Speeding down I-40 while drunk. Urinating in public. Using an adult's ID to buy a case of beer while underage. Kicking in the slats of a fence after an argument with a girlfriend.

Since 1999, records show, 41 Blue Devil lacrosse players -- about 31 percent of all players on the roster from then until now -- have been charged with a variety of rowdy and drunken acts.

Of this year's squad of 47 players -- their season canceled, their coach exiled and their university shamed -- roughly a third have been charged with similar misdemeanors.

In contrast, records show, only two members of Duke's 27-man soccer squad for this year have been arrested -- on charges of misdemeanor property damage and resisting arrest. Four of this year's 22 baseball players have been arrested in connection with underage alcohol offenses, all misdemeanors, records show.

Taken separately, the charges against Duke lacrosse players read like standard-issue, alcohol-fueled offenses of college students experiencing their first taste of freedom. Most are minor cases, quickly settled, that fall far short of the allegations of an escort service dancer who says she was gang-raped during a team party March 13 in the bathroom of a white rental house on Buchanan Boulevard where three lacrosse co-captains lived.

None of the misdemeanor charges encompasses the ugliness of team member Ryan McFadyen's searing e-mail in which he threatened to kill and skin strippers or a racially provocative insult shouted by an unidentified white male on Buchanan Boulevard the night of the team party.

But taken as a body of work, the charges track the noisy passage of a championship lacrosse team with a reputation for a swaggering sense of entitlement and privilege. They underscore the hard-drinking image of the Duke lacrosse team -- which some residents say is a super-sized version of the university's elitist, party-hearty ethos.

"There is a culture at Duke of an entitlement to be drunk in the evenings and on the weekends," said Robert Panoff, a former Notre Dame club lacrosse player who has lived for more than a decade in Trinity Park, the neighborhood on the edge of Duke's east campus where the lacrosse team captains lived.

"That's the attitude that pervades the Duke campus, and it's not just the lacrosse team," said Panoff, founder and executive director of a nonprofit research and education organization. "There is a particular swagger at Duke. Is there a particular machismo and variation of that swagger on the lacrosse team? Absolutely."

Panoff is quick to point out that lacrosse is not a monolithic culture. But for other Durham residents, the lacrosse imbroglio has raised racial tensions.

The dancer who is alleging the rape is black. She says her three unidentified attackers are white. All but the team's lone black player have submitted to DNA tests, and Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong says results could be released this week. Nifong says he's confident the woman was sexually assaulted. But attorneys for the players say no rape, assault or sex occurred.

'Preppy arrogance'

The case has ripped an already frayed town-and-gown relationship, underscoring the friction between the school, with its $41,000-a-year cost and walled campus, and the surrounding city.

"It's this preppy arrogance that they will never be held accountable for what they've done -- that their daddies will get them out of it," said Eugene Brown, a Durham city councilman who lives on Buchanan Boulevard, a block from the rental house.

"What do you do when you walk out and some guy is urinating on your house and you ask him to stop and he refuses?" Brown said. "We've been living with this for years, and the lacrosse players were the worst."

On the field, Duke's team has the reputation for playing a disciplined and aggressive brand of lacrosse, a fast-paced, hard-hitting game invented by American Indian tribes. Under coach Mike Pressler, who resigned last week, they won Atlantic Coast Conference championships in 1995, 2001 and 2002. Last year, they narrowly lost the NCAA championship game to another perennial lacrosse power, Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore.

But the team's behavior off the field rankles some Duke students, causing a smoldering resentment against lacrosse athletes they see as more aloof, isolated and arrogant than fraternities or other university athletic teams.

"They're rude," said Jordan Greene, 21, a senior philosophy and art major. "They're everything everyone [in Durham] wants to hate. ... I can't wear a Duke shirt in town without people automatically making assumptions about my background, whether or not I have a million-dollar trust fund."

Former Duke baseball players say loutish behavior and dancers at team parties weren't just a lacrosse thing -- they did the same thing and often joined the lacrosse team at tailgate parties during Duke football games.

But Duke's current baseball players haven't racked up an arrest record like the lacrosse team's. Triangle court records show 16 lacrosse players currently on the roster have been arrested in the past three years on charges ranging from public urination on a private residence to underage possession of a malt beverage to helping a minor get a mixed drink.

In addition, sophomore player Collin Finnerty and two friends were arrested last fall in Washington on simple assault charges. Finnerty was ordered to perform 25 hours of community service in Washington; if he does, the charges will be dropped, his attorney said.

Duke officials have struck different stances on the series of alcohol-related charges against lacrosse players. At a news conference March 28, university President Richard Brodhead and Athletic Director Joe Alleva said the charges weren't a warning sign of a team out of control.

"Many, many things in university life are aggravated by the presence of alcohol," Brodhead said. "Talk to anybody at any university, you will learn the truth of that. At the same time, the presence of alcohol does not guarantee that really bad things happen thereafter."

Alleva said: "I do not believe that those incidents, as the president has said, has any correlation with the severe allegations that are made in this case."

But Tallman Trask III, Duke's executive vice president, told The New York Times last week that he pulled all the disciplinary records on the lacrosse team a year ago -- violations that in hindsight should have been a red flag.

On Wednesday, Brodhead announced five committees charged with investigating the culture of the lacrosse program, student conduct, Duke's handling of the gang-rape allegation and other issues.

Brodhead said a faculty group will investigate the lacrosse team's renegade reputation and "look into that whole history and tell us whether that's true or not."

Lacrosse defended

Former lacrosse players at Duke and other colleges defend their sport. So do lacrosse coaches at the public high schools and prep schools that feed players to Duke's program. They also worry that the allegations that caused Duke officials to cancel the team's season will blunt the growing popularity of their sport and give college officials a ready reason not to make lacrosse a varsity sport.

"It's had a negative impact," said Aaron Fenton, a first-team All-American at Duke who graduated in 2005, one of three brothers to play for Pressler. "I don't want everybody to label lacrosse players in general the way the Duke lacrosse team has been. Playing for Duke was the best experience of my life."

Fenton said the portrayals of the team's rowdy partying and elitist attitudes were greatly exaggerated. Playing lacrosse at Duke builds character, he said.

"It taught me to be a man," said Fenton, a goalie drafted this year to play professionally for the San Francisco Dragons. "We were the average student-athlete at Duke. We weren't elitist. I don't think people saw us that way."

Fenton's mother, Dr. Marie Savard, an internal medicine specialist from Wynnewood, Pa., said she was saddened by Pressler's departure and shocked by McFadyen's e-mail. McFadyen and his parents could not be reached for comment about his e-mail.

"I would be devastated if one of my sons wrote something like that, even if they were drunk," she said.

Robinson "Rob" Bordley, head coach of boys' lacrosse at the Landon School in Bethesda, Md., a private school that has five graduates on this year's Duke team, said his former charges told him that Duke may decide by May 1 whether to resume lacrosse next year. With Pressler gone, such added uncertainty hurts Duke's chances to land top prospects, including several Washington-area players.

"People would be insane right now to sign with Duke without even knowing if there will be a program there," he said.

Bordley said he has used McFadyen's lurid e-mail as an object lesson for his players.

"I told them this was another illustration of what alcohol does to a kid's brain," he said. "Who in their right mind would make the rational decision to send an e-mail like that?"

Alcohol and young, aggressive athletes playing a violent game are a volatile combination, said William E. Scroggs, senior associate athletic director at UNC-Chapel Hill and chairman of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's rules committee for men's lacrosse.

"Everything that goes wrong in intercollegiate athletics, behaviorally, revolves around alcohol," said Scroggs, UNC's former men's lacrosse coach, ticking off a list that includes drunken driving, fights and sexual assaults. "My personal opinion is it's an alcohol issue, not a lacrosse or athletics issue. These types of things don't happen on a Tuesday afternoon when no one's been drinking."

The pipeline to Duke

Lacrosse, once a minor sport limited to such places as Long Island, Baltimore and New England, is now the fastest-growing sport in the United States, according to an April 2005 Sports Illustrated article. The game's popularity has pushed its boundaries to Colorado and California.

Traditional lacrosse powerhouses fall into two camps. One camp includes prestigious private schools such as Landon or Delbarton School in Morristown, N.J., an all-boys academy administered by Benedictine monks. Five Duke lacrosse players, including co-captain Dave Evans, are Landon grads. Five, including McFadyen, went to Delbarton.

But a third of Duke's lacrosse team -- 14 players -- come from Long Island, home to a far more physical brand of lacrosse. They are graduates of public school powerhouses such as Garden City High School or Massapequa High School or perennial Catholic contenders such as Chaminade High School.

If the Triangle is basketball-crazed, consider Long Island lacrosse-obsessed.

"It's almost like a disease, but in a good way," said Sean Keenan, assistant boy's lacrosse coach at Oceanside High School on Long Island and 1987 lacrosse All-American at Adelphi University. "You fall in love with the game and you can't even watch baseball. It's hockey on grass, but much more scoring makes it more exciting. ... It's an emotional game and you play it as long as you can and when you can no longer play, you coach."

Keenan worries about the impact of the Duke lacrosse scandal on the sport he loves.

"It's a blemish for all lacrosse players," he said. "It's going to be a blemish that causes colleges to take a second look at lacrosse. Hopefully, it's not a black card that halts the collegiate expansion of lacrosse."

(Staff writers Anne Blythe, Sam LaGrone, Michael Biesecker, Jane Stancill and Ned Barnett and researcher Brooke Cain contributed to this report.)

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