History of the Tobacco Road Rivalry

The term rivalry strikes a nerve in the heart of every sports fan across the country.  Bars are full of people passionately proclaiming their allegiance to the team with tendrils of passion dripping from every word.  Boys and girls, their hearts filled with allegiance to their team, will pretend they are scoring the game-winning basket against their favorite school’s biggest rival. 

Nowhere is this passion and pride expressed more deeply than in what is considered the greatest rivalry in all of the sports.  The Duke vs. UNC basketball game has etched its mark into the being of everyone in the country, and it all started 60 years ago inside the walls of what was then called Duke Indoor Stadium.

Before 1961, the Duke-Carolina rivalry was a local battle between two schools separated by eight miles.  On February 4, 1961, everything changed thanks in large part to the game being carried on regional television.  As a sophomore, UNC’s Larry Brown drove to the basket and was met by a hard foul from Duke’s Art Heyman.  Brown, blood boiling from memories of a high school feud with Heyman, responded by punching Art in the face, sparking a huge brawl that featured both benches clearing and fans igniting with fury for their Blue Devils. 

The commissioner of the ACC could only watch as fans bellowed for the rest of the game, booing the UNC players and yelling at the referees.  Far-away fans watching from their living rooms took notice, immediately transforming the local rivalry into a regional affair with everyone on the east coast choosing their allegiance for UNC or Duke. 

With the Tar Heels dominating the battle most of the 1970s under the legendary Dean Smith, a new coach stepped foot on the Duke campus in 1980.  Young Mike Krzyzewski quickly built a team that could compete with its regional rival from down the Durham-Chapel Hill Boulevard.  While most of the east coast was paying attention to the two powerhouse programs, led by future Hall of Famers Smith and Krzyzewski, the rest of the country seemed unaware of the feud between these two schools. 

As the Duke program found its legs to gain prowess in the college basketball world, it was not until the mid-1980s that the two teams began playing before national television audiences, which sparked a passionate flame inside the hearts of college basketball fans across the country.  From coast to coast, everyone was cheering for either Duke or UNC in a game of “choose your blue.”

It seemed as though both teams propelled themselves to the top of college basketball every year, furthering the interest of the country.  Twice a year coaches Krzyzewski and Smith tried to win their two regular-season games against each year and claim bragging rights until they met again, perhaps in the annual ACC tournament. In the process, the programs made each other better from the intense desire to win.   

In 1989, UNC star guard Jeff Lebo entered what was now called   Cameron Indoor Stadium on crutches after suffering a sprained ankle.  The Blue Devils mascot greeted him with a dozen roses in a prank unwelcomed by the UNC team.  Two hours later, with the Tar Heels leading by a large margin and assured of victory, the gym grew quiet as the fans realized their team would lose in this year’s home game against their fabled rival.  Coach Smith called a time out and told his players how much fun it was that they had silenced the Cameron Crazies.

As the rivalry made its way into the 1990s, UNC boasted 16 wins while Duke had won only 9 times against the lighter shade of blue.  During the decade, both teams battled in classic games over ESPN, as the nation watched with hearts pounding.  Young athletes everywhere dreamed of playing in the legendary games between the Tar Heels and Blue Devils. At Duke, students camped out for months in a tent city called Krzyzewskiville to get bleacher seats closest to the court.   At UNC, students anxiously navigated through a lottery system that featured three seat locations in the Dean Smith Center. 

By the time the new millennium rolled around, both teams had been to the Final Four 17 times in the prior 20 years with each winning two national championships. 

In 2003, Coach Roy Williams took over the UNC program after coaching the Kansas Jayhawks to multiple Final Four.  As he stepped off the bus at Duke to enter the arena for his first rivalry game as a head coach, he was greeted by Duke fans holding a sign that read, “You’re not in Kansas anymore” as a clever reference to the “Wizard of Oz” movie. 

In 2007, the feud jumped to a hotter level as Gerald Henderson got mythical revenge in the minds of older fans for the shot Larry Brown took on Art Heyman 46 years earlier by violently elbowing UNC star Tyler Hansbrough in the nose near the end of the game. 

As the rivalry stands today, each program boasts three national championships since the turn of the century as indisputably the best in college basketball.  The 2021 games will be a challenge at each stop on Tobacco Road as both teams struggle to find a way into the NCAA tournament.  Even without fans in the arena, the rivalry will continue to pulsate as viewers put on their chosen shade of blue to cheer on their team in another renewal of the greatest rivalry in college basketball.