Nov. 5, 2009
by Lee Pace
The glory days of the Wallace Wade-Bill Murray football regime of the mid-20th century had faded at Duke University by the late 1960s. Meanwhile in Chapel Hill, a young coach named Bill Dooley was trying to resurrect the Tar Heel program back to the heights enjoyed two decades earlier when Charlie Justice was running rampant across the Kenan Stadium field.
Two gadget plays, one perfectly executed by each school, highlighted the games of 1969 and '70. The infamous "shoestring play" sprung receiver Wes Chesson for a touchdown and provided the winning margin in the Blue Devils' 17-13 win in Durham the first year. Then Paul Miller's bootleg, shown in this photo from the UNC Athletic Communications archives, ignited the Carolina powder keg one year later as the Heels pummeled the Blue Devils, 59-34.
"There was a lot riding on our game with Duke my junior year," Miller says of the 1970 game in Kenan Stadium. "Not the least of which was our memory of the `shoestring play' from the year before. That spring the Iron Dukes sent out cards to all their alumni and had a shoestring cut in half and taped to a letter. Coach Dooley got a copy of it and it taped on the locker room wall before we took the field. He just wanted to remind us of what had happened the year before."
Duke was a perennial ACC challenger under Murray from the league's inception in 1953 through his retirement in 1965, with the Blue Devils winning or sharing the league title seven times in 13 years. Coach Tom Harp took over in 1966, and the program was mired in the middle of the league as the '69 season wound down. Duke was 2-3-1 in the league and 2-6-1 entering the traditional season finale against Carolina.
Dooley moved from Georgia to Chapel Hill in 1967 to take over from coach Jim Hickey and instituted the ways and means of SEC football--rigorous off-season conditioning, 24-7 recruiting and a no-frills, smash-mouth mindset. Carolina was 2-8 and 3-7 his first two years but stumbled out of the blocks in year three, posting a 1-4 mark by mid-October. Miller remembers the devastation of a 52-2 loss at Florida in the fifth game.
"Four of us spent the night in the hospital when we got back to Chapel Hill," Miller says. "John Swofford, Judge Maddox, Jim Webster and I rode back lying in the aisle of the plane. They took us straight to the infirmary. My back was hurt in that game and I had a spinal fushion done after the season."
But Carolina rallied with four straight wins, one of them over conference heavyweight Clemson--"In those days, beating Clemson was unheard of," Miller says--before traveling to Duke to end the season.
Duke's coaches had noticed the Tar Heel defense turned its back to the offense when huddling and devised a trick to take advantage of its momentary lack of attention. With the game tied at 7-7 late in the third quarter, Duke QB Leo Hart was tackled close to the sideline. He was slow to return to the huddle and kneeled to apparently tie his shoelace. Meanwhile, his teammates feigned a huddle but were careful to make sure there were seven players aligned along the line of scrimmage. End Marcel Courtillet "centered" the ball to Chesson, who raced down the opposite sideline to a 53-yard touchdown.
"I saw that play on our sidelines and said, `They can't do that,'" remembers Don McCauley, a junior tailback in '69. "But they could. They got us good."
The Tar Heels were stung by the loss, but their 5-5 finish marked yet another step of upward mobility for the program, and by 1970 they were playing a number of seniors and juniors who had made it through the rigors of the Dooley building years. Carolina was 7-3 overall and 4-2 in the ACC (with losses to South Carolina and Wake Forest) on the third week in November. Duke was 6-4 overall and 5-1 in the ACC and, with a win, would collect the ACC title by one-half game over Wake Forest.
"There was a lot of sweat equity built up by the seniors," says Paul Hoolahan, the Tar Heels' left tackle and today CEO of the Allstate Sugar Bowl. "We had some tough times as freshmen, sophomores and juniors. Coach Dooley was a demanding coach. It was not a program for the faint of heart. We were committed to making sure the program was on solid footing by the time we left."
"That was a big game for Duke and for us," Miller adds. "Duke still had some pretty good ballplayers and they could win the ACC title. We were hoping for a bowl bid--Carolina's first since 1963--and we would have no chance unless we won that game. So there was a lot riding on it."
Carolina borrowed enough sections of bleachers from Duke and moved them to Chapel Hill to add 2,000 seats, giving Kenan Stadium a capacity of 49,000, and the game would be the first with both end zones lined with bleacher seating. A new attendance record was expected, the previous high being 47,500 for the South Carolina game in October (a 35-21 Gamecocks win), and in fact the total was 48,500 on a sunny afternoon.
Carolina led 14-10 late in the first half when Tar Heel defensive back Rusty Ross forced a fumble by Hart. Carolina recovered at the Duke 25 and in three plays was inside the five yard-line. McCauley was stoned three times at the goal line.
"Duke had a linebacker named Dick Biddle who didn't take his eyes off me all day," McCauley says. "I don't know if I was looking at the hole where I was going or if something tipped them off, but they had their entire defense it seemed waiting for me."
Dooley gave Miller the green light to go for the score on fourth down, and Miller called Power Right 44, which would have McCauley following the block of fullback Geof Hamlin over the right side. Sensing Duke's overt attention to McCauley, Miller believed a fake handoff to McCauley and a bootleg to the right would be money in the bank.
He made a decision in the huddle to fake the handoff and keep it himself. Miller wanted to communicate his intentions to McCauley so that the tailback would not make an overt effort trying to pull the ball from Miller's hands, but he didn't want the Blue Devils seeing them talk as it might tip them off. So as they broke the huddle, Miller made eye contact with McCauley and said, simply, "Don ...."
Miller thought that McCauley would pick up on his subtle message of what was to happen. But McCauley had no clue. "He could have meant a hundred things--`Don, go score. Don, run hard,'" McCauley says.
So McCauley felt Miller put the ball in his stomach on the feigned handoff and powered into the pile. But then he sensed he didn't have the ball.
"I thought I had fumbled," McCauley says. "I dove into the pile and was falling all over the place looking for the ball. I hoped I would get lucky and it would pop back into my hands."
The entire Duke defense converged on the middle of the line. Meanwhile, Miller pulled the ball out of McCauley's belly, put it on his right hip and swooshed around the right side. No one was within 10 yards of him.
"Everybody in the stadium and every player thought McCauley was going to get the football," says Dooley, today retired and living in Wrightsville Beach. "It obviously worked--21 players and 50,000 people in the stands thought Don had the football."
Miller was careful to show the ball to the official once it was clear he wasn't going to be caught. He remembered a game at Ayden High when he and his teammates did such a good job faking that a 60-yard touchdown was called back because the official blew the play dead, never knowing exactly where the ball was.
It took a few seconds for everyone in the goal-line scrum to figure out what had happened. "My head popped up and someone yelled touchdown," McCauley says. "I thought, `How did we get a touchdown?' I was just happy I hadn't fumbled it away."
"I had no idea about all the theatrics going on behind me," Hoolahan says. "I was just focused on taking my man out. I heard the crowd and knew something good had happened."
Carolina added a Ken Craven field goal before the first-half gun and enjoyed a 24-10 lead. The Tar Heels then piled it on in the third quarter, with Miller scampering 60 yards for a touchdown on a broken play and Carolina bolting to a 45-10 lead. McCauley had 149 yards rushing in the first half, and Carolina Sports Information Director Jack Williams was keeping track from the press box and knew that with a monster second half, McCauley could eclipse O.J. Simpson's single-season rushing mark of 1,709 yards. With the game's outcome settled, Dooley and Miller kept feeding the ball to McCauley, and he passed Simpson late in the game to finish with 279 yards for the day and 1,720 for the year.
"One of the coaches kept saying, `Get back in,'" says McCauley, who played a decade with the Baltimore Colts and today is on the Rams Club staff. "I'm thinking, `Jeez, don't we have this in hand?' I wasn't sure what was going on. No one told me I was close to a record. I didn't know anything until I got the record and they announced it on the P.A. I thought, `Isn't that nice?'"
The Tar Heels got their bowl bid, the fledging Peach Bowl in Atlanta inviting them to face Frank Kush's Arizona State juggernaut. The Tar Heels fell to the Sun Devils in the snow and sleet by a convincing 48-26 margin. McCauley and Hoolahan were gone the next year, but players like Miller, Webster, Ron Rusnak, John Bunting and Lewis Jolley returned. The Tar Heels ripped off two straight ACC titles in 1971-72, with much of the groundwork for those titles laid in 1969-70.
"That Duke game was the only game in college that we were laughing on the field we were having so much fun," Miller says. "We were not laughing at Duke--I had friends on that team and Leo Hart remains a wonderful friend today. But it all came together as a program that day and we couldn't help ourselves. It was a complete domination. Duke scored 34 points, but most were against our second team. It was a huge day--we kept Duke from winning the ACC and got a Peach Bowl bid ourselves."
Lee Pace writes "Extra Points" twice a week and reports from the sidelines for the Tar Heel Sports Network. Send your questions to the broadcast crew for discussion on the pre-game show to asktheheels@gmail.com.
