Duke - Carolina - Volumes 1-5 The Blue Blood Rivalry, The Master Collection. Art Inc. Chansky

      “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.