NCAA Basketball: Why fans enjoy rival’s losing as much as their own winning

You can’t help but be excited any time your NCAA Basketball team wins a game, well not your team, I should have said when Duke wins a game, but why does it feel so wickedly nice when the team you root against loses?

I had just finished watching NCAA Basketball team Duke steamroll Wake Forest and I was happy.  Duke looked dominant and committed while building a large early lead that they would never relinquish.  Coach K also continued to play the deep rotation that has been working so well this year, so what’s not to like?

Due to the big lead and lack of drama, I would occasionally wander off on the internet and I stumbled upon an interesting headline that contorted my face into a contorted sneer.  It proclaimed the Tar Heels had lost in historic, and therefore embarrassing, fashion earlier that day.  My happiness bolstered even further, I waited until the end of the Duke game before reveling in the soul-crushing demise of UNC by watching the last five minutes and overtime for myself.

It was glorious.  Just a few days earlier, I got to see my alma mater, Pitt, go into the Dean Dome and break their own historic losing streak on the road in the ACC.  That was glorious as well.  I had a satisfied smile on my face while watching the Duke game, but to witness Clemson rip the Heels’ hearts out after Pitt had so only a few nights before, well that’s a different type of satisfaction born from a long and spiteful disdain of them.

It wasn’t as fun when Clemson did the same thing to Duke a few days later but I wrote this before that so I’m pretending it was all a bad dream.  My smile had a wicked, little twinge to it and watching Roy pound that table in frustration warmed my heart in ways I know are wrong.  I know it’s not good or noble to take pleasure in other’s misery, but to be honest, if it feels that good then I just don’t want to be right.

I know the hopes and dreams, not to mention the possible fragile states, of young hearts and minds, is a hard thing to root against.  To watch their anguish while realizing your own elation is a direct product of that pain is probably something that should be examined as a society, but thankfully it’s not.

Sports is pretty much the only arena that allows and welcomes disdain for others based on your own sense of worth and inadequacy.  Politics seems to be catching up, but I’ll leave that alone.  I’m sure I’ll get enough hate from my UNC bashing, but this feels too good, so bring on the loathing.

Even though I realize that I, as a 44-year-old man, should take no pleasure in the pain of young men and kids even, I do.  To justify this wanton evil within, I can say I root against and relish the most heartbreaking downfalls of the North Carolina Tar Heels and Kentucky Wildcats, because the cast of characters is constantly changing which focuses the animus at the institutions and not any particular players or coaches, although in the cases of Tyler Hansbrough and John Calipari, c’mon, that’s just not fair.

Another story update: with Zion’s introduction on the NBA stage, the replays of his Duke games have been re-airing so I got to watch their dismantling of Kentucky at last year’s Champion’s Classic.  I love that I can see, over and over, the stunned face and wide eyes of Coach Cal as he tried to focus through the shell shock to keep it under 40 or the tears falling off the cheek of Ol’ Roy into a baby blue and plaid jacket that seems much too festive a resting place for such sadness and disappointment.

I know, I know, in all likelihood I’m going to Hell so I might as well enjoy the ride while I’m on it.  I can at least take solace in the fact that there are others like me, many others actually, who join the mob mentality that sports create.  It lets me know I am not alone in my wicked ways and shamefulness.  I have even heard there are some Duke haters out there if you can imagine such a world.

Although our collective attitude for our rivals does have a perverse kind of societal acceptance for our moral shortcomings, we really do know the truth about ourselves and just don’t give a rat’s —.  We all know when the pigs are happiest right?

Rolling around in it.  Feeling that mud caressing their skin, wiggling on their backs to scratch those itches that are the hardest to get to, the deepest and most intimate, yet are the most wickedly pleasurable to satisfy.  Getting dirty.  Being dirty and not caring because that mud is so warm and so soft and that feeling is so good and so wrong that it just has to be right.