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Featherston: The Rivalry
2/11/2009 9:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball, Athletics
The New York Times didn't send a reporter and there was no one on hand from Chicago, Philadelphia or anywhere outside North Carolina to cover the matchup between two Tobacco Road neighbors. In 1955, there was no reason for anybody outside the new Atlantic Coast Conference to care about the game. There was nothing of national significance at stake that night in Durham. Even the ACC implications were minor. The 17-7 Blue Devils needed a win to clinch second place in the league standings, while the 10-9 Tar Heels were trying to finish above .500 in the second season of ACC play.
It's only in retrospect that Duke's 96-74 victory that night stands out as a landmark game. It's only by looking back across a half-century that has seen the Duke-North Carolina series develop into the best rivalry in college basketball ? maybe the best rivalry in all of sports ? that the Feb. 25, 1955 meeting in Durham assumes it's true significance:
It was the last time that Duke and North Carolina met on the basketball court and neither was ranked.
When North Carolina visits Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium this Wednesday night, it will be the 141st straight meeting that features at least one team ranked in a major poll. It will be the 41st time that both teams have been ranked in the top 10 by the Associated Press.
Can any other rivalry in sports match that level of consistency? The Yankees and Red Sox are usually offered as a challenger, but before Boston rallied from a 3-0 deficit to beat the Yankees in the 2004 American League championship series, the Yankees had won every significant game/series versus the Red Sox for more than half a century. Do five years of competitive excellence make a great rivalry?
How about the Redskins-Cowboys? The two NFL rivals have combined to win one playoff game in the last decade. Kentucky-Louisville is a great basketball rivalry, but the two Bluegrass State programs didn't play each other for more than a quarter century. Maybe, you can cite Michigan-Ohio State or Auburn-Alabama in football as contenders. And Miami-Florida State had a decade of spectacular competition before both teams slipped into mediocrity in the 21st century.
None of those rivalries can match Duke-Carolina for sustained excellence.
The Duke-Carolina rivalry is now working on its second half-century of greatness. Since that 1955 meeting, the neighboring basketball giants have combined for seven national titles, 13 No. 1 poll finishes, 30 Final Four appearances, 32 ACC championships and 59 top 10 finishes in the final AP poll.
Before the 2005 Duke-Carolina matchup in Cameron, Blue Devil coach Mike Krzyzewski was asked if he thought Duke-Carolina was the best rivalry in sports.
“You know, I really believe that ... because it's college,” he answered. “It's not like who the star on another pro team is. It used to be the Lakers and the Celtics. That was more Magic against Bird. This transcends coaches and players.
“They no longer talk about the Lakers and the Celtics. Duke-Carolina, it'll be here forever. Fans? They'll come whether I'm coaching or not. It's not about me vs. Dean [Smith] or me against Roy [Williams] or Dean against Vic Bubas.”
In the four years since Krzyzewski made that little speech, the NBA has changed so much that the Lakers and Celtics once again represent one of the league's best rivalries. But that merely reinforces his point ? most professional rivalries are transitory ... they come and go as the Lakers/Celtics have done. Only Duke-Carolina endures. The two Tobacco Road powers are always relevant. And the rivalry helps make each one better.
“It's like cross marketing,” Krzyzewski said. “Even though a Duke fan wouldn't necessarily like Duke [linked] with North Carolina or vice versa, when you put those two names together, each individual name prospers. I think both programs, whether they would like to admit it or not, have helped one another and certainly it's helped the ACC. Sometimes you hear complaining about why is the Duke-Carolina game this and that. The reason is because more people want to watch it. It's just at a different level.”
But in a very real sense, the rivalry goes beyond cross marketing. One of the intriguing strengths of the Duke-Carolina rivalry is how much alike the two programs have been in their rise to greatness. They may hate each other and snipe at each other, but at the most basic level they've won with interchangeable players and with almost exactly the same kind of fans.
The Gray Fox
Although Duke and North Carolina first met on the basketball court in 1920 ? back when Duke was still Trinity College ? the rivalry remained football oriented for the first six decades of the 20th Century.
That's not to say there weren't some memorable moments on the hardwood. Duke's “Never-a-Dull-Moment” boys of 1938 launched their improbable title drive with an upset of UNC in old Card Gym. Dick Groat, Duke's first national player of the year, concluded his Blue Devil tenure with a memorable 48-point explosion against North Carolina in Duke Indoor Stadium. The undefeated 1957 Tar Heels overcame one of their greatest challenges from Duke in Woollen Gym: two late steals by Bobby Joe Harris enabled the Blue Devils to tie No. 1 ranked UNC with 16 seconds left in a wild game ? so wild that the Carolina student in charge of the hand-operated scoreboard forgot to change the score on Duke's last basket; a confused Harris thought the Devils were down two instead of tied and gave an intentional foul that allowed UNC to escape with a 75-73 victory.
Yet, for all the occasional drama, Duke-UNC remained a football rivalry through that era. The basketball matchups drew regional interest, but little national attention.
Ironically, N.C. State's basketball coach would change that.
The Wolfpack, despairing of competing with Duke and UNC on the football field, made the conscious decision to focus the school's efforts on dominating basketball. To that end, N.C. State hired Indiana high school legend Everett Case after the 1946 season. Case, the ol' Gray Fox, immediately made the Red Terrors (the Wolfpack nickname was still several years in the future) into the best basketball program on Tobacco Road.
In 1946, Duke ? bolstered by its magnificent new Indoor Stadium ? was probably the best program on Tobacco Road. Under Eddie Cameron and Gerry Gerard, the Blue Devils had won five Southern Conference titles in the previous nine seasons. The '46 Devils won 21 games and swept N.C. State, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest to win the league championship.
A year later, Case had turned Tobacco Road on its head. He inherited a 6-12 team and promptly won 26 games, including the first of six straight Southern Conference titles. N.C. State would win nine conference titles in Case's first 10 seasons ? five times beating Duke in the finals, once in the semifinals.
It was a frustrating period for Duke basketball, which was good ? but not good enough. However, it was even worse for North Carolina, which saw its program collapse in the early 1950s ? just as basketball began to take hold in the public's consciousness.
Again, the catalyst was Case, who proved an even better promoter than he was a basketball coach. The Indiana product made basketball exciting, introducing pep bands, net-cutting ceremonies, spotlighted introductions. He had the first coaches' TV show in the nation. He started the Dixie Classic, a holiday tournament that became a fixture on the Tobacco Road sports landscape. He traveled the state of North Carolina, selling his favorite sport and occasionally passing out balls and hoops to eager youngsters.
Case's success galled the powers at UNC, which took their superiority over N.C. State for granted. The Tar Heels had won eight straight over N.C. State before Case's arrival ... then promptly lost 15 straight matchups with the Gray Fox. After the disastrous 1952 season, UNC athletic director Chuck Erickson went looking for a coach good enough to stand up to Case.
Ironically, he found his man in Reynolds Coliseum. Erickson was in the stands for the 1952 NCAA East Regionals, watching as a fiery Irish coach led St. John's past N.C. State on its home floor. The next night, the Redmen knocked off defending national champion Kentucky to earn a trip to the Final Four. St. John's lost the national title game to Kansas (with a little-noticed backup guard named Dean Smith playing a few seconds for the winning Jayhawks), but that didn't cool UNC's interest in Frank McGuire.
It took the new Tar Heel coach four years to mount a serious challenge to Case's juggernaut. His 1956 team shared the ACC regular season title with the Pack, but came up short in the tournament. That merely spurred the 1957 Heels ? an aggregation of New York City prep products ? to greatness. UNC swept through the regular season undefeated, survived a scare from Wake Forest in the ACC Tournament semifinals, then marched to the national title, finishing with a perfect 32-0 record.
More than any other event, UNC's 1957 national championship helped make basketball king on Tobacco Road. Case's success ? and his salesmanship ? had laid the groundwork, but McGuire's perfection had reaped the benefits. That much was evident when the UNC team plane, returning from Kansas City, was forced to abort its landing at Raleigh-Durham Airport because more than 15,000 delirious fans had swarmed over the runway.
But the focus of the growing basketball mania on Tobacco Road was on the red-hot UNC-N.C. State rivalry. Duke was a little behind the curve.
Blue Devil athletic director Eddie Cameron had tried to take steps to keep up with his neighbors in 1949, when Coach Gerard, a former University of Illinois two-sport standout who had been Red Grange's backup on the football field, was diagnosed with cancer. Cameron had hired a young pro coach to come to Durham as Gerard's assistant and future successor, but after a summer and fall on campus, Red Auerbach got a better offer from the NBA and left to coach the Boston Celtics. Cameron ended up bringing in Hal Bradley from Hardwick College, who took over as Duke's head coach after the 1950 season.
The trouble is that while Bradley was very good, he was not quite good enough. He won ACC regular season titles in 1954 and 1958 and averaged almost 19 wins a year, but he couldn't beat Case when it mattered and soon saw his program passed by McGuire's new dynasty at UNC. When Bradley decided to leave Duke for Texas after the 1959 season, it was a very similar situation to the one in Raleigh a few years ago, when Herb Sendek left N.C. State for Arizona State ? Bradley certainly wasn't fired, but many Duke fans were happy for a fresh start.
Cameron, flooded with applications from coaches who saw Duke as a sleeping giant, in the end got his new coach from the same place UNC had found McGuire ? from Reynolds Coliseum.
Vic Bubas, a product of Gary, Ind., had been one of Case's first Hoosier Hotshots. He was an All-Southern Conference guard who scored the first basket ever in Reynolds Coliseum and led the Pack to its first Final Four in 1950. He stayed on in Raleigh, first coaching N.C. State's freshman team, then becoming Case's recruiting dynamo. It was Bubas who found future All-American Ron Shavlik in Denver and lured him to Raleigh. He went to Philadelphia to recruit celebrated young big man John Ritcher and while there, he found unknown guard Lou Pucillo ? a tiny player who was so unpromising on the surface that when Bubas begged Case to offer the future All-American a scholarship, the Gray Fox suggested that Bubas must be drunk.
In the spring on 1959, just as Cameron began his coaching search, Bubas was completing one of his greatest recruiting coups, traveling into Lexington, Ky., and stealing celebrated shooting guard Jon Speaks from under the nose of Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp. The Baron of Bluegrass reacted with an angry tirade that not only offended Speaks, but also turned off his junior teammate, a 6-4 forward with a sweet jump shot named Jeff Mullins.
That was to pay major dividends a year later when Mullins also rejected Rupp and signed with Bubas. Speaks would go on to win All-ACC honors at N.C. State. Mullins was even better ? a first-team All-American at Duke.
But before Mullins arrived on campus, Bubas had already convinced Long Island prep superstar Art Heyman to renege on his commitment to UNC and play at Duke. That decision ? and all the violence and hard feelings that followed ? helped take Duke-UNC past UNC-N.C. State as the premier basketball rivalry on Tobacco Road. When No. 4 Duke beat No. 5 North Carolina in the infamous 1961 brawl game, it marked the first time in the rivalry where both teams were ranked in the top 10.
It would not be the last.
The Players
Few Duke players in the last half-century have been as abused by the North Carolina fans as Bobby Hurley. The irony is that the gifted playmaker could have easily played for the Tat Heels.
In fact, the Jersey City point guard offered to commit to UNC if Dean Smith would only commit to him. But one of Smith's most admirable traits was his honesty with recruits. He told Hurley that he was just UNC's No. 2 point guard prospect. As long as the Heels had a chance to land Kenny Anderson, he couldn't commit to Hurley.
Krzyzewski was also recruiting Anderson, but when Hurley came to him with the same offer, he didn't hesitate to accept the deal. As a result, Duke landed the point guard that would lead the Blue Devils to three Final Fours and back-to-back national championships. Meanwhile, Smith lost Anderson to Georgia Tech and had to make do with King Rice and later Derrick Phelps. The two replacement point guards would “only” manage to combine for two Final Fours and one national championship in their tenure at UNC.
The interesting part of the story is how hated Hurley became in Chapel Hill. To Tar Heel fans, he was a whiny little punk ... yet, how loved would he have been by the Carolina nation had Smith accepted his offer and signed him to play point guard at UNC in the early 1990s?
But that's an important part of the Duke-Carolina dynamic ? ever since the days when Bubas stole Heyman from Frank McGuire, the two programs have fought for the same players. Heyman made Duke dominant in the rivalry. But in this rivalry, neither team remains dominant very long. Smith always attributed his rise to power to his first clear-cut recruiting victory over Bubas, when he beat the Duke coach out for Pennsylvania prep star Larry Miller.
It was Miller who turned the tide in the rivalry in 1967. Duke had won 10 of the previous 12 meetings when the two teams met in Cameron that year. The Blue Devils trailed that game much of the way, but rallied late and tied the score in the closing seconds. On the sidelines, Smith was trying to call a timeout, but Miller took the inbounds pass and ignored him. The powerful forward drove the length of the court and scored the go-ahead basket. A little over a month later, Miller hit 13 of 14 field goal attempts and scored 32 points to lead UNC past Duke in the ACC Tournament title game. His play that season pushed Carolina ahead of Duke in the rivalry ... a position the Heels would hold for the next decade until Duke coach Bill Foster beat out Smith and everybody else in the country for the services of Philadelphia schoolboy superstar Gene Banks.
It's amazing how many of the key players in the rivalry were recruited by both schools. High school teammates became rivals: Dick DeVenzio and Dennis Wuycik; John Kuester and Mark Crow; Jim Spanarkel and Mike O'Koren; Gerald Henderson and Wayne Ellington; Nolan Smith and Ty Lawson. Even brothers: Jay and Bruce Buckley; Jeff and Jason Capel wore different shades of blue. Duke recruited Mitch Kupchak, Eric Montross, Vince Carter, Kris Lang. UNC wanted Danny Ferry, Shane Battier, Mike Dunleavy and Greg Paulus.
Hurley, Grant Hill and Christian Laettner ? the three big guns on Duke's 1991-92 national champs ? were all major Tar Heel targets. Laettner's mother recalled a recruiting visit to UNC when she and her son were riding an elevator with Smith in Granville Towers to see where the players lived. She said she had just asked the Tar Heel coach about the rivalry with Duke and he was pooh-poohing it as a media creation when the elevator doors opened and there across the hall was the door to J.R. Reid's room ? plastered with anti-Duke signs and posters.
Duke's 2001 national champs also included three major Tar Heel targets. There was a brief “Dean hung up on Shane” hullabaloo when Battier called the UNC coach to tell him he was going to Duke (Smith, woken by Battier's phone call, was rather abrupt in his response ? although Battier said the Tar Heel coach later wrote a gracious letter of congratulations); Mike Dunleavy picked Duke over Carolina despite his father's wishes; and Jason Williams confessed that he was first interested in Carolina, but swung towards Duke when UNC coach Bill Guthridge told him that they already had their future point guard in Ronald Curry and they didn't think Williams was a good enough scorer to play the No. 2 guard.
It's amazing how players are perceived ? on both sides of the rivalry ? depending on which shade of blue they wear. But the truth is that with a few exceptions there's little difference between the players on either side ... largely because with a couple of different breaks in the recruiting wars, you could almost swap rosters.
Could you imagine that happening with N.C. State or Maryland? Of course not. But there are dozens of Tar Heel greats who might have worn Duke blue and just as many Blue Devil stars that could have their jerseys hanging from the Smith Center rafters.
The Fans
What makes a Duke fan or a Carolina fan?
Well, obviously alums of the two schools have tangible reasons for their loyalties. But anybody living or growing up on Tobacco Road understands that actual graduates make up just a small percentage of either fan base. We all know families split by the Duke-Carolina rivalry ? indeed, this author's own family is mixed: my father and I attended Duke and two brothers who went to Carolina. If you go a little farther afield, two of my great uncles ? Rufus and Bunn Hackney ? captained the UNC basketball team in the 1920s and a third great uncle ? Elmo “Honey Boy” Hackney ? was a football All-American at Duke.
But while the divisions between loyalists may be sharp, the behavior of the two fan bases are amazingly similar ... and equally irrational. Now, I don't mean a blanket indictment of either Duke or Carolina fans. Both schools have plenty of rational, intelligent, classy fans. But both schools also have their share of biased, unreasonable devotees.
Let me give you one example.
Most of those reading this are Duke fans, who will recall Ademola Okulaja's famous declaration in 1999 that the only team that could beat Carolina was Carolina. To Blue Devil fans, his words were a worthy target of ridicule. Well, about a year later, Duke's Nate James said almost exactly the same thing ? that the only team that could beat Duke was Duke.
Now here's the funny thing: To this day, Carolina fans ridicule James' statement without acknowledging that one of their guys said the same thing. And Duke fans cite the Okulaja declaration without understanding that James had said almost exactly the same words.
That's not the only example.
Carolina fans reacted with malicious glee when Coach K cried after Hurley's last game in 1993. But Duke fans often deride Roy Williams for similar emotional displays at Kansas. And remember when Coach K said after losing to UConn in St. Petersburg that he was in the business for relationships? Carolina fans loved that one. Of course, Roy said exactly the same thing at the ACC Basketball tipoff in 2005 and Duke fans jumped on him.
For years, Duke fans complained that Dean Smith had the refs in his pocket and that Carolina got all the calls. Now many Tar Heel fans sincerely believe that the refs favor Coach K and there's a clear Duke bias in ACC officiating.
Both sides have their codewords, shorthand for what they see as the other program's sins, often without understanding the issues behind the scenes. For instance, parents of players from both programs have secured employment locally while their sons played basketball on Tobacco Road, raising eyebrows from either side.
The truth is that both programs are a sterling example of what college basketball should be about. Neither program, nor the coaches involved in this rivalry are perfect. But overall, both Duke and Carolina play by the rules, they both play with real student-athletes and they both play the sport of basketball at very the highest level.
That's why it's the best rivalry in college basketball ... and maybe the best rivalry in all of sports.
Players Mentioned
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