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To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever
Will Blythe
A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry
HarperCollins
March 2006
368 pages ISBN: 006074023X Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir | Non-Fiction
"It is a basketball rivalry that simply has no equal.
Duke vs. North Carolina is Ali vs. Frazier, the Giants vs.
the Dodgers, the Red Sox vs. the Yankees. Hell, it's bigger
than that. This is the Democrats vs. the Republicans, the
Yankees vs. the Confederates, capitalism vs. communism. All
right, okay, the Life Force vs. the Death Instinct, Eros vs.
Thanatos. Is that big enough?" The basketball
rivalry between Duke and North Carolina is the fiercest
blood feud in college athletics. To legions of otherwise
reasonable adults, it is a conflict that surpasses sports;
it is locals against outsiders, elitists against populists,
even good against evil. It is thousands of grown men and
women with jobs and families screaming themselves hoarse at
eighteen-year-old basketball geniuses, trading conspiracy
theories in online chat rooms, and weeping like babies when
their teams -- when they -- lose. In North Carolina,
where both schools are located, the rivalry may be a way of
aligning oneself with larger philosophic ideals -- of
choosing teams in life -- a tradition of partisanship that
reveals the pleasures and even the necessity of hatred.
What makes people invest their identities in what is
elsewhere seen as "just a game"? What made North Carolina
senator John Edwards risk alienating voters by telling a
reporter, "I hate Duke basketball"? What makes people care
so much? The answers have a lot to do with class
and culture in the South, and author Will Blythe expands a
history of an epic grudge into an examination of family,
loyalty, privilege, and Southern manners. As the season
unfolds, Blythe, the former longtime literary editor of
Esquire and a lifelong Tar Heels fan, immerses
himself in the lives of the two teams, eavesdropping on
practice sessions, hanging with players, observing the
arcane rituals of fans, and struggling to establish some
basic human kinship with Duke's players and proponents. With
Blythe's access to the coaches, the stars, and the bit
players, the book is both a chronicle of personal obsession
and a picaresque record of social history.
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