Duke - Carolina: The Blue Blood Rivalry

By Art Chansky

Famed sportswriter and Tobacco Road basketball historian Art Chansky is releasing a digital version of his award-winning book, Blue Blood, for the Apple iPad, iPhone and iTouch. 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 the iPad and iPhone 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 2010-2011 college basketball season, with the first chapter "Volume 1: Introduction and Earliest Years" scheduled for release in November 2010. Each month thereafter, culminating with the final volume being released during March Madness, a new volume will be released that will detail the history of the rivalry -- chronologically. The final volume will detail the last two seasons; where UNC and Duke won back-to-back NCAA National Championships, which has only added to the greatness of the rivalry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456600792

Art Chansky

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

Book preview

SECTION I — ’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.

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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