A Rival Rivalry
A commercial for Nokia cell phone covers that feature the logos of ACC basketball teams, begins with two attractive young businesspeople, a man and a women, walking through the lobby of an office building. The woman realizes she has forgotten her cell phone and asks the man if she can borrow his. He hands her his phone, which has a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Tar Heels logo on it. The woman promptly throws the phone out the window, and explains, Duke. Class of 94. The man nods, understanding completely.
Last year I transferred to Harvard from Duke University. I am very happy to be here. However, the week of the Harvard-Yale game is a very hard time for me because it brings back the most amazing experiences of my college career that I know I will never have here at Harvard. What I miss most about Duke is its profound sense of community, and nothing reminds me more of its absence here than the Harvard-Yale game. Duke basketball was the unifying force behind the close-knit student body, and the Duke-UNC rivalry was the epitome of this phenomenon. When I compare this rivalry to Harvard-Yale, I want to climb into a hole, puke up my guts until Im vomiting bile, and then die.
Duke students go to great lengths to get seats at regular, non-UNC games. Students wake up at 8am on a Saturday to get a bracelet in front of Cameron Indoor Stadium, go back to sleep, and then get up at 2pm to get on line for the 7:30pm game. Once the game starts, there is no time to rest. Dukies are always on their feet and cheering constantly. When the opposing team dribbles, fans say Boing, boing, boing. They shout Whooooa when an opposing player holds the ball, Pass! when he passes it, Shot! when he shoots and Miss! when he misses (or Awww, if he gets the basket). For Duke players, they shout Whos your daddy? Battier! for Shane Battier and cheer J-Will, J-Will rock you! for Jason Williams.
The best cheers are spontaneous and usually very cruel. For example, University of Florida power forward Udonis Haslem, is very, shall we say, morbidly obese. At the Florida game, chants of Please dont eat me! Clap-clap clap-clap-clap shook Cameron, as well as the Fat Albert greeting, Hey, hey, hey! When UNC came to Cameron two years ago, their star guard, Ed Cota, had recently been arrested for drunk driving. Some enterprising Blue Devil fan got the idea of distributing thousands of copies of a fake Cota mug shot to the crowd, who held them up throughout the game while chanting, Go to jail, Ed Cota, go to jail (to the rhythm of the traditional anti-UNC taunt, Go to Hell, Carolina, go to Helleat shit). Ex-Dukies at Harvard used to be able to reenact such rituals at the Crimson Sports Grille, where former Duke undergrads, now Harvard grad students, and transfers like myself could watch the game as a group. But now that the Grille is gone, we Dukies are going to have to find some other place, and find it we will, my friend.
To really understand the Duke-UNC rivalry, you have to understand tenting. Starting in January, groups of students camp out in tents in front of Cameron to get seats for the March game, creating a small community called Krzyzewski-ville (K-ville for short). For the next two months, there must always be at least one person from the group in tent or the group forfeits its place in line. As ridiculous as this sounds, it used to be worse. People used to starting camping out before winter break until the administration restricted tenting to spring semester only. During my admissions interview at Harvard, I was asked whether the Duke administration thought its students had better things to do than camp out for two months for a basketball game, to which I replied, What more could an administration want than to have students willing to camp out in the cold for no other reason than to support its school? This is something that would never happen at Harvard (Duke students wouldnt camp out for three weeks to support a labor movement, but thats another story). The Duke administration encourages tenting; it spent $40,000 on installing Ethernet jacks in the ground by Cameron so that students can have access to the Internet during tenting season.
The night before the game Coach Krzyzewski gives a speech to K-ville and the team comes out to take pictures and sign autographs. People drink a lot of beer (which, by the way, is on the meal planseriously, it is). During the game, the crowd is even wilder than during the seasons normal games and certain cheers are reserved especially for Carolina, such as Hey UNC, who the fuck you come to see? Duke, Duke, motherfucker! Duke, Duke, motherfucker! When we win, everyone spills onto the Quad and builds a huge bonfire out of the large wooden benches that are in front of every dorm.
My first Harvard-Yale weekend is nothing like this. An early indication to me that there is no real rivalry between the two schools was that Harvard students and Yale students seem to actually be friends. Duke students hate UNC students, and more importantly, look down on them. It is hard for Harvard students to be quite as snobby in regard to Yale, although we try to. Our safety school cheer rings pretty hollow given the large number of kids who choose Yale over Harvard or come to Harvard because they didnt get into Yale. At Duke, however, we all know UNC sucks, and they think that we are elitist, private-school snobs.
This doesnt mean that I am not looking forward to this weekend. After I puke and die, I will have a good time. The Harvard Yale rivalry is sort of like Hannukah, which reminds us Jews of our victory over the Assyrians, but we really dont hate the Assyrians anymore, do we? In fact, Im not even sure they exist. Are they the Syrians? I dont know. The point is, its a good time, and its the celebration of Americas two greatest, oldest educational institutions. Go Harvard. Eat shit, Elis! Yay!
Thomasin D. Franken is a Sociology concentrator in Quincy House. Her father is rumored to be Al Yankovic.