Rivalry Spans Sacred to Profane

Few things in life are eternal, unless you count death. The ineffable quality of the rest is open to variance in viewpoint and belief, including our certainty that particular allegiances, standards, concerns and passions will endure through the ages. As Americans, even our oldest traditions rarely extend back more than a few centuries. And when it comes to American sports rivalries, 100 years is a good, healthy run.

That said, contemporary folks have made a good start at perpetuating the Duke-North Carolina rivalry, as two recent instances illustrate.

The other day, a memorial service was held at Duke Chapel for Dr. Elizabeth Hart King, who died earlier this month at age 73. A Durham native, King graduated from Duke in 1950. Eight years later she was among the first women to earn a medical degree at Duke University Medical Center, where she practiced for nearly 40 years. Besides helping others and supporting the university, Dr. King’s most notable interests were her four sons and their families, her needlepoint work, and Duke basketball.

“She was a Duke fan through thick and thin, and a walking history of the program,” wrote son Julian, instrumental in the ongoing success of the unauthorized Web site, Duke Basketball Report. “She went to every Dixie Classic game, and every ACC and Final Four that Duke was part of" except when sidelined by illness in 2001.

Dr. King had season tickets from 1960 through 2007 at Cameron Indoor Stadium, where her family received friends following her funeral service. A quick glance at the mourners at Duke Chapel revealed former Blue Devil players Jack Marin and Steve Vacendak and ex-assistant coach Lou Goetz. Duke president Richard Brodhead also slipped quietly into a pew and participated in the service.

In paying tribute to Dr. King and her interests, the officiant, the Rev. Canon Dr. Samuel Wells, Dean of the Chapel, made sure to mention Duke basketball. And that included, the man of faith noted to the pleased chuckles of most in attendance, her fervent desire that the Blue Devils succeed while teams from the university in Chapel Hill be condemned to the flames of eternal damnation.

Consistent with that theme, but at the other end of the spectrum in numerous respects, the fires of the Duke-North Carolina rivalry were stoked by the mid-March posting of a profanity-laced rap effort called “This is Why Duke Sucks.”

Posted on You Tube, the burgeoning portal for idiosyncratic, non-professional videos, the commentary created by Peter “PMD” Rosenberg and directed by Michael Wolcott was an immediate hit. Spurred by Gerald Henderson’s inadvertent blow to Tyler Hansbrough, the 3-minute, 22-second video is an alternately clever and mean-spirited parody -- with Duke basketball as the target -- of the hit song “This is Why I’m Hot.” (The original by the New York rapper Sean Mims, which hit the No.1 spot on the “Billboard Hot 100” earlier this year, includes such impeccably logical lyrics as “I’m hot ‘cause I’m fly, you ain’t ‘cause you not.”)

Impressively, since being posted barely a week ago in the comedy category, the video excoriating the Duke program, coach Mike Krzyzewski, various Blue Devil players, and a supposedly obsequious Dick Vitale has attracted just shy of a half-million viewers. Earlier this week a “prude version” without profanity, deemed “safe for work,” was posted.

You Tube has 48 videos and counting on the general theme of derogating Duke, showing everything from Josh McRoberts crying on the bench after a loss to Carolina to bonfires on Franklin Street following a Tar Heel victory.

By the way, You Tube is the site where a video called “The Pit Breakup,” purportedly revealing a couple ending their relationship before a crowd on the UNC campus, was posted six weeks. The staged, profanity-laced exchange between Ryan Burke and Mindy Moorman was so realistic it made the local and national news. Even so, to date the breakup has attracted a hundred thousand fewer viewings than “This is Why Duke Sucks.”

On Sunday, You Tube will announce its first, user-selected video awards in seven categories, comedy included. The Duke slam is not among the contenders.

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Fallout is sure to continue from last week’s cheering in the Lawrence Joel Coliseum media room, reported here first, that followed Duke’s NCAA loss to Virginia Commonwealth. Others on the scene subsequently wrote about the unprofessional display, and word filtered back to Duke folks, many of whom were in Buffalo while UNC-oriented media types and other, supposedly unaffiliated journalists celebrated the Blue Devils’ defeat.

The outburst at Winston-Salem may reflect changing, or rather eroding, standards in journalism, in sports and beyond.

Coaches such as North Carolina’s Roy Williams lament the different tacks taken by journalists with professional training compared with others who utilize the Internet or airwaves to report without seeking both sides of a story, identifying sources, or seeking multiple confirmations of their information. Cleveland Cavaliers general manager Danny Ferry, visiting the Triangle earlier this season to scout talent, noted that beat writers who cover his NBA team feel free to post rumors on-line that do not meet the publishing standards of their newspapers.

Perhaps it is a sign of changing mores that reporters felt free to cheer Duke’s competitive demise. Advocacy journalism has become increasingly common, and popular, particularly on cable TV.

Those who assert media members are objective are fooling themselves. Most everyone has rooting prejudices, however well hidden, even if only in favor of a person or league.

But overt fairness and emotional detachment are essential if reporting and commentary are to be trusted. Cheering in the press box is quickly quashed, or used to be. If that has changed, readers and viewers will understandably look for the hidden motive in everything they read or see, causing the already-uncertain credibility of the media to continue its decline. And that is no small matter.

As for those in the press room who apparently resented having their behavior noted, they might take this as an occasion for learning. Individual media members are rarely on the receiving end of coverage, a gap in education that likely limits their empathy with others in the public eye.