Art Heyman, Larry Brown And A Brawl: Classic Moments Abound In ...

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By Bethany Bradsher, WRALSportsFan contributor

The seeds of every Big Four rivalry can be found in the 1950s, but the only rivalry that has stayed white-hot through all of the subsequent decades was actually the last one to form.

In the early days of the ACC, Duke struggled to win consistently enough to be viewed as a threat, but that changed when North Carolina State assistant Vic Bubas was named the new Blue Devils head coach in 1959.

  • Inside the Rivalry: Duke vs. UNC Basketball

Bubas struck a painful blow to North Carolina before he even coached a game. Art Heyman, a brash forward from Long Island considered the top high school prospect in the nation, had already signed a letter of intent to play for Frank McGuire and his Tar Heels when Bubas took the Duke job and immediately started recruiting Heyman despite his stated intention.

Amid reports that Heyman’s stepfather had gotten into a shouting match with McGuire on one of Heyman’s visits to Chapel Hill, Bubas continued to make connections with the Heymans.

“He charmed my mother and stepfather,” Heyman said. “They made me go to Duke. All my friends from New York were at Carolina. If Duke hadn’t picked me up at the airport, I would have gone down the road (to Chapel Hill) and started school there.”

Under NCAA rules at that time, the letter of intent was only binding until July 1, so Heyman decommitted and followed his parents’ hearts to Durham. He was still playing on the freshman team during the 1960 ACC Tournament when his new team got the best of his almost-team in the tournament semifinals, a 71-69 victory made more surprising by the fact that the Tar Heels had trounced the Blue Devils by more than 22 points in each of the three regular season meetings.

When Heyman joined the Duke lineup that fall, he was already the team’s star, and his presence helped fuel the fire that still blazes between Durham and Chapel Hill today.

Art Heyman

In December 1960 the teams met in their first and only Dixie Classic final, when Heyman scored 11 points in the early minutes of the game but then met an immovable object in UNC senior guard Doug Moe, who held him scoreless for the rest of the game and helped the Tar Heels to a Dixie Classic title.

“Heyman was in shock,” Joe Menzer wrote in the book Four Corners. “No one held him to 11 points. No one.”

With the sting from that defeat still vivid, Heyman led his team on a six-game winning streak and showed up for the next game against UNC ready for revenge. Depending on which poll you believed, the Blue Devils and Tar Heels were either No. 4 and No. 5, or No. 5 and No. 4, respectively, when the Heels arrived at Cameron on Feb. 4, 1961.

Moe drew the unenviable task of guarding Heyman again, and the two almost came to blows several times as Heyman accused Moe of spitting on him. The atmosphere was combustible throughout the contest—Heyman even pushed down a UNC cheerleader on his way to the locker room at halftime—but the true theatrics came with 15 seconds left in the game.

Duke had an 80-75 edge, Heyman fouled Tar Heel guard Larry Brown as he attempted to shoot, and the former Long Island friends (who were reportedly planning to be roommates if Heyman had played for UNC) got into a less-than-friendly brawl.

1961: The Heyman-Brown Fight

Heyman and Brown started throwing punches, fans poured out of the stands and joined in, and later Heyman even claimed he was kicked by a pair of alligator shoes presumably belonging to UNC coach McGuire.

“Duke won the game, but lost the fight,” wrote Jack Horner, the sports editor of the Durham Morning Herald.

A few other noteworthy results in the early days of the rivalry many consider the nation’s best:

On March 2, 1968 A reserve Duke guard named Fred Lind etched his name in the history books for his role in a triple-overtime 87-86 victory over the Tar Heels in the regular season finale. Prior to that game, Lind had only scored 12 points all season; against the Tar Heels he notched 16 points and nine rebounds and hit the shots that tied the game in both regulation and the first overtime period.

March 2, 1974 In another regular season finale for the ages, the Tar Heels erased an eight-point deficit in 17 seconds in regulation and went on to prevail over the Blue Devils 96-92 in overtime. It was a comeback made even more improbable by the fact that the three-point shot was not introduced to the college game until 1986.

Feb. 24, 1979 Fans in Cameron for the matchup between the two teams might have preferred to watch paint dry, but it turned out they were witnesses to a classic. Dean Smith drove Duke head coach Bill Foster crazy with his lethargic four corners offense in the first quarter, directing his Tar Heels to keep possession of the ball for 12 minutes and 25 seconds.

The scoreboard read 7-0 Duke at halftime (“It should have been 2-0 or something at the half,” Smith said afterwards.) The second half was positively explosive in comparison, and Duke won 47-40.

"I've been doing this a long time, but during the first half last night I began to think maybe I've been doing it for too long," Foster said the next day. “I thought Naismith invented basketball, not Dean Smith."

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