"AARON CRAFT AND I have a date tonight," Michigan senior Alex Lipnik tells me, some three hours before his Wolverines will face the hated Buckeyes. "I'm going to wine and dine him. Hopefully, we'll have a nice chat. But at the end of the night, I hope he leaves here heartbroken. I want him to be miserable."

For this date, there will be no red roses, chocolate hearts or bottles of Argentinean malbec. Instead, there will be yelling, screaming and a flood of foul language. Lipnik, a communications major, has stood outside for nearly nine hours in temps in the low teens with the lone goal of telling the Ohio State junior guard exactly how he feels.

"You suck," Lipnik yells during pregame warmups. "I hate you. You're terrible at basketball. You shouldn't even be out on the floor. You should be paying us to watch you."

Craft ignores the taunts. He dribbles to the other end of the court, also packed with testosterone-laced Michigan fans, to shoot jumpers.

"This isn't JV, Craft."

"Go home! You're too small to play this game."

"You suck, Craft. And I'm not just saying that to be mean. You actually do suck."

For Craft, it's just another night on the road in the Big Ten as one of the country's most polarizing players. "They hate me," he admits.

What has he done to deserve this? Why have students like Lipnik counted the days (353, to be exact) until Craft returned to Crisler? Because he's a pest. Because his physical, in-your-face defense can fluster anyone, even Michigan's Player of the Year candidate, Trey Burke. And because of something else -- something difficult to pin down.

Twenty-four hours earlier, in a meeting room in the heart of Michigan's campus, some 65 members of the Maize Rage, the UM student section, are squirming in their seats.

They are there to organize outfits and cheers, taunts and jeers. All agree Craft certainly will be a target. But then the group is asked to vote, by a show of hands, if they would feel differently about Craft if he weren't white. The students pause. Deliberate. A few hands gradually pop up. And then a few more. When it's clear that it's socially acceptable to do so, nearly half the students in the room -- a room where everyone, coincidentally, is white -- raise their hands.

Fans hate Craft's shifting D -- and the fact that he just doesn't care thay they do. Robyn Twomey for ESPN The Magazine

FROM THE REACTION, it's obvious that most of these fans weren't really aware they enjoy insulting a white player partly because he's white. It's easier to believe they hate him just because, and to keep tricky racial biases relegated to the subconscious.

Lipnik, though, is more open about his predilections than most. "I'm thrilled you said that," Lipnik says when asked about the role Craft's skin color plays in his long-brewing animosity. "I didn't want to be the racist guy who calls out the white thing. But that's exactly one of the main reasons I hate him. He's that rural white guy who thinks he's hard-nosed, the my-dad-taught-me-how-to-play-defense, I-can't-score-the-basketball-if-you-paid-me guy. And everyone hates those guys. They're just ... just annoying."

By "those guys," Lipnik doesn't mean every white player. They are not white international guards like Steve Nash, or mean white big men like Christian Laettner, no matter how despised they might be for different reasons. They are not pure scorers like Jimmer Fredette or wings with a sweet stroke like J.J. Redick. He means strictly this guy: the short (by basketball standards), overachieving American white kid who doesn't pass the eye test, struggles to average double figures yet somehow thrives in the college game.

It's a club reserved for the likes of former Dukies such as Bobby Hurley (1989-1993), Steve Wojciechowski (1994-98) and Greg Paulus (2005-09), Purdue's Chris Kramer (2006-10) and Indiana's Dane Fife (1998-2002). Duke, with its rep as a bookish program with pesky tendencies, has more members in the club than anyone else. Craft's least favorite player growing up was none other than Paulus, now a friend and Ohio State video coordinator. "Slapping the floor and the way he carried himself, I didn't like Greg at all," Craft says. But being a Blue Devil is not vital. They just have to be, as Lipnik puts it so aptly, "that guy."

There aren't many candidates for the position. On the 75 rosters in the six major conferences, only about a third of the players appear to be white, and five of them (including Craft) are as small as 6'2", play at least 20 minutes and shoot at or under 40 percent.

And yet only Craft, with his rosy red cheeks and hitch-plagued jumper, fits the bill perfectly, dominating games with the swagger of a swingman who drops 20 a game.

"The easiest one to hate on," says Kramer, the former Boilermaker, describing this rare species. "You're not scoring points. You're not grabbing rebounds or getting many assists. You're the target. You're easy to pick on."

"We're boxy figures," adds Fife, who set the Hoosiers career steals record in 2002. "We don't walk athletic. We don't look athletic. And then the game starts and we are in your face, taking the ball from you. We're doing whatever we can to beat you. And for some fans and players, they don't know how to handle it."

Actually, they know exactly how to handle it: Turn Fife and Craft into villains, taking subconscious advantage of what sports sociologist Jay Coakley calls the social acceptability of a fan base harassing a player of the same race. There's more to our explanation than that; there's also probably a dissertation to be written on whether black fans feel as comfortable trashing white point guards as white fans do. But a theory needs a place to start, and this is it: "You don't want to be accused of racism you didn't intend, or maybe you want to hide your own racism that you don't want exposed," says Coakley, a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs who played college ball. "It all makes white players safer to attack. You don't have to self-censor as much." So you scream: "You SUCK!"

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Aaron Craft is the type of young man any father in America would love for his daughter to bring home. He's polite, makes eye contact when spoken to and is the Academic All-American of the Year with a 3.9 GPA in nutrition (premed). He writes Bible verses on his new high-tops and says what limited free time he has is spent at Athletes in Action Christian sports ministry meetings in Columbus.