Duke - Carolina Volumes 1-5
The Blue Blood Rivalry, The Master Collection
Including Bonus Blue Blood Photo Gallery
by
Art Chansky
Editorial Assistance, Al Featherston
Digital color photographs, Robert Crawford, Rich Carkson, Bob Donnan, Durham Herald-Sun, The Daily Tar Heel, Duke University and the Associated Press
Copyright 2012, GreatestFan
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-1161-3
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
VOLUME 1: ‘BASKET BALL’ AT BOTH SCHOOLS
There are several oddities about the beginnings of Duke-Carolina Basketball, which grew into the greatest rivalry in the college game and perhaps all of sports.
Or maybe those oddities aren’t that odd, after all.
Duke began basketball in 1906, a full five years before UNC started the sport on the varsity level. The nation’s first state- supported university opened its doors in 1795 but educated students for nearly 100 years before forming any kind of intercollegiate athletics program.
And, even though what was once called Normal College, then became Trinity, had relocated from Randolph County to Durham only eight miles from Chapel Hill in 1892, the schools did not play each other in basketball until 1920.
The culprit here was king football.
They both began football in 1888, and Trinity defeated UNC 16-0 on November 27 in the first college football game played below the Mason Dixon line. They both had nice little teams for a few years, playing only two or three games and, like today, meeting in November. In fact, the 1889 game remains listed as a forfeited victory in the respective Duke and UNC record books because each school thought it was hosting the other on its campus — and both teams stayed home.
19th Century Trinity-UNC Game Program
In the next few years, Trinity became a powerhouse, claiming the unofficial championship of the South after its 1891 team beat UNC, Virginia and Furman by a combined score of 122-4. Before 1892, Trinity had won the two games that had been played against the Tar Heels and was apparently happy with how things were going. Not UNC, which expanded its schedule to six, then seven, then nine games and its “Wonder Team” twice beat the stuffing out of the Trinity Eleven (24-0, 28-0) in 1892 and ’94. The Trinity faculty had been agitating for the elimination of football for several years when the abolition movement received a major push from the Western North Carolina Conference of the Methodist Church. At the time, the organization provided a significant portion of Trinity’s income, but in 1894 the Board voted to withhold any more contributions to Trinity until it gave up football. Almost immediately, the school’s faculty voted to ban the sport — despite protests from football-crazy students.
Trinity would not play another football game for 26 years—a victim of the growing disgust with its brutality that almost killed the sport it in its infancy (until Teddy Roosevelt pushed for the formation of the NCAA and adoption of new rules to open up the game). An 1893 editorial in the Duke Archive described football as “a brutal, ungentlemanly immoral game ... one that encourages indolence and vice.” And THAT was written by an anonymous author who was defending the game! Today’s Duke media guide still says “Football was banned (from 1895-1919) by the Board of Trustees as too dangerous physically and it distracts from academics.” But Trinity’s opposition to football went beyond a general disgust with the sport. To justify banning the popular game, officials complained about growing professionalism in football, especially at the University of North Carolina, then enjoying its first great era of gridiron success.
Football Was "Brutal" Unsafe Game in 1800s
UNC officials didn’t appreciate such charges and their response was a gradual breakdown in all athletic relations between the two schools. The annual baseball rivalry between UNC and Trinity — which might have been the biggest intercollegiate athletic event in the state in the 19th Century — was suspended after 1898. The two schools occasionally met in tennis or competed in the same multi- team track meets, but for more than two decades Trinity and UNC did not compete in the sports that really mattered — football, baseball and the new game of basketball. More than 20 years of bad blue blood ensued. Despite those measly eight miles, Trinity and UNC had little to do with each other because those football Tar Heels remained “a bunch of pros” as far as the more studious men of Trinity were concerned. What else would you expect from a Methodist college whose motto was “Eruditio et Religio,” meaning “Knowledge and Religion.”
THE BIRTH OF THE RIVALRY
It’s not exactly clear what unfroze relations between the two schools. It may have had something to do with the growing enthusiasm at Trinity to resume football — a long battle that finally led to a resumption of the sport in 1920 — and renewal of the Trinity-UNC rivalry in 1922.
But the first major break in the athletic freeze came in the spring of 1919, when UNC traveled to East Durham for a baseball showdown with Trinity. It was the first major athletic competition between the two schools in 21 years — and ended with a dramatic anti-climax when the two nines battled to a 15-inning, 0-0 tie. A week later, UNC squeezed out a 3-2 victory on a muddy field in East Durham to strike the first blow in the rivalry of the 20th Century.
Trinity started its basketball team under volunteer coach Wilbur Wade “Cap” Card, who got his nickname as captain of the Trinity baseball team. As a grad student at Harvard, Card had met Dr. James Naismith, who invented the game of “Basket Ball” at the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, and spread it to other Y’s across the Northeast and eventually into the South and Midwest.
Dr. James Naismith Invented "Basket Ball"
Card had been an aspiring minister but instead became a basketball disciple of Dr. Naismith. When he was hired by Trinity as a physical education teacher, he first started teams in track and field, gymnastics, bowling, swimming, fencing and volleyball. That was before Card had ever met and befriended Richard “Red” Crozier, his counterpart at Wake Forest College who had formed the first collegiate basketball team in North Carolina in 1905 and played against local YMCA teams, the only opponents he could find made up mostly of post-graduates
