Sometimes in life, you have to be prepared.

Tomorrow morning, at 8am, Duke plays their third game against the U-23 Chinese national team. This one’s in Beijing, the site of the now-infamous Beijing Brawl between Georgetown and the Bayi Rockets. Painful as it is to admit, the Hoyas lost that fight convincingly. Bayi is a professional squad affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army, and this wasn’t their first rodeo. Also, they were older than Georgetown and presumably trained in hand-to-hand combat. Georgetown has a reputation as a tough Big East school who recruits from the inner cities, but their guys were plainly not prepared for what the Chinese Army was laying down.

Duke, on the other hand, has a reputation for recruiting kids from middle- and upper-class backgrounds; kids that grew up in less gritty environments, with presumably fewer opportunities to fight. One thing I couldn’t help thinking after watching Georgetown get battered was, ‘holy shit, thank God that wasn’t Duke.’ It would have been even more vicious, and I would have been even more angry afterward.

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