In the wake of Grayson Allen’s recent tripping incidents against Louisville and Florida State, the concept of the “Duke villain” has once again taken center stage for a program that is rooted in the love-to-hate-them culture of college basketball.
From the “I Hate Christian Laettner” T-shirts to the litany of books exploring the subject, the Blue Devils are no strangers to being the national enemy. Within this whirlwind of hatred seems to always be a central figure that raucous crowds across the country love to target.
For Duke, it seems as though that player is always one guy—the sharp-shooting, white player. And this season, it is the sophomore guard from Jacksonville, Fla.
Things reached new heights during the firestorm that erupted after last Thursday's trip of Florida State's Xavier Rathan-Mayes, which earned Allen an official reprimand from the ACC. Former Duke star and 2006 National Collegiate Player of the Year J.J. Redick—who was no stranger to boos and vitriol on the road during his time in Durham—took notice, and used the opening segment of his newly-created podcast, The Vertical Podcast with J.J. Redick, to talk about what he sees as the media's creation of the "Duke villain."
“For whatever reason there seems to be this—I like to call it a myth—this myth of the Duke villain,” Redick said on his most recent podcast, which first aired Feb. 29. “And more often the villain is white, he’s a white Duke player, and it goes from Danny Ferry to Christian Laettner to Steve Wojciechowski to Chris Collins to Mike Dunleavy to J.J. Redick to Greg Paulus to Jon Scheyer, and now it’s Grayson Allen. He’s this 'villain.' And I think it’s fine for an opposing fan base to choose a player to root against, or you dislike certain guys. My issue, though, is I think the media has perpetuated this white Duke villain myth as much as anyone.”
Listen to Redick's full podcast here.
In calling out the media, Redick may have a point. Most of the fans at Cameron Indoor Stadium hardly noticed the trip as the Crazies chanted, “Just go home” in the waning seconds of their team’s 80-65 rout of the Seminoles. But immediately following the buzzer, a series of Vines, blogs and posts hit the Internet and social media, all adding fuel to the premise spelled out in an article written by ESPN's Dana O’Neil following Allen's first incident, a trip of Louisville's Ray Spalding Feb. 8.
Redick participated in an interview for that article, but challenges the notion that one player has to be to the next target of spite and hate.
“The media, I guess, was choosing who we should hate, saying ‘This guy is the next guy,’” Redick said. “[O'Neil] didn’t seem to go off the rails against Duke or wasn’t as anti-Duke as some people might think it is, but she kind of said the same thing: 'Now we’re supposed to dislike Grayson Allen.'”
But for the Los Angeles Clippers guard, this sense of who’s next for hating a program is the wrong way to approach Duke hatred. As he did in O’Neil’s article, Redick acknowledges in his podcast his “antics, the smiling, the head-bobbing [and] the trash-talking” that he exhibited as a collegiate player, but claims it was in response to the hatred fans sent his way.
Redick may be right. No one seems to pick Brandon Ingram, Matt Jones or even Marshall Plumlee as the target of their most incendiary insults. Ingram is 6-foot-9 and projected by many to be the second overall pick in June's NBA draft. Jones is a shut-down defender and Plumlee fits the bill for the towering center on the block. But the rest of the "Duke villains" are guys that other teams love to hate because they are good and receive ridicule for their ability to defy the expectations of the game.
Redick is criticized both for his defense and his penchant for running off screens to hit 3-pointers rather than creating his shots off the dribble. No one expected him to be a starter in the NBA, but he is now averaging 16.6 points per game for the Clippers.
Perhaps that is what has occurred with Allen—no one expected the 6-foot-5 guard to lead the Blue Devils in scoring and people dislike him for being tough to defend and an aggressive driver unafraid of contact. As a result, the media has kept Allen under the microscope, waiting for him to react.
“To vilify some guy because, honestly because he’s white and because he plays a certain way, he’s not a villain,” Redick said. “Grayson Allen is not a villain. Chris Collins, Jon Scheyer, these guys were not villains. I just disagree with it. I’ve been around the Duke program going back to 2000, so basically half my life. We’re not perfect, I don’t think any program is perfect. We’ve certainly had guys, myself included, that maybe didn’t make the best decisions in college. But how is that different from any other school?”
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