As Good
as a Pass
To former sports information
Director Rick Brewer
’ 71, the rivalry never
has died. The most
stunning play he
ever saw was at the
end of the 1978
game. The Heels
were down 15-10
with 1: 42 left and
no timeouts, and
half of Dick Crum’s
last eight calls were
handoffs to Amos
Lawrence ’ 80.
Famous Amos covered 18, 4 and 20
yards, and with
13 seconds to play
Crum called a draw
from the 11-yard-
line. “Amos running
is as good as a
pass,” Crum said.
16-15 Carolina.
Trinity simply had a superior knowledge of
the rules and tactics of the relatively new
game.
Trinity’s administration then outlawed
football for 20 years (the Methodist
Church having ruled it “a source of evil”)
and, when they came back, Carolina
seemed to have figured it out, winning six
straight. Then an odd thing happened: Wallace Wade, who had won three national
championships as Alabama’s coach, decided
to move to Durham.
Wade would go 110- 36-7 at Duke, and
he pretty much owned Carolina until
Charlie Justice and his teammates got to
town. (Duke never beat Justice.)
The game of the 1930s was the 1935
matchup at Duke. All that the heavily
favored, unbeaten and No. 5-ranked Tar
Heels needed to go to the Rose Bowl was
to beat the Blue Devils. Duke, which
entered the game 6-2, reportedly borrowed
temporary bleachers from Carolina to help
expand its seating by 10,000. A crowd of
47,000, the largest ever to watch a football
game in the South at the time, saw Duke
COURTESY OF ELEANOR MORRIS ’ 55
It’s 1946 and the
Heels hadn’t beaten
their rival since a
year before the war.
With gas rationing
over, the Kenan
crowd bulged to
44,000. The game
program that year
featured generic
players on the cover.
But soon everybody
would know the
faces of Charlie
Justice ’ 50 and his
teammates, who
would rule Duke for
the next four years.
shut out the Heels 25-0 in a drizzling rain.
There were multiple reports that Wade’s
people had hidden in the woods and
watched the Heels practice and then
showed an unexpected game plan as a
result. The DTH accused Duke of an
unethical use of movie cameras.
