From Atomic History to B-Ball

J. Samuel Walker, the former historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is best known for his acclaimed work on the history of the atomic age.

But he’s always been passionate about college basketball, ever since he was a graduate student at the University of Maryland at College Park. He arrived on campus in 1969, the same year as a new coach, Lefty Driesell, who would tell an inaugural press conference that he intended to make the college “the UCLA of the East.”

Now Walker, the author of such books as Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan (University of North Carolina Press, 1997) and The Road to Yucca Mountain: The Development of Radioactive Waste Policy in the United States (University of California Press, 2009), has returned to basketball—to have some fun and ask some serious questions about the role of sports in higher education.

Begun before he retired, ACC Basketball: The Story of the Rivalries, Traditions, and Scandals of the First Two Decades of the Atlantic Coast Conference will be published by North Carolina this month. The Chronicle interviewed the historian about the roots, trials, and lessons of the early years of what would become a college-basketball powerhouse.

Q: You describe how the ACC was created in 1953 amid point-shaving scandals in college basketball and violations of academic standards in college football. How did the new league attempt to address those problems?

A. The ACC was founded by seven institutions that broke away from the 17-member Southern Conference, in significant part because administrators at several believed that a smaller league would have a better chance of ensuring academic integrity. In the new league, a majority of members regarded maintaining a proper balance between athletic and academic objectives as their top priority and winning games as secondary. The presidents of the Consolidated University of North Carolina (which included the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State College), Duke University, and Wake Forest College were particularly committed to enforcing academic standards and avoiding an overemphasis on winning in their athletic programs. The University of Virginia, which became the eighth member of the ACC in late 1953, took the same position.

One important way that the ACC attempted to carry out its academic commitment was by imposing minimum academic requirements for admitting athletes to conference schools. It became the first conference to adopt such a rule in 1960, when it agreed on a minimum score of 750 on the SAT for scholarship athletes. The ACC later raised the score to 800 and applied it to all participants in intercollegiate sports, whether or not they received athletic scholarships. The 800 requirement, despite its low threshold, was intended to ensure that athletes who enrolled at ACC schools had at least a fair chance to succeed academically and earn their degrees.

Q: As you note, by 1970 “ Sports Illustrated” called the ACC the “strongest league” in college basketball. How and why did the ACC focus on that sport? And how and why did the focus on basketball help, or hinder, the league over time?

A. The ACC’s rise to a pre-eminent position in college basketball was a gradual and unanticipated development. Along with the goal of exercising better control over athletic programs, the ACC was also founded to provide more evenly matched competition and greater prestige for the football teams of conference schools. The Southern Conference, in response to a scandal at the College of William and Mary in 1951 in which football coaches had been guilty of flagrantly violating academic integrity, banned appearances by league members in bowl games. That policy was strongly opposed by several presidents and athletic directors, who lobbied for a new conference The impact of leaving the Southern Conference on basketball was not a major consideration. At best, it was an afterthought.

When the ACC was created, it was sharply divided between members that had good basketball programs and those that did not. During its first decade or so, ACC basketball was dominated by NC State, North Carolina, Duke, and Wake Forest, the so-called Big Four. Gradually the other members of the conference took steps to improve and catch up. The outcome, by the early 1970s, was a league that was exceptionally talented and well balanced. When Curry Kirkpatrick of Sports Illustrated called the ACC “college basketball’s strongest league” in 1970, he was referring both to the excellence of its programs and the competitive balance among its teams.

The second part of the question is much harder to answer. Basketball has been the ACC’s foremost claim to athletic prominence for the past four decades. Its teams won more national titles (10) than any other conference between 1975, when the NCAA expanded the championship tournament to allow more than one team from a conference to participate, and 2011. The ACC has been less successful in football. Between 1953 and 1969, for example, its record against Southeastern Conference opponents was 19 wins and 105 losses, which led Bill Cate of the Roanoke Times to comment that ACC football was “one of the worst frauds ever perpetrated on the Southern sporting public.” The ACC’s struggles in football generated enormous controversy over the 800 rule, which was seen by some members as a serious hindrance to recruiting and caused the University of South Carolina to withdraw from the league in 1971. The ACC has expanded its membership during the past few years in order to increase its prestige and competitiveness in football. To date, the results have been disappointing, and the effect on basketball, the league’s premier attraction, has seemingly been harmful. Expansion of the ACC ended home-and-home match-ups between all conference teams every year, diluted rivalries, and spawned signs of growing indifference among fans.

Q: How did the ACC reflect—and how was it influenced by—the social and economic trends of the nation, and the South, in its first two decades?

The most obvious transformation was the racial integration of its basketball teams. That was a gradual and sometimes painful process, but it changed the face of the conference—literally—for the better. Billy Jones of the University of Maryland was the first black player to appear in a varsity game for an ACC institution in December 1965, and it was not until 1971 that every member of the conference had at least one African-American on its basketball roster. Arguably, the integration of conference teams had a positive influence on reducing racial barriers in the South, at least to the extent that it fostered color blindness on the part of fans who regarded winning games against hated rivals as far more important than observing racial dogma.

The unprecedented economic prosperity in the South after World War II also had a significant impact on the ACC. It made possible much-needed improvements in education and allowed ACC schools to upgrade their academic programs and prestige. That, in turn, was a drawing card for at least some outstanding basketball prospects. The growth in disposable income among Southerners also enabled more of them to spend money to fill arenas, support programs, and buy television sets to watch ACC games.

Q: There’s been a lot of controversy over violations of rules in college sports and a lot of talk of reform. What lessons can you draw from the ACC’s first two decades for college athletics today?

A. The primary lesson is that administrators need to deal with abuses in college sports, after thorough investigation, forthrightly and firmly. The ACC’s record of compliance with NCAA rules was hardly spotless in its first 20 years. Between 1953 and 1972, every conference school except Virginia and Wake Forest was guilty of offenses that led to NCAA reprimands or probation. Gordon Gray, the president of the Consolidated University of North Carolina, lamented in 1954 that “intercollegiate athletics is the biggest problem I have.” In 1956, the NCAA placed NC State on probation for four years for recruiting violations in its basketball program. In 1961, it placed the University of North Carolina on probation for one year for far less serious offenses. William Aycock, the chancellor of the Chapel Hill campus, believed that the penalty was an embarrassment to the university, and he effectively forced the basketball coach to resign. The coach was the legendary Frank McGuire, who had led North Carolina to a national championship just four years earlier.

At about the same time, both NC State and North Carolina were rocked by an even more distressing scandal. Four players from NC State and one player from North Carolina, along with dozens of other players at colleges across the country, admitted that they had conspired with gamblers to shave points in basketball games. As a result, William C. Friday, who succeeded Gray as the president of the Consolidated University, decided to abolish the Dixie Classic, a highly popular and highly profitable Christmas holiday tournament held in Raleigh. Friday took that step not because there was evidence at that time that gamblers had corrupted the classic, but because he believed that the tournament was a “prominent example” of the “exploitation for public entertainment or for budgetary and commercial purposes of a sports program which properly exists as an adjunct to collegiate education.” Friday suffered a great deal of criticism for his cancellation of the Dixie Classic.

It would be refreshing to hear the same kind of sentiments and witness the same kind of decisive action from more university presidents who deal with a wide range of problems in their athletic programs. The considerable benefits of intercollegiate sports come at a price, and the price should not include damaging the reputation or undermining the academic integrity of an institution of higher learning.