The day after Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha were killed, Marcus Paige shared a video on Twitter. The clip starts with Deah and Marcus posing for a picture and going to shake hands before Deah, in a red T-shirt, pulls back, makes an N.C. State wolf sign and waves as he walks away. Marcus, in humored disbelief, calls out, “You’re a Wolfpack?”
In our society, what team you’re with is one of the most polarizing identifiers you can have, whether that team is UNC or a religious affiliation. In sports, those teams take pride in hate. “You think you hate Duke? Well, I hate Duke so much...”
We love to point out the similarities between the Blue Devils’ coach and a certain sewer animal, to make fun of students who spend weeks in tents for tickets. In our alma mater, after chanting about how being a Tar Heel is a blessing, we follow it up with a curse: “Go to hell, Duke.”
When I first heard the idea of a Duke tribute T-shirt to the late Dean Smith, my first thought was that it likely wouldn’t see the light of day. My second thought was that I didn’t want it to. Such a kindhearted gesture would make it a bit harder to hate the supposedly soulless Crazies.
I don’t want to compare sports rivalries to religious intolerance, but if sports are a microcosm of society, that includes the dark parts, too. And there aren’t many parts darker than blind hatred.
Sports are a fantastic tool for bonding, but part of that bond is building a dangerous “us vs. them” mentality. In one basketball game in high school, a player on the opposing team was knocked to the floor after a foul. I helped him up. My coach benched me: “On the court, you two are enemies. No matter what.”
I don’t remember who won that game, or who we were playing. But I do remember the moment I lost some respect for a coach I loved.
Sports offer us an acceptable release of our darkest self. They make it commonplace to fight other people simply because they wear different colors than you do. They make it fun to hate blindly.
