Going into the 1977-78 basketball season, Duke had won four ACC Tournaments, all in the 1960’s, when only one conference team got to advance to the NCAA Tournament. The ACC was unique at the time because no other major conference had a tournament to decide its champion, and either you won it or if you were lucky, you went to the NIT. And even though the NIT still had some juice then, it wasn’t on par with the NCAA. That was where you wanted to be.
Bill Foster got to Duke in 1975, after Bucky Waters retired and Neil McGeachy spent a season as interim coach. For some inexplicable reason, then-Duke AD Carl James thought it was a good idea to make a run at retired Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp. He only turned the job down because there had been a crisis at his farm and he didn’t think he could leave.
So James ultimately hired Foster, who had a reputation as a master builder. And build he did.
He found Jim Spanarkel in his first freshman class, Mike Gminski in his second, and in his third, struck gold with Kenny Dennard and Gene Banks.
Those four formed the core of Duke’s 1978 team, a youthful group that got all the way to the national championship game, losing to Kentucky, 94-88.
Along the way, they got to the ACC Finals, where they faced a really good Wake Forest team that featured Frank Johnson, Larry Harrison, Leroy McDonald, and Rod Griffin. It wasn’t easy, but Duke won, 85-77.
This was pre-ESPN, and there wasn’t promiscuous video everywhere. Still, there’s some posted around, and this little clip shows you some of the joy of that team and that season.
There have been better Duke teams since then, but as great as everything has been, no Duke team has had that team’s sheer level of exuberance, joy, and passion.
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