Book Review: "To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever"

The front and back covers of the paperback edition of Will Blythe's book.

Tobacco Road Rage

Review by FRANKLIN FOER

The New York Times

Published: April 2, 2006

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.

357 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $24.95.

WILL BLYTHE is the Samuel P. Huntington of hoops. Huntington, you may remember, wrote the seminal work of post-cold-war party pooping, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order." While nearly everybody else lyrically portrayed a beautiful future of globalization and a world freed from ideological struggle, Huntington forcefully warned of an impending boom of tribalism and hate — precisely the big themes of Blythe's book. But instead of writing on conflagrations between Hindus and Muslims, Blythe has devoted himself to explicating a far more proximate example of a civilizational showdown: the clashing supporters of the men's basketball programs at the University of North Carolina and Duke University.

Quite unlike Huntington — and quite fortunately for readers — Blythe, a longtime magazine editor, has not a lick of scholarly detachment. He passionately supports North Carolina, and just as rabidly despises Duke. He describes the Dukies' "Nuremberg-rally cheers." The Duke coach, Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K), is "The Rat. Ratface. . . . Satan. The Evil One." When the crowd at a Duke basketball game explodes, he hopes that it might really explode — "you know, blue-painted body parts shooting through the air, cheerleaders spiraling above the city of Durham, all those obnoxious students and that out-of-state arrogance disappearing in one bright blast."

Blythe spends a lot of time hyping the Tobacco Road rivalry as the greatest in sport — a bit too much time, if you ask me, or Red Sox and Yankees fans, or supporters of Michigan and Ohio State football, or anyone who has watched a European soccer derby. But he is, by all objective measures of sporting bile, not far from the mark. These two programs are the hugely successful aristocracy of their sport. They reside within eight miles of each other, a proximity that obviously heightens the ill will. "We share the same dry cleaners," Coach K has explained. There's also a sociological subtext to their games that eludes most outsiders: where North Carolina is a public university and draws heavily from within the state, Duke is private, endowed by tobacco money and heavily populated by imports from the Northeast. At least that's Blythe's partisan understanding.

For an entire season — the glorious 2004-5 championship season, as it turns out — Blythe returns to live with his mother and follow his Tar Heels. He isn't just searching for a pretext to turn his all-consuming passion into a book advance. Hovering over the book — and clearly his prime motive for writing it — is his recently departed father. (In an opening scene, the minister who just presided over his father's funeral continually whispers basketball scores to Blythe.) His dad loved the state of North Carolina and the University of North Carolina, where he taught, but his curmudgeonly character prevented him from joining his son in his highly irrational fandom. And his father considered Blythe's emigration to New York City an act of betrayal. Blythe never explicitly spells out how this book will help him mourn — and there are long stretches where his father doesn't appear. But if I had to guess, Blythe wants to use the book to explain his basketball obsession to his father, to show how, at his core, he shares precisely the same passions and values.

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.

Fortunately, Blythe goes far beyond the facile John Feinstein "inside a season" formula. As promised in the title, he uses the rivalry to explicate the nature of hatred — "paddling up the Nile of my Duke hatred, looking for its source." In this quest, he visits the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman and meditates on the 19th-century English essayist William Hazlitt. But Blythe provides no dazzling insights into the universality of hatred, let alone its presence in sports. And that's hardly a fault. Rather than formulate broad conclusions, he sticks to the peculiarities of the Carolina Piedmont and his own biography. This leads him to digress on Southern Presbyterianism — whose cool Calvinist tendency leads white North Carolinians to seek more effusive spiritual outlets, like basketball — and the suburbanization of his state — which leads North Carolinians to seek authentic emotional experiences, like basketball. He pulls off these generalizations because he writes amusingly, self-deprecatingly and often beautifully.

Only one part of the book grows tiresome. He keeps returning to a colorful cast of eccentrics, whose entire existences are consumed by the rivalry — we meet, for instance, a Duke supporter named Crazy Towel Guy and an Episcopal priest whose obsessive collecting of Carolina paraphernalia culminates in his divorce. None of this feels fresh, however vividly Blythe depicts his subjects. From Nick Hornby's "Fever Pitch" to Warren St. John's "Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer," the crazed fan has received his fair share of attention — and then some.

Toward the end, Blythe's book takes a very un-Huntingtonian turn. As he encounters Duke fans, he begins to realize that he might not truly hate them. They don't necessarily belong to a morally inferior branch of subhumans. Reading these passages, you wonder if hate isn't too strong a word to describe the emotions at play. For all the passions of these games, they never end in riots or physical violence. Fans of the two programs harbor deep respect for their foes. We are, after all, talking about two elite institutions of higher education and a thoroughly bourgeois set of basketball devotees. While he may have begun his journey along the Nile of Duke hatred anticipating a heart of darkness, he discovers something far closer to sweetness and light.


Franklin Foer, the editor of The New Republic, is the author of "How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization."