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

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Will Blythe

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Overview

"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.

Editorial Reviews

Franklin Foer

Fans of college basketball will wish that all sportswriters possessed Blythe's ability to describe a game, to translate its tension and render its action. (Writing about the Duke sharpshooter J. J. Redick, he says, "When he missed, North Carolina fans felt spared an execution, as if they'd already been standing blindfolded in front of the wall when the last-minute reprieve came in from the governor.") They will enjoy his impeccable miniature profiles of the corporate conservative Coach K and his longtime liberal Carolina counterpart, Dean Smith. (Do my descriptions inadvertently reveal just how effectively Blythe has spun me?) Blythe tells much of the season's story through a backup North Carolina guard named Melvin Scott, who began his career as one of the most sought-after high school players in the country. We watch Scott suffer through the dashed expectations and travel with him to his childhood home in the Baltimore ghetto.
— The New York Times

More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews

From The Critics

You don't have to be a Tar Heel or a Blue Devil to like To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever (a mouthful of a title) because it's funny, perceptive and smart. The best book about basketball is still David Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game, but Blythe holds his own in that particular rivalry.
— The Washington Post

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780060740238
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 2/28/2006
Edition number: 1
Pages: 368

Meet the Author

Will Blythe is the former literary editor of Esquire. A frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, he has written for the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Elle, and the Oxford American, and is the editor of the acclaimed book Why I Write. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Sportswriting. He grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and now lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

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

By Will Blythe

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

The Object of My Affliction

My Little Duke Problem

"A man who lives, not by what he loves
but what he hates, is a sick man."

-- Archibald Macleish

I am a sick, sick man. Not only am I consumed by hatred, I am delighted by it. I have done some checking into the matter and have discovered that the world's great religions and wisdom traditions tend to frown upon this.

Therefore, dear reader, I need your prayers. But even more than I do, the University of North Carolina's basketball team, the object of my obsession, needs them. Here is the depth of my sickness. It is several years back on a beautiful afternoon during basketball season. The cable is out. (Note to self: Kill Time Warner.) I am alone in my apartment in New York City, frantically hitting the refresh button on my computer screen, getting the updates of Carolina's shockingly bad performance against its archrival, Duke. So far, the Heels have shot 18 three-pointers and hit exactly five.

There is no end to my gloom. My father is in his grave, my marriage is kaput, my girlfriendis said to be in Miami (though what she is doing there I can't say, since we're not speaking), I have no income, and yet the thing that is driving me over the edge is a basketball game that I can't even see. North Carolina, my beloved North Carolina, is being brutalized by Duke, being outplayed by opponents who are too kind, too mannerly even to gloat. At least when your rival gloats, you know victory over you means something. Again and again, I hit the refresh button and am transported anew to a message board resounding with rending cries and moans from fellow Carolina obsessives, posting their dismay, miss by brutal miss. It's like tuning in to the distracted mutterings of old men alone on park benches, all over America. There are so many of us.

Grown men, presumably a lot like me, are spending their Sunday afternoon on the Inside Carolina message board, writing things like "I wanna hurl." BlueBlood cries, "My sixth-grade students are gonna rip me a new one."

While I myself never post, content to lurk, I've come to know the personalities of some of the posters. The clever but doomsaying Jeff Brown opened one season by writing an amusing, if despairing, list with the title "We Just Have a Few Minor Problems." A guy calling himself The Critic, who gets on my nerves with his constant pessimism, says, "Good night, folks."

I won't eat. I can't eat. Or maybe I should eat, since there is the possibility, faint perhaps, that through a small, apparently unconnected action, like ordering sushi from the Malaysian place down the street, I will change the karmic pattern at work in this game. It's chaos theory and not to be sniffed at. What's that classic example -- a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and two weeks later a major hurricane devastates the Bengal peninsula? Or, to put it in my terms, perhaps a tuna roll inside out will allow Jason Capel to actually hit a three-point shot. Maybe a bowl of chirashi will cause Brian Morrison to stop booting the ball out of bounds. And a nip of sake may teach goddamn Kris Lang (as he is known in my household) to hold on to the ball.

A former teacher of mine, a great scholar of Southern literature, believes that he can control games by maintaining the same posture throughout the contest and by doing some kind of weird voodoo gesture with his fingers every time an opposing player shoots a free throw. I'd rather try eating, so I order the sushi, but nothing works. Carolina is shooting 29 percent from the field, and Lang has exactly one rebound. Like a cancer patient, I continue to make bargains with God (who I am not sure even exists). But He must not be watching this game. Another Tar Heel three clangs off the rim. They lose by 26.

The message board erupts. Coolheel: "I could have shot 5 for 18 from 3 myself after having a six-pack, which was much needed to endure the flow of this stinker." UNCodeCorrect: "It's a huge shit sandwich and we're all going to have to take a bite."

Another fan writes, "I may have to sit out this year with a bad back," a pointed reminder of the hated Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski's condition during the 1994-95 season, when the Blue Devils suffered a beautifully horrible time of it, finishing 13 to 18. Overburdened, Krzyzewski took a leave of absence from coaching that year. Rumors swirled through the Research Triangle of the Duke coach in tears, huddled in his bedroom, wrapped in a bathrobe, muttering more inanities than Dick Vitale. Now, the normal human certainly would feel sympathy for a man in such pain. But I am a North Carolina fan and by definition, at least when it comes to Duke, not a normal man.

I came naturally by my prejudice in this matter from my father, William Brevard Blythe II. He was a lifelong North Carolinian, born in Mecklenburg County in 1928. His childhood during the Great Depression was paradisiacal, or so he portrayed it to his children, whom he liked to tease for being "city kids." (Until we got older and learned to hit back, we would actually cry when he called us this.) He had a pony and a dog; he roamed through the woods and the fields without supervision; he and a couple of friends had the initiative to build their own tennis court when they decided they wanted to learn the game. Like his father before him and like me after him, he graduated from the University of North Carolina. He could not understand why you might want to live in some other place. He loved his home state (trees, birds, soil, fish, crops, counties, ladies, barbecue) in a way that few people seem to love their home states anymore, home being a quaint, antique concept in a nomadic and upwardly mobile America.

Continues...

Excerpted from To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever by Will Blythe Copyright © 2006 by Will Blythe. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Anonymous

Posted April 18, 2009

Great read..

For anyone from the NC area, this book hits the nail on the head! If you live in NC you have to choose...Duke or UNC...So, although this book may not appeal to everyone, I loved it- laughed out loud on several occasions.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted May 8, 2006

Great writing by Blythe

My girlfriend bought this for me before our latest trip, with the inscription 'DCTarHeel: Feeding the mania.' I'm sure she didn't realize how fitting those words would be, but this book's author, Will Blythe, surely would appreciate it. I'm a fellow fanatic of his North Carolina Tar Heels, and this book was amazing in how closely it hit the mark with me. The writing style appears effortless and light, making this a very quick read, and Blythe manages to intertwine a great sense of humor, sometimes self-deprecatingly, throughout. As stated earlier, this book is virtually a memoir, showing the depth of the author's love for his Heels, and his investigation into the root causes of his hatred of dook. It also delves into the histories of the Carolina and dook schools, students, coaches, and players, as well as the author's very own (admittedly biased) family. I read this in three days and loved every page of it.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted March 30, 2006

Phenominal

I began reading this book thinking that it was going to be written by an author that has no bias to eiher Duke or Carolina. Little did I know that the author is a deep rooted Carolina fan. That being said, I am an avid Duke fan! This book is an unbelievable tale of the Duke and UNC rivalry no matter what side of it you are on. The story goes behind the scenes and digs deep with in individual players and personalities associated with these two teams. A must read!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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JDCNC

Posted July 7, 2011

Awesome for all Tarheels to read-this is our lives as we live them

Will is a truly gifted writer. I just completed my third reading, with six months in between each one. He explains in a very detailed and explicit way, what all North Carolinians who become members of the "True Blue Brotherhood " experience with each game, and expecially those with Dook. I laugh outloud often, when I come across situation comparisons that I put my wife and my neighbors through during a heated Carolina contest. I once thought I should have some shame about the way I reacted, but not anymore, thanks to Will and his justification for hate.
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BartMidwood

Posted November 12, 2008

BRAINLESS FLABBY PROSE

What more is there to say?
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Anonymous

Posted March 22, 2006

Undoudtedly my best read in years...far more than a sports book

Blythe's writing style would engage me even if he was writing about boiling water. A great memior of home, family, mothers, fathers, coaches, etc. All emotions revealed in this very smart and insightful story of the author's life growing up as a UNC fan and Duke 'hater', as well as the players, past and present, who participated in this unmatched rivalry. I would recommend this book to anyone who appreciates a well written story.
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Posted November 29, 2010

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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

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Overview

All Available Formats + Editions

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

More About This Book

Overview

Related Subjects

Editorial Reviews

Franklin Foer

From The Critics

Product Details

Meet the Author

Read an Excerpt

To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

The Object of My Affliction

Rating Distribution

Great read..

Great writing by Blythe

Phenominal

Awesome for all Tarheels to read-this is our lives as we live them

BRAINLESS FLABBY PROSE

Undoudtedly my best read in years...far more than a sports book