Duke - Carolina - Volumes 1-5 The Blue Blood Rivalry, The Master Collection: Including Bonus Blue Blood Photo Gallery

By Art Chansky

Famed sportswriter and Tobacco Road basketball historian Art Chansky is releasing a digital version of his award-winning book, Blue Blood. Blue Blood details one of sport's greatest rivalries, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and details the emergence, growth and fierce competition that has existed between these two schools, which are located only eight miles apart on Tobacco Road.

Blue Blood -- The Digital Edition provides new and updated commentary and photos, and is specifically formatted for digital devices. Users can flip through the pages of the eBook and enjoy a "coffee-table book" style version of Blue Blood through the brilliance of tablet and mobile computing.

Blue Blood -- The Digital Edition will be released over the course of the 2010-2012 college basketball season, with the first chapter "Volume 1: Introduction and Earliest Years" scheduled for release in November 2010. Thereafter, culminating with Volume 5 being released during the Fall of 2012. Finally, the Masters Collection will be released with all the volumes that will detail the history of the rivalry -- chronologically from beginning to end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456611613

Art Chansky

Art Chansky is a veteran sportswriter and author of several books on UNC basketball, including Light Blue Reign and Blue Blood.

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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 that had taken up the sport.

Crozier had envisioned the same kind of intercollegiate basketball competition that linked schools on what would become Tobacco Road — UNC, N.C. State, Methodist Trinity and small, Baptist Wake Forest located in northern Wake County — mainly football and baseball. His inquiries first led him to Cap Card at Trinity, who by then had all his other teams going and agreed to form a basketball team but demanded three weeks to train his recruits most of whom had never played the new sport.

Trinity Fielded First Team in 1906…

The delay cost Trinity a chance to be part of the South’s first college basketball game, as Crozier found a willing Guilford College squad to play in February, 1906. Crozier finally took his team to Durham on March 6 for the first game between schools that would eventually comprise the Big Four. Wake Forest defeated Trinity, 24-10, in the tiny Angier B. Duke Gymnasium, where the 32 x 50 playing floor was about third the size of what would become the standard college basketball court but about the same size as the original Springfield court where Dr. Naismith invented the game. The teams played again two weeks later at Wake Forest with the same result.

...And Played in Tiny Angier B. Duke Gym; It is still on East Campus and is Called The Ark

Trinity had to wait until the following season to earn its first intercollegiate victory, 24-1 over Guilford college. Card’s teams would lose six straight to Crozier’s Baptists before finally breaking through in 1909 with a 22-14 win. Trinity lost the rematch 30-5, but was on its way to an 8-1 season, Card’s best record as a basketball coach.

Wilbur Cap Card Was Trinity's First Coach After Learning the Game From Dr. Naismith

In 1912, after coaching the Trinity team for seven years without a stipend, Card stepped down and Trinity hired former player Big Jennie Brinn as its first paid basketball coach. Brinn stayed one season, when his younger brother Claude served as team captain, and then came Noble Clay for two years and the Doak brothers (Bob and Chick) for three. Henry P. Cole, a sophomore, was the school’s only playing coach in 1919. Men named Walter Rosenthies, Floyd Egan, James Baldwin and Jesse Burbage followed for one or two seasons.

Carolina Fielded its First Team in 1911; Marvin Ritch (holding ball) was Captain

By then, Carolina had turned its intramural basketball program into a varsity sport after some students who had played in the advanced YMCA leagues of Charlotte and Durham approached the UNC administration. The most persuasive was a student named Marvin Ritch, who not surprisingly would go on to be a prominent attorney in the state after graduating from Chapel Hill.