"Please don't rape me!" Clap clap clap-clap-clap!
"Please don't beat me!" Clap clap clap-clap-clap!
"Sean can't read! Sean can't read!"
Shelden Williams, Casey Sanders and Sean Dockery will hear plenty of heckling during ACC road games this year. Denizens of U-Hall and Doherty's Disciples will have scathing put-downs, and Maryland students may finally put down their batteries. For years, their players suffered as the Cameron Crazies exploited each player's foibles and faults, and now they have their chance for retribution.
Suddenly Duke's house has an awful lot of glass, and all the stones thrown over the past 20 years will come flying back.
The Duke fan's natural reaction will be indignation. The charges against Williams were dropped; Sanders was granted deferred prosecution; and Dockery emerged from an area where very few students would qualify easily. This is all certainly true and the indignation is reasonable to a point.
We don't know what happened in the Ohio hotel room that led a woman to accuse Williams of rape. Nor do we know exactly what transpired in Sanders' girlfriend's house that allegedly led him to push her. Both seem human, with at least the potential for innocence. We consider how the taunting will affect them and consider the injustice of the situation.
But that hasn't stopped Cameron Crazies from harassing players in strikingly similar situations, whose only proven crimes were wearing different colored jerseys. When Maryland's Herman Veal, who was accused of sexual assault by a fellow student and disciplined by his school but not the legal system, took the floor of Cameron in 1984, he was greeted with 1,000 panties and condoms. Veal's and Williams' situations are practically identical.
The Cameron Crazies love it when opposing players have brushes with the law, although Mike Krzyzewski has been shooing them away from particularly sensitive cases--perhaps because he knew a day would soon come when Duke's luck would stop and a Blue Devil would find himself in the police blotter.
Personally, I have great sympathy for Dockery. If I had attended Dockery's high school and lived in his neighborhood, I'm sure I wouldn't be attending a school like Duke. If he works in the classroom, he'll outperform many Duke basketball players of the past who had no trouble with standardized tests. But that won't stop fans of opposing schools from heckling him incessantly.
Cameron Crazies added "can't" to the middle of North Carolina star JR Reid's name for no other reason than his last name or, according to Tar Heel head coach Dean Smith, his race.
Dockery's very public struggles with the ACT punctured the myth that Duke basketball players are scholars and other college basketball players are idiots. And unfortunately for Dockery, he's likely going to hear about it at every ACC port of call.
Around the ACC, the Cameron Crazies don't have the best reputation. Fairly or not, students at Maryland regularly cited their behavior as justification for battery and bottle tossing and profanity. UNC students have set themselves up as Doherty's Disciples in alliteration imitation. But their coach held a very negative view of the Crazies when he was a player.
"I think they're all a bunch of rude northerners who study too much and release it on the players," UNC head coach Matt Doherty said as a 22-year-old in the wake of the Herman Veal incident. "Seriously, I don't think it shows much class.... I haven't seen too many things over there that are clever. It's been pretty crude, some of the things."
To say that the Cameron Crazies are the reason Williams, Sanders and Dockery will be heckled this season is overly simplistic. But the Cameron Crazies have played a large part in the culture that encourages the players' private lives be picked apart by thousands of fans.
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