EDMUND BURKEI attended the Syracuse-Georgetown basketball game at the Verizon Center in Washington, DC last Saturday with my wife and some dear college friends. When I went to buy the tickets, I knew that this was going to be the last regular-season game that Syracuse, my alma mater, and Georgetown would play as members of the Big East. Next year, both schools join other conferences. And I surely knew that Syracuse and Georgetown were passionate basketball rivals – or as the Washington Post would soon be describing them – “archrivals,” and even “archenemies.”
But I didn’t appreciate how big a deal this was.
My first clue came when I went to buy tickets at the Verizon Center. The agent at the ticket window informed me that this was a special event and she could not sell me tickets. I was then ushered upstairs to a plush suite and seated on a couch. After informing me how historic this game would be, a salesman laid out on the coffee table a colored Verizon Center seating chart and a list of ticket prices. Next to each ticket price was a second dollar figure. Just to be eligible to purchase tickets to this very special game, which were themselves priced much higher than normal, one had to make a contribution to Georgetown University – my beloved alma mater’s archenemy. “Okay,” I glibly asked, “how much do I have to contribute to be eligible to buy the best seats in the house?” The salesman smiled and pointed to the figure: $250,000. No, I am not making this up. I settled for what I was eligible to buy with a $50 contribution. We wound up sitting behind an end zone (or whatever it’s called in basketball lingo), in the very last row of seats, watching miniature basketball players throw around a bb-sized ball hundreds of feet below us.
The two teams played twice this season. The first game was at Syracuse. While I doubt – considering it’s a truly great institution with laudable values – Syracuse was as rapacious in selling tickets as greedy Georgetown, the New York Times reported that Syracuse found a way to squeeze a few more seats into the Carrier Dome for the last game between the two rivals, setting an attendance record of 35,012.
Shortly before game day, the Washington Post ran an article about the Syracuse-Georgetown rivalry. It was three full pages long. The newspaper also posted on its website a four-part video about the rivalry. Lord knows what the Syracuse Post-Standard did.
All of this got me thinking about the pedagogy of college rivalries.
Oh, sure, college rivalries are fun. But they also serve an educational purpose.
A rivalry helps define a college and what it means to be part of its community. Consider the Harvard-Yale game. Yale is, in part, Yale because it’s worthy of being Harvard’s rival, and vice versa. Or consider the Army-Navy game. Who understands what it means to attend West Point? Other than a West Point cadet, the only other person who truly understands that is an Annapolis midshipman. Rivalries are special because they help us feel special. I don’t mean just in an elite kind of way. Louisville and Kentucky are rivals, and Michigan and Ohio State are rivals too. Each rival implicitly says to other, I recognize we share something in common, something meaningful to both of us, something we take pride in. Someone who declares you his or her rival grants you respect – and all of the faux insults and put-downs operate to emphasize that point.
Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty were archenemies because each recognized that the other was, beside himself, the greatest living genius in the field of crime and criminal detection.
In the recently-produced BBC production “Sherlock,” Holmes’ faithful friend, Dr. Watson, observes that normal people don’t have archenemies. Of course, that’s true. We normal people aren’t great enough to earn archenemies for ourselves. But we can have archenemies vicariously, or derivatively, through our college rivalries. (City team rivalries – e.g., Red Sox v. Yankees – are similar.)
Through irony and transposition, college rivalries teach respect – respect for those who oppose or disagree with us, and respect for ourselves.
Last May, Syracuse alum Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter and producer (“West Wing,” “A Few Good Men,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Social Network,” and many more), gave the commencement address at his alma mater. This was part of what he told Syracuse’s graduates:
Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day. Civility, respect, kindness, character. You're too good for schadenfreude, you're too good for gossip and snark, you're too good for intolerance—and since you're walking into the middle of a presidential election, it's worth mentioning that you're too good to think people who disagree with you are your enemy. Unless they went to Georgetown, in which case, they can go to hell.
In the transcript of Sorkin’s speech posted on its website, Syracuse University was careful to add “(Laughter)” after that last line. And, of course, the students did laugh and cheer. Sorkin, being a master of theatrics, delivered the line deadpan. He did not smile or wink at the audience. That made the line even funnier. But notice how Sorkin used the rivalry to punctuate his point about civility, self-respect, mutual respect, and character – four things that are inextricably tied together. (You can read or watch Sorkin's speech here.)
How did the game turn out? Syracuse, which had been rated as high as number three this season, set a record for scoring the lowest number of points since Jim Boeheim started coaching the team in 1976. Georgetown won 61-39. An historic event indeed.
But over the full span of their time together in the Big East, Syracuse won 48 games and Georgetown 41.
Just sayin’.
UPDATE (March 15, 2013): At the start of his son's press conference following the game described in the post above, former Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson Jr. yelled, ""Kiss Syracuse goodbye!"" (John Thompson Jr., father of Georgetown's present coach, was the head coach of Georgetown basketball from 1972 -1999, and is master of the salt-in-the-wounds insult.) You shouldn't have said it, Coach. Syracuse won two consecutive games to earn a rematch against Georgetown in the Big East tournament in Madison Square Garden, and then beat Georgetown 58-55 in overtime in their real, final game as members of the Big East. Oh, sweet, sweet revenge!