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 girlfriend is 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 Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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HarperCollins
ISBN: 0-06-074023-X
