It’s been 10 years since ESPN released a 30-for-30 documentary titled “I Hate Christian Laettner,” an attempt to put a particular finger on a widely shared disdain. As the linchpin on NCAA men’s basketball championship teams in 1991 and 1992 for Duke University, Laettner was the prototype of an excellent but arrogant player who, for a lot of years, seemed to define the popular but polarizing basketball program from the private school in Durham, N.C.
Given the school’s lineage of crybaby stars from Bobby Hurley to Grayson Allen to J.J. Redick — not to mention a holier-than-all coach, Mike Krzyzewski, forever floating above the seediness of a high-revenue sport in the pre-NIL era — it has almost always been easy to hate Duke, which is aiming to win its sixth national championship.
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