Kentucky and Louisville.  The big one.  The bitterest of bitter rivalries.  A juxtaposition of U2's famous Pride (in the name of love) seems the perfect allegorical starting point.

This is a burning question we seem to ask ourselves every year, especially when we hear Dickie V. on television during the annual Duke/North Carolina games going on and on about how that is college basketball's greatest rivalry.  With that in mind, I encourage you to read Mike's post over at the Card Chronicle addressing this question, and why he thinks that the Cardinals vs. the Wildcats is the greatest of them all.

I must tell you, however, that I find quite a bit to disagree about in Mike's piece, and some that is downright objectionable.  But because his reasoning is so tied up with racial politics, and because I am loath to entangle sports and politics on this blog, I will simply say that I don't agree with Mike's apparent take that racial animus is the essential basis of the rivalry between the two schools.  There is no question that it is a factor, I just don't believe the modern rivalry truly has its roots in racialism.  I also don't find his suggestion that Jamaal Mashburn is "unlikely to show up on the list of a Breathitt County man's top five all-time favorite Cats" either clever or likely to be true, but I suppose we will have to agree to disagree about that, since there is no way I know of to test Mike's premise.

But I do agree with much of what Mike has to say, including his conclusion that Louisville and Kentucky, not Duke and North Carolina, represent the most intense rivalry in all of college basketball.  That is what I want to focus on.

Adolph Rupp is largely responsible for the rivalry that exists today, but not for reasons related to race relations.  Jon Scott tells this tale very well on his website, and I will jump ahead to the beginning of the Rupp years and Jon's explanation of how this went:

This, my friends, is the root of the bitter part of the rivalry.  Plainly speaking, it boiled down to jealousy.  Rupp was unwilling to share the success he had garnered on the national scene with in-state schools.  Rupp was using the fact that he was not playing in-state rivals as a mechanism to bring a more national focus to Kentucky basketball, and this understandably rankled many at Louisville, Western and other Kentucky schools.  Now, before anyone suggests that I am taking sides against Rupp, I will tell you that I think he was absolutely right to do what he did, from the standpoint of the program.  Rupp understood that in order to focus on national rivalries and a national basketball scope, he had to eschew local rivals.  Of course, Louisville was having some fair success in their own right in that era, prompting Rupp to go so far as to pressure SEC teams not to play Louisville for fear that Louisville would beat them and make Kentucky look bad.  Naturally, Louisville fans were incensed, and Kentucky became an avowed enemy.

But then came Wesley Unseld, and the bitter recruiting battle that ensued.  This event, in my opinion, is a major nexus of the modern Kentucky-Louisville rivalry.  Again, from Jon Scott's Rivalry Text:
Either way, it was irrelevant.  Wesley Unseld went on to star at Louisville, and many Kentucky fans got their noses all out of joint.  Kentucky was not used to having their actual recruiting targets go to smaller in-state schools.  But by the late 1960's Louisville's success on the court gained them grudging respect even from Wildcat fans, and tempers began to cool.  Then came Denny Crum, and shortly after his arrival, the famous (back then) series of events which kindled a blazing inferno from a barely-smoldering ember:
You have to give Denny credit -- even if he may not have intended to outrage Kentucky fans, he could hardly have done so any more effectively.  Not only were the Wildcats' Boys in Blue disrespected by the new Louisville coach, but UCLA, the dominant team of the 1970's, was thrown up by Crum as the archetype of a successful college basketball program at the expense of Kentucky.  Understandably, Kentucky fans disagreed.  From a UK fan standpoint, Crum had spoken blasphemy, and forever became the object of anger and invective from many Kentucky fans of the day.  Louisville became an ugly word around UK circles, and as you might expect, Louisville fans began to return the bad vibes sent their way with their own.

Denny Crum's success on the court led directly to the renewal of the modern rivalry game under threat of legislative mandate, and that success further enraged Cat fans, who were loathe to share the success of their program with another in-state team, particularly one coached by Crum.  Kentucky fans continued to stoke the anger throughout the 1980's, creating pejoratives like "Little Brother" to describe Louisville, which former coach Joe B. Hall famously repeated.  What could they expect from the Cardinal fans but resentment?  Not only that, but Louisville was enjoying unprecedented success against the Wildcats on the court, particularly in 1983, further stoking the flames of passion and dislike among Kentucky fans.  But that all changed in the 1990's.

With the coming of Rick Pitino, Kentucky basketball enjoyed wide-ranging success, and marked the beginning of a gradual decline from national prominence of the Cardinals.  Louisville still had success against the Wildcats on the court, but it was now becoming clear that the Cardinals were going to be on the short end of the rivalry for some time to come.  Even the departure of Pitino and the coming of Tubby Smith did not reverse this trend, and the anger from the UK side gradually abated.  Many Kentucky fans would cheer for Louisville over other teams, and professed the Cards as their "second favorite".  Cardinal fans, more and more frustrated with their return to second-class status in the state, began to fume even more.  Loathing of Kentucky became a rite of passage, and you would very rarely find "Cardinal first, Wildcats second" fans.  This has festered on through the new millennium, and now it is Cardinal fans who have an almost irrational disgust for Kentucky fans, the exact reverse of the 1970's and 1980's.  As is typical of such a cycle, Wildcat fans are again beginning to reciprocate that loathing with their own, fueled by the return of their former coach to the state as the head coach of Louisville.

So where does that leave us?  I would argue that there is no basketball rivalry anywhere as bitter as this, and the rivalry between Duke and North Carolina simply pales in comparison.  UK-UL is a festering sore that has been treated with dirty bandages, denied antiseptic, and the pain of it sets brother against brother.  It is as bitter as they come, rivaled only by the extremes of college football's most vitriolic resentments -- Auburn-Alabama or Florida-Florida State.  UNC-Duke seems positively Marques of Queensbury by comparison.