The Dukolina Blue Heels

In the afterglow of Duke’s narrow national title victory over valiant Butler, whose talented and fresh-faced thirty year old coach Brad Stevens makes me feel ancient at just thirty-five, one fact has become unavoidable: while UNC and Duke may field two men’s basketball teams, they share one basketball program. UNC and Duke stand head and shoulders above every other college basketball program only because of each other. You may wish to cue up Grover Washington Jr.’s “Just the Two of Us” as we proceed.

The UNC-Duke merger occurred in 1980 when Duke hired Mike Krzyzewski, a budding coaching genius who could go toe to toe with UNC’s resident basketball demigod, Dean Smith. While Smith had ruled basketball’s best conference, the ACC, with an iron fist for much of the late sixties and then the seventies, he had remained unable to capture his elusive first national championship. It is no coincidence that within two years of Coach K’s arrival at Duke, Dean finally got the monkey off of his back, with a little help from a freshman named Michael Jordan, in 1982. With the encampment of Smith and Krzyzewski within a few miles of one another, the epicenter of college basketball, which had been floating in the ether after departing Wooden’s UCLA and landing briefly in Knight’s Indiana only to discover that the company wasn’t so great, planted itself firmly on Tobacco Road. It hasn’t left yet.

By 1986, fueled by competition with the very best, i.e. Smith, Coach K came into his own and led Duke to its first of what would become almost perennial Final Four appearances. It was as if Duke and Coach K had drafted behind Smith and UNC for a few years and then slungshot past them at the mid-point of the decade, with the pendulum reaching the outer point of its Duke-ward arc in 1991 and ’92, as Coach K claimed back-to-back national titles. Duke had pulled ahead.

But the pendulum swung quickly back the other way. And this time it was Smith and UNC benefitting from the thrill of the chase. Smith knew he had just about one lap left in which to catch Coach K, and this sense of urgency propelled Smith to make the final act of his legendary career perhaps its finest, with a second national title in 1993 and two more trips to the Final Four in ’95 and ’97 before calling it a day and leaving a program fully loaded for his ever loyal assistant Bill Guthridge to make his own Final Four run in 1998. And it was almost as if Coach K exited the stage in order to let Smith have his well deserved spotlight to himself, as Coach K endured his brief wilderness period, missing half the ’95 season with what was politely referred to as “exhaustion”, and which landed him in the hospital.

Needless to say, Coach K’s dark night of the soul was short lived, and by the time Smith had officially hung up his coaching whistle, Coach K was ready to take back what he saw as rightfully his. And as Carolina struggled to find its way in the post-Smith era, Guthridge went to two Final Fours in three years but nevertheless realized it’s no fun replacing God and promptly joined Smith in retirement, Coach K reasserted his will. A narrow Duke loss in the 1999 national final was followed up by Coach K’s third national crown in 2001.

Which point brings us to the most fascinating juncture of the UNC-Duke merger. When Guthridge up and quit Dean summoned another loyal assistant, and a bona fide coaching genius in his own right, Roy Williams. But Williams did the unthinkable and said no to the Godfather, preferring to stay in a house he had built for himself, so to speak, in Kansas. In the chaos that ensued Carolina hired a man in way over his head, Matt Doherty, and Carolina entered its own wilderness period.

Under Doherty Carolina was no longer able to function as UNC in the UNC-Duke rivalry; the Tarheels were too busy imploding. A surrogate was required in order to maintain the symbolic order that had come to govern the college basketball universe. Enter Gary Williams and his Maryland Terrapins. For one shining moment Maryland was elevated to the college basketball stratosphere, like a passenger getting bumped from coach to first class. A heartbreaking Final Four loss to sudden archrival Duke in 2001 was followed by Maryland’s triumph as the 2002 national champions. Believe it or not, Maryland –Duke was now the game in town, while UNC was busy simply trying to keep its dirty Doherty laundry out of the media.

Perhaps Maryland could have joined UNC-Duke and transformed the rivalry into a “trivalry”, but something strange and sad happened instead. Maryland, and especially its fans, became consumed by the rivalry with Duke rather than fueled by it. For a rivalry to thrive, beneath the pleasure taken in mutual animosity there must exist a foundation of tacitly acknowledged mutual respect. Respect and animosity are the yin and the yang of rivalry, and in this case Maryland had way too much yang. Maryland’s fans truly hated Duke, resenting Duke in a fashion that was toxic to the emerging rivalry. Perhaps Maryland had developed too large a chip on its shoulder from all those years trucking down to Greensboro for the ACC Tournament, which should have been called the State of North Carolina Invitational Tournament. Whatever the genesis of Maryland’s vitriol, they hurled it in heaping proportions at Duke; the profanity became so obscene that Gary Williams himself had to verbally reprimand the denizens of “Garyland” for their poor sportsmanship and unseemly behavior. The breaking point was perhaps when Maryland fans threw objects at Duke players’ parents seated in the Maryland bleachers. There is nothing left to say but that Maryland’s fans, and college basketball rivalries are ultimately about the fans, did not live up to the promise of the fledgling Duke-Maryland rivalry.

And perhaps that is for the best, as three is inevitably a crowd. Maryland faded into the background, courtesy largely of the recruits Gary Williams did and did not land, and fate reasserted itself, as always, to restore the symbolic order. After Doherty was mercifully canned, Dean swallowed his considerable pride and reached out again to his unexpectedly prodigal son, Roy Williams. As Williams later put it, he couldn’t say no to Dean Smith twice, leaving unsaid the fact that the Godfather’s house was now in rank disorder. Williams must also have been able to sense that Smith was on Alzheimer’s doorstep, and that this was his last chance to make things right with his mentor. Williams was basically the son who had refused to come home and run the thriving family business, only to see the business subsequently run into the ground by his inept cousin. Of course he came home.

Like Smith before him, Williams was great before locking horns with Coach K in the UNC-Duke rivalry, but like Smith he had never won his coveted national title before doing so. And while Coach K’s focus blurred just slightly as he spent summers coaching Kobe and Lebron on the US national team, Williams never had more to prove than he did to all those who thought he looked foolish in leaving Kansas the second time that Dean asked him. And in a blink the pendulum had swung again, as Williams led the the Tarheels to a national title in 2005, and again in 2009, while Duke was uncharacteristically mediocre by Coach K standards, and unable to get past the Sweet 16 several years running. Carolina had pulled ahead.

The pendulum swings quickest whenever one school seems to have obtained marked superiority in the rivalry. To wit, UNC, a popular pre-season Final Four pick on magazine covers for 2010, unaccountably fell flat on its face, finished close to the bottom of the ACC and failed to qualify for the NCAA tournament. The effect was so shocking that Roy Williams temporarily lost his mind and compared the Tarheels’ losing streak to the deaths of thousands of earthquake ravaged Haitians. Meanwhile, all Coach K did was guide Duke to its fourth national title while simultaneously ruining the end of the movie Hoosiers (Butler became less like Hoosiers and more like the first Rocky in which Rocky Balboa wins the day despite losing the boxing match to Apollo Creed). Consider the symbolic order intact, and the UNC-Duke merger stronger than ever (with yet another assist from Maryland, who stepped up in place of this year’s lowly Heels and upset Duke in the regular season’s final week to share the regular season title with the Blue Devils; if Maryland were to win an Oscar it would inevitably be as best supporting actor).

For now, what is good for UNC is good for Duke, and vice versa. No single team can be great every year, but the UNC-Duke program can. The rivalry cum merger has made Duke and Carolina greater than they could ever be alone, which is orders of magnitude beyond what any other monistic college basketball program can achieve. This is unlikely to change as long as Coach K and Ol’ Roy steer the ship. Don’t think for a second that Carolina won’t be back with full force next year, as their service to the symbolic order was fulfilled this year. The rivalry’s real test will come when either Coach K or Coach Williams departs. This will likely be harder for Duke, as UNC has already endured the trauma of Dean Smith’s retirement and come out the other side. I’d hate to be the man attempting to fill Coach K’s shoes. But, eventually, the symbolic order will assure that those shoes are capably filled. UNC will probably win a national title or two while things shake out, and, who knows, maybe Maryland will get invited to the prom one more time.