University of North Carolina Athletics
Chansky: 40 Years Of Firsts
March 8, 2007 | Men's Basketball
March 8, 2007
by Art Chansky
On the 40th anniversary of Dean Smith's first championship, the ACC Tournament moving to Tampa has more than a few parallels to that memorable 1967 season.
Just as the 54th conference tourney is being staged in Florida for reasons of fairness to all schools, the 1967 tournament was the first played in the old Greensboro Coliseum, which had one level, a low, smoke-trapping ceiling and barely 9,000 seats.
Previously, all ACC Tournaments had been played at Reynolds Coliseum on the NC State campus because the rectangular hangar held more than 12,000 fans and Wolfpack coach Everett Case, the driving force behind the three-day event, advocated maximizing revenues for the fledgling league.
He also wanted to continue dominating the ACC as he had in the old Southern Conference; between both, Case's State teams won a total of eight tournament championships on their home floor. From the 1950s, when Frank McGuire coached Carolina, through the 1960s, when Vic Bubas left Case's staff to take over at Duke, sentiment grew to move the tournament to a neutral site.
The coaches prevailed, and after Case had retired and passed away the ACC bit the bullet and took the tournament to Greensboro, where each of the eight ACC schools received barely a thousand tickets. It was the first year that seats were not sold to the public, all of the tickets going to the athletic departments and booster clubs.
Forty years later, ironically, tickets to the Tampa tournament are in such low demand that some schools are selling them to anyone who calls up. Travel and four days in Florida seem too much for many ACC fans, perhaps looking ahead to following their teams on the road when the NCAA Tournament begins next week.
That is the biggest difference between then and now, the sense of urgency being gone. Regardless of the final standings, the ACC Tournament champion from 1954 through 1974 received the league's only NCAA bid. McGuire called it Russian roulette because lose one and you were done for the season.
It created tremendous pressure for Smith's young 1967 team, which had won the regular season (12-2) and beaten defending ACC Champion Duke twice. The Blue Devils had become the next dominant program, also winning conference titles in 1960, '63 and '64. UNC's only ACC Tournament championship came 10 years prior, when McGuire's team road its storybook undefeated record of 32-0 to an NCAA title.
Although the Tar Heels had lost only four games and were ranked fourth in the nation, skeptics claimed Carolina couldn't beat Duke three times in the same season. Smith Barrier, sports editor of the old Greensboro Daily News, wrote a column predicting another title for Bubas' more-experienced Blue Devils.
To break the tension one day that week in practice, Smith had his team play volleyball and he joined the squad that had seven-foot center Rusty Clark, the best spiker. Clark was one of three sophomores to start and two more came off the bench as the sixth and seventh men, maybe the youngest Tar Heels ever in the days of freshman ineligibility.
When Carolina arrived in Greensboro, All-American junior Larry Miller had Barrier's column with him. After the Tar Heels advanced to the championship game against Duke on Saturday night, March 11, 1967, Miller folded up the article and stuffed it into his sneaker. Miller played like he had magic in his shoes, hitting 13 of 14 shots for 32 points. His high-flying teammate, senior Bobby Lewis, added 26 points as Carolina rallied from a late deficit to dethrone Duke and claim the crown, 82-73.
Late in the game, with the score still very close, Miller drove by the Carolina bench and calmed his 36-year-old coach by saying to Smith, "Don't worry, we got it, we got it." After trimming the nets, Miller met sportswriters in front of his locker, pulled the sweaty clipping out of his shoe and handed it to Barrier with a smile on his face.
Two weeks later, Dean Smith would take the first of 11 teams to the Final Four. Thirty years later, he would set the record for the most wins among major college coaches with 879 before retiring at age 66. The first milestone was that weekend in Greensboro, when the Tar Heels broke a 10-year championship drought.
Amazingly, it has now been nine years since UNC last won the ACC Tournament, also in Greensboro, under Coach Bill Guthridge. During that time, Duke has dominated again, winning seven tourney championships and playing in nine consecutive final games.
If history is ready to repeat itself from 1967, Carolina will snap a similar slide and Roy Williams, a protégé of Smith with five rookies of his own, plus two veteran starters, will win his first ACC Tournament in another building where it will be played for the first time. Although it may not be as tough a ticket, and certainly not do or die, assuredly more than 9,000 fans will be there to see it.
