A Tale of Two Fanbases

Americans don't really study history any more -- and they certainly don't study the history of boring white people in the South who use Miracle Whip and believe in a triune God. And this puts those of us who are a part of that history at a big disadvantage. Others may know of their grandparents who landed at Ellis Island or how their family was shipped off to an internment camp during World War II. But the folks who grow up in places like Paducah, Kentucky and Hickory, North Carolina never learn much about their ancestors and how they got to be the way they were. And that's a shame, because even if you don't care about history, history cares about you and is always pushing you in one direction or another.

Take the fans who root for the University of Kentucky. As they prepare to descend on Newark tomorrow in their thousands for a holy war with UNC, they are one of the best-known fanbases in America. We are famously controversial, angry, vengeful, and passionate -- the sort of people who flood arenas, blow up Internet polls, and send and endless string of furious e-mails and tweets to Bristol, Connecticut and New York City, attacking ESPN and the rest of the media for its treatment of our heroes.

But how did we get to be this way? And why are we so different from the wine-and-cheese crowd who root for the Tar Heels, and who move through life with the confidence of people who have always gotten special treatment? How can two states with so many surface similarities produce such different fan bases? The answers can be found in history.

Let's start with UK. In 1930, Kentucky was dominated by a small wealthy group of people who lived in and around Louisville and Lexington, while the rest of the state groaned through life in countless small towns, seeking the consolation of religion -- or drink -- for the inherent unfairness of their lives. (Sound familiar?) Because of the Depression, Kentucky was ripe for a populist rebellion against its overlords -- a fact shown by the election of Happy Chandler to the governor's mansion a few years later. The true leader of Kentucky's populists, however, arrived in 1930 to make his mark in basketball. Adolph Rupp was, of course, a basketball genius. But he was so much more -- a rhetorician, a great hater, a wit, and a man who devoted his whole life to the principle that the UK basketball team should crush everyone it played.

Rural Kentuckians had already learned that basketball could spur small-town rivalries and fill the bleak period between Christmas and Easter. Rupp showed them that it could be so much more -- that it could serve as a morality play in which the virtues of populism (hard work and team spirit) prevailed over the sneaky plotting of elites (who usually took the form of referees and journalists). From an early period, Rupp took his teams around the country -- especially up to New York -- showing everyone that in this arena, at least, Kentucky was better than anyone. As he went, he left controversy everywhere, because he feuded with almost anyone of consequence.

All of this, of course, embarrassed the fox hunters and golf players who ran the state -- as you can still see if you read the Lexington Herald Leader or listen to the sneering attitude toward basketball among Lexington intellectuals. But the elites were smart enough not to interfere with their state circus. No matter how many controversies and scandals might plague the program, they realized that a winning basketball team was truly the best opiate of the masses.

So go ahead -- make fun of our passion, sneer at our conspiracy theories, laugh at our worries over announcer bias. But just remember: we learned all of it from one of the greatest coaches of all time. And, in fact, UK is always at its best when it is at its most rabid. To overcome its numerous demographic and economic disadvantages, the UK program must be led by someone as obsessive as Rupp himself. A gentleman like Tubby Smith may please the smart guys in Woodford County, but Kentucky basketball is not a game for gentlemen.

Over in Chapel Hill, however, they have a very different history. White Southern liberalism isn't heard from much these days, but it has a very long and proud tradition of its own. And for decades, UNC has been the fountainhead of Southern liberalism -- a place where white Southerners who really liked Eleanor Roosevelt or Hilary Clinton could feel at home.

Of course many of these people were patricians -- by and large, liberalism in America is a patrician mindset. It was invented by New Englanders like Ralph Waldo Emerson who wanted to make sure that the "best people" were in charge, not a bunch of yahoos like Andrew Jackson or capitalists like Cornelius Vanderbilt. And so UNC developed as a haven for patrician liberals who desperately wanted to bring what they thought of as the best ideas of the North into the South. (Rural populists in North Carolina were much more likely to root for the farming school in Raleigh.)

You must never think of Southern patricians as being soft. They are not soft -- soft people don't last for long down here. And they like to win. So it isn't surprising that in the late 1950s they hired a New Yorker, Frank McGuire, to coach the UNC basketball team. Or that they didn't mind when McGuire used a team of New Yorkers to win the 1957 NCAA championship. But McGuire was never a great fit for UNC. He was sort of a 1950's Jim Valvano -- brash, controversial, always in trouble with the NCAA. So in the early 1960s he was replaced by the absolutely perfect coach for UNC. Dean Smith was a liberal himself, but a quiet one. Just as Rupp had all the virtues (and vices) of populism, Dean had all the virtues (and vices) of elitism -- discretion, family pride, a willingness to bend the rules in his favor, and a remarkable ability to hide his determination for victory behind a facade of bland mummery. (Just as George H. W. Bush would never admit to really caring about the outcome of an election, Dean would never admit to caring about the outcome of a basketball game.)

Just as Rupp's views seeped into Kentucky culture, Dean's attitudes prevail among his team's fans. While UK fans learned to mistrust the officials, UNC fans learned that you're supposed to work them. While UK fans learned to mistrust the media, UNC fans saw that their national publicity was almost always favorable. And so the two groups went off in different directions.

And that brings us to tomorrow's game. There are two types of rivalries in sports. One type of rivalry exists among two fanbases that share common worldviews. A good example would be the rivalry between UK and Arkansas in the 1990s. No matter how many times Nolan Richardson beat us, UK fans never hated Arkansas fans -- we could see ourselves in them. This type of rivalry can be truly friendly. But the other type is much more vicious. Here the two groups are so different that they cannot respect each other at all. In an extreme form, each becomes convinced that the other is cheating. To UNC fans, UK is a racist program that wins through corruption and academic fraud. To UK fans, UNC is a creation of the East Coast media that gets its players thanks to ESPN, gets special treatment from the NCAA, and wins by flopping, fouling, and intimidating the officials.

In making these points, I am necessarily dealing with generalities. UK certainly has its share of patrician fans. UNC may have some redneck fans. And there are people of good will in both fan bases who are looking forward to a good, clean game tomorrow. But I am not one of them. I am a populist myself, and I believe that no team -- in any American sport -- is so bad for its game as the UNC basketball team. The flopping, the special treatment from officials, the countless NCAA games in North Carolina -- these and other tactics distort our game in ways that are inherently unfair to everyone else. UK fans have always believed that on the basketball court, we could get the fair chance we were so often denied in real life. But UNC seeks to expand the privileges of the country club and the ivory tower into basketball.

Accordingly, they must be fought and stopped. And if we can beat them tomorrow, UK fans will hug that memory to their chests for years to come. Even if they don't know all of the history that makes them feel that way.