Maybe, but the championship records
are not so sketchy. Duke won six Southern
Conference titles to Carolina’s two during
the Wade years and won the series 8-7-2.
And Wade was not necessarily the most
significant coach in the rivalry era. Bill
Murray, coach at Duke from 1951 to ’ 65,
was 11-5 against the Heels and won or
tied for the Atlantic Coast Conference
championship six times; Carolina had a
single ACC title before 1971.
The thrills of the late 1940s, of course,
have always obscured those numbers in
Chapel Hill.
Justice accounted for 30 of the Heels’
43 points in the 1946 and ’ 47 games, lifting the team from a 7-7 mid-fourth-quar-ter tie in the former and scoring as a runner, passer and receiver in the latter.
“You didn’t have to worry about which
way to block,” said Ralph Strayhorn ’ 47, a
guard who served as co-captain in 1946.
“If you blocked one way, he went the
other.”
The Heels’ 20-0 win the next year featured the much-talked-about 43-yard
touchdown in which “Choo Choo,” at
first trapped behind scrimmage, was
thought to have run maybe 100 yards’
worth of zigs and zags. Legend has it that
UNC tackle Ted Hazelwood ’ 48 knocked
down a Duke player as Justice danced by
and then denied his cries for release.
“Heck no,” Hazelwood said, “not with that
Justice. You never know when he might be
coming this way again.”
In the last game of the Justice era, the
Heels walked off Duke’s field with a 21-20
win, only to be called back when the officials determined there was still time for
Duke’s Mike Souchak to attempt a field
goal. “I was lucky enough to get the jump
on the blockers,” Weiner said. “He kicked
me so hard on the
backside that I just
fell and sat on the
ball.”
“We played
good games with
Duke — it was the
biggest game on
both schedules,”
Weiner said. “It was a good time to play at
Carolina. We all came back from the service without a dime in our pockets. We
stayed together and had a great time
together. There was a lot of camaraderie,
and we went to bowl games.”
The setting for the 1959 game could
not have been more poignant. The Heels
were in a dismal stretch in which Duke
had won eight of nine. The team was
ranked third in the national preseason poll
as expectations were higher than at any
time since the Justice years.
Just weeks before
the start of the
season, Coach Jim
Tatum ’34 died of
Rocky Mountain
spotted fever.
Offensive coordinator Jim Hickey
took over, and after
five losses in eight
games some students hung him in effigy. (The Beat Duke
Queen that year, Carolyn Kelley ’ 61,
would wind up marrying a Duke player.)
Duke was suffering a mediocre season,
too, and the faithful had to pin it all on
the finale in Durham. A sign in Carolina’s
parade read, “If you think we’re beat, wait
till you see Dook.” And it was prophetic.
The Heels scored the first three times
they got the ball on that Thanksgiving
Day. It was 27-0 at halftime. Don Klochak
’ 57 went 93 yards, untouched, to start the
second half.
“I remember it like it was yesterday
afternoon,” said Wade Smith ’ 60, who was
a second team All-ACC halfback. “We got
on the bus to go to Duke. It was absolutely
quiet. It was ominous. We were poised and
ready to go.
“We ran out on
the field and nearly
killed them.”
Very late in the
game the heavy-hearted Carolina
players decided,
apparently without
Hickey’s consent, to go for a two-point
conversion. The headline in The DTH
measured five inches high: 50-0.
Four of the series’ best games came
over the next four years as Carolina won
two by a total of three points and Duke
won two by a total of five. Every one had
bowl implications.
The 1963 season would be the only
one of that decade that Carolina fans
could write home about. The Duke game,
postponed after President John F.
NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION
Kennedy’s assassination, looked bleak after
the Devils intercepted a pass late in the
game with a 14-13 lead. But Carolina got
the ball back, and Max Chapman ’ 66
kicked a 41-yard field goal with 38 seconds left. The win earned the Heels a
Gator Bowl trip that produced their first
postseason win, 35-0 over Air Force.
The 1969 game is remembered for one
of the most famous plays in ACC history.
In the third quarter Duke quarterback Leo
Hart was tackled on an option run near
the sideline. He got up slowly, as if he were
shaken up. He bent down to tie his shoe.
The defense huddled, and Duke receiver
Marcel Courtillet picked up the ball and
tossed it to receiver Wes Chesson, who ran
down the sideline all alone for a 53-yard
touchdown that sealed a 17-13 win.
And on Nov. 21, 1970, as the fire in the
great old rivalry began to flicker, Don
McCauley ’ 71 ran for 279 yards and five
touchdowns to lead Carolina to a 59-34
win at home. McCauley broke O.J. Simpson’s single-season NCAA rushing record
in the process, and his 21st TD that season
is still a UNC record.
Besides the football game, Homecoming/RAMpage 2009
includes parties, reunions, seminars and many other activities. Learn more on page 60 and keep up
with the latest schedule at alumni.unc.edu/homecoming.
