The Vic Bubas Years - a Jim Sumner Production
A great article from Jim on the first hints of glory in Duke basketball.
1959-1960 was Vic Bubas's first year and the team hadn't won anything. Art Heyman was a freshman and not eligible to play. In snow and cold Duke upset UNC in the ACC semis and Wake Forest in the finals. I learned a lot from the article.
Duke went on to defeat Princeton in the first round of the NCAA's and St. Joe's in the regional semis before losing to t he NYU Violets in the finals.
Here's a paragraph on the weather:
The ACC Tournament was held at Reynolds Coliseum, on the NC State campus, only 25 miles or so from Duke’s campus. Raleigh was hit with a seven-inch snowfall earlier that week, part of a pattern that made March of 1960 one of the coldest, snowiest Marches ever recorded on the east coast. The bad weather so compromised attendance that local station WRAL was allowed to telecast the first round of the tournament, something that had never been allowed before.
And a personal note: I had never set foot on the Duke campus but was scheduled to go on Friday morning for Angier Duke scholarship weekend. I got a phone call at my high school on Thursday, postponing the trip by a week. OK, but the weather was even worse the next weekend, and the Duke campus was covered in a foot of snow. Friday night I got to see Duke beat St. Joe's on TV and, for the first time, started rooting for the Blue Devils.
Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013