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Making Memories At Greensboro Coliseum For Over 40 Years
By John Roth, Blue Devil Weekly
GREENSBORO, N.C. - Greensboro Coliseum was barely a year old and had about the same seating capacity as Duke Indoor Stadium when the Blue Devils made their first basketball appearance there for a game with Navy.
The date was Jan. 3, 1961, and football was still very much in the news. Duke had won the Cotton Bowl the day before, while Navy had played in the Orange Bowl. In fact, one Navy athlete, Capt. Allan Hughes, served as a halfback for the Midshipmen in Miami, then flew to Greensboro to play in the basketball game.
Sophomore Art Heyman made sure the Blue Devils won their Greensboro debut. Duke was coming off the first loss of Heyman’s varsity career, at the hands of archrival North Carolina in the championship game of the final Dixie Classic. Heyman had been shackled by nemesis Doug Moe for most of that game. Against Navy, he rebounded by delivering 28 points to break the young coliseum’s scoring record of 25 (which has been held, ironically, by Moe). When Navy rallied to make it close at the end, Heyman scored seven points in 93 seconds to seal the outcome before 5,132 fans.
The Blue Devils have since played over 100 games at Greensboro Coliseum, which has grown from its original 9,000-seat configuration to 16,000 seats in 1970 and on to 23,000-plus in 1994. This week’s ACC Tournament marks the 21st time the league’s signature event has been held at the Coliseum.
Duke, of course, would love to spend TWO straight weekends in Greensboro by returning March 16-18 for the NCAA Tournament play, the 11th time the Coliseum has been a part of March Madness.
This may very well be the busiest basketball month in Greensboro’s storied history. With the ACC women, ACC men and NCAA men in town on consecutive weekends, that’s 28 games in 17 days.
Greensboro became the home of ACC basketball during the glory days of the 1970s. If this year marks its most hectic March, then 1974 was its most significant. N.C. State and Maryland waged a 103-100 overtime battle in the finest ACC Tournament final ever, then two weeks later the Wolfpack returned to end UCLA’s long NCAA championship reign by defeating the Bruins and Marquette in the Final Four, the first time Greensboro had hosted an NCAA event.
While the ACC tourney was taking up residence in Greensboro for almost the entire decade of the 1970s, the creation and 11-year run of the Big Four Tournament gave the arena an early-season focal point that jump-started the state’s basketball frenzy from 1971-81.
Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski is an unabashed supporter of basketball at Greensboro Coliseum, where he has won three ACC titles, including his first in 1986, plus one of his early milestone wins over top-ranked North Carolina in the 1984 semifinals. Over the last two decades, his teams are 31-7 in Greensboro. But even before his arrival, Greensboro provided a platform for some of Duke’s greatest stars to shine.
Beginning with that Navy game of ’61, Duke used to schedule at least one game a year in Greensboro. For most of the 1960s, Duke and Wake played each other over the Christmas holiday in a game that did not count in the ACC standings but filled a gap left in the calendar by the demise of the Dixie Classic. The Blue Devils also opened several seasons in the 1960s and 1970s by meeting Virginia Tech in Greensboro.
Jeff Mullins still remembers the 1964 Duke-Tennessee game in Greensboro as one of his favorites. His eighth-ranked Blue Devils rallied to pull out a 67-65 double-overtime win behind Mullins’ then-career high of 33 points. That total included the shot to tie the score at the end of the first overtime and the one to give his team the lead for good in the second OT.
Bob Verga had two of Duke’s best performances ever in Greensboro when he played all 40 minutes and scored his career high of 41 in a one-point loss to Ohio State during the 1967 season, a total that set a new arena record. Later in the year he returned to hit for 35 against Virginia in the ACC Tournament (on 14-of-22 shooting), Duke’s individual tourney scoring high that was matched by J.J. Redick vs. N.C. State at the MCI Center last year.
During the 1971 season, Duke played almost as many games in Greensboro as it did in Durham, with seven: the Big Four, ACC and several intersectionals. Randy Denton in particular thrived there, with double-doubles in six of the seven. That included a 29-point night against Princeton and a rare 20-20 game against Northwestern ? 23 points and 25 boards.
Duke’s landmark 1978 team won the ACC tourney in Greensboro, and the 1980 team did the same while working from the No. 6 seed. The ’78 team went on to the Final Four and the ’80 team reached the Elite Eight in Bill Foster’s closing days as a Blue Devil.
Krzyzewski’s ACC crowns of 1986, 1988 and 2003 came in Greensboro, and his teams also launched NCAA play there four times (1986, 1989, 1992, 2001). All four of those teams wound up in the Final Four, the last two winning the NCAA title.
No doubt he and all Duke fans would like to see a similar finish get started in Greensboro this week.
