28 years, two friends, one beer and the end of another era for Duke and UNC
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What does a Michelob Light from 1994 actually taste like? Friendship? Maybe. Does anyone actually want to find out?
Mike Krzyzewski isn’t the only one bidding farewell to the Duke-North Carolina rivalry on Saturday, barring an encore in Brooklyn or beyond. For 28 years, Partha Howell and David Clawson have passed the same bottle of Michelob Light back and forth with every victory in the rivalry, their own traveling trophy of hops, malted barley and St. Louis tap water, delivered as consolation for the loser.
But the loser on Saturday won’t have to keep it. Or even drink it, if they were crazy enough to do so. The end of one era called for the end of another, mutually agreed upon.
“It was just the end of an era,” Howell said. “It’s not the end for us. Hopefully we’ve got years of friendship left.”
It started on Feb. 3, 1994, when Clawson showed up at his friend Howell’s house in Beaufort late at night with a bottle of beer and a towel – to drown her sorrows and dry her tears after his Tar Heels beat her Blue Devils, 89-78. What possessed Clawson, in that moment, to revel so gleefully in victory, he can’t now say.
But he grew up in Beaufort a Duke fan, switching allegiances when he went to school at UNC in 1966 – he framed a “Beat Dook” placard from his first game – and Howell grew up in Raleigh a neutral but adopted Duke because her husband Leroy and her longtime boss with the state health department were both Duke fans. Clawson worked for the state as a shellfish inspector and Howell worked on shellfish health standards, and as coworkers their personalities meshed even as their allegiances clashed.
And then one night Clawson decided to ramp up their in-person rivalry with the late-night impromptu gloating.
“I’m a hateful person!” Clawson joked.
“You are not!” Howell said.
“I guess I probably had an extra beer,” Clawson said. “I had it, so I’m going to go get it. I don’t know why. It just came to me on the spur of the moment.”
“It was the beginning of a great story,” Howell said. “One of my favorite sayings is, live a great story.”
Howell refused to drink it and Leroy suggested she keep it in the refrigerator to repay the favor the next time Duke beat UNC. Which she did … three years later, after Howell and her husband had left Beaufort for Greenville in 1996. Clawson gave it right back in two months. At some point, the bottle received its own protective traveling case, like the Stanley Cup, an old toner-cartridge box packed with bubble wrap.
In 2001, Howell and her husband moved back to Beaufort and the exchanges got easier. They also started writing the dates and scores of changes of possession on the box, like graffiti, with the occasional message. “You’ll probably get this back on March 8!” “2011 ACC tourn. Champs. Yours till next year!” “What a night!” There’s no space left.
What would possess two otherwise rational people to carry on like this for decades? It says a lot about not only basketball in North Carolina, and the Carolina-Duke rivalry in particular, but how sports can bring us together as much as it can divide us. People don’t exchange moldering beers over rising and falling stock prices. Through moves and job changes and life changes, they carried on their own little rivalry tradition until it took on a life of its own.
Last week, they ran into each other on the street, as one does in a small coastal town like Beaufort. Howell was walking her dog. Clawson was riding his bike. They came to a joint realization that the end of one era – Roy Williams last year, Krzyzewski this year – required the end of another.
The aggrieved party in Coach K’s final Cameron appearance will not retain the bottle-aged brew in perpetuity, although they will each keep half of the box. Compared to the notes and messages and inside jokes written on its protective container, the beer’s just a thing, an object.
“We’ll probably make Partha’s husband drink the beer,” Clawson said.
“I’ve drank a lot of stuff but I ain’t drinking that,” Leroy piped up from another room.
Whatever happens to the beer, even if it gets tossed in a recycling bin after almost 30 years, it long ago faded in importance compared to everything it represented: a rivalry, a friendship and the ties that can bind us together, not to mention the realization that everyone and everything should have the chance to meet a dignified end in its time.
This story was originally published March 5, 2022 at 6:10 AM with the headline "28 years, two friends, one beer and the end of another era for Duke and UNC."
