton Academy For Going To An Ivy League School alumni, went to geographically determined high schools. “Go East, beat West!” we cheered, in full knowledge that had we lived a mile down the road, it’d be the exact opposite cheer. Rivalry was arbitrary.
Everything changed when we came to Duke: Rivalry became a conscious choice. Demanding that Tar Heels go to hell has been part and parcel of a well-rounded Duke education since the beginning of time (the beginning of time, of course, being the year Mike Krzyzewski became Duke’s head coach).
When we matriculated, we agreed to despise UNC until the day we die. Even our native North Cackalackians and Robertson Scholars are tasked with taking our side in the rivalry. If you weren’t a basketball fan before, you are now. If you were indifferent toward UNC before, you’ve made up your mind now.
In most cases, Blue Devils come to loathe Tarheel athletics based on deference to decades of tradition. Truthfully, we like a lot of UNC people on an individual level and haven’t thought a lot about how aggregating those individually likeable qualities to a larger scale jives with hating the school as a whole.
Not thinking about exactly why we hate them is okay. Many psychological studies show that most cognition is done based on gut reaction, and you’d be correct to feel some inchoate disgust for UNC without rationalizing that decision.
But we still lack a comprehensive list of reasons to hate UNC independent of the fact that our athletes compete against each other a lot (otherwise, that might be true for Maryland) and the campuses are nearby (same thing, N.C. State).
I hope you find the list below a logical supplement to your intuitive dislike for UNC as an institution.
1) They’re smelly.
2) Baby blue is used in only three capacities: infant nurseries, gangs and UNC. In short, to be a Tarheel is to conjure images of gang babies. This is how Duke students arrived at the “Sean May eats babies” cheer of yesteryear (Note: No undergraduate here was at Duke when Sean May was at UNC, so I’m really playing to a small audience with that one).
3) They consistently brand themselves as more folksy and down-to-earth than Duke, when in reality they rank among the most elitist universities in the country (according to the scientific poll I just conducted in my head, based on the fact that their chancellors have names like Herbert Holden Thorp and Joseph Carlyle Sitterson).
4) There’s not actually a chapel on the hill anymore. A Carolina Inn now rests where the original chapel once lay. How disingenuous is that?
5) Mike Nifong went there. So did James K. Polk, who shared an equally infamous political career.
Be sure to consult this exhaustive list next time you task yourself with rooting against Carolina. While I may have been accused of fostering division, I assure you I know where my priorities lie: Duke-UNC is division one.
Charlotte Simmons really spoon-fed you that pun. Can’t wait to “out” myself next week!
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