Dennis K. Berman
This should be a moment of elation for Kentucky fans. Their team plays a ruthlessly beautiful brand of basketball. Their starting lineup is better than the New Jersey Nets.
And yet there is something lurking underneath: A sense that winning is, in its own odd way, making UK’s fans miserable. Their expectations of triumph—be it recruiting battles or tournament games—has hardened into a coarse entitlement. It’s gotten to the point where even a championship will feel like anticlimax.
My best friend, a rare species of Louisville-turned-Kentucky turncoat, admits it. “It’s not fun,” he says. “We expect it.”
Where do we find the most joy as fans? Does it come from our teams’ absolute achievements—championship or bust? Or is it all relative, when they perform beyond what we anticipate? Saturday’s Final Four matchup between Louisville and Kentucky gives us a case study.
I write as a Louisville Cardinals fan, who grew up in the heyday of Louisville hoops, and who spent his early years caught in the very real feud between fans of the two schools.
ESPN would have you believe that the Duke-North Carolina rivalry is the most intense in college basketball. ESPN is wrong. The title belongs to Kentucky-Louisville, a 99-year-old feud that cuts across cultural, racial, and even religious lines.
I won’t presume to know what life is like in, say, Northern Ireland. I can tell you that to this day, like Catholics and Protestants, I could name which of my classmates was a Louisville or Kentucky fan.
The answer meant a lot. If you were a Kentucky fan you were more likely from a family with deeper, rural roots in the state. Maybe a grandparent attended school in Lexington, just a 90-minute ride from Louisville.
Cardinal fans were, and remain, the counternote. They were the ones historically excluded from the blue blood social orbits of Lexington. They were Jews and blacks, and more likely than not Democrats—a citified minority in a sea of rural rectitude.
Back home, they’re already calling Saturday’s contest The Civil War. Red and blue car flags are flying like gang colors. They’ve begun burning couches in Lexington. Even my hoops-agnostic mother is sending me articles about Louisville point guard Peyton Siva.
It bears stating: This is the single biggest sporting event in the state’s history.
This is Kentucky’s game to lose. It already beat Louisville on New Year’s Eve 69-62, and clearly has better, NBA-ready personnel. Anthony Davis alone will make more money playing pro ball than the entire Louisville roster.
And yet when you perform a fan’s accounting, the picture changes. The Wildcats lose their edge.
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