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Duke-N.C. State: The Second Rivalry
1/19/2011 8:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
DURHAM, N.C. – Everybody – even Maryland coach Gary Williams – acknowledges that the Duke-UNC rivalry is THE rivalry in college basketball.
Does that famous feud leave room for another Blue Devil rivalry?
According to the ACC, Duke's “other” rival is Maryland. That's the one team (besides North Carolina) that the Blue Devils face twice each and every season. And, indeed, for the last decade, Duke-Maryland has been a hotly contested rivalry.
But in historical terms, Duke's long rivalry with N.C. State dwarfs its recent duel with the Terps. The two Triangle schools have battled for 99 years – and for much of the time, they've battled for supremacy on Tobacco Road. They've traded coaches and stadium designs. It was a Duke grad who helped N.C. State become a national power for the first time. It was a State grad who first steered the Blue Devils to national prominence. Duke's longtime radio play-by-play voice is a State grad and one of the Pack's most prominent radio voices got his start announcing on the Duke network.
And it was the long alliance between Duke athletic director Eddie Cameron and N.C. State's Roy Clogston who shaped the basketball landscape of the new ACC in the early 1950s and defended the fledgling ACC Tournament from a multitude of early critics.
Duke will travel to Raleigh Wednesday night to meet N.C. State for the 234th time. Well, actually, it will merely be the 233rd meeting, but the 234th outcome – the two schools didn't actually meet late in 1917, but Duke (then Trinity) claims a forfeit victory (a claim acknowledged by N.C. State).
It's a shame that Wednesday night's game won't attract as much national attention as next month's Duke-Carolina game will, but it's worth taking a moment to consider the huge role that N.C. State has played in Duke basketball history … and vice versa.
The Early Years
When the first game in the rivalry was played, there wasn't a Duke or an N.C. State … it was Trinity vs. North Carolina A&M when the Methodists from Durham defeated the Farmers on February 9, 1912.
Trinity/Duke dominated the early days of the rivalry, but in the first significant postseason matchup between the schools, N.C. State College (as A&M had come to be known) prevailed. Duke made its first trip to the Southern Conference Tournament in Atlanta in 1929 and the team recently nicknamed the Blue Devils beat Alabama, North Carolina and Georgia to reach the championship game.
That Duke team featured future major league baseball star Bill Werber, Duke's first basketball All-American, along with Harry Councilor and big man Joe Croson. That group had split two games with N.C. State in the regular season, but the Farmers won the rubber match – and their first conference championship – 43-35.
Duke would gain a measure of revenge nine years later when Eddie Cameron's 1938 Blue Devils – known as the Never a Dull Moment boys – upset N.C. State (led by future NFL standout Connie Mack Berry) in the first round of the Southern Conference Tournament in Raleigh. Robert O'Mara, who starred at fullback on Duke's undefeated Rose Bowl team the next fall, outdueled Clemson All-American Banks McFadden in the finals to give Duke its first conference championship.
The Duke-State basketball rivalry was about to take off, dwarfing for a time the Blue Devils more traditional rivalry with North Carolina (which still continued to dominate on the football field).
The Blue Devil program, getting a huge boost from the completion of the magnificent Indoor Stadium in 1940 (the largest on-campus arena in the country) was emerging as the dominant power in the Southern Conference. Cameron also benefited from the explosion of basketball talent in Durham, which was reflected by Durham High's famous pre-war team – a squad that won 71 straight games between 1939-41.
Cameron was able to secure the bulk of the talent from that team, including two-sport stars Robert Gantt (the son of a famous Duke baseball star) and Gordon Carver, plus the talented Loftis brothers. But he missed on the biggest star of all, losing 6-6 Horace “Bones” McKinney to N.C. State.
McKinney always blamed his rejection of the hometown school on an incident that occurred while he was still a student at Durham High. He claimed that he was caught sneaking into the Duke Indoor Stadium through a bathroom window and was given a spanking by a campus cop in front of a crowd of jeering Duke students. He always insisted that the embarrassment caused him to pick State over Duke.
McKinney became an immediate star when he joined the N.C. State varsity in 1941-42. He almost single-handed turned a 6-9 team into a 15-win conference contender. The colorful big man led State past South Carolina and William & Mary in the Southern Conference Tournament – all the way to the championship game.
There he found a Duke team that boasted the bulk of his old Durham High team. Sophomore guard Cedric Loftis was the team's leading scorer, while Gantt and his twin brother Garland Loftis were key contributors. They helped lead Cameron's greatest team to a 22-2 season. They capped the brilliant year off with a 45-34 victory over McKinney and N.C. State.
That was supposed to be merely the opening salvo in N.C. State's bid to become a basketball power. The school's athletic council, despairing of competing with Duke and North Carolina in football, voted to sink unprecedented resources into basketball and to dominate its neighbors in that sport. School officials worked out a complicated funding plan with the North Carolina Assembly and the U.S. Army for the construction of a new basketball arena to replace the tiny Walter Thompson Gym (built in 1925).
As originally drawn, the new basketball facility would be almost a carbon copy of Duke's Indoor Stadium, which had just opened in Durham. The first steel frames were erected just below the railroad tracks that bisected the campus in the late fall of 1941.
Obviously, Pearl Harbor changed everything. As the United States entered the war, N.C. State's grandiose plans were put on hold and the nation focused on more important things than college basketball. McKinney left N.C. State and joined the Army and the school's program went into hiatus, leaving the bare steel frames of the new arena as a reminder of those pre-war basketball dreams.
The Indiana Maestro
After the war, N.C. State was ready to resume its quest for basketball excellence, but where to start?
The answer came from a Duke graduate. Former Blue Devil Dick Herbert, the sports editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, suggested that State officials go to Chuck Taylor, a pioneer in basketball shoe design and sales, who had contacts with every coach in the country. It was Taylor who suggested that the school go after a Lt. Commander in the Navy – a former Indiana high school coach who was just about to get out of the service.
Everett Case came to Raleigh in the spring of 1946, just a few weeks after Duke defeated Wake Forest to win the 1946 Southern Conference title. That was the fifth league title in nine years for the Blue Devils and under Coach Gerry Gerard, Duke was enjoying its first period of basketball dominance.
Case would end Duke's reign with dramatic suddenness. Inheriting one holdover from a 6-12 team, the Indiana prep legend (the first coach to win four state titles there) promptly retooled with a team of Navy veterans and Indiana natives. His Hoosier Hotshots promptly won 26 games, including an 11-2 run in the Southern Conference. One of the two losses was to Duke in Durham, but the Red Terrors (the Wolfpack nickname still a couple of years away) blitzed the Devils in Raleigh just before the Southern Conference Tournament.
Case's arrival – and his team's fast-paced style of play – excited fans on Tobacco Road in a way they had never been excited about basketball. Interest grew so quickly that just weeks before the Southern Conference Tournament was due to open in the Raleigh Auditorium – a 4,700-seat facility that had hosted the event since 1933 – Case went to Duke's Eddie Cameron, who was chairman of the Southern Conference basketball committee, and suggested they move the tournament to Duke's 8,800 seat (at that time) Indoor Stadium.
The last-minute switch went off without a hitch and the tourney averaged more than 8,000 fans a session in Durham. Unfortunately, Duke failed to take advantage of the home court, losing to South Carolina in the first round. N.C. State rolled to the title (its first since 1929), edging UNC in the championship game. Afterwards, Case and his team cut down the nets in celebration – an old Indiana high school tradition that he introduced to the college game.
The 1947 season would set the tone for the next decade. Duke was almost always very good, but N.C. State was always just a little bit better – especially when it mattered most.
“We beat them plenty of times,” Dick Crowder, who played center for the Devils from 1950-52, said. “But every time we played them in the tournament, it was on their home floor and they always won.”
That home floor was Reynolds Coliseum, which had started out as a carbon copy of Duke's Indoor Stadium. When Case arrived, he demanded a bigger structure. In his experience in Indiana, the school with the biggest gym gets to host the tournament games. The only problem was that the steel frame erected before World War II didn't allow easy expansion. The only way to make the facility bigger was to extend the ends. Hence, Reynolds Coliseum ended up with thousands of terrible end zone seats – but those seats were there – 12,400 in all, making it the largest gym in the South.
It opened in 1949-50 and the Southern Conference moved its tournament from Durham to Raleigh in 1951. Case would win his first four conference titles in Durham – beating Duke in the finals in 1948 and 1950 (on the Devils' own home floor). The Pack's domination of the Blue Devils continued in the 1951 and 1952 finals in Reynolds.
The latter was particularly galling for Duke star Dick Groat. In his senior season, the Blue Devils started slowly and were a mere 9-5 after losing a double-overtime thriller to N.C. State in Durham. But after that game, Groat and Duke caught fire, winning 15 straight games, including a 71-58 thrashing of N.C. State in Reynolds.
“I can still see their fans lined up in the aisles in a hurry to get out with a couple of minutes left,” Groat recalled in a 2007 interview. “That was a sweet moment.”
Duke – with rebounding machine Bernie Janicki and sweet-shooting guard Rudy D'Emilio giving Groat strong support – was playing so well at the end of the season that when Groat was honored for his 48-point performance in the season finale against UNC, he took the mic and promised the crowd a victory in the upcoming Southern Conference tournament.
But Duke was frustrated by a curious seeding decision. West Virginia (a team Duke had lost to on the road early in the season) was seeded first in the tournament. N.C. State was given the second seed. Duke, thanks to those early season struggles, was seeded third. There was a big drop-off to the fourth seed, George Washington.
By all rights, the pairings should have been set to match No. 2 seed N.C. State and No. 3 seed Duke in the semifinals, with West Virginia getting George Washington. To this day, Groat can't understand how the pairings were set up to match No. 1 West Virginia and No. 3 Duke in the semifinals – while No. 2 seed N.C. State got to coast against a much inferior George Washington team.
Duke had to open with a tough Maryland team, coached by Bud Milliken.
“He was a disciple of Hank Iba and they held the ball on us,” Groat recalled. “We were down six with five minutes left, but I hit three field goals quickly and we were able to pull it out. That game took everything we had. The next night, we played West Virginia and we beat them 90-88 on a [last second tip-in] by Dick Johnson. I thought West Virginia was the best team in the country.
“The next night we played State in the championship game. They had two easy games in the first two rounds and they were able to coast. We were up four at the half, but I remember sitting in the locker room and looking at my teammates and knowing how I felt, thinking, 'We've got nothing left.'”
Groat was right – the rested Wolfpack rolled to a 77-68 victory over the weary Blue Devils. Groat and his teammates were disappointed when university officials turned down a bid to the NIT in New York. The previous spring's point-shaving scandals had put a taint on New York City basketball and starting in 1952, most major conference schools refused to play in the postseason event.
Case's Right Hand Man
Duke's frustration with N.C. State continued throughout the decade of the 1950s. The Blue Devils were always among the top teams in the new ACC, but were never good enough to get past N.C. State.
That started in the very first ACC Tournament, when the Blue Devils earned the top seed in a transitional year that saw a wide imbalance in schedules. Duke blitzed Virginia in the opener, but drew fourth-seeded N.C. State – on its home court – in the semifinals. Harold Bradley's Blue Devils had beaten State twice in the regular season, but fell 79-75 in the tournament.
It was after that game that Case uttered his famous dictum, “It's hard to beat a good team three times in one season.”
But that's just what N.C. State did in 1955, beating Duke in Durham and Raleigh during the regular season, then topping the Blue Devils in the finals of the ACC Tournament. Because State was on probation, that runner-up finish earned Duke its first NCAA Tournament bid, but Bradley's team was still disappointed to lose yet another tournament game to N.C. State.
Duke's frustration continued through the end of the decade. In the first six years of the ACC, Bradley's teams never finished worse than third in the ACC – and twice won regular season titles – but could never get past State in the tournament. While the Devils were constantly coming up short, Case was winning nine conference titles in 10 years between 1947 and 1956 … then he added a 10th crown in 1959.
It finally got to be too much for Bradley, who despaired of competing with Case and accepted a lucrative offer to coach at Texas.
Cameron received more than 140 applications for the Duke job, but he knew right away who he wanted – N.C. State assistant coach Vic Bubas.
The 31-year-old Case protégé had been one of the earliest of N.C. State's Hoosier hotshots, arriving from Gary, Ind., in the fall of 1947. He starred four years for the Wolfpack – playing on conference championship teams in each of his four seasons. When he graduated in 1951, Bubas remained on Case's staff and quickly established himself as a dynamic recruiter, who expanded the Wolfpack talent base far beyond Indiana.
Bubas found Ronnie Shavlik in Denver. He invaded Duke's traditional recruiting territory in Pennsylvania to steal John Richter and Lou Pucillo. In his last act for N.C. State, he snatched sweet-shooting guard Jon Speaks from Adolph Rupp's backyard in Lexington, Ky.
It took Bubas just weeks to pull off his first recruiting miracle at Duke, convincing UNC-bound Long Island prep star Art Heyman to switch to Duke. Bubas also used his experience as Case's recruiting ace to score for the Blue Devils when he returned to Lexington, Ky., and landed Speaks' prep teammate, Jeff Mullins – driving Kentucky's Rupp to fury.
Between them, Heyman and Mullins helped make Duke a national power – and led the Devils to their first Final Four. With N.C. State temporarily sidetracked by another point-shaving scandal, Bubas dueled Wake Forest's Bones McKinney for ACC supremacy.
But N.C. State refused to stay down long.
In the finals of the 1965 ACC Tournament, No. 8 ranked Duke was stunned by unranked N.C. State in the championship game, thanks to a career game by backup Larry Worsley. To this day, that remains the most bitter defeat in Bubas' brilliant career. A year later, N.C. State almost did it again to an even better Duke team, leading the No. 3 ranked Devils late in the last ACC championship game to be played in Reynolds Coliseum. Senior guard Steve Vacendak helped Duke rally for the 71-66 victory.
Those two back-to-back title games produced two ACC oddities: in 1965, Worsley became the only backup to earn tournament MVP honors; in 1966, Vacendak's heroics were so impressive that he was voted the ACC's most valuable player for the season – even though he was merely a second-team All-ACC pick.
Duke and State played another memorable tournament game later in the decade. The 1968 Blue Devils were No. 6 in the nation and looking forward to a matchup with No. 2 North Carolina in the finals of the ACC Tournament in Charlotte when they fell to the Pack 12-10 in the greatest slowdown game in conference history. The mastermind of the deep freeze was second-year N.C. State coach Norman Sloan, a former teammate of Bubas' at N.C. State. Indeed, Sloan always nursed a grudge against Bubas, who came a year later and took his job in the Wolfpack backcourt.
The Two Young Lions
Sloan would turn the 1970s into a memorable decade for the Pack, winning ACC titles in 1970, 1973 and 1974 and adding the national champion in 1974 with the incomparable David Thompson.
The ACC's greatest player would be another link between Duke and N.C. State. Both schools would earn a year's NCAA probation for their attempts to recruit him. In Duke's case, the penalty was due to a “booster” who gave Thompson a ride to the ACC Tournament and bought him a $35 sports coat to wear to an awards banquet. The irony is that Thompson later said that he had no idea the booster was working for Duke.
Although N.C. State dominated the early part of the decade, Duke finished strong under Coach Bill Foster, winning ACC titles in 1978 and 1980, plus sharing a regular season title in 1979.
By chance both the Duke and N.C. State coaching jobs came open in the spring of 1980 – when Sloan opted to leave for Florida and Foster bolted for South Carolina.
Duke surprised the basketball world when athletic director Tom Butters introduced unknown Army coach Mike Krzyzewski to guide the Blue Devil program. A week later, N.C. State's Willis Casey introduced Iona's Jim Valvano to succeed Sloan.
The two energetic young coaches had been rivals in the Northeast and quickly resumed their competition on Tobacco Road.
Valvano scored the first success, driving his 1983 team to an improbable NCAA title. That same year, Krzyzewski endured an 11-17 season that ended with a 40-point loss to Virginia in the first round of the ACC Tournament.
But the tide was about to turn. The next year, Duke surged to its first NCAA bid under Krzyzewski, while N.C. State faded after a fast start. A key game in the fortunes of both teams was Duke's 73-70 overtime victory in Reynolds Coliseum in late February.
Krzyzewski slowly began to obtain the upper hand on his rival, winning ACC titles in 1986 and 1988 and playing in the Final Four in four of the last five years that Valvano was at State. But Jimmy V stayed close – he won a second ACC title in 1987 and reached the NCAA Elite Eight in 1985 and 1986.
Indeed, when Valvano was forced out at N.C. State after the 1990 season, there wasn't a huge difference in their resumes: In 10 seasons at Duke (to that point), Coach K had two ACC titles, four Final Fours and a 23-7 NCAA record; Valvano had two ACC titles, a National Championship and a 14-6 NCAA record. He also had a 13-9 head-to-head winning record against K.
When Valvano and Krzyzewski were coaching rivals – both at Iona/Army and N.C. State/Duke – they were professional colleagues. No more than that.
Their relationship changed when Valvano was diagnosed with cancer and began receiving treatment at Duke Hospital. Krzyzewski became one of his most frequent visitors and the two former rivals became close friends.
Valvano enjoyed a brief career as an ESPN analyst as Krzyzewski continued to drive the Duke program into the stratosphere. Valvano survived to see his friend win back-to-back national titles in 1991 and 1992. When he died in the spring of 1993, the Duke program had achieved elite status, while the once-great Wolfpack program was beginning a two-decade stretch of mediocrity.
The Rivalry Today
Duke's long dominance of the rivalry in the post-Valvano era has taken the luster off the once-heated competition between the two schools.
The Blue Devils have won 36 and lost 8 to the Pack since Les Robinson replaced Valvano. And it's not just head-to-head. When N.C. State won its 10th ACC title in 1987, the Pack could claim a historic edge on the Blue Devils – two national championships and 10 ACC titles versus no national titles and seven ACC titles.
Today, Duke has four national titles and 18 ACC titles – while State has failed to add to its trophy case.
That doesn't mean that there haven't been some memorable moments in the rivalry over the last 20 years. Twice, first-year N.C. State coaches have upset heavily favored Duke teams in the ACC Tournament before making an improbable run to the championship game. Herb Sendek's first N.C. State team in 1997 beat a No. 7 ranked Duke team that had won the regular season title. Sidney Lowe's first Wolfpack team in 2007 upset No. 21 Duke in Tampa.
On the other hand, Duke has twice denied the Pack in the ACC championship game, blitzing N.C. State in 2002, then rallying to beat the Pack in 2003 when freshman J.J. Redick scored 21 of his game-high 30 points in the final nine minutes.
Perhaps it's appropriate that the most significant moments of the Duke-State rivalry in recent years have come in the ACC Tournament since those two schools were for many years the strongest defenders of that event.
In the early days of the ACC, the majority of coaches hated using the three-day tournament to determine a champion (and to pick the league's NCAA representative). Coaches such as UNC's Frank McGuire and Maryland's Bud Milliken never missed the chance to rip the tournament and demand its abolition.
N.C. State's Everett Case was the one coaching defender of the event, but behind the scenes, the powerful tandem of Duke athletic director Eddie Cameron and N.C. State AD Roy Clogston blocked any efforts to squash the tournament. Cameron, who headed the basketball committee of the Southern Conference and then the ACC for more than a quarter century, argued that not only was the event an important money-maker (in fact, in those days before big TV money, it was the biggest single money-maker for the league), it was the reason that ACC basketball enjoyed the popularity it did.
The issue came to a head in the ACC spring meetings of 1961, when UNC athletic director Chuck Erichson introduced a motion to use the regular season to determine the ACC champion instead of the tournament. Not only were Cameron and Clogston able to quash that motion, they forced through another motion that made the long-standing policy of the basketball committee a league bylaw – the tournament champion was THE official ACC basketball champion.
That rich, deep historic link between N.C. State and Duke should be remembered. For veteran Tobacco Road fans, N.C. State's long absence from the ranks of the ACC's powers leaves a sad void. There is no reason that N.C. State shouldn't be an ACC power – the school has great facilities, a rabid fan base and a wonderful tradition.
And it would be great to see a revival of the long-dormant Duke-State rivalry.
Does that famous feud leave room for another Blue Devil rivalry?
According to the ACC, Duke's “other” rival is Maryland. That's the one team (besides North Carolina) that the Blue Devils face twice each and every season. And, indeed, for the last decade, Duke-Maryland has been a hotly contested rivalry.
But in historical terms, Duke's long rivalry with N.C. State dwarfs its recent duel with the Terps. The two Triangle schools have battled for 99 years – and for much of the time, they've battled for supremacy on Tobacco Road. They've traded coaches and stadium designs. It was a Duke grad who helped N.C. State become a national power for the first time. It was a State grad who first steered the Blue Devils to national prominence. Duke's longtime radio play-by-play voice is a State grad and one of the Pack's most prominent radio voices got his start announcing on the Duke network.
And it was the long alliance between Duke athletic director Eddie Cameron and N.C. State's Roy Clogston who shaped the basketball landscape of the new ACC in the early 1950s and defended the fledgling ACC Tournament from a multitude of early critics.
Duke will travel to Raleigh Wednesday night to meet N.C. State for the 234th time. Well, actually, it will merely be the 233rd meeting, but the 234th outcome – the two schools didn't actually meet late in 1917, but Duke (then Trinity) claims a forfeit victory (a claim acknowledged by N.C. State).
It's a shame that Wednesday night's game won't attract as much national attention as next month's Duke-Carolina game will, but it's worth taking a moment to consider the huge role that N.C. State has played in Duke basketball history … and vice versa.
The Early Years
When the first game in the rivalry was played, there wasn't a Duke or an N.C. State … it was Trinity vs. North Carolina A&M when the Methodists from Durham defeated the Farmers on February 9, 1912.
Trinity/Duke dominated the early days of the rivalry, but in the first significant postseason matchup between the schools, N.C. State College (as A&M had come to be known) prevailed. Duke made its first trip to the Southern Conference Tournament in Atlanta in 1929 and the team recently nicknamed the Blue Devils beat Alabama, North Carolina and Georgia to reach the championship game.
That Duke team featured future major league baseball star Bill Werber, Duke's first basketball All-American, along with Harry Councilor and big man Joe Croson. That group had split two games with N.C. State in the regular season, but the Farmers won the rubber match – and their first conference championship – 43-35.
Duke would gain a measure of revenge nine years later when Eddie Cameron's 1938 Blue Devils – known as the Never a Dull Moment boys – upset N.C. State (led by future NFL standout Connie Mack Berry) in the first round of the Southern Conference Tournament in Raleigh. Robert O'Mara, who starred at fullback on Duke's undefeated Rose Bowl team the next fall, outdueled Clemson All-American Banks McFadden in the finals to give Duke its first conference championship.
The Duke-State basketball rivalry was about to take off, dwarfing for a time the Blue Devils more traditional rivalry with North Carolina (which still continued to dominate on the football field).
The Blue Devil program, getting a huge boost from the completion of the magnificent Indoor Stadium in 1940 (the largest on-campus arena in the country) was emerging as the dominant power in the Southern Conference. Cameron also benefited from the explosion of basketball talent in Durham, which was reflected by Durham High's famous pre-war team – a squad that won 71 straight games between 1939-41.
Cameron was able to secure the bulk of the talent from that team, including two-sport stars Robert Gantt (the son of a famous Duke baseball star) and Gordon Carver, plus the talented Loftis brothers. But he missed on the biggest star of all, losing 6-6 Horace “Bones” McKinney to N.C. State.
McKinney always blamed his rejection of the hometown school on an incident that occurred while he was still a student at Durham High. He claimed that he was caught sneaking into the Duke Indoor Stadium through a bathroom window and was given a spanking by a campus cop in front of a crowd of jeering Duke students. He always insisted that the embarrassment caused him to pick State over Duke.
McKinney became an immediate star when he joined the N.C. State varsity in 1941-42. He almost single-handed turned a 6-9 team into a 15-win conference contender. The colorful big man led State past South Carolina and William & Mary in the Southern Conference Tournament – all the way to the championship game.
There he found a Duke team that boasted the bulk of his old Durham High team. Sophomore guard Cedric Loftis was the team's leading scorer, while Gantt and his twin brother Garland Loftis were key contributors. They helped lead Cameron's greatest team to a 22-2 season. They capped the brilliant year off with a 45-34 victory over McKinney and N.C. State.
That was supposed to be merely the opening salvo in N.C. State's bid to become a basketball power. The school's athletic council, despairing of competing with Duke and North Carolina in football, voted to sink unprecedented resources into basketball and to dominate its neighbors in that sport. School officials worked out a complicated funding plan with the North Carolina Assembly and the U.S. Army for the construction of a new basketball arena to replace the tiny Walter Thompson Gym (built in 1925).
As originally drawn, the new basketball facility would be almost a carbon copy of Duke's Indoor Stadium, which had just opened in Durham. The first steel frames were erected just below the railroad tracks that bisected the campus in the late fall of 1941.
Obviously, Pearl Harbor changed everything. As the United States entered the war, N.C. State's grandiose plans were put on hold and the nation focused on more important things than college basketball. McKinney left N.C. State and joined the Army and the school's program went into hiatus, leaving the bare steel frames of the new arena as a reminder of those pre-war basketball dreams.
The Indiana Maestro
After the war, N.C. State was ready to resume its quest for basketball excellence, but where to start?
The answer came from a Duke graduate. Former Blue Devil Dick Herbert, the sports editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, suggested that State officials go to Chuck Taylor, a pioneer in basketball shoe design and sales, who had contacts with every coach in the country. It was Taylor who suggested that the school go after a Lt. Commander in the Navy – a former Indiana high school coach who was just about to get out of the service.
Everett Case came to Raleigh in the spring of 1946, just a few weeks after Duke defeated Wake Forest to win the 1946 Southern Conference title. That was the fifth league title in nine years for the Blue Devils and under Coach Gerry Gerard, Duke was enjoying its first period of basketball dominance.
Case would end Duke's reign with dramatic suddenness. Inheriting one holdover from a 6-12 team, the Indiana prep legend (the first coach to win four state titles there) promptly retooled with a team of Navy veterans and Indiana natives. His Hoosier Hotshots promptly won 26 games, including an 11-2 run in the Southern Conference. One of the two losses was to Duke in Durham, but the Red Terrors (the Wolfpack nickname still a couple of years away) blitzed the Devils in Raleigh just before the Southern Conference Tournament.
Case's arrival – and his team's fast-paced style of play – excited fans on Tobacco Road in a way they had never been excited about basketball. Interest grew so quickly that just weeks before the Southern Conference Tournament was due to open in the Raleigh Auditorium – a 4,700-seat facility that had hosted the event since 1933 – Case went to Duke's Eddie Cameron, who was chairman of the Southern Conference basketball committee, and suggested they move the tournament to Duke's 8,800 seat (at that time) Indoor Stadium.
The last-minute switch went off without a hitch and the tourney averaged more than 8,000 fans a session in Durham. Unfortunately, Duke failed to take advantage of the home court, losing to South Carolina in the first round. N.C. State rolled to the title (its first since 1929), edging UNC in the championship game. Afterwards, Case and his team cut down the nets in celebration – an old Indiana high school tradition that he introduced to the college game.
The 1947 season would set the tone for the next decade. Duke was almost always very good, but N.C. State was always just a little bit better – especially when it mattered most.
“We beat them plenty of times,” Dick Crowder, who played center for the Devils from 1950-52, said. “But every time we played them in the tournament, it was on their home floor and they always won.”
That home floor was Reynolds Coliseum, which had started out as a carbon copy of Duke's Indoor Stadium. When Case arrived, he demanded a bigger structure. In his experience in Indiana, the school with the biggest gym gets to host the tournament games. The only problem was that the steel frame erected before World War II didn't allow easy expansion. The only way to make the facility bigger was to extend the ends. Hence, Reynolds Coliseum ended up with thousands of terrible end zone seats – but those seats were there – 12,400 in all, making it the largest gym in the South.
It opened in 1949-50 and the Southern Conference moved its tournament from Durham to Raleigh in 1951. Case would win his first four conference titles in Durham – beating Duke in the finals in 1948 and 1950 (on the Devils' own home floor). The Pack's domination of the Blue Devils continued in the 1951 and 1952 finals in Reynolds.
The latter was particularly galling for Duke star Dick Groat. In his senior season, the Blue Devils started slowly and were a mere 9-5 after losing a double-overtime thriller to N.C. State in Durham. But after that game, Groat and Duke caught fire, winning 15 straight games, including a 71-58 thrashing of N.C. State in Reynolds.
“I can still see their fans lined up in the aisles in a hurry to get out with a couple of minutes left,” Groat recalled in a 2007 interview. “That was a sweet moment.”
Duke – with rebounding machine Bernie Janicki and sweet-shooting guard Rudy D'Emilio giving Groat strong support – was playing so well at the end of the season that when Groat was honored for his 48-point performance in the season finale against UNC, he took the mic and promised the crowd a victory in the upcoming Southern Conference tournament.
But Duke was frustrated by a curious seeding decision. West Virginia (a team Duke had lost to on the road early in the season) was seeded first in the tournament. N.C. State was given the second seed. Duke, thanks to those early season struggles, was seeded third. There was a big drop-off to the fourth seed, George Washington.
By all rights, the pairings should have been set to match No. 2 seed N.C. State and No. 3 seed Duke in the semifinals, with West Virginia getting George Washington. To this day, Groat can't understand how the pairings were set up to match No. 1 West Virginia and No. 3 Duke in the semifinals – while No. 2 seed N.C. State got to coast against a much inferior George Washington team.
Duke had to open with a tough Maryland team, coached by Bud Milliken.
“He was a disciple of Hank Iba and they held the ball on us,” Groat recalled. “We were down six with five minutes left, but I hit three field goals quickly and we were able to pull it out. That game took everything we had. The next night, we played West Virginia and we beat them 90-88 on a [last second tip-in] by Dick Johnson. I thought West Virginia was the best team in the country.
“The next night we played State in the championship game. They had two easy games in the first two rounds and they were able to coast. We were up four at the half, but I remember sitting in the locker room and looking at my teammates and knowing how I felt, thinking, 'We've got nothing left.'”
Groat was right – the rested Wolfpack rolled to a 77-68 victory over the weary Blue Devils. Groat and his teammates were disappointed when university officials turned down a bid to the NIT in New York. The previous spring's point-shaving scandals had put a taint on New York City basketball and starting in 1952, most major conference schools refused to play in the postseason event.
Case's Right Hand Man
Duke's frustration with N.C. State continued throughout the decade of the 1950s. The Blue Devils were always among the top teams in the new ACC, but were never good enough to get past N.C. State.
That started in the very first ACC Tournament, when the Blue Devils earned the top seed in a transitional year that saw a wide imbalance in schedules. Duke blitzed Virginia in the opener, but drew fourth-seeded N.C. State – on its home court – in the semifinals. Harold Bradley's Blue Devils had beaten State twice in the regular season, but fell 79-75 in the tournament.
It was after that game that Case uttered his famous dictum, “It's hard to beat a good team three times in one season.”
But that's just what N.C. State did in 1955, beating Duke in Durham and Raleigh during the regular season, then topping the Blue Devils in the finals of the ACC Tournament. Because State was on probation, that runner-up finish earned Duke its first NCAA Tournament bid, but Bradley's team was still disappointed to lose yet another tournament game to N.C. State.
Duke's frustration continued through the end of the decade. In the first six years of the ACC, Bradley's teams never finished worse than third in the ACC – and twice won regular season titles – but could never get past State in the tournament. While the Devils were constantly coming up short, Case was winning nine conference titles in 10 years between 1947 and 1956 … then he added a 10th crown in 1959.
It finally got to be too much for Bradley, who despaired of competing with Case and accepted a lucrative offer to coach at Texas.
Cameron received more than 140 applications for the Duke job, but he knew right away who he wanted – N.C. State assistant coach Vic Bubas.
The 31-year-old Case protégé had been one of the earliest of N.C. State's Hoosier hotshots, arriving from Gary, Ind., in the fall of 1947. He starred four years for the Wolfpack – playing on conference championship teams in each of his four seasons. When he graduated in 1951, Bubas remained on Case's staff and quickly established himself as a dynamic recruiter, who expanded the Wolfpack talent base far beyond Indiana.
Bubas found Ronnie Shavlik in Denver. He invaded Duke's traditional recruiting territory in Pennsylvania to steal John Richter and Lou Pucillo. In his last act for N.C. State, he snatched sweet-shooting guard Jon Speaks from Adolph Rupp's backyard in Lexington, Ky.
It took Bubas just weeks to pull off his first recruiting miracle at Duke, convincing UNC-bound Long Island prep star Art Heyman to switch to Duke. Bubas also used his experience as Case's recruiting ace to score for the Blue Devils when he returned to Lexington, Ky., and landed Speaks' prep teammate, Jeff Mullins – driving Kentucky's Rupp to fury.
Between them, Heyman and Mullins helped make Duke a national power – and led the Devils to their first Final Four. With N.C. State temporarily sidetracked by another point-shaving scandal, Bubas dueled Wake Forest's Bones McKinney for ACC supremacy.
But N.C. State refused to stay down long.
In the finals of the 1965 ACC Tournament, No. 8 ranked Duke was stunned by unranked N.C. State in the championship game, thanks to a career game by backup Larry Worsley. To this day, that remains the most bitter defeat in Bubas' brilliant career. A year later, N.C. State almost did it again to an even better Duke team, leading the No. 3 ranked Devils late in the last ACC championship game to be played in Reynolds Coliseum. Senior guard Steve Vacendak helped Duke rally for the 71-66 victory.
Those two back-to-back title games produced two ACC oddities: in 1965, Worsley became the only backup to earn tournament MVP honors; in 1966, Vacendak's heroics were so impressive that he was voted the ACC's most valuable player for the season – even though he was merely a second-team All-ACC pick.
Duke and State played another memorable tournament game later in the decade. The 1968 Blue Devils were No. 6 in the nation and looking forward to a matchup with No. 2 North Carolina in the finals of the ACC Tournament in Charlotte when they fell to the Pack 12-10 in the greatest slowdown game in conference history. The mastermind of the deep freeze was second-year N.C. State coach Norman Sloan, a former teammate of Bubas' at N.C. State. Indeed, Sloan always nursed a grudge against Bubas, who came a year later and took his job in the Wolfpack backcourt.
The Two Young Lions
Sloan would turn the 1970s into a memorable decade for the Pack, winning ACC titles in 1970, 1973 and 1974 and adding the national champion in 1974 with the incomparable David Thompson.
The ACC's greatest player would be another link between Duke and N.C. State. Both schools would earn a year's NCAA probation for their attempts to recruit him. In Duke's case, the penalty was due to a “booster” who gave Thompson a ride to the ACC Tournament and bought him a $35 sports coat to wear to an awards banquet. The irony is that Thompson later said that he had no idea the booster was working for Duke.
Although N.C. State dominated the early part of the decade, Duke finished strong under Coach Bill Foster, winning ACC titles in 1978 and 1980, plus sharing a regular season title in 1979.
By chance both the Duke and N.C. State coaching jobs came open in the spring of 1980 – when Sloan opted to leave for Florida and Foster bolted for South Carolina.
Duke surprised the basketball world when athletic director Tom Butters introduced unknown Army coach Mike Krzyzewski to guide the Blue Devil program. A week later, N.C. State's Willis Casey introduced Iona's Jim Valvano to succeed Sloan.
The two energetic young coaches had been rivals in the Northeast and quickly resumed their competition on Tobacco Road.
Valvano scored the first success, driving his 1983 team to an improbable NCAA title. That same year, Krzyzewski endured an 11-17 season that ended with a 40-point loss to Virginia in the first round of the ACC Tournament.
But the tide was about to turn. The next year, Duke surged to its first NCAA bid under Krzyzewski, while N.C. State faded after a fast start. A key game in the fortunes of both teams was Duke's 73-70 overtime victory in Reynolds Coliseum in late February.
Krzyzewski slowly began to obtain the upper hand on his rival, winning ACC titles in 1986 and 1988 and playing in the Final Four in four of the last five years that Valvano was at State. But Jimmy V stayed close – he won a second ACC title in 1987 and reached the NCAA Elite Eight in 1985 and 1986.
Indeed, when Valvano was forced out at N.C. State after the 1990 season, there wasn't a huge difference in their resumes: In 10 seasons at Duke (to that point), Coach K had two ACC titles, four Final Fours and a 23-7 NCAA record; Valvano had two ACC titles, a National Championship and a 14-6 NCAA record. He also had a 13-9 head-to-head winning record against K.
When Valvano and Krzyzewski were coaching rivals – both at Iona/Army and N.C. State/Duke – they were professional colleagues. No more than that.
Their relationship changed when Valvano was diagnosed with cancer and began receiving treatment at Duke Hospital. Krzyzewski became one of his most frequent visitors and the two former rivals became close friends.
Valvano enjoyed a brief career as an ESPN analyst as Krzyzewski continued to drive the Duke program into the stratosphere. Valvano survived to see his friend win back-to-back national titles in 1991 and 1992. When he died in the spring of 1993, the Duke program had achieved elite status, while the once-great Wolfpack program was beginning a two-decade stretch of mediocrity.
The Rivalry Today
Duke's long dominance of the rivalry in the post-Valvano era has taken the luster off the once-heated competition between the two schools.
The Blue Devils have won 36 and lost 8 to the Pack since Les Robinson replaced Valvano. And it's not just head-to-head. When N.C. State won its 10th ACC title in 1987, the Pack could claim a historic edge on the Blue Devils – two national championships and 10 ACC titles versus no national titles and seven ACC titles.
Today, Duke has four national titles and 18 ACC titles – while State has failed to add to its trophy case.
That doesn't mean that there haven't been some memorable moments in the rivalry over the last 20 years. Twice, first-year N.C. State coaches have upset heavily favored Duke teams in the ACC Tournament before making an improbable run to the championship game. Herb Sendek's first N.C. State team in 1997 beat a No. 7 ranked Duke team that had won the regular season title. Sidney Lowe's first Wolfpack team in 2007 upset No. 21 Duke in Tampa.
On the other hand, Duke has twice denied the Pack in the ACC championship game, blitzing N.C. State in 2002, then rallying to beat the Pack in 2003 when freshman J.J. Redick scored 21 of his game-high 30 points in the final nine minutes.
Perhaps it's appropriate that the most significant moments of the Duke-State rivalry in recent years have come in the ACC Tournament since those two schools were for many years the strongest defenders of that event.
In the early days of the ACC, the majority of coaches hated using the three-day tournament to determine a champion (and to pick the league's NCAA representative). Coaches such as UNC's Frank McGuire and Maryland's Bud Milliken never missed the chance to rip the tournament and demand its abolition.
N.C. State's Everett Case was the one coaching defender of the event, but behind the scenes, the powerful tandem of Duke athletic director Eddie Cameron and N.C. State AD Roy Clogston blocked any efforts to squash the tournament. Cameron, who headed the basketball committee of the Southern Conference and then the ACC for more than a quarter century, argued that not only was the event an important money-maker (in fact, in those days before big TV money, it was the biggest single money-maker for the league), it was the reason that ACC basketball enjoyed the popularity it did.
The issue came to a head in the ACC spring meetings of 1961, when UNC athletic director Chuck Erichson introduced a motion to use the regular season to determine the ACC champion instead of the tournament. Not only were Cameron and Clogston able to quash that motion, they forced through another motion that made the long-standing policy of the basketball committee a league bylaw – the tournament champion was THE official ACC basketball champion.
That rich, deep historic link between N.C. State and Duke should be remembered. For veteran Tobacco Road fans, N.C. State's long absence from the ranks of the ACC's powers leaves a sad void. There is no reason that N.C. State shouldn't be an ACC power – the school has great facilities, a rabid fan base and a wonderful tradition.
And it would be great to see a revival of the long-dormant Duke-State rivalry.
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