Showing results for "Duke" in Sports History

Even today, it’s considered one of the most thrilling races in Olympic history. The hundred-meter sprint final at the 1924 Paris Games, featuring three of the world’s fastest swimmers—American legends Duke Kahanamoku and Johnny Weissmuller, and Japanese upstart Katsuo Takaishi—had the cultural impact of other milestone moments in Olympic history: Jesse Owens’s podiums in Berlin and John Carlos’s raised, black-gloved fist in Mexico City. Never before had an Olympic swimming final prominently featured athletes of different races, and never had it been broadcast live.

Sihugo Green, Dick Ricketts, Dave Ricketts, Mickey Winograd, Lou Severine, Jim Fallon, Lou Iezzi, Paul Lojpersberger, Ralph Leng, John Nosworthy, Tom Peszko, Bob Schneider, Dudey Moore and Red Manning. They are all connected, in perpetuity, as a special group of men who not only captured the lone major national title in Duquesne University history, but to date the only Division I college basketball national championship the city of Pittsburgh has ever produced in a tournament. No other team has ever had the honor of raising a national championship trophy.

The basketball rivalry between Duke and North Carolina is the fiercest and longest-running blood feud in college athletics, and perhaps in all of sports. To legions of otherwise reasonable adults, it is a conflict that surpasses athletics; it is rich against poor, locals against outsiders, even good against evil. In North Carolina, where both schools reside, it is a way of aligning oneself with larger philosophic ideals—of choosing teams in life—a tradition of partisanship that reveals the pleasures and even the necessities of hatred.