Christian Laettner

• 1. Introduction

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  Christian Laettner topped an ESPN fan poll as the most hated college basketball player in history. That vote came more than twenty years after he left Duke University. By then he already held a spot in multiple halls of fame and a championship record few college players can match. How does one career produce both a villain's reputation and a champion's trophy case? The answer starts on a farm outside Angola, New York, long before any of those trophies existed.

• 2. Blue-Collar Roots

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  Christian Donald Laettner was born on the 17th of August 1969, into a blue-collar Roman Catholic family in Angola, New York, near Buffalo and Niagara Falls. His father, George, ran presses at a newspaper plant and carried Polish ancestry from grandparents who spoke the language as their first tongue. His mother, Bonnie, worked as a teacher. Christian's older brother, Christopher, bullied him often as a child, which helped instill a stern competitive drive in him. Both boys worked as farm laborers to add to their allowance.

  He enrolled at the private Nichols School, where a financial aid package covered much of his tuition. His family still made sacrifices, and he took on janitorial work to help pay the rest. By graduation, he had scored more than 2,000 points, breaking a school record held by teammate Ron Torgalski. His teams won two state titles and reached another semifinal. He became the second Western New York player to reach 2,000 career points. He finished short of the 2,162 that Curtis Aiken had set five years earlier. College recruiters pursued him heavily.

  In 2009, The Buffalo News marked fifty years of All-Western New York basketball selections. Laettner, a two-time All-WNY first-team pick, was named to the 1980s All-WNY first team alongside Aiken, Gary Bossert, Keith Robinson and Ritchie Campbell. He also made the all-time All-WNY first team, alongside Aiken, Paul Harris, Bob Lanier and Mel Montgomery. It was a signal of how much promise Western New York saw in him before he ever played Division I basketball.

• 3. The Duke Years

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  In 1988, Christian Laettner arrived at Duke University to play for coach Mike Krzyzewski, beginning a four-year career as a starter. He reached the Final Four as a freshman and a runner-up finish as a sophomore, then became the team's star as a junior and senior. In his final two seasons Duke won the first two national championships in school history, one in 1991 and the other in 1992. Across his four years, Laettner played 23 of a possible 24 NCAA tournament games, winning 21 of them, both of which stand as records.

  For his career, Laettner averaged 16.6 points and 7.8 rebounds per game while making almost half of his three-point attempts. His senior season alone produced 21.5 points per game and swept every major national player of the year award. Duke retired his No. 32 jersey later that year.

  He also holds two NCAA tournament scoring records. He scored 407 career points, the most anyone has scored in tournament play, and made 142 free throws on 167 attempts. Some of those records were set in games that decided championships outright.

• 4. Clutch Performances

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  In the 1990 East Regional Final against the University of Connecticut, Duke trailed by one point with two seconds left in overtime. Laettner made a jumper as time expired to win the game, a scenario that would repeat itself two years later in almost identical form.

  At the 1991 Final Four semifinal, Laettner swished the game-winning free throws against an undefeated, heavily favored University of Nevada, Las Vegas team. The result avenged UNLV's 30-point rout of Duke in the 1990 championship game. Duke then beat Kansas in the final to win its first national title, and Laettner was named the tournament's most outstanding player.

  The rematch came in the 1992 East Regional Final, a game many critics still rank among the greatest in college basketball history. With Duke again trailing by one point and two seconds left in overtime, Laettner turned and released a jumper at the buzzer. It has been called The Shot ever since. He finished that game shooting a perfect ten of ten from the field and ten of ten from the free-throw line, scoring 31 points. He then closed his college career by leading Duke to its second consecutive national title.

  The following year, ESPN gave Laettner three separate honors for that game and season. They were Outstanding Performance Under Pressure, College Basketball Play of the Year, and Outstanding College Basketball Performer of the Year. The shot itself became a fixture of basketball montages and even appeared in television commercials. In 2006, The Best Damn Sports Show Period ranked it the fifth most memorable moment in the history of sports.

  That same game against Kentucky also contained a physical incident that would follow Laettner for decades, one that had nothing to do with his shooting.

• 5. Most Hated

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  During that same 1992 regional final against Kentucky, Laettner stepped on the chest of Kentucky player Aminu Timberlake, an act referees ruled a technical foul. He later said he regretted the misconduct, though he believed being ejected from the game would have been too harsh a punishment.

  That reputation for hostility eventually led ESPN to produce a 30 for 30 documentary called I Hate Christian Laettner. It explored five reasons its filmmakers believed explained the hostility: race, privilege, bullying, greatness, and physical appearance.

  None of that hostility stopped the Minnesota Timberwolves from taking Laettner with the third overall pick in the 1992 NBA draft.

• 6. Six Teams, Thirteen Seasons

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  Over 13 seasons, from 1992 to 2005, Laettner scored 11,121 points and grabbed 5,806 rebounds. He played for six different teams: the Minnesota Timberwolves, the Atlanta Hawks, the Detroit Pistons, the Dallas Mavericks, the Washington Wizards, and the Miami Heat. His first six seasons were his best. He averaged 16.6 points and 7.9 rebounds per game and started nearly every one he played.

  In 1993, Laettner earned a spot on the All-Rookie First Team. In 1996, the Timberwolves traded Laettner and Sean Rooks to the Atlanta Hawks in exchange for Spud Webb and Andrew Lang. With Atlanta, Laettner made the 1997 All-Star Game, and the Hawks years were his most successful stint, reaching the second round of the playoffs twice.

  Despite those achievements, Laettner's NBA career never found much stability. He was traded six times and never stayed with one team for more than four full seasons. In 2004, he was suspended for several games for using marijuana. In total, he appeared in 868 regular-season games, averaging 12.8 points, 6.7 rebounds, and 2.6 assists over his career.

  His most enduring highlight, though, had already happened years earlier, in a single Olympic summer.

• 7. The Dream Team

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  As the national player of the year, Laettner was the only college player chosen for the 1992 U.S. Olympic team known as the Dream Team. The team won the 1992 Summer Olympics gold medal in dominant fashion, though Laettner's own role was modest: he averaged just 4.8 points per game.

  That roster is widely considered one of the greatest in the history of sports. As a group, it was inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame and the FIBA Hall of Fame. Individually, though, Laettner's own path to basketball immortality would look very different from his teammates'.

• 8. Life After Basketball

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  Laettner has stayed close with former Duke teammate Brian Davis. Together they have pursued real-estate development in Durham, a bid for a Major League Soccer team, and an unsuccessful attempt to buy the Memphis Grizzlies. Some legal problems, mostly involving unpaid debts, have followed those ventures.

  In 2010, Laettner was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a member of the 1992 Dream Team. He remains the only player on that roster not inducted individually. His individual career instead earned him a place in the College Basketball Hall of Fame, also in 2010. The Dream Team itself was separately enshrined in the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 2009 and the FIBA Hall of Fame in 2017. In 2008, his Polish heritage earned him induction into the National Polish-American Sports Hall of Fame.

  Since 2011, Laettner has run numerous youth basketball training camps. He also spent one season playing in a semi-pro league and briefly worked as an assistant coach in the NBA Development League. The Z Team is an Olympic Channel show that pairs former Olympic athletes with struggling teams. For it, Laettner spent a week working with the Garinger High School boys basketball team.

  Laettner lives in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, where he is an avid muskellunge fisherman. He is divorced with three children. He has also donated large sums of money to his alma maters, support that continues even now.