The Next White Duke Superstar May Be About to Break America

When Cooper Flagg—the most hyped 16-year-old basketball player on the planet, and a lanky white kid with a tousle of blond hair from the microscopic township of Newport, Maine—reclassified to the 2024 collegiate class earlier this year, everyone braced for the worst. Sure enough, while Flagg entertained an avalanche of recruitment offers from big-deal programs (including UConn, Georgia, and Michigan), he announced Monday that he’d taken the red pill and will be playing for the Duke Blue Devils—the widely loathed upper-crust crucible of mid-South rich kids and Caucasian hardwood prospects. It’s a turn of events that is inevitable, poetic, and supremely evil. Flagg is now both the latest in a long line of terrorizing, aesthetically oppressive white basketball players to pass through Duke and also, without a doubt, the biggest, strongest, and most athletically gifted talent to ever fit that specific mold. (He absolutely blows the sauceless, low-vertical fundamentals of a JJ Redick or a Christian Laettner out of the water.) In other words, Flagg is a Disney Channel Original Movie villain come to life. His reign is going to be unbearable, and honestly, I can’t wait.

If you aren’t up on prep-school basketball, Flagg projects as one of those circa-2020 frontcourt types like Giannis Antetokounmpo or Joel Embiid who, despite being built like Karl Malone, can somehow do everything on the basketball court. At 6-foot-8 and still growing, Flagg can protect the rim, he can drift out for 3s, he possesses a silky handle, and he can absolutely yam on any of the puny teenagers who step in the lane on his way to the basket. Flagg’s highlight mixtapes are downright gratuitous—look at him reducing these poor kids into piles of gristle and bone! It should honestly come with a content warning.

You might be thinking: So he’s awesome and he’s white. What’s the big deal? Well, there’s more to it than that. If you aren’t up on NCAA basketball, Duke is one of the most legacy-rich schools in the sport—with five March Madness championships and a reputation for cultivating a fandom that is perhaps a little more elitist (and some would say racist) compared to the rest of the fleet. Many of those charges are associated with Duke’s former longtime head coach, Mike Krzyzewski, who often espoused the school’s focus on “scholar-athletes” that come from a different stock compared to the typical sort of college basketball player. Hmm, I wonder what he meant by that? Here’s Krzyzewski, in an interview from 1997, courtesy of Bomani Jones, who dedicated a whole segment on his HBO show to why Black Americans hate Duke.

“What Duke does limits some of my recruiting, because not every youngster can get into Duke,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that kids who don’t get into Duke are worse or better. It’s just that schools are for different kids.”

Combine that attitude with the Caucasian-heavy makeup of historic Duke rosters, and you can’t blame people of color for reading between the lines of what the school was really prioritizing. (For instance, consider the way Michigan’s Fab Five regarded the popularity of ’90s Duke megastar Christian Laettner.) From that vantage point, Flagg—who appears more talented than Laettner and perhaps every other white player who has passed through Duke—is a Book of Revelations–level apocalyptic omen. He’s already posing with a hilariously fraught fiery trident. It’s so over, man!

It should also be said that Flagg has thus far displayed no racial animus of his own. But that is hardly going to matter when he starts playing. He is fun to watch in a way that the other infamous white Duke alumni could only dream of being. Redick, one of the best players in the school’s history, was a jump shooter with no off-the-dribble game to speak of, and made hay with the boring, extremely Duke-ish attributes of discipline, IQ, and monastic workout routines. Grayson Allen—whose penchant for seemingly dirty fouls renders him, to me, one of the most abominable players in basketball history—got to the NBA by being a decent scorer, and a grotesque, digging-below-the-belt cheap-shot defender. Compare that to Flagg, who is a shoo-in to be featured, nightly, on House of Highlights sizzle reels as he brutalizes the competition with ego-demolishing blocks and dunks. Unlike his antecedents, his particular prowess might make him appear as a taunting, overpowering bully every night, and his presence is a major story, regardless of melanin concentration. It really makes Flagg the perfect storm for sports punditry.

And yet, when you zoom out and consider the texture of college sports as a whole, perhaps I’m overreacting. The whole industry of amateur basketball has been cracked open by a wave of NIL money which has morphed NCAA stars into millionaires, and no institution—not even one as stuffy and traditional as Duke—can avoid those laws of gravity. The two most recent Blue Devils to make waves in the NBA? Zion Williamson and Paolo Banchero. Both of those players are Black, both of them were beloved, and both of them attended Duke for exactly one season to soak up the branding potential before departing for the draft. In fact, the only reason they attended college at all is because the NBA forces draft prospects to be at least 19 years old, thereby making aspiring rookies complete a single year of play in either the NCAA or another lesser pro league for eligibility, which has turned the whole concept of amateur sports into a charade. Flagg will absolutely follow suit after his cup of coffee in Durham. Duke basketball has fallen into line with all of the other programs it claimed, for decades, it was different from. There’s some delicious restorative justice in that fact. “Scholar-athletes”—ha!

But still, a giant white guy in a Duke jersey throwing down tomahawk jams on, like, a hapless Wake Forest roster strikes an ancient nerve in American society. You better start preparing for the 2024 college basketball season now, because the takes are going to come hot and fast. It could get very ugly. Stephen A. Smith is going to get involved. Bret Stephens might be moved to write a column. May God have mercy on our souls.