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In the 1920s and through the Depression years, basketball was just a minor part of the sports landscape. Football was the big sport and with the arrival of Wallace Wade at Duke, the Duke- UNC football game supplanted UNC-Virginia as the region's biggest annual sporting event.

Basketball was still secondary to baseball in the hearts and minds of Tobacco Road’s sporting public. The small gyms at UNC (the Tin Can) and at Duke could accommodate 3,000 or so fans, but usually drew less than a third of that. Compare that to the “massive” Duke Stadium for football, a center piece of the new West Campus where Wade won enough to first have his picture on the cover of Time Magazine and eventually have the horseshoe named after him.

The bloated Southern Conference split in 1932 along strictly geographic bounds — the 13 western schools forming the new Southeastern Conference, while the 10 schools on the Eastern Seaboard remained in the Southern Conference. Because of the split, the conference moved its championship game from Atlanta to Raleigh, where Memorial Auditorium offered a more-than- adequate 3,000 seats for the league’s postseason event.

UNC-Duke basketball continued in the shadow of a football rivalry that came to be more and more dominated by Wallace Wade’s juggernaut in Durham. Head to head, the two programs competed on fairly even terms in basketball, although Duke kept coming up frustratingly short in conference competition, while UNC cashed in on its opportunities.

The Blue Devils, losers in the 1929 and 1930 finals in Atlanta, also lost in the championship game of the first two Southern Conference Tournaments played in Raleigh — the 1934 loss a one-point heartbreaker to Washington & Lee. Carolina would beat W&L in the 1935 and ’36 finals before the Generals — playing in their fourth straight Southern Conference title game, edged the White Phantoms (as UNC was being called in those days) for the 1937 title.

That game, played before some 2,000 fans in Raleigh, was to be the last played under the old rules that dictated a center-jump after every basket. The NCAA voted to eliminate the center-jump (except to open games and the second half) for the 1937-38 season.

That decision was to change the face of college basketball.

Fan interest exploded in 1938 in the wake of the NCAA rule change. That change would essentially create the modern game by allowing the up-and-down flow that characterizes basketball today. Adaptation to the new rule was sporadic—many schools were slow to realize the possibilities inherent in the new rule changes.

As it turned out, Durham somehow became one of the leaders in the exploitation of the new rules. The humble mill town — dominated by tobacco and textile manufactures — saw a remarkable synergy in the days just before World War II. A few miles from the Duke campus, young basketball genius John McLendon, a Kansas product who learned the game directly from James Naismith, joined the staff at the North Carolina College of Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) and began experimenting with a fast break offense and the full-court press on defense. Across town at the Durham YMCA, “Footsie” Knight began training a remarkable crop of young players in many of the same tactics. Several of Knight’s proteges took his innovations a few blocks across town to Durham High School, where under Coach Paul Sykes, they dazzled crowds with a brand of basketball unlike any ever seen before. That Durham High team would win 71 straight games over the next three years, winning tournaments as far away as Buffalo, N.Y., and Jacksonville, Fla.

Many of those Durham High stars would end up playing for Eddie Cameron at Duke. Yet, even before the arrival of the Knight/Sykes contingent, it became obvious that the Duke coach was aware of the revolution taking place in his hometown. The 1938 Duke team began the season with almost no expectations. Cameron told a local reporter that this would be his worst team ever. But as the Duke coach slowly and carefully integrated some of the innovations that McLendon and Knight were developing across town, Cameron’s Blue Devils began to attract attention.

When Center Jump Was Eliminated in 1938, Basketball Became a Faster-Paced Game And Durham Was Birthplace of New Tempo

Early in the 1938 season, an anonymous AP reporter wrote of Duke’s home opener against Mississippi State:

“Practically a full house was on hand to take a look at the new streamlined game. While last night’s contest was slow at times, they saw the possibility of plenty of excitement in future engagements.”

That was an astute prediction. The 1938 Duke team earned the nickname “The Never a Dull Moment Boys” for its unpredictable play. The Blue Devils proved capable of some dreadful performances (such as a loss at South Carolina — the only conference win that season for the Gamecocks) and some wonderful ones (victories over preseason conference favorites North Carolina and Washington & Lee). Over the course of the 1938 season, interest in the four teams in the Raleigh/Durham area reached unheard of levels.

“The only drawback to North Carolina basketball this season is the lack of space in which to properly handle interested customers,” columnist Fred Haney wrote in the Durham Morning Herald. “Interest in the popular sport has increased at an amazing pace during the last few years and has caught all of the schools unprepared. The University of North Carolina is now constructing a gymnasium designed to seat 6,000 people at basketball games, but the building won’t be ready this season and as a result, people are going to be forced to crowd into the Tin Can to see the White Phantoms. When the new gym is completed, fans will be able to enjoy basketball more, but don’t think Carolina will have any extra space, even with 6,000 seats available because the major attractions will attract more people than that.”

The explosion of interest in the winter sport was reflected in the ticket rush for the 1938 Southern Conference tournament. League officials, anticipating record crowds, managed to cram an extra 1,700 seats into Raleigh’s Memorial Auditorium, raising its capacity to 4,672. When the league offered 500 “season” tickets (for all four sessions) at $3.50 each, they were gobbled up in hours. The semifinals and finals were sold out before the tip-off of the first game. Pre-tournament ticket sales for the two first-day sessions topped 4,000. When a standing room crowd of more than 5,000 squeezed in for the semifinals on Friday night, the crowd was proclaimed the largest to ever attend an indoor sporting event in the South. A similar crowd watched Cameron’s “Never a Dull Moment Boys” knock off Clemson to give Duke its first conference championship.

The 1939 season marked Cameron's only losing record (10-12) and also the inaugural NCAA basketball tournament, which invited eight teams from different sections of the country to play in Eastern and Western Regionals. UNC, Wake Forest and N.C. State all reached the NCAA tournament in its first 12 years before expanding to 16 teams in 1951. Duke never got into the original eight-team format and would have to wait until 1955 to make what was then the not-so-big dance.

Cameron coached for 14 seasons, during which the Blue Devils won 226 games (vs. 99 losses), qualified for the eight-team Southern Conference Tournament every year and won three championships, including titles his last two years. All the while he remained as an assistant football coach, and in 1942 he stepped away from basketball to fill in for Wallace Wade, when the legendary grid coach served active duty in World War II. While stalking the Duke “outdoor” Stadium sideline for four seasons, Cameron posted a 25-11-1 record, including a win over Alabama in the 1945 Sugar Bowl, and never lost to North Carolina.

When Wade returned from the war, Cameron became Duke’s first full- time athletic director and grew into one of the most powerful figures in college athletics. He spearheaded the formation of the Atlantic Coast Conference in 1953, essentially running the ACC for 20 years until he retired in 1972. They officially put his name on Duke Indoor Stadium the same day the floundering .500 Blue Devils basketball team of the early 1970s stunned third-ranked UNC. Still think God is a Tar Heel?

Duke Opened Its Impressive Indoor Stadium, Built with Funds from 1939 Rose Bowl game, Vs. Princeton in 1940, but it did not Sell Out

Cameron’s record against Carolina in basketball was 19-14 and he went only one season (1937) without beating the Tar Heels at least once. And UNC was strong in its own right during the Cameron years, posting only one losing record and taking home three more Southern Conference championships. That losing season was the last for Coach Walter Skidmore, who with James Ashmore and George Shepard had established the first sustained success in Tar Heel hoops over 13 years.

Woollen Gym Was Already Too Small When It opened in 1938

Football was still king on college campuses across the country, and Duke used funds from its 7-3 loss to Southern Cal in the 1939 Rose Bowl to commission black architect Julian Abele to design and begin building an 8,000-seat indoor basketball arena patented after The Palestra in Philadelphia. Duke Indoor Stadium opened in 1940 with a victory over Princeton. Meanwhile, Carolina had finally moved Into Woollen Gym, which held 6,000 fans and proved too small from its first day to accommodate the growing interest in intercollegiate basketball.