My Hatred of Syracuse
By Tee Kane
February 21, 2008
Every fan has one team he or she truly loathes. The mere sight of its fans is enough to make your blood boil. Granted, most fans don’t generally like any other teams in their team’s conference, but there’s at least one team that inspires venom.
It’s possible to follow college basketball long enough that eventually a player or coach will come through a program that will cause you to temporarily suspend your hatred. However, for that one team you cannot stand there’s no such hope; you will always despise it. Your hatred for it isn’t rational, it’s tribal. That team for me is the Syracuse Orangemen.
Syracuse may have officially changed its name in 2004, but they will always be the Orangemen to me. Orangemen, as in the same religiously intolerant guys who march through the cities of the six occupied counties of Northern Ireland every summer and beat drums as they beat up Catholic children. Frankly I don’t know how they were allowed to keep their nickname for as long as they did. That kind of religious intolerance has no place anywhere outside of Baghdad, the former Yugoslavia, and Glasgow.
I’m told that there are at least a few Irish Catholics that attend Syracuse University and that’s fine, but I would be genuinely scared that my dead grandmother would haunt me for the rest of eternity if I enrolled there. Growing up in the Kane household, there were a few things each of us learned quickly from Dr. Old School, including not trusting computers, rejecting relativism, and rooting against Syracuse (not even necessarily in that order).
Until I was 14 or 15, all I wanted to be was a sports journalist. I obsessed over all the schools with a well-regarded journalism school, but never dared to consider Syracuse. How Gerry McNamara from Scranton, PA (perhaps the most Irish town in America), decided to attend Syracuse is beyond me. Then again, this article was edited by a Syracuse journalism school graduate, so maybe anything is possible.
Growing up watching Georgetown, Syracuse was rarely the best team the Hoyas played every year, but there was no other team more painful to lose to. Jim Boeheim paced the sidelines, throwing child-like tantrums and crying over every single call, while Lawrence Moten and Jason Hart tossed up ugly jump shots that bounced in off the favorable rims of the Carrier Dome. The worst experiences with opposing teams’ fans every March at the Big East tournament were always with Syracuse fans. There was no chance of enjoying competitive yet friendly banter with them, mostly because they had been under a foot of snow for three months, which prevented any oxygen from reaching their brains. Earlier this year, Syracuse came to the Verizon Center and lost in overtime in a flat performance by both teams. The Syracuse fans were exceedingly annoying after the game even though they lost.
This past week I was offered a chance to make the trip to upstate New York to see the Georgetown game. There are few things I enjoy more than going on road trips to see college basketball, but a trip to see Syracuse – into the heart of darkness – just didn’t feel right. When I turned on ESPN Saturday morning to watch the game, I knew instantly I made the right decision. The sight of all that orange was nauseating. It reportedly was the largest crowd for a college basketball game this year (more evidence there’s absolutely nothing to do in central New York).
Georgetown put on an absolute stinker of a first half and couldn’t overcome a large deficit. At the end of the game the students stormed the court unaware of the irony that they did the same thing last year, only to miss out on the NCAA tournament completely. Then again, what do you expect from fans that haven’t won a NCAA tournament game in three years?
I think there’s good chance the Orange will head back to the NIT this year. They have one of the thinnest benches of any major program in the country and have a brutal final stretch of the season, which means they might go into the Big East tournament with an 8-10 conference record and in need of repeat of its 2006 miracle run through the Big East tournament.
I’ll wager Tee’s Weekly’s advertising income they don’t do it. Donte Green is not a good shooter, but he feels he’s entitled to almost 20 shots a game even though he’s a freshman. Unlike Carmelo Anthony, the last heralded freshman at Syracuse, Green cares much more about auditioning for the NBA than winning games for his team. I’ll be delighted if Georgetown draws them in the Big East tournament. Just please don’t sit me next to an Orangeman.
Editor’s note: The sentiments reflected in this article do not reflect those of the entire Tee’s Weekly staff and are regarded especially malicious by its Syracuse alumna editor-in-chief. It’s also surprising, given his pricy GW education, Tee cannot always get his subjects and verbs to agree. Of course, there was also that infamous rabbit-hole incident (ask Dr. Enakmas)…