Anti-Duke Manifesto-The Complete Hate
By Matt Hamm
– Chapter Six –
The Fans
No essay on the subject can be complete without discussion of the mindless Duke fan base that has emerged over the past decade or so. As distinguished from the obnoxious student body that at least has a reason to support the team, these are the fair-weather fans that simply root for whichever team enjoys a winning tradition at a given point in time. They are the folks we see in four-wheel drives donning Blue Devil baseball caps and championship bumper stickers. Neither the Duke fan nor his close friends or family members attended Duke, but they have all purchased Blue Devil apparel from a Durham County Wal-Mart.
Unheard of during Krzyzewski’s early years, this growing collection of gullible dupes also buys into the media’s misplaced love for Duke by believing that the program and its coach are class unmatched. Most of the fans are North Carolinians, who, perhaps not unreasonably, assume that the school’s central state location is reason enough to justify an allegiance to it. Because the Blue Devil fan has no firsthand experience with the school, he has no idea that the vast majority of the student body (eighty-five percent) is imported, with a large percentage comprising smug Northeastern carpetbaggers who constantly mock North Carolina and its native residents. Much of the independent Duke fan base consists of teen and pre-teen fans, a fact that confirms the necessity of compulsory education and minimum age drinking laws.
Like the school, the Duke fan refuses to comprehend Duke’s many failures and somehow spins them into absurd distortions. The Duke fan is convinced that Duke players dominate in the NBA and creates various myths to hide the endless embarrassing proof to the contrary. He has come to believe that Cherokee Parks is a renowned Indian retirement community, rather than a classic NBA flop whose most distinguishing feature is a hideous assortment of tattoos. The perception that other schools are rude and cruel to Duke players, completely without cause, is another great example of this distorted mindset. The Duke fan honestly believes that Mike Krzyzewski is handsome and marvels at his ability to coach ACC basketball for a quarter of a century without sprouting a single grey hair.