Duke - Carolina Volume 2. Art MD Chansky

      

      Duke - Carolina Volume 2

      by

      Art Chansky

      Editorial Assistance, Al Featherston

      Digital color photographs, Jack Morton

      Copyright 2011, GreatestFan

      All rights reserved.

       http://www.Greatestfan.com

      Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com

      ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0384-7

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

      N.C. STATE FORCES THE DUKE-CAROLINA HAND

      Duke coach Eddie Cameron landed the bulk of the great Durham High teams of the 1940s – football-basketball star Bob Gantt, the Loftis brothers and (a year later) Gordon Carver. But he missed the big prize, Horace “Bones” McKinney, who got his nickname not from his spindly frame but from the part he once had in a high school play.

      Eddie Cameron

      Bob Gantt

      The way Bones later told it, Cameron began leaving Duke tickets for all the Durham High players. But as a youth McKinney had made a habit of sneaking into Blue Devil games and wasn’t about to break his tradition. One night he was caught by a campus policeman, trying to climb through a narrow window into the first-floor men’s room (right beside the door where the Duke students now enter). Instead of banishing or even arresting McKinney, the policeman punished the embarrassed teenager by giving him a spanking in front of a crowd of jeering Duke students.

      McKinney said that he vowed at that moment that he would not attend Duke. Instead, he landed an academic scholarship at N.C. State. In first varsity season, he almost single-handedly turned what had been a 6-9 team in 1941 into a 15-win squad in 1942. He led the Red Terrors (as the Wolfpack was known at that time) to the Southern Conference championship game, where it lost to Duke.

      That would be McKinney’s last season at N.C. State. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and spent the rest of the war playing for the Fort Bragg base team. Released in 1945, McKinney decided to pursue a degree in physical education. Since that was not offered at his old school in Raleigh, he elected to enroll at UNC, where he joined an already powerful team that boasted stars in John “Hook” Dillon and Jim Jordan, the latter a standout at St. Mary’s who was transferred to UNC by the Navy.

      Horace “Bones” McKinney went to N.C. State , then to UNC.

      But transfers worked both ways. Ed Koffenberger, 6-2 Wilmington, Del., product, enlisted in the Navy in 1944 and was assigned to the V-12 program in Chapel Hill. He actually played football for UNC in 1944, but midway through the season, he elected to purse an engineering program that wasn’t offered at UNC.

      John Seward (left) Ed Koffenberger (right)

      So he was transferred by the Navy to Duke – where Koffenberger finished the football season playing for the Blue Devils

      Koffenberger was a good football player, but he was even a better basketball player. His presence allowed Duke to keep pace with the talent-rich White Phantoms (as UNC was known) as WWII wound to a close.