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" Originally published in the March 2006 issue Hatred makes scholars of its practitioners, which is to say, all of us. We study the objects of our disdain like old dons in the British Library poring over ancient manuscripts. No less than lovers, good haters notice everything about their enemies. Every tendency, every inconsistency, every speck of newness. Hatred focuses the attention.  As a North Carolinian raised and educated in Chapel Hill, with a robust distaste for the privileges of class, I have hated Duke University basketball and all for which it stands for as long as I can remember. And my attention has been focused. All season long, I have been paddling up the Nile of my Duke hatred, looking for its source. And with every new meeting, my hatred has evanesced like fog in a bright sun. The Blue Devil players, past and present, even the Duke fans--I am mystified to say that I kind of like them. They aren&amp;#039;t that bad. Some are even better than that. Then, however, I was faced with the ultimate encounter that I had long been dreading during my voyage upriver--I was going to see Mike Krzyzewski. Or, as he is more commonly known to me and my fellow Carolina fans: the Rat. Ratface. Fuckhead. Satan. The Evil One. I would finally see whether Krzyzewski up close was the same guy I hated so easily from afar, whether man and symbol matched, whether there was any similarity between the dark prince of my psyche and the coach from eight miles down the road. A friend of mine mocked me. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re going to like him,&amp;quot; he said.  &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t know that!&amp;quot; I cried. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re going to like him. Nah nah nah.&amp;quot; The journalist in me was wary because he understood one of the basic perversities of journalism--that at first encounter, people are rarely as bad as you might expect. By such paradoxes are stories generated. The killer in his cell was so gracious, so mannerly, so calm. It was hard to believe that he ate an entire family of Icelandic farmers. The more evil their reputation, the more striking their simple decencies appear. When it came to Duke coaches over the years, I hadn&amp;#039;t always been a raving maniac. I knew that I hadn&amp;#039;t hated Vic Bubas (I was too young), Bucky Waters (his crew cut was so out-of-date that he inspired sympathy), Neill McGeachy (10--16), or even Bill Foster (don&amp;#039;t know why not). In contrast, I couldn&amp;#039;t remember a time when I hadn&amp;#039;t hated Mike Krzyzewski. So it was all a little surreal as he came toward me on an ordinary Thursday afternoon in the grimy bowels of Cameron Indoor Stadium. Here was a man I had cursed most foully for a quarter century. &amp;quot;Sit down, Rat!&amp;quot; I had commanded just the other night. And here was a coach who had most foully cursed everyone around him for the last twenty-five years. He cussed like a man whose mouth was on fire. He was a Chicago foundry spitting out hot nuggets of Fuck! and Bullshit! and Asshole! at officials, rival coaches, even--most especially--his own players. The injustice of life spewed out of him like the spray from a hydrant wrenched open in the summertime. He liked for his teams to stomp on even the weakest of opponents--the Valparaisos, the Bucknells, the Harvards--and he would curse them as they breathed their last.  We shook hands firmly. He led me into his old office at Cameron, the one he inhabited before moving into the tower next door. This was a windowless bunker of a place crowded with basketballs and Duke paraphernalia.  He was fidgety, sitting in his shorts and sport shirt and sneakers at an angle to his old desk in that old office--his legs stretched out in front of him. He jiggled them as we talked. His bony knees gave him an odd impression of vulnerability, a kid at summer camp. But the intensity! The famous Krzyzewski intensity radiated off him in waves, like heat rising off a highway baked by the August sun. He wore his game face. Before long, I actually made him cry. Yes, I did. But first, I asked him whether after twenty-five years in Durham he considered himself a North Carolinian. He did, he said. He and his wife loved North Carolina. They intended to retire here. He loved the beauty of the place, and he loved to cultivate its beauty in his garden. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t like to golf,&amp;quot; he explained. &amp;quot;I understand why people love golf. But I&amp;#039;m competitive in everything I do, and then I would have to be competitive in golf. And I just want to be outside growing things.&amp;quot; About his garden, Mike Krzyzewski spoke this afternoon like a nature poet, a man in love with trees and shrubs and flowers whose names he was slowly learning. A Chicago boy with more nature in his grasp than he ever imagined existed. &amp;quot;A tree, a tree would be good here--that&amp;#039;s what I think,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I can see it, I can watch it grow. I don&amp;#039;t know if it&amp;#039;s being Polish or whatever, but when I&amp;#039;m outside, I want to work. I want to cut something down, to prune a limb, to grow something.&amp;quot; In the garden, he competed, he admitted. Against the deer and the insects, against too much heat, not enough rain. &amp;quot;Nature, I guess,&amp;quot; he said. But not against people, the way he did everywhere else.  In the garden, Mike Krzyzewski got to be alone. He didn&amp;#039;t have to be Mike Krzyzewski there. Everywhere else he had to be Mike Krzyzewski, basketball coach, elder statesman, lightning rod, loved and detested in unequal measure. Some places he couldn&amp;#039;t even go. North Carolina might be his home state, but he went to Chapel Hill only once a year--when Duke played Carolina. He had never been on Franklin Street his entire life. &amp;quot;What would I do there,&amp;quot; he asked with a laugh, &amp;quot;except cause trouble?&amp;quot; But in the garden, it was different. &amp;quot;My fingernails get dirt under them,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Feeling dirt. I love that. You know what I mean? I don&amp;#039;t know whether it&amp;#039;s good or bad, but it&amp;#039;s what I like.&amp;quot; In his garden, Mike Krzyzewski was just another Polish guy, an accidental, patriotic American, late in middle age, trying to make things grow. He&amp;#039;d traveled a long way to this green place. Born in 1947, Krzyzewski came from Chicago, like the hero of Saul Bellow&amp;#039;s The Adventures of Augie March, and his own story seemed to echo that great novel&amp;#039;s opening, the pugnacious, hungry, prideful announcement of a guy from the neighborhood: &amp;quot;I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.&amp;quot; Krzyzewski&amp;#039;s parents, Bill and Emily, raised their two sons, Mike and Bill, now a retired fireman, on the first floor of a rented house on Cortez Street in a predominantly Polish neighborhood on the North Side. Relatives lived upstairs. His father worked as an elevator operator for nearly twenty-five years, a quarter of a century spent inside a windowless cab, opening and closing doors, riding up and down, up and down. Good morning, sir, good afternoon, sir, good night, sir. He saved a little money and opened a lunch joint in one of Chicago&amp;#039;s industrial sections. It failed. So then Bill Krzyzewski bought and ran a local bar on the South Side, which is what he was doing when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1969--his son Mike&amp;#039;s last year at Army. Mike hadn&amp;#039;t realized the full extent of his father&amp;#039;s illness; his family hadn&amp;#039;t wanted to bother him. That Krzyzewski had ended up at West Point playing for Bobby Knight, his first coaching mentor, he credited to his parents. Had he had his way, he would have gone off instead to a Big Ten school or Creighton University in Nebraska. His last two seasons of high school, he&amp;#039;d been the leading scorer in the Chicago Catholic League. His grades were good. Then Bobby Knight came calling. He wanted Krzyzewski to play for him at West Point. No, thank you, Krzyzewski said. For the next week, his parents muttered to each other in Polish. &amp;quot;Stupid Mike,&amp;quot; they muttered. They muttered within their son&amp;#039;s earshot: &amp;quot;Stupid Mike, stupid Mike.&amp;quot; Finally, Stupid Mike gave up. Resistance was futile. &amp;quot;When you have one parent who never went to high school,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;and another who never finished high school, they looked at West Point as an opportunity for their son to do something that only the rich and privileged got to do. I could have let me down, but I couldn&amp;#039;t let them down.&amp;quot; Krzyzewski came up believing that he was going to have to batter his way into a society that would have been quite happy for him to pound the North Side pavement for the rest of his life. And if Krzyzewski himself wasn&amp;#039;t exactly a working-class hero, he harbored no illusions about the way society worked. &amp;quot;It isn&amp;#039;t all equal,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;If it were, everybody would be born into the same pool and given the same advantages from the start.&amp;quot; His father paid for the unfairness with his name. &amp;quot;He didn&amp;#039;t go by the name Krzyzewski,&amp;quot; the son said. &amp;quot;He went by the name Kross. That&amp;#039;s how my father handled ethnic discrimination. That&amp;#039;s what he felt he had to do to get a job. &amp;quot;It made me better prepared to handle this environment,&amp;quot; Krzyzewski said. &amp;quot;C&amp;#039;mon, what are you going to do to me that wasn&amp;#039;t done to my dad at a worse level? Because they were Polish, my parents were worried that if they messed up in any way, they might not get the job. That&amp;#039;s the real world. So if you&amp;#039;re going to say something bad to me about Duke, is that going to hurt me? Are you kidding me? It&amp;#039;s only going to make me want to do better.&amp;quot; The son, it was becoming clear, would make up for his father&amp;#039;s having to counterfeit the family name, an act of concealment that bespoke fear and the cold sweat of ruin. Sportswriters everywhere would not only remember the family name--they would have to spell it, too! That&amp;#039;s Krzyzewski!  If Krzyzewski was any indication, the rocket fuel of American achievement was resentment, the desire to show someone--someone who never noticed you or your family, never believed in you or your family or anyone from your neighborhood--that you were not to be ignored, not then, not now, not ever. The past could never quite be shirked, and the future that would cauterize the insults of that past could never get quite close enough. More wins, more wins, more wins. Shovel them into the furnace, the engine, keep that thing firing, keep it burning red-hot. Three national championships--in 1991, 1992, and 2001--not enough. Five straight ACC tournament championships, from 1999 to 2003--not enough. At Duke, Krzyzewski had managed to go as far afield from the North Side of Chicago as he could go while at the same time re-creating for himself the sense of being embattled on the block, embedded in hostile territory, surrounded. He was a Catholic in the South, and there hadn&amp;#039;t been as many of those when he arrived to take over Duke in 1980 as there were now. It hadn&amp;#039;t been all that long ago that North Carolina had been considered missionary territory by the Catholic church.  But being Catholic in the state was not nearly as exotic as being at Duke. &amp;quot;With North Carolina and North Carolina State around, we&amp;#039;re a minority,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;But growing up in Chicago prepared me for that. It wasn&amp;#039;t so much race there--black-white--it was nationality. I was Polish and I was a minority. And I think that&amp;#039;s one of the reasons I&amp;#039;ve done so well here. Because we&amp;#039;re still a minority. &amp;quot;You have to have a thick skin,&amp;quot; Krzyzewski said. &amp;quot;If we did at a state school what we have done at Duke . . .&amp;quot; He stared at me. &amp;quot;Pick a state,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;North Carolina,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Not North Carolina,&amp;quot; he said. He was trying to make a point about North Carolina, I was to understand. In this state, Duke would never be considered the home team. &amp;quot;Okay. How about Rhode Island?&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Indiana,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;South Dakota,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Ohio,&amp;quot; Krzyzewski said. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s say at Ohio State that we did what we have done at Duke. There would be statues. There would never be anybody looking for anything wrong with what you did. It would be a different mind-set from the one we have within this community.&amp;quot; He was having work done on his house at the moment. Most of the workers were North Carolina and North Carolina State fans, he said. &amp;quot;People don&amp;#039;t understand the magnitude of the isolation here. We have to do without that support. And actually, there are eyes close on you, looking at you, not wanting you to do real well. It&amp;#039;s toughened us up. We&amp;#039;re never going to lose because we have too many people patting us on the back. Never.&amp;quot; He told me a story of how years ago, his oldest daughter, Debbie, had come home crying from Durham&amp;#039;s Northern High School one day. Some of her fellow students had been following her, taunting and teasing her because of her dad. &amp;quot;It astonished me,&amp;quot; Krzyzewski said, &amp;quot;but it didn&amp;#039;t completely surprise me. It made me think: But that happened to my mom and dad. And my first reaction to her was: Show your toughness. Maybe I should have showed more compassion. But it was a way of saying: You know what? We&amp;#039;re Polish, we&amp;#039;re from Duke. And you can&amp;#039;t do anything to hurt us. At the end of the day, we&amp;#039;re who we are, and we&amp;#039;re proud of it. And whatever you do, it&amp;#039;s not going to stop us from being that. That&amp;#039;s one of the reasons my daughter Debbie and I are so close. Because she went through more of that crap than the others. We hadn&amp;#039;t established ourselves. My other two daughters were able to respond from a position of strength: Look, you can say what you want, but we&amp;#039;re a national-championship program--that type of thing.&amp;quot; In a sense, it was Krzyzewski and family against the world. There was a 1940s feeling to the coach: the Polish squad leader of a bunch of American types--country boys, city slickers, smart guys, dumbasses. He believed in tough love and duty. It was your platoon dug in your foxholes against the oncoming hordes. The world was divided into us against them. His wife, Mickie, was a Southern Baptist from northern Virginia. They married on the day he graduated from West Point in 1969. She shared with her husband the sense of family as us against the world. A story recounted by the sportswriter Bill Brill is instructive. At the ACC tournament finals in 1991, Duke was playing North Carolina. Featuring Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley, and Grant Hill, the same Blue Devil team would go on to win the school&amp;#039;s first national championship, but they were having a hard time of it that afternoon.  At the time, Krzyzewski&amp;#039;s daughter Debbie was a sophomore at Duke. She was going out with Brad Evans, a sophomore at North Carolina. Before the game, Mickie laid out the ground rules to Brad for sitting with the family. &amp;quot;You are sitting courtside in the front row of the Duke section with the Krzyzew-ski family,&amp;quot; she explained. &amp;quot;There can&amp;#039;t be any outward displays of support for Carolina, not as long as you&amp;#039;re with us. This is family.&amp;quot; Family is family, but this was Duke versus North Carolina. The Tar Heels were in the process of scorching Duke; the final score would be 96 to 74.  The Tar Heels&amp;#039; Rick Fox punctuated the rout with a rim-rattling dunk, and the unfortunate Brad could not help himself. He clapped. A single clap, apparently, but the thwack could not have been more resounding had he fired a bazooka. Debbie jabbed her boyfriend in the side, and the two began to squabble, shortly thereafter to be separated by Mickie&amp;#039;s sister, Donna, who proceeded to sit between Brad and Debbie.  Mickie steamed. She decided that the family would leave the game before it ended. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not going to give Brad the satisfaction of seeing his team win,&amp;quot; she told her sister. Mike Krzyzewski happened to glance over at his family during the feud, as he sometimes did during games. And fourteen years later, he was not about to let Brad Evans off the hook. &amp;quot;My wife was probably upset that I might have seen that,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;He should have the right to . . . but not when he&amp;#039;s with us. Not that I&amp;#039;m looking at them all the time, but when I do look there, my wife wants me to see a uni?ed team.&amp;quot; Away games for Duke are now so acrimonious in the stands, he said, that Mickie rarely accompanies the team on the road anymore. &amp;quot;In the Catholic church we have an expression,&amp;quot; Krzyzewski said. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t put yourself in the occasion to sin.&amp;quot; He translated the expression into a dialect spoken more commonly in Chicago: &amp;quot;You know, don&amp;#039;t be an idiot.&amp;quot;  Family as enclave. It had started with his mother, Emily. By the time she died in 1996, she had seen her son win two national championships, and even now she was never far from his thoughts. Her maxims kept drifting up from his memories into the locker room, where his teams became accustomed to his mom&amp;#039;s homespun wisdom. &amp;quot;Get on the right bus, she used to tell me,&amp;quot; Krzyzewski said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d say, &amp;#039;I know which bus to get on, Mom. I know how to get around Chicago.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;d say, &amp;#039;No, no, no, Mike. I&amp;#039;m not talking about the Chicago Transit Authority. I mean if you get on someone else&amp;#039;s bus, make sure that person is good. Sometimes, people driving the bus will take you places you&amp;#039;ve never been before. And other times, you will drive the bus. Make sure you allow only good people on your bus. And you will take people to the good spots.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; In his own life, he said, he&amp;#039;d ridden a lot of good buses. The West Point bus. The Bobby Knight bus. The U. S. Army bus. The Duke bus. He&amp;#039;d allowed Shane Battier to drive his bus. Christian Laettner, too. Until his mother died, Krzyzewski called her after every game. &amp;quot;One day, she asked me: &amp;#039;Mike, how did all this happen?&amp;#039; &amp;quot; She meant the championships, the lionizing of her son, the good fortune that had been showered on them all. Just as Krzyzewski started to tell me the story, he stopped. He cleared his throat. He turned his head to the side. His cheeks ?ushed. His eyes reddened, and then tears began to well. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m going to start crying,&amp;quot; he said. He cleared his throat again and went on, his voice thick with emotion: &amp;quot;She asked me how it happened, and I said, &amp;#039;Because of you.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; &amp;quot;She said, &amp;#039;C&amp;#039;mon, c&amp;#039;mon.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; &amp;quot;And I said, &amp;#039;Mom, if I could do as well in what I do with the resources I have as you did with what you had, I&amp;#039;d be unbelievable.&amp;#039; I said, &amp;#039;Mom, you did better than me. I&amp;#039;ll never be that good.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; The planes of Krzyzewski&amp;#039;s face were lit by various intensities of red. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s the reason I&amp;#039;m not afraid to lose,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s because I always had her. I didn&amp;#039;t know I was armed this way until I was well into my adulthood. And you know what she wanted from me? Nothing. I tried to give her money, and she&amp;#039;d give it back to the kids at Christmas. She said, &amp;#039;Mike, I got enough.&amp;#039; C&amp;#039;mon . . . who is like that? She&amp;#039;s a saint.&amp;quot; I knew what he meant. I told him about my own mother, her generosity and kindness. I decided to leave out the part about her feelings toward Duke and Krzyzewski. Why ruin a husky moment?  &amp;quot;Then you know,&amp;quot; Krzyzewski said. The whole exchange had a kind of lull-in-battle intimacy. The tiny office hardly contained the rawness of emotion. Here was the man who had come to represent everything on earth I loathed, and he was crying in front of me. We were woo-wooing about our mothers. The world was too damned complicated. Man, this hatred gig was tough.  Krzyzewski pulled himself together when I asked him why Duke was the most hated team in America. (Bye-bye, mamas.) I proposed that the eighties were Duke&amp;#039;s decade. They were America&amp;#039;s team. Back then, the Blue Devils were like boy bands--squeaky-clean, cute, irrepressible, mostly white (with an occasional black guy, like the point guard Johnny Dawkins, singing lead). They played hard, they played together, and they had the added advantage of being the underdog, the team on the rise. They were the perfect embodiment of the Reagan years--led by a conservative, cranking out the PR, representing an institution peopled by those unapologetically in pursuit of personal success. The Duke of that era finally engaged in their epochal confrontation with the forces of darkness (i.e., a predominantly black team) in 1990 and 1991 when they took on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in the Final Four. In the first game, they were slaughtered. In the semifinals the following year, they upset the previously unbeaten Running Rebels and beat Kansas (and Roy Williams) in the finals to win it all at last. In the nineties, by contrast, Duke became the team America loved to hate. How had this happened? If I may venture a proprietary guess, the answer had to do with the mutterings and complaints of college-basketball fans all over the country who discerned a double standard being applied to the Blue Devils. They played physical defense and got called for fewer fouls than their opponents, most notably against Maryland in the 2001 Final Four. There was the Duke sanctimony--the holier-than-thou attitude, the We&amp;#039;re scholars and basketball players, unlike the rest of you hired hands. And they were slavishly praised by lapdogs like Dick Vitale. What made Duke so special? Over time, these solitary judgments had coalesced into a popular verdict: Duke was America&amp;#039;s most hated team. How did Krzyzewski explain this? &amp;quot;In the eighties, we hadn&amp;#039;t won yet,&amp;quot; he said dryly. So it&amp;#039;s just winning? I asked. &amp;quot;In the history of sports,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;if there&amp;#039;s a team that wins a lot, a certain percentage of people are going to want them to lose. I understand it.&amp;quot; And you believe that explains the degree of hatred? I asked. &amp;quot;Hate is a strong word,&amp;quot; he said. It seemed an accurate one, I said. I was speaking from experience. &amp;quot;I guess in a sports way, they hate us,&amp;quot; he acknowledged. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re not a state school. We don&amp;#039;t represent the masses.&amp;quot; So here was class again. But oh, the ironies: Krzyzewski had scrapped his way out of Chicago, a son of the working class, hyperaware of every slight lurking around him, and he had ended up doing the bidding of a private college that had come to represent rich kids and wealth despite that institution&amp;#039;s having begun as Normal College, an impoverished Methodist school in nineteenth-century North Carolina. The only thing that was normal here was the degree to which the integers of class and privilege in America got all scrambled. Suddenly, I saw Krzyzewski as an Indian fighting for the British Empire against the local settlers. So how does all this hatred affect you? I asked. &amp;quot;It makes me want to win even more,&amp;quot; he said.  As our time together neared its end, I had to admit: Winning, like deals with Satan, seemed to keep a man younger than his years. Victory toned the skin, thickened the hair (or maybe in Krzyzewski&amp;#039;s case dyed it--we weren&amp;#039;t going to talk about that), and lent vitality to the manner.  Winning was addictive. And yet there was something foolish about that craving and its undignified postures--at least to the extent that mastering loss by learning to live with it becomes an essential lesson as one ages. Or then again, maybe you could just win a lot. Krzyzewski listened to me go on about winning and losing. Then he said, &amp;quot;I believe in going on to the next play. I&amp;#039;m on a continuum. For me, there&amp;#039;s never one event that&amp;#039;s an ending.&amp;quot; This seemed like an optimistic note on which to depart. We shook hands, and I went back to Chapel Hill.  I left Krzyzewski that afternoon with my spirit thoroughly complicated, even vexed. The natural-gas cleanliness of my hatred, its warming joys and pleasures, had been replaced by the murk of actual knowledge. But this was surely a step toward greater morality--toward fellow-feeling and universal brotherhood--was it not? So why was I sinking into the tar pits of melancholy? For the next few weeks, I studied Krzyzew-ski working the sideline, and my feelings remained a briar patch of confusion. I&amp;#039;d lost all clarity and focus. He&amp;#039;s still such an asshole! the beast within me said. Look at him berating the ref. He&amp;#039;s complicated, I replied, to a look of horror and disgust from myself. You&amp;#039;ve gone soft, the beast said. You&amp;#039;ve lost the conviction that there is a right and a wrong. You&amp;#039;ve descended from the high grounds of hatred into the swamp of moral equivalence. He stands for everything you hate. It&amp;#039;s no accident that he ended up at Duke. You poor, weak bastard. I&amp;#039;m sorry, I whimpered to myself. I wish I&amp;#039;d never met the man. And then it happened. One afternoon, I was watching Duke play Texas. The Blue Devils were putting the steel-capped boot to the Longhorns. And there, standing at the bench, his face contorted in a rictus of hateful intensity, was Mike Krzyzewski. Suddenly, I was renewed. All the hatred in me broke through the dam created by our meeting and flooded through me like intravenous glucose. My spirit raised itself off the gurney of its virtue and shouted: &amp;quot;Give the bastard a technical!&amp;quot; If he could hate, so could I. In fact, my good old North-Carolina-loving Duke-hatin&amp;#039; would be fuel for his winning. (I would actually be doing him a favor!) And in that moment, I realized that an honest hatred was better by far than a dishonest piety.  &amp;quot;T the Rat up!&amp;quot; I yelled every time Mike Krzyzewski got off the bench for the rest of the game. The beast and I were back in perfect harmony. And all was right with the world. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/a1477/esq0306coachk-226/>