This book provides a series of stories to provide a history of the Duke Basketball program. Basketball was introduced to Duke in 1906. Starting with the hiring of Eddie Cameron as the head coach in 1928 through the current teams of Mike Krzyzewski, the sport has been revered at Duke. The book includes many vignettes about individual players across the nearly one hundred years. Sumner also discusses the Duke/UNC rivalry. He provides lots of stories regarding the five championship teams.
While I am quite familiar with the Duke program since the early seventies, I was enlightened by the stories of players and coaches prior to that point. Several of the great coaches were:
- Eddie Cameron
- Harold Bradly
- Vic Bubas
- Bill Foster
- Mike Krzyzewski
The players are too numerous to list, but some of the early players were:
- Bob Gantt (1940’s)
- Dick Groat (1950’s)
- Art Heyman (1960’s)
- Jeff Mullins (1960’s)
- Jack Marin (1960’s)
- Bob Verga (1960’s)
- Randy Denton (1960’s)
- Dick DeVenzio (1970’s)
- Gary Melchionni (1970’s)
The book’s subtitle is A Collection of the Greatest Duke Basketball Stories Ever Told.
The author is Jim Sumner.
The book consists of nine chapters plus acknowledgements. I will use the prefix DBBL when creating chapter note tiddlers for this book.
The chapters in the book are:
- Setting the Stage
- Building the Program
- The Bubas Years
- The Up and Down 1970’s
- The Beginning of the Coach K Era
- Mike Krzyewski Reloads
- Back to the Top
- Continuing the Tradition
- The Freshman Take Over
If you see a parenthetical with a number or number range in the chapter notes, this indicates the page in the book where the citation was found.