Arizona has a treasured history with Duke, 10 name-dropping, prestige-growing games, a fountain of pride that covers 37 years and undeniably helped to put the Wildcats on the college basketball map.
If you wrote a history of UA basketball, one chapter would have to be titled “The Dukies.”
Duke’s Cooper Flagg (2), forward Mason Gillis (18) and center Khaman Maluach (9), try to grab the ball from Arizona forward Henri Veesaar (13) in the second half at McKale Center in Tucson on Nov. 22, 2024. Duke won 69-55.
No one could’ve seen it coming.
Duke was a relative newbie in college basketball’s class structure in the spring of 1986. Mike Krzyzewski had just turned 40, his résumé included one Final Four, and he was looking for two things: more money for his rising program and a bigger stage.
That’s when Coach K flew to Colorado Springs to attend the tryout camp for Team USA’s 1986 World Championship team, coached by Lute Olson. Duke guard Tommy Amaker was in the group of 20 attempting to make the final cut.
Along with others, Krzyzewski and Olson went to dinner one night in Colorado Springs. They talked about Amaker and about scheduling one another, Duke vs. Arizona.
Olson, in his third year at Arizona, and Coach K, in his sixth year at Duke, shared an intuition that the Wildcats and Blue Devils needed more exposure coast to coast.
A year later, boosted by $100,000 in front money from Valley National Bank in an attempt to improve Arizona’s middling two-year-old holiday basketball tournament, Olson and athletic director Cedric Dempsey decided to shoot for the stars.
They would invite No. 9 Duke, No. 8 Florida and 1979 national champion Michigan State to the third Valley National Bank Classic held between Christmas and New Year’s at McKale Center. (The previous year’s event included St. Bonaventure and NC Charlotte and didn’t sell out, drawing just 11,116).
All three accepted, each pocketing $33,333, which was significant money in college basketball at the time.
Duke was also drawn by the offer to lodge, no charge, at the stylish and new Ventana Canyon Resort. To Krzyzewski, the competition and the money was far more appealing than hosting his own holiday tournament, which had included Appalachian State and Northwestern the previous winter.
“Going to Arizona will be outstanding,” Coach K told the Durham Herald. “It’ll be our best preparation for the ACC season.”
A long-distance rivalry was born.
In that Dec. 30, 1987, championship game at McKale, No. 1 Arizona beat No. 9 Duke 91-85, during which Olson and Coach K became forever rivals. Bitter rivals. Coach K told Sports Illustrated, then the bible of American sports, that he would never agree to play another game with Pac-10 officials.
Arizona’s Sean Elliott battles for a loose ball against Duke during the Fiesta Classic at McKale Center on Dec. 30, 1987.
The two coaches engaged in a memorable shouting match on the sidelines; Olson, who insisted he never used profanity, was said to have yelled “bulls—” toward Krzyzewski.
It was great theater, but it seemed to doom any chance for Arizona and Duke to schedule one another again.
But in the late spring of 1988, a few weeks after Arizona played in its first Final Four, a sports official from NBC phoned Olson and Krzyzewski and asked if they would meet in a made-for-TV game on Feb. 26, 1989, a Sunday, on a neutral court, the Meadowlands Arena, in East Rutherford, N.Y.
He offered each school’s athletic director $125,000. That was an enormous sum to a college athletic department in the 1980s; Arizona’s Dempsey and Duke’s Tom Butters agreed.
It didn’t seem possible, but the ’89 game in New Jersey one-upped the holiday classic in Tucson a season earlier. Arizona shot to a 30-11 lead. Duke went on a 22-1 run. It was an instant classic for a national TV audience.
Finally, with 52 seconds remaining, Arizona All-American Sean Elliott, college basketball’s player of the year, swiftly dribbled up court. Game tied at 70. Elliott didn’t look to pass. When he got about 24 feet from the basket, he shot. Swish.
The No. 2 Wildcats won 77-75. Of the more than 1,000 Arizona basketball games I attended over the years, Elliott’s 3-pointer and Arizona’s victory over No. 8 Duke is easily in the Top 10.
“You don’t wear Elliott down,” said Coach K, capping an unforgettable weekend in which the Wildcats toured Manhattan and stayed at the same East Rutherford hotel, the Meadowlands Sheraton, as the Detroit Pistons and Los Angeles Kings. Isiah Thomas and Wayne Gretzky both were seen lounging in the lobby, signing autographs for the Wildcats.
They probably were just as impressed by seeing Elliott and Duke’s Danny Ferry.
It was on that weekend that Olson and Krzyzewski mellowed a bit, agreeing to a home-and-home series. They would play at Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium in February 1990 (the Blue Devils won 78-76 with Bobby Hurley and Christian Laettner) and they would finish the series at McKale in February 1991, perhaps the greatest game ever played at McKale. Arizona won in double overtime, 103-96.
A battle for the boards between UA's Wayne Womack (30) and Duke's Antonio Lang (22) on Feb. 24, 1991, at McKale Center.
It would be nice to say that the Arizona-Duke rivalry became a can’t-miss, in-the-rotation match, with Olson and Coach K, but the two men, both stubborn to a fault, would not admit they wanted to keep playing one another.
That doesn’t mean they didn’t meet again, chin to chin.
Until last season’s game at Duke and this year’s game at McKale, the Wildcats and Dukies only met when karma interceded. They met in the 1997 Hawaiian Maui November tournament (the Blue Devils won 95-87); they met in the infamous 2001 national championship game — Duke won 82-72 when UA fans were outraged by the officiating; they met in the 2011 Sweet 16 when the fifth-seeded Wildcats stunned/routed Coach K 93-77; and they met in 2013 in the NIT Preseason Classic at Madison Square Garden, Arizona won 72-66.
Jason Williams, left, rides Jason Gardner as Gardner drives down the court April 2, 2001, in the national title game.
In the home-and-home arrangement set up by Tommy Lloyd and new Duke coach Jon Scheyer two years ago, each has won on the other’s home court. It has been a rousingly successful, if raucous, series.
The Wildcats and Blue Devils meet in Chapter 12 Thursday night in Newark, N.J. — about 7 miles from their historic 1989 showdown in East Rutherford. Arizona leads the series 6-5, and is 6-4 vs. Duke since the 1987 contest.
Let’s hope Chapter 12 leads to Chapter 13, Chapter 14 and on and on until it’s time for Lloyd and Scheyer to retire, leaving the irresistible Duke-Arizona connection to a third generation of Wildcat and Blue Devil fans.
