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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Apr 2011
    Location
    Sarasota, Florida

    Lew Alcindor v Duke

    Interesting reminiscence by Abdul-Jabbar about Duke. If memory serves, Duke thumped UCLA twice the previous year, once at Cameron (then still Duke Indoor Stadium, I think) and next night in Charlotte. Sports Illustrated's story byline was There Was Blood On The Carolina Moon in which the writer stated or heavily implied that UCLA was beaten twice because of racism from Duke fans toward UCLA black players. (I haven't looked the story up). I thought it was an unsubstantiated load of crap. The simple fact is that Duke was simply better. Jack Marin, Bob Verga, Steve Vacendak, Bob Riedy and Mike Lewis,a sophomore starter because freshman were not eligible were on the team, as were a number of other talented players. The following year we played UCLA, and Alcindor simply couldn't be guarded. Way too tall, and too good along with the height. Mike Lewis is certainly one of Duke's greats, but I do not think that's Mike Lewis in the picture. Lewis was heavier and quite blonde. It may be Warren Chapman, 6'8" and dark hair. The Duke team of 1965 - 66 which beat UCLA was the one which lost in NCAA semi-final to the Kentucky team which in turn was upset by Texas Western. As most Duke fans know, Duke lost to Kentucky because Verga - a phenomenal long range shooter who was either first or second in scoring (with Marin) became ill and could hardly play. I've always thought that a healthy Duke would not have been upset by Texas Western. Duke (with two six ten guys) had been upset by UCLA in the 1964 finals even though UCLA had no one over six - six, played on the west coast (no real basketball there) and was coached by some guy named John Wooden who had been at UCLA for some years without doing much. With Vacendak and Marin on the 63 - 64 team and Riedy and Verga in school and in the program, Duke was well aware that I'm a real wanker for saying this.I'm a real wanker for saying this.I'm a real wanker for saying this.I'm a real wanker for saying this. can happen, and i just don't think we would have overlooked ANYBODY in the final game after getting our I'm a real wanker for saying this.I'm a real wanker for saying this.I'm a real wanker for saying this. handed to us two years earlier. (And for that matter, being upset one year earlier in the ACC Tournament when somenobody from NC State got hot and shot Duke right out of post season play. Plus, while i don't know that Kentucky's '65 - '66 players were racist, Adolph Rupp is pretty much accepted to have been. I suspect Texas Western used that as motivation, while Kentucky - having scaled Olympus beating Duke in the semi-final game may have assumed that all it needed was to dress out and pick up the trophy.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Raleigh, NC
    Duke certainly was better than UCLA in the 1965-'66 season. The Bruins didn't even win their conference that season and went 18-8. According to urban legend the freshman team beat the varsity team during a preseason scrimmage. Wouldn't surprise me. Alcindor was that good.

    Still, no one really questions the fact that the black UCLA players were subjected to some racial taunts when they played Duke in North Carolina. I heard visiting black players subjected to them when I was at Duke and that was a few years after that. Not a lot. Isolated to be sure. But it happened. I even heard C.B. Claiborne called the so-called "N-word" in Duke Indoor Stadium. We're talking about the south in the middle 1960s and it's pretty disingenuous to pretend that those sentiments didn't exist and weren't expressed in ways we would find profoundly offense. Art Heyman told me some of the anti-Semitic stuff he heard on the road in the early 1960s and it was KKK-level stuff.

    Back to Alcindor.

    Bubas told me this story, which ended up in a book.

    The teams are warming up before the game. UCLA is warming up in front of the Duke bench. Alcindor trots by, looks at the Duke bench and gives them a great big grin. Bubas turns to his assistants and says something along the lines of "boys, we're in trouble."

    Little known fact. Wake Forest seriously recruited Alcindor out of Power Memorial. Wake was ahead of the curve as far as southern schools recruiting African Americans and Bones McKinney had the full support of the administration. In fact Wake successfully recruited Norwood Todmann, a teammate of Alcindor's at Power Memorial. Todmann was one year behind Alcindor. He was Wake's first black player.

    McKinney had been an NBA star at 6-7 and was considered a quality big-man coach. He thought he could leverage that reputation into getting Alcindor to come south. Didn't work. But can you imagine Alcindor in the ACC?



    And no, I've never heard anything to suggest that Bubas made any attempt to recruit Alcindor. C.B. Claiborne was in the same class as Alcindor but he was a walk-on. Don Blackman, prep class of 1968, was Duke's first recruited African American basketball player and he was from the greater NYC area.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Apr 2011
    Location
    Sarasota, Florida
    Sorry to hear of your experience, Jim. In seven years at Duke i missed one home basketball game. I never heard the N word at a game or any race-based insult shouted at any player. Insults, hell yes, but race baiting - none, I'm happy to say. I remember Don Blackmon well, although i did not know him personally.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Sep 2010
    Location
    Franklin TN
    Quote Originally Posted by Jedweb View Post
    Sorry to hear of your experience, Jim. In seven years at Duke i missed one home basketball game. I never heard the N word at a game or any race-based insult shouted at any player. Insults, hell yes, but race baiting - none, I'm happy to say. I remember Don Blackmon well, although i did not know him personally.
    I was at Duke from 1967 to 1971. I was in pep band, we had two and each played every other game. When we weren’t playing I typically sat on chair seats on the floor in the end zone, where the cheerleaders sit now. I never heard racial taunts. I certainly screamed a lot of unpleasant things at opposing players, but I never heard racial taunts. I even mentioned one time to Coach Waters that I screamed enough insults to Eddie Fogler that he took time to scream back at me during a game. I figured I had done my job if he was yelling at me instead of concentrating on the game.

    I’m certainly not claiming there was no racism at Duke at that time, but not at the games. I was saddened to learn later that C. B Claiborne was not invited to the basketball banquet because it was held at Hope Valley Country Club. That was awful and quite frankly tainted my opinion toward Coach Bubas. At that time I believe most of Duke’s highest administration officials may have been members of the same club. These were interesting times, and there were a lot of bad things but I did not hear racial taunts at sports events on campus. By in large the students were fairly liberal and not bigoted. Of course there was a Klan sign in Johnston County on I 95 on the way to the beach.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Dec 2010
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    Carolina Beach
    Quote Originally Posted by jimsumner View Post
    C.B. Claiborne was in the same class as Alcindor but he was a walk-on. Don Blackman, prep class of 1968, was Duke's first recruited African American basketball player and he was from the greater NYC area.
    Jim, you have taught me something today. As a long time Duke fan, I knew about C.B. but I did not realize that he was not recruited. Was he ever granted a scholarship during his time at Duke?

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Nov 2007
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    Vermont
    Quote Originally Posted by wsb3 View Post
    Jim, you have taught me something today. As a long time Duke fan, I knew about C.B. but I did not realize that he was not recruited. Was he ever granted a scholarship during his time at Duke?
    he had an academic scholarship...there was a thread about this a month or two ago.
    I don't recall any racial taunts at Duke during that era, but I do recall a seminal moment when some of Duke's (pretty small) African American fan contingent started chanting "check the floor," because our opponent had five black players on the floor at the same time (pretty rare indeed) while Duke had five white guys. Must have been an out of conference game.

  7. #7

    Jim, that's not an urban legend, that's legendary

    Quote Originally Posted by jimsumner View Post
    Duke certainly was better than UCLA in the 1965-'66 season. The Bruins didn't even win their conference that season and went 18-8. According to urban legend the freshman team beat the varsity team during a preseason scrimmage. Wouldn't surprise me. Alcindor was that good.
    I know I'm dating myself, but before freshman eligibility the equivalent of today's blue white scrimmage was usually the varsity vs. the freshman team. In 1965 the UCLA intrasquad scrimmage not only featured Lew Alcindor, but it was also the first game at Pauley Pavilion:


    November of 1965. UCLA opened its new Pauley Pavilion with the annual varsity-freshman game. The varsity had several players back from the 1965 national championship team and was ranked No. 1. The freshman team had Alcindor, Shackelford, Heitz and Lucius Allen, all high school phenoms.

    “It was supposed to be Coach Wooden’s big night,” Abdul-Jabbar says. “A bunch of Coach’s former players were there for the building’s opening, and they formed a human tunnel for Coach to run through to the cheers of the over 12,000 fans in the stands.

    “My main thought going into the game was that they would beat us quickly and that would kill any future rivalry between us. They were the national champs, having just come off a record of 58 wins out of 60 games for the last two seasons. We were a tune-up game to launch them into yet another championship season.”

    Some tune-up. The freshmen won 75-60.

    https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball...50-years-later

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Location
    Wilmington
    My first Duke basketball game was the Duke UCLA game in Charlotte. The old coliseum on Independence Blvd .. I think it's still there. It was huge to me.

    Duke won. It helped the pain of losing to them in the 64 Championship game.

    I use to go to the Campbell College basketball camp and Coach Wooden was always there ,, teaching defense. I don't know if it is rumor, myth , or the truth, but after losing to Duke for the second loss,, Wooden was to have said, I'll never play a game in NC again.. If true , he didn't till the NC State semifinal game in Greensboro. Who knows. It was also said he always came to the Campbell camp to recruit,, ( henry bibby ? ) . That camp was awesome. Pete and Press Maravich, and others.

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Raleigh, NC
    The specific incident I recall was in the spring of 1969, my freshman season. It wasn't actually an NCAA game but rather one of those barnstorming games played by seniors after the end of the season. This one was in Duke Indoor Stadium and Claiborne was one of the participants. At one point a young man, middle-school age, perhaps high-school clearly yelled at Claiborne "go home n****. He was sitting alongside a woman I presumed to be his mother.

    Now this was not a game that was part of the regular-season ticket package and I'm sure many of the fans were not regular attendees and many likely were not Duke fans.

    But this happened no more than 10 feet away from me. I very loudly suggested to the young man something along the lines of "no, you go home," perhaps accompanied by a common but vulgar hand gesture.

    They left.

    I can't remember much of what I did last week but I vividly remember this. Seared in my memory.

    My first game at DIS, aka Cameron was Duke versus Alabama, December 1968. Claiborne was the only black player on either team.

    Looking at Duke's schedule the only teams during Buddy Womble and my tenures at Duke that might have put five black players on the court at the same time would have been Michigan, Dayton, perhaps Penn.

    I don't remember that but I do recall an international track meet at Wade between a U.S. team and a Pan-African team. No surprise that a lot of the U.S. athletes were African Americans. A group of African Americans in the stands, many of whom appeared to be around college age, held up a sign keeping a running score that read something like "Sons of Africa" versus "Sons of Europe." It seemed relatively good-natured.

    But these were pretty tense times to attend college. The Vietnam War raged, the Kent State shootings took place during my sophomore year and George Wallace running for president bookended my Duke years.
    Last edited by jimsumner; 05-20-2020 at 01:29 PM.

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Asheville
    Quote Originally Posted by jimsumner View Post
    The specific incident I recall was in the spring of 1969, my freshman season. It wasn't actually an NCAA game but rather one of those barnstorming games played by seniors after the end of the season. This one was in Duke Indoor Stadium and Claiborne was one of the participants. At one point a young man, middle-school age, perhaps high-school clearly yelled at Claiborne "go home n****. He was sitting alongside a woman I presumed to be his mother.

    Now this was not a game that was part of the regular-season ticket package and I'm sure many of the fans were not regular attendees and many likely were not Duke fans.

    But this happened no more than 10 feet away from me. I very loudly suggested to the young man something along the lines of "no, you go home," perhaps accompanied by a common but vulgar hand gesture.

    They left.

    I can't remember much of what I did last week but I vividly remember this. Seared in my memory.

    My first game at DIS, aka Cameron was Duke versus Alabama, December 1968. Claiborne was the only black player on either team.

    Looking at Duke's schedule the only teams during Buddy Womble and my tenures at Duke that might have put five black players on the court at the same time would have been Michigan, Dayton, perhaps Penn.

    I don't remember that but I do recall an international track meet at Wade between a U.S. team and a Pan-African team. No surprise that a lot of the U.S. athletes were African Americans. A group of African Americans in the stands, many of whom appeared to be around college age, held up a sign keeping a running score that read something like "Sons of Africa" versus "Sons of Europe." It seemed relatively good-natured.

    But these were pretty tense times to attend college. The Vietnam War raged, the Kent State shootings took place during my sophomore year and George Wallace running for president bookended my Duke years.
    I was at that game, also. If I remember correctly, Bubas purposely started Claiborne to get to Alabama. We killed them, with Claiborne having like 20 pts., I think.

    ricks

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Raleigh, NC
    Quote Originally Posted by ricks68 View Post
    I was at that game, also. If I remember correctly, Bubas purposely started Claiborne to get to Alabama. We killed them, with Claiborne having like 20 pts., I think.

    ricks
    Claiborne had 12 points. Randy Denton led Duke's 86-48 win with 17 points and 14 rebounds.

    That was part of a 3-0 start that pushed Duke to ninth in the AP poll.

    Just what this then freshman was expecting. Four years of top-10 Duke basketball.

    Alas and alack. Duke dropped its next four games and didn't find its way back to the top-10 until 1978.

  12. #12

    photo

    The photo: Joe Kennedy, Mike Lewis, and Steve Vandenberg ??????

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Nov 2013
    Location
    Farmingdale, New Jersey
    Quote Originally Posted by dukefan7680 View Post
    The photo: Joe Kennedy, Mike Lewis, and Steve Vandenberg ??????
    Yes, definitely the three of them.

  14. #14
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Location
    Lewisville, NC
    Quote Originally Posted by jimsumner View Post
    Claiborne had 12 points. Randy Denton led Duke's 86-48 win with 17 points and 14 rebounds.

    That was part of a 3-0 start that pushed Duke to ninth in the AP poll.

    Just what this then freshman was expecting. Four years of top-10 Duke basketball.

    Alas and alack. Duke dropped its next four games and didn't find its way back to the top-10 until 1978.
    Including a loss to East Tennessee State in Indoor Stadium

    Schedule and results for 1968-69:
    https://www.sports-reference.com/cbb...-schedule.html

    Stats for the season (CB Claiborne averaged over 6 pts/game)
    https://www.sports-reference.com/cbb...duke/1969.html

  15. #15
    Join Date
    Nov 2007
    Location
    Vermont
    ^ Harley Skeeter Swift made Duke look like the Washington Generals in that game. And shortly thereafter, we entered the BuckyZoic Era.

  16. #16
    Join Date
    Jun 2008
    Location
    Winston Salem, NC
    Quote Originally Posted by roywhite View Post
    Including a loss to East Tennessee State in Indoor Stadium

    Schedule and results for 1968-69:
    https://www.sports-reference.com/cbb...-schedule.html

    Stats for the season (CB Claiborne averaged over 6 pts/game)
    https://www.sports-reference.com/cbb...duke/1969.html
    The 68-69 team went 15-13 and was I one disappointed Duke fan. The year before I had returned from the Army and had watched a good Duke team go 22-6 with losses: at SC by 3, at home to SC by 6, at Vandy by 1 and at the Uncheats by 3. That team had Lewis, Golden, Kennedy and Vandenberg average double figures. Mike Lewis had a great year; 22 ppg, 14 rebounds per game. They lost in the ACCT to NC State 12-10 (which should be my number one disappointing loss of all time). I'll have to add that to another thread. I remember Coach Bubas staying in a zone and let the Wolfpack run the clock down. I always wondered what might have been if he had gone to man2man. All off season I was excited for the '68-'69 team. I was expecting to see another great Duke team. If I'm not mistaken the freshmen class of Denton, Devenzio, Katherman and Evans were really hyped, but they never jelled with the upper classmen. Then came years of disappointment one after another. Today's Duke fans are spoiled. All you have to do is look at some of the posts here on DBR. I never take a Duke team for granted and I hesitate to say we will blow a team out. As for CB he was a fine young man that represented Duke University well.

    GoDuke!

  17. #17
    Join Date
    Apr 2011
    Location
    Sarasota, Florida
    The 12 - 10 loss to NC State was truly a pisser, and I've also wondered why Bubas didn't play more aggressive defense. I've assumed that he might have been influenced by the fact the The Schnozz and the baby blue smurfs tried the same thing in 1966 - holding the ball (Dean's vaunted 4 corner (no) offense) in the days before the shot clock. Duke won that one 21 - 20, and perhaps Bubas was gambling again on passivity and no mistakes. Following the 12 - 10 debacle, i recall having read somewhere that somebody had sent a letter addressed to "Gutless Wonder North Carolina State University." It was delivered to Coach Norm Sloan.

  18. #18
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    Jun 2008
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    Winston Salem, NC
    Quote Originally Posted by Jedweb View Post
    The 12 - 10 loss to NC State was truly a pisser, and I've also wondered why Bubas didn't play more aggressive defense. I've assumed that he might have been influenced by the fact the The Schnozz and the baby blue smurfs tried the same thing in 1966 - holding the ball (Dean's vaunted 4 corner (no) offense) in the days before the shot clock. Duke won that one 21 - 20, and perhaps Bubas was gambling again on passivity and no mistakes. Following the 12 - 10 debacle, i recall having read somewhere that somebody had sent a letter addressed to "Gutless Wonder North Carolina State University." It was delivered to Coach Norm Sloan.
    I imagine that hurt the Wolfpack worse than a loss to Duke would have. Comparing them to the cowardly Four Corner offense ole Deano employed GTHC!

    GoDuke!

  19. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by Jedweb View Post
    The 12 - 10 loss to NC State was truly a pisser, and I've also wondered why Bubas didn't play more aggressive defense. I've assumed that he might have been influenced by the fact the The Schnozz and the baby blue smurfs tried the same thing in 1966 - holding the ball (Dean's vaunted 4 corner (no) offense) in the days before the shot clock. Duke won that one 21 - 20, and perhaps Bubas was gambling again on passivity and no mistakes. Following the 12 - 10 debacle, i recall having read somewhere that somebody had sent a letter addressed to "Gutless Wonder North Carolina State University." It was delivered to Coach Norm Sloan.
    Vic Bubas was quoted after that 12-10 loss to State, that this particular team he had couldn't guard a team of grandma's that year in a man to man defense.

  20. #20
    Join Date
    Apr 2011
    Location
    Sarasota, Florida
    Kennedy, Vandenberg and Lewis - definitely correct. i had missed this photo altogether and only noticed the one of Lew dunking on a single player. I suppose i might have asked myself who was being referred to as "the other two guys." But, I didn't.

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