A nearly forgotten UNC-Duke national semifinal made history long before this Final Four
You may have heard that the UNC-Duke Final Four game Saturday will be the first time the two teams have ever met in a national postseason tournament.
But that’s not actually true.
In 1971, when Richard Nixon was president, Watergate was still a year away and the Vietnam War was on the news every night, UNC and Duke met in another national semifinal before a packed house of 18,812 fans at Madison Square Garden in New York.
UNC edged Duke, 73-67, in the semifinals of that National Invitation Tournament. Then the Tar Heels beat Georgia Tech — a then-independent team that actually turned down an NCAA bid in favor of playing in the NIT that year — for the 1971 tournament title.
“We gave Dean Smith his first national championship,” said David Chadwick, now a pastor in Charlotte and then one of the Tar Heels’ post players. “Back then, the NIT was still fairly prestigious. It didn’t feel like a consolation prize. It felt like a national tournament.”
That nearly forgotten NIT meeting has stood for 51 years as the only one of UNC and Duke’s 257 games that occurred in a postseason tournament that wasn’t the ACC tournament. It will be joined Saturday by the Duke-UNC Final Four game in New Orleans (8:49 p.m., TBS).
Some context for that NIT meeting:
The NCAA tournament, at the time, only included 25 teams (UCLA would win the tournament title that season, for the fifth year in a row). Only the first-place winner from the ACC made the NCAA cut. After those 25 teams — and remember, the NCAA field is 68 teams today — the 16 next-best teams went to the NIT.
And although UNC had won the ACC regular season, the Tar Heels were upset in the ACC tournament final when South Carolina stole the tip on a last-second jump ball and scored to win, 52-51.
That meant both UNC and Duke headed to the NIT, where each had also played in 1970. “We both got bounced in the first round that year,” said Bucky Waters, then Duke’s basketball coach.
To try and avoid the same fate in 1971, Waters said he called Smith during the break between the ACC tournament and the NIT with an idea to keep both teams fresh.
“We actually scrimmaged with Carolina before that game in ‘71,” Waters said. “We had a long wait before we went to the NIT. I called Dean and said, ‘We’re just standing around. If you want to scrimmage, we’ll come to you.’ And so we scrimmaged in Chapel Hill. I don’t think we even kept score. But it was a good thing for both of us, to keep us pepped up.”
Beating Dr. J and Ernie D
By then, the two teams had already played each other three times that season, with UNC winning in an early-season Big Four tournament matchup in Greensboro, 83-81, and then each team winning by single digits at home after that.
“The NIT was a pretty big deal back then,” said Randy Denton, who was Duke’s 6-foot-10 center at the time and who would later play in both the ABA and the NBA. “People don’t remember that.”
Duke and UNC first had to win twice to face each other in the NIT’s version of the Final Four. All 16 teams headed to New York. The entire NIT was contested in Madison Square Garden back then and really did have some panache. In 1970, Marquette had also turned down an NCAA bid in favor of the NIT, because coach Al McGuire was upset at the NCAA seeding Marquette would have gotten. Instead, Marquette went to the NIT, enjoyed New York for a week and won the whole thing.
In the first round of the 1971 NIT, UNC had to face a Massachusetts team led by Julius “Dr. J” Erving.
“We opened a can of whoop a-- on them,” said Steve Previs, one of the Tar Heels’ starting guards, “and won by 41 points.”
The final score was 90-49. Erving scored only 13 points before fouling out with 16:41 to go in the game.
“I don’t think Erving had ever seen anything quite like our help defense,” Chadwick said. “He wasn’t a great shooter yet, and so he would drive to the middle a lot and find three guys there, standing ready to draw the charge.”
However, UNC lost its leading scorer Dennis Wuycik to a knee injury in the UMass game, and he couldn’t play for the rest of the NIT. The Tar Heels were deep and still beat Providence and its star guard Ernie DiGregorio in their next game, known by his nickname “Ernie D.” Duke, meanwhile, beat Dayton by eight points and then Tennessee by 14 to set up the NIT semifinal.
“We were so pumped up for that game for a variety of reasons,” Previs said, “but obviously the biggest one is that we loved to beat Duke.”
UNC-Duke, 51 years later
That NIT game itself wasn’t a classic. UNC jumped to an early lead and never trailed in its six-point win.
“I remember that we had played them so much and so often that they knew our plays so well,” Chadwick said, “and we knew their plays so well. It was almost like you’d go to the spot and they’d be there waiting for you, or vice versa. But we just got ahead early and kept some distance the entire game.”
Said Smith to reporters shortly after the game: “When you have played a team as many times as we have played Duke this season, there is never a problem knowing what each of us is going to do.”
UNC was led by future NBA coach George Karl, a guard for the 1971 team, with 21 points. Bill Chamberlain, Chadwick and Lee Dedmon all contributed 10 points apiece. For Duke, Richie O’Connor had 18, Gary Melchionni had 12, Rick Klatherman had 12 and a foul-plagued Denton had 10 points, which was half his average.
“Dedmon and Chadwick gave me some trouble inside,” Denton said. “And Bill Chamberlain had a great tournament. I do remember that.”
Indeed, Chamberlain lit up Georgia Tech for 34 points in the NIT final, which UNC won, 84-66. He would be named the tournament MVP.
Previs said one of his main takeaways from that 1971 tournament is that UNC earned Smith his first national title of any type as a head coach (Smith was still 11 years away from winning his first NCAA tournament in 1982).
The other takeaway?
“We beat Duke three times that year,” Previs crowed.
Now, 51 years later, everyone still alive who participated in that 1971 game is focused on the 2022 version of Duke-Carolina in another, even more prestigious national tournament.
“We need to keep Mark Williams out of foul trouble,” Denton said.
“If Brady Manek is hitting from outside, that’s going to open everything up,” Chadwick said.
“On Saturday night, if our kids believe like we did, 50 years from now they might just be telling the same kind of story,” Previs said.
“I just worry that there will be so much emotion poured into this game that the winner may be drained for the national final Monday against Villanova or Kansas,” Waters said. “Even though I coached at Duke, I want the ACC to win the title Monday, no matter who is representing the conference.”
Many UNC and Duke fans don’t feel that way, of course. To them, Saturday night is Armageddon, and life may cease to exist depending on the outcome.
It’s not really that way, though. As the young men who played in the 1971 NIT tournament can tell you — all of them now around 70 years old, give or take a few years — life goes on after Duke-UNC.
But, as they’ll also tell you, it is a lot sweeter when you win.
This story was originally published April 1, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
