Completed Event: Men's Basketball versus #7 UConn on March 29, 2026 , Loss , 72, to, 73
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Final
Men's Basketball
72
vs #7 UConn
73
The Legendary Vic Bubas
1/29/2001 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
By Bill Brill
Blue Devil Weekly
I attended my first ACC Tournament in 1960. I haven't missed one since, but that initial occasion provided the most surprising winner in my memory.
Oh, there have been other major surprises. Virginia in 1976, for its only tournament title. N.C. State in '83, the only way that the Wolfpack could have gotten into the NCAAs, which it won. State again in '87.
But the Duke team that won its first-ever ACC title in 1960 was led by a rookie coach, whose team was 12-10 in the regular season. What's more, the Blue Devils defeated North Carolina in the semifinals. They had played the Heels three times previously. They lost them all, by margins of 22, 26 and 25 points.
In the finals, Duke upset Wake Forest, 63-59. During the regular season, the Deacons had romped over Duke twice, by 17 and 19 points. After that shocking event, Duke was the lone ACC representative in the NCAAs, which didn't accept multiple league entries for another 15 years. The Blue Devils continued to be a March surprise, defeating Princeton and St. Joseph's before losing to NYU in the East Region finals.
"Imagine that," said Vic Bubas, then the 32-year-old coach of the Devils.
"That team went to the elite eight, one game away from the Final Four." Bubas coached at Duke only for the decade of the 1960s. He won 213 games and lost just 67. His .761 winning percentage has only this year been passed as the best-ever at the school by the current resident, Mike Krzyzewski.
His teams won four ACC regular seasons and four league tournaments. He took his team to the Final Four on three occasions. These were all firsts at Duke. For six straight years, the Blue Devils finished in the top 10. From 1961-67, his teams had the best record in the nation, 159-37.
The legendary Bubas, who now resides at Bluffton, S.C. (Sun City Hilton Head), will have the concourse at Cameron Indoor Stadium named for him at halftime of Sunday's home game against Florida State. A bronze bust of the coach will be unveiled prior to the game. The Bubas section of the concourse will be in one of the corners in the area surrounding all upper level seats in the building. It will include a large photo of Vic, plus the three Final Four plaques. There also will be a montage representing the Bubas era.
Eventually, the other corners of the Bubas Concourse will feature women's basketball, the players whose jerseys have been retired, and the Krzyzewski era.
The concourse was part of a $1 million dollar fund-raising campaign chaired by former Duke All-America Jeff Mullins in coordination with associate athletics director Susan Ross. The project will include a multitude of memorabilia commemorating the history of Duke basketball.
"Eventually, we hope to have the name of everybody who ever played in Cameron to be listed on the concourse," said Mike Cragg, assistant athletics director and head of the basketball Legacy Fund. Bubas, who played under and coached for Everett Case at N.C. State at a time when the Wolfpack dominated the Southern Conference and later the new ACC, was a coach well ahead of his time. In a mere 10 years, he did a lot to revolutionize college basketball.
He was way ahead of the game in recruiting. He hired assistant coaches who went on to distinguished careers in the sport, including the NBA. Every one of his assistants eventually became a head coach. Bubas took the Duke job on May 5, 1959, replacing Hal Bradley, who had left for Texas. He immediately went out recruiting, and persuaded Art Heyman of Rockville Center, N.Y., that he should come to Duke instead of UNC. Heyman would become a three-time All-America, national player of the year, and the No. 1 draft pick in the NBA by the Knicks.
The 1960 tournament championship jump-started the Duke program, and Heyman kept it going - with a lot of help from Mullins, who arrived a year later. By '63, the Blue Devils were in their first Final Four, where Heyman was named MVP. Coaching jobs were handled differently in those days. "Part of the deal was that I inherited the assistants, Fred Shabel and Whit Cobb," Bubas said recently.
That summer, Cobb left for private business, and Bubas hired Bucky Waters, who had just graduated from N.C. State in 58. "Vic talked to me at the North Carolina All-Star Clinic," said Waters, now a longtime Duke vice president. "I coached the freshman team, which included Heyman." Waters remained for four years, then became head coach at West Virginia at age 28. Five years later, he would replace Bubas at Duke. He coached three seasons, then accepted a fund-raising job at Duke Hospital. Shabel left to become the head coach at Connecticut and wound up at Penn.
"After that, he decided to make more money than all of us put together," Bubas said. Shabel is CEO of the firm that runs the First Union Center in Philadelphia, where the NCAA East Regional will be played.
The next assistant was Chuck Daly, who came to Duke from a Pennsylvania high school. He eventually left to become head coach at Boston College, and later won two NBA titles with the Detroit Pistons. He also coached at New Jersey and Orlando and has done considerable work on television. He was the head coach of the original Dream Team in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.
Coach K was one of the assistants.
Other assistants under Bubas were Hubie Brown, who later became the coach of the New York Knicks, has been a longtime NBA analyst on TNT, and knew more basketball than anybody I ever met; and Tom Carmody, who left Duke to become the head coach at Rhode Island. Bubas always had a great staff, and, after home games, the assistants always would have a party at one of their houses. I went to a lot of those social functions. The women would sit in the living room; the men would talk basketball in the kitchen. Mostly, I listened and absorbed, and if I know anything about basketball, it's because I was fortunate enough to participate in fabulous informal seminars, where the games were surgically dissected.
When Bubas announced his surprise retirement on Valentine's Day, 1969, I was attending an American Press Institute seminar in New York City. I saw the story on the news wire and caught a plane to Charleston, W.Va., where I talked with Vic and wife Tootie in their motel room.
It was the first time that I ever interviewed a prominent sports celebrity who was still in his pajamas.
Bubas had accepted a job to become a vice president at Duke. He later would leave to be the commissioner of the new Sun Belt Conference. During that period, he was the first chairman of the NCAA Basketball Committee, which selected the teams for the postseason tournament.
There is no mistaking Bubas' imprint on the college game, and his success into building Duke into a national basketball power, where it remains today. He was one of the all-time greats.
"Eventually, we want the concourse to be a walking museum of Duke history," Cragg said. "The Bubas display is the first phase."
It was the proper place to start, and the right man to provide the name of the concourse.
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