INTRODUCTION
CELEBRATIONS
For the second time in their storied basketball rivalry, Duke University and the University of North Carolina held NCAA championship celebrations in consecutive years.
The first came after Duke won back-to-back national titles in 1991 and 1992 and Carolina won in ’93. Duke’s championships were the first and second in a rich history that included eight previous trips to the Final Four. At the raucous reception at Cameron Indoor Stadium upon the team’s arrival home from Minneapolis on April 7, 1992, a day after the Blue Devils defeated Michigan’s Fab Five 71–51, students and fans began to chant, “Mike has two, Dean has one!”
Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, at the beginning of his ascension toward the zenith of his profession, tried halfheartedly to stop the boisterous barb, saying into the microphone, “Let’s be happy about what we have accomplished.” The year before, after Duke had broken through and won the 1991 NCAA tournament by defeating Kansas in Indianapolis, the team bus chugged down Interstate 40 from Raleigh-Durham Airport when it approached the fork that had a left arrow pointing to Chapel Hill and the right arrow going to Durham. Now known widely as Coach K, he turned to his team and said loudly, “Hey, you want to go cruise Franklin Street?”—the main drag abutting the UNC campus. The players broke out in joyous laughter at their coach’s dig.
By early in the 1992–93 season, coach Dean Smith’s Tar Heels knew they had a team capable of not only winning his second national championship, they were determined to reclaim the ballyhoo they had lost to Duke. Smith’s first title had come in the 1982 epic victory over Patrick Ewing and Georgetown in New Orleans on a swish shot by freshman Michael Jordan, but they had returned to the Final Four only once since then, in 1991, along with Duke. UNC lost to Roy Williams’ third Kansas team in the national semifinals; the Blue Devils upset top-ranked and unbeaten UNLV and then defeated the Jayhawks for their first NCAA title.
The geographic area of North Carolina known as the Research Triangle is a hub for technology companies and home to three major universities within a twenty-five-mile radius, and the market is covered by the same media. The Raleigh News & Observer and Durham Herald-Sun both report on all three schools; television stations WRAL, WNCN, and WTVD, plus the sports talk shows, try to be fair and impartial to the giant athletic programs at Duke, N.C. State, and UNC. But when one team goes further into postseason play, and the others return home in defeat, the papers and stations double-down on their coverage of whichever is still standing with a chance to “win it all.”
In the summer of 1992, George Lynch and Eric Montross—the stalwarts in UNC’s upcoming season—were fishing at a pond about fifteen miles west of Chapel Hill. In the solitude of the rowboat, they shared their mutual frustration over Duke’s nonstop publicity of late and pledged they would lead their teammates back to New Orleans for the 1993 Final Four so Smith could win a second NCAA title in the Big Easy.
Montross is still remembered for his bloody battle with Christian Laettner in UNC’s 1992 upset of the top-ranked and 17–0 Blue Devils at the Smith Center. Students rushed the court afterward, which angered Smith because, he said, “We’re supposed to beat Duke.” Krzyzewski regretted the game for a different reason. “Bobby [Hurley] broke his foot, and if he doesn’t sit out three weeks we might have been undefeated that season with what I thought was my best team,” he said of his second straight NCAA champs.
Fourteen months later, Lynch, Montross, and the rest of the Tar Heels took the stage and celebrated with the packed Louisiana Superdome. They had beaten Kansas in the semifinals and Michigan’s Fab Five in the final to bring home Carolina’s third national championship trophy, including Frank McGuire’s miracle 32–0 season of 1957. UNC was back on top and Duke’s dream to three-peat was over, ended by Jason Kidd and Cal in the second round as Blue Devils All-American Grant Hill hobbled with a foot injury.
Now Mike had two and Dean had two. And then came an occurrence that was to be repeated two decades later. In 1994, Duke returned to the championship game and lost to Arkansas on a last-minute 3-pointer by Scotty Thurman. In 2016, a year after the young Blue Devils had won Duke’s fifth NCAA title, UNC reached the championship game and lost on a buzzer-beating long ball by Villanova’s Kris Jenkins.
The best rivalry in college basketball ebbed and flowed through the rest of the 1990s, when each school reached five Final Fours. Krzyzewski missed almost a full season with medical problems in 1995, and two years after his return Smith’s long-anticipated retirement ceded the mantle to Coach K.
His teams whipped Carolina 15 of 17 games during a stretch from 1999 to 2005, and Duke enjoyed an unprecedented run of winning the ACC regular season and/or conference tournament for an astounding 10 consecutive seasons (1997–2006).
In 1998–2000, the Blue Devils went 46–2 in the ACC regular season, including a pulsating 1998 comeback win over the Tar Heels at steamy Cameron for Krzyzewski’s 500th career victory. Duke also was beating Carolina in most head-to-head recruiting battles (Shane Battier, Elton Brand, Mike Dunleavy) and getting players from as far away as Alaska (Trajan Langdon and Carlos Boozer).
The twenty-first century featured long, grinding campaigns for both programs, with Duke on top during the early years while Carolina collapsed in turmoil after inexperienced Matt Doherty succeeded Bill Guthridge, the successor to Dean Smith. The veteran team Doherty inherited in 2001 did win at Cameron for UNC’s first victory there since 1996 but paid the price in two subsequent meetings that season, including a humiliating 26-point beat-down for the ACC tournament title in Atlanta, where Doherty swore the game clock never moved whenever he looked at it.
After the 79–53 blowout of the Tar Heels before the biggest crowd in ACC tourney history, and marking the 600th career victory for Coach K, the Blue Devils won a third NCAA title over Arizona back in Minneapolis, where they had stripped the nets for their second national championship nine years earlier.
Doherty’s second team posted a school-worst 8–20 record, snapped a plethora of streaks begun by Smith and extended by Guthridge, and was on the verge of UNC’s largest losing margin at home against Duke when Krzyzewski called off the dogs with a timeout and 30-point lead. “There has been great basketball played in this building before, and there will be again,” he yelled at his smirking players. “So, go out there and finish the game, shake their hands and walk off the court.”
It turned out that two of Doherty’s three highly recruited freshmen the next season—Raymond Felton and Rashad McCants—helped him win his last regular-season game against the Blue Devils, in March 2003. But not before Doherty and Duke assistant coach Chris Collins engaged in a foul-mouthed, chest-bumping incident that had the irritated Krzyzewski wishing the game and eventual three-point loss had ended right then and there. The often fiery coach was turning into more of a diplomat. “It was like an alarm clock, game over, we lost,” he said.
After Carolina finished 19–16 and missed the NCAA tournament for a second straight year, a third coaching change in six seasons brought Roy Williams back to his alma mater from Kansas in April 2003, fifteen years removed from the UNC bench as an assistant next to Smith. “The family business needs you,” Smith told his protégé.
By then, Duke and Krzyzewski were the most prominent names in college hoops, and Williams vowed to restore unity on and off the court among dissenting players, disenfranchised former Tar Heels, and disgusted fans. He also intended to sign five-star recruits who could rival Duke on the floor.
Williams, a virtual unknown when he landed the Kansas job in 1988 with the help of KU alumnus Smith, was now a renowned name in his own right after winning more than 80 percent of his games coaching the Jayhawks. In the summer of 2000, he had turned down the chance to return to Chapel Hill when Guthridge stepped down after three seasons; Williams cited pledges he had made to his last recruiting class at Kansas. Potential pros Nick Collison, Drew Gooden, and Kirk Hinrich had said they would go to KU only if Williams agreed to coach them as long as they were in Lawrence, and they had all just finished their freshman season.
So Williams stayed, led the Jayhawks to the third and fourth Final Fours of his tenure there, and then went home to North Carolina after losing the 2003 national championship game to Syracuse. He returned largely because Smith asked him again and Williams’ father and older sister were in failing health back in his native Asheville. He had been out recruiting for Kansas when his mother died in 1992, and he wanted to be closer this time to his remaining childhood family members. Estranged father Babe Williams died of cancer in 2004, and sister Frances succumbed after a short battle with dementia in 2005.
His first season as head coach at UNC was more about restoring a winning culture and work ethic to the Carolina program, which was wrought with distrust and infighting from having lost 36 games in the last two seasons. Williams found the players in such bad physical condition less than a month after the 2003 season ended that several almost puked when he put them through a 28-minute workout just to see what he had for a new team.
He reviewed the stats and saw guys were doing things—like shooting 3-pointers—beyond their capabilities. In individual meetings, he told each of them what he expected, and if they could not obey he would help them transfer to another school. Jackie Manuel, who had been Doherty’s whipping boy, was one of them and agreed to stay, and he became the defensive stopper the rest of the team eventually followed.
In Williams’ first two games against Duke, the Tar Heels let Chris Duhon drive the length of the court to steal a two-point overtime victory at the Smith Center, and in the rematch at Cameron, McCants had the ball in the frontcourt in the final seconds when Carolina trailed by three, but Duke’s aggressive defense forced a turnover. Williams cajoled them to a 19–11 record and back into the NCAA tournament, but so much remained to get his program where he wanted it. The Blue Devils finished first in the ACC regular season and reached their fourteenth Final Four.
After a grueling first season getting players, alumni, and fans back on the same page, and with UNC’s six-year record against Duke at 2–15, change came dramatically in the 2005 game on Senior Day at the Smith Center. The Blue Devils were on the verge of winning their fifth straight over Carolina, holding a nine-point lead with a little more than three minutes left to play. Williams called timeout, told his players to get their heads up, and said something that, at the time, he thought might be blarney.
“We’re going to win this game,” he yelled at them. “If you all do everything I tell you to do, I guarantee you we’re going to win this game. It’s got to be a total commitment. You have to do it right now better than you have ever done it before. And if you do that, if you’ll give me total commitment on every possession, I promise you we’re going to win this game!”
Clearly a last-ditch effort to save a game that had all but slipped away, what other choice did Williams have? He later admitted to “maybe lying” because he had nothing else to say. But his team took it to heart, kept Duke marksman J. J. Redick scoreless in the second half, and closed with an 11–0 run to win 75–73 on a three-point play by freshman Marvin Williams as the Teflon roof nearly blew off the dome. “The loudest I have ever heard any building anywhere,” Williams said after winning his first ACC regular-season championship as a head coach.
A month later, his Tar Heels were in St. Louis for the Final Four when Williams ran into Redick, who was there for a college all-star game after the Blue Devils had been ousted in the Sweet 16. “You may not believe me, but I’ll be pulling for you this weekend,” Redick told Williams, who replied, “You’re right, I don’t believe you.” In addition to everything else about the rivalry, Krzyzewski had just surpassed Dean Smith’s record with his sixty-sixth NCAA tournament victory before losing to Michigan State.
Carolina went on to win a seminal national championship that one-upped the Blue Devils, defeating top-ranked Illinois at the Illini orange–festooned Edward Jones Dome. Williams’ first NCAA title was the school’s fourth, and the remarkable turnaround brought Carolina Basketball back together. Smith, Michael Jordan, and Phil Ford joined the team celebration in the locker room, during which Williams pointed to them and said to his players, “They are what made North Carolina basketball great, and now you all are part of that forever.”
Upon returning to his home in an upscale Chapel Hill golf course community, several signs were in Williams’ front yard, one reading, “Thanks for ‘Heeling’ our team.”
Four players left and became NBA draft lottery picks that spring, but 6'9" Tyler Hansbrough enrolled before the next season, and among other things, he helped Carolina beat Duke more often. The Tar Heels won six of eight matchups in his four years at Chapel Hill. They also added two more Final Four trips, losing to Williams’ former Kansas team in San Antonio in 2008 and completing a destruction of the tournament field with six victories by double figures in 2009. Carolina dismantled Michigan State for the championship at Ford Field in Detroit, less than a hundred miles from the Spartans’ East Lansing campus, on Monday night.
Copyright © 2018 by Art Chansky
