Who would've thought one of the most storied and passionate rivalries in intercollegiate athletics began when someone thought a sportswriter was not only qualified to serve as the president of a fledgling college, but also as its head football coach?
Before there was a patron named Washington Duke or a sport called basketball, there was a man named John Franklin Crowell. Known for his knack for football reporting, Crowell arrived in Randolph County in 1887 to become Trinity College's second president and first football coach.
The new president thought it would be wise to challenge a school a bit up the road in Chapel Hill for his first game.
Little did Crowell know he was inaugurating a rivalry that would eventually evolve into the unrivaled madness that will invade Cameron Indoor Stadium Saturday afternoon when Duke plays North Carolina, with both the Atlantic Coast Conference title and the No. 1 national ranking on the line.
Sportswriter turned football coach
One hundred and eleven years ago, the 29-year-old Crowell arrived at the university full of ambition, armed with a resumé touting experience reporting on football for the Yale Daily News and the New Haven Morning News.
Shortly after his arrival, Crowell challenged the University of North Carolina to a football game. After an initial refusal, UNC accepted Trinity's challenge and agreed to play on Thanksgiving day, 1888, in the Raleigh Baseball Park.
On Nov. 27, 1888, the two schools clashed in the first college football game ever played south of the Mason-Dixon line. In front of 600 UNC fans, Crowell coached Trinity to a 16-0 shutout in the two schools' first athletic match-up, thus unwittingly beginning the longest intercollegiate rivalry in the South.
"Victory added not only to the athletic reputation of Trinity, but gave the college an indefinable prestige of a general and most effective kind," Crowell would later write.
Although Crowell served only two years as head football coach, Trinity continued to play until 1895, when the sport was banned at the University. With John Kilgo as the new president, the Board of Trustees banned the sport from the campus, calling it "too dangerous physically, and distracting from academics."
Illegal video cameras and stolen rams
After a 25 year hiatus, football returned to Trinity in the fall of 1920. During the next 11 years, as Trinity College made the shift into Duke University, seven men passed through the team's head-coach turnstile, until Wallace Wade took the helm in 1931. Actively coaching the team for 16 of the next 20 years, Wade guided the Blue Devils to a 110-36-7 record, including a win in perhaps the most famous game ever between Duke and North Carolina.
In 1935, UNC came to Durham after winning all seven of its games, attaining a No. 5 national ranking and outscoring its opponents by an unfathomable count of 209 to 19. A win against Duke (5-2 at the time) would virtually assure UNC of its first Rose Bowl appearance.
"Two or three touchdowns are being given by Carolina supporters who confidently believe that the Tar Heels' margin of victory will be more than that," The Durham Morning Herald wrote at the time. "The dopesters are practically unanimous in agreeing that Saturday afternoon will be a bad one for the Blue Devils."
A throng of 46,880-a full 10,000 over the usual capacity-jammed into Duke Stadium on a drizzly November afternoon to witness what the Morning Herald dubbed "the biggest event of the year on the North Carolina calender." Behind a swarming defense that forced eight Carolina turnovers, the Blue Devils dashed Carolina's Rose Bowl visions with a 25-0 trouncing.
Afterwards, The Daily Tar Heel, UNC's student newspaper, accused Duke of the unethical use of movie cameras in scouting the Tar Heels offense.
For the 1970 game, Duke fans stole UNC's ram mascot, Ramses IX, dressed it in Duke blue and trotted it out to the Duke sidelines.
Beanies, basketball and cheerleader-slapping players
By the 1950s, the UNC rivalry had become so firmly entrenched at the University that it actually became an institutionalized aspect of student life. Freshmen were required to wear dinks, or beanies, to class everyday from the first day of classes until the UNC football game. If Duke prevailed, they were allowed to stop wearing them; if not, beanies would remain a part of their attire until the spring semester.
Although the tradition was discontinued in the early '60s, the rivalry lived on with even more intensity.
The reason? Basketball.
Although Duke met UNC for the first time on the hardwood in 1920 (a game which Duke won 19-18), basketball did not evolve into a focal point of the rivalry until the late 1950s, when both programs began emerging as national contenders.
Carolina coach Frank McGuire, complaining about hostile fans around the Atlantic Coast Conference, chose Duke Indoor Stadium to stage his ultimate protest in 1958.
After the Blue Devils defeated UNC 59-46 in their regular season finale to clinch the ACC title, fans carried Duke coach Vic Bubas off the floor while McGuire held his players on the court. McGuire then requested a police escort to lead his team to the dressing room.
Duke's football coach Bill Murray, who was in charge of stadium operations at the time, was none too pleased about the incident.
"It was an uncalled-for demonstration," Murray said after the game. "No athletic team will have trouble walking off the court. When we have to have police protection to escort a team off our court, well, we should quit playing. In all of my coaching experience, I have never seen a more obvious exhibition. It was the most revolting act by a college coach I've ever witnessed."
UNC's McGuire then responded in a manner that would have made Don King proud.
"I wish Murray had come to me with those remarks," he said. "I'd tell him he has enough to worry about in [UNC football coach] Jim Tatum to keep him occupied. I'd tell him he'll never beat Carolina in football as long as Tatum's around."
The tensions between the two teams exploded on Feb. 4, 1961, when their two basketball teams became involved in what may well be the ugliest game in ACC history.
In the opening freshman game, Carolina had to play the last 11 seconds with only three players on the court, after five others had fouled out. One Carolina player had been ejected for throwing punches, and another for tackling a Duke player on a lay-up attempt.
But that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Early in the varsity contest, UNC's Doug Moe and Duke's Art Heyman had a heated confrontation. McGuire then further endeared himself to Duke fans by walking the length of the court to chastise a Duke assistant trainer. And, as the players walked off the court for the half, the always-volatile Heyman slapped a male UNC cheerleader after being touched.
The second half looked like it would pass uneventfully.
But then, with nine seconds left in the game, Heyman and UNC's Larry Brown became engaged in fistfight that quickly led to a bench-clearing melée. As many as eight Tar Heels piled on top of Heyman, and Moe-who had already fouled out-was in the middle of it all, throwing punches at every Blue Devil he saw.
A massive party and
unbridled passion
Although no similar free-for-alls are expected to take place Saturday in Cameron, the rivalry has lost neither its passion nor its luster-at least not according to the more than 1,300 students in Kryzewskiville.
"It's a f---ing massive party," said Trinity sophomore Steve Burke, a resident of Tent 12. "I want to the share in the emotion and joy of my fellow students. That's the Cameron experience-you can't come to Duke without going to the Carolina game."
Apparently, 9,313 other fans agree with Burke and will show up in Cameron this Saturday to see the continuation of one of the grandest traditions on Tobacco Road-Duke vs. UNC.
"This is the biggest rivalry in college basketball, and probably in college sports," Duke forward Roshown McLeod said. "If you can't get yourself up for this game, you shouldn't be playing."
Thanks to Tom Harkins and the University Archives for their help in the research of this story.
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