[dropcap]S[/dropcap]hortly after Duke’s basketball team won the ACC Tournament two weeks ago, a group chat between my buddies and I began blowing up. Our friend Phil, an avid Blue Devil fan, sent a litany of texts explaining in no uncertain terms that, as Duke was far and away the best college basketball team in the country, it would only be a matter of time before they’d be cutting down the nets once again as longtime coach Mike Krzykefsy took home his sixth national title.
The messages were peppered with casual denigrations of the teams the rest of us supported and rooted in the deep-seated sense of entitlement that Cameron Crazies – much like Yankee fans – seem to exude.
On March 19, the Duke Blue Devils got eliminated in the second round of the NCAA tournament. Despite it ruining his bracket, sports editor Mike Smith couldn’t be happier.
So boy did it feel good on Sunday night when the Dukies got eliminated by South Carolina.
The Blue Devils were trailing by 10 in the final minutes when we started letting Phil have it. Memes of Duke guard/villain Grayson Allen tripping random opponent, images of Blue Devils with Jordan Crying-Faces superimposed on them, second-by-second updates of a score that was increasingly going the Gamecocks’ way; we were pouring it on thick.
30 minutes after the game, Phil finally responded to us, although both AP Style and common decency pretty much prohibit me from telling you what he said.
Outside of watching your own team win (my Villanova squad was similarly eliminated in the second round on Saturday), seeing the teams you despise – especially when your friends root for them – can provide some of the purest joy in the sports world.
I don’t think it makes me a bad guy to take such delight in the failures of my buddies’ teams, but that’s just the nature of sports. Heck, that kind of schadenfreude even caused me to root against my own self-interests. I had Duke advancing to the finals in most of my tourney pools but it was absolutely worth having my brackets busted in order to see Coach K get bounced by a No. 7 seed.
As it turned out, this weekend turned out to be a veritable cornucopia of petty fandom on my part. On Saturday night, the USA knocked the Dominican Republic out of the World Baseball Classic, and although I was proud that the Stars and Stripes lived to play another day, thanks in part to a spectacular home run-robbing catch by Adam Jones, I was positively cackling at the idea of being able to twist the knife a little bit when I saw some of my friends from San Pedro the following morning.
I had a litany of “Platano Power” jokes lined up to go, and suffice it to say, I used them all.
Maybe it’s an ugly part of sports fandom, maybe it’s spiteful, but honestly, right now, I don’t care, because I got the chance to gloat.
Just please don’t make fun of me when the Red Sox finish third in the American League East this year. That would be supremely uncool.
