Duke Photography/Megan Morr

November 23, 2009 | Will Blythe is the author of “To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry.” As the title suggests, the book matches the intensity of other books on great sports rivalries, but adds a dollop of humor and a writer’s touch such books often lack. Blythe -- a rabid UNC fan who grew up in Chapel Hill, N.C. -- is freelance writer and a former literary editor at Esquire. He lives in New York.

In an interview with Faith & Leadership, Blythe talks about the particular rivalry he loves and the habits and practices required to be an elite coach, player and fan.

Q: Much of your book is propelled by your admission that you still yell at the television. Why?

I suspect that yelling at the television is a form of ventilation that purges the spiritual toxins from me and insures my psychic well-being. After games, I often feel emptied out. Of course, the room I’ve been watching in can also be emptied out. This can be lonely following a loss. On the other hand, I fear that such ranting may represent a profound failure of impulse control of the same sort that results in murder, assault and Coach K-baiting.

I asked the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman whether my game-watching tendencies might result in my being reincarnated as an insect or a monkey or a baying coyote on the edge of some lonesome Western suburb. He answered that, indeed, there was some danger in that. I’ve had to weigh my intense fandom against the possibility that I will one day be crouched on all fours out in the desert scrub, barking with longing at a mystifying moon.

For many of us, games become inchoate contests between differing values that we imagine represented by the competing teams. The games satisfy or disappoint our sense of virtue as members of the “right” group. In that sense, the games are not just games -- they’re morality plays.

But I’d rather not take such a philosophical stance on game night, all right?

Q: What did you learn about the discipline, habits and practices necessary for players to compete at the level of Duke and Carolina?

Success at that level requires players to approach basketball like a job. The practices and video sessions alone take hours. The players also lift weights and do additional drills on their own time. Then they have to do their course work. They also have to learn to mesh their own ambitions and particular talents into those of a larger group, often subordinating gifts that have won them acclaim (indeed, scholarships) for the sake of the team. That can be psychologically brutal.

Q: How would you characterize the way each coaching staff works to motivate its players, and how has this changed over the years?

The prevailing view seems to be that a generation or two ago, players would run through a plate-glass door if the coach suggested they do so. Modern players would apparently prefer the coach run through the plate glass door to make sure it’s safe and then post it on YouTube. I suspect that both Roy Williams and Mike Krzyzewski feel they have to be better psychologists than they used to be, that players are a bit more fragile, far less willing to tolerate the General Patton shenanigans of coaches like the Great Chair-Thrower Bobby Knight.

That said, I’ve seen Roy Williams ride players in practice pretty hard and throw a few off the court. At Duke, J.J. Redick told me with a sly grin that Coach K had questioned his manhood in words that Redick was not willing to fully repeat. This didn’t seem to bother Redick but I got the sense that Shavlik Randolph did not adjust so well to the raw particulars of manhood-questioning.

[Former UNC coach] Dean Smith still strikes me as ideal in having had high expectations of his players while still treating them respectfully -- as human beings first, players second. Though [former UNC player and assistant coach] Phil Ford once told me that Dean Smith didn’t need to say anything when he was disappointed with Ford’s play, that he could chill him to the bone with just a simple look.

Q: Can you see a relationship between practice and performance?

I see a greater relationship between having the best players and playing better on game day.

Q: How does each of the great coaches you got to know use storytelling as part of their leadership?

I think great coaches know how to frame a season as a narrative of some sort, whether of vengeance, comeback, fulfillment of destiny, survival, endurance, even ultimate acceptance that there are things in this world bigger than basketball. They animate their players with a conviction that the string of games they play from fall into spring has a larger meaning.

Coaches like to retail their favorite stories, of course, as a way of imparting wisdom, sometimes to the eyerolling of players.

Coach K shared this parable with me when we talked in his old office in the bowels of Cameron Indoor Stadium: “Get on the right bus,” his mother used to tell him.

“I know which bus to get on, Mom,” he’d tell her. “I know how to get around Chicago.”

“No, no, no, Mike. I’m not talking about the CTA -- Chicago Transit Authority. I mean if you get on someone else’s bus, make sure that person is good. Sometimes, people driving that bus will take you places you’ve never been before. And other times, you will drive the bus. Make sure you only allow good people on the bus. And you will take people to the good spots.”