When Duke and North Carolina square off on the hardwood Saturday, Buzz Mewhort looks forward to watching in peace.
Meaning: The former Toledo schoolboy star and Blue Devils captain looks forward to watching alone — and very much not at peace.
“When I watch Duke, I’m pacing back and forth, sweating it out, yelling at the TV,” said Mewhort, 81. “People always ask, ‘Don’t you want to get together with a group of friends?’ No! I don’t want to put them through the agony that I go through.”
And that’s for any game.
Not sure if you’ve heard — has ESPN mentioned anything? — but this is not another game.
No, it’s the mother of them all, a one-in-a-million-blue-moons collision scripted in TV heaven, a showdown that has the sport’s most prominent rivals meeting for the first time ever in the NCAA tournament, let alone in the Final Four and in the final season for Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski.
This is big, really big, and, for the men who have lived the Duke-North Carolina feud, it’s bigger.
“Pure excitement,” Mewhort said.
And unfiltered angst.
When the cosmos aligned to give the hoops universe what the folks on Tobacco Road are calling the biggest sporting event in North Carolina history, I thought of Mewhort for a couple reasons.
For one, the DeVilbiss grad and longtime Toledo lawyer is a good guy who could give us an on-the-ground report from the epicenter of what he called “Nutso” Land. He and his wife, Martha, retired a few years ago to a village in the North Carolina countryside, and their home is within a half hour of both Duke and UNC. Mewhort tells us it’s as wonderful as it sounds, save for this time of year, given the predominance of Tar Heels fans.
“I don’t go outside,” he cracked.
Also, I knew Mewhort could appreciate as well as anyone the magnitude of Saturday, and how improbable such a stage once would have seemed, including to a kid from Toledo.
If Duke is now among the biggest and most polarizing brands in college basketball — the Death Star that fans either love or hate, with no in between — it wasn’t always that way.
In fact, hard as it is for some to believe, there was even a time Krzyzewski wasn’t the coach.
“People around here look at me and say, ‘Oh, did you play for Coach K?’” Mewhort said with a laugh. “And I’m thinking, ‘Well, I’m flattered that you think I’m that young, but hell no.’ He’s only been here for 42 years. Because Coach K is bigger than life, everybody thinks that’s where it all started.”
In truth, long before Krzyzewski built his empire, the first cornerstone of greatness was laid in 1960, the year Mewhort and his teammates unexpectedly authored Duke’s first deep March run.
Until then, the small private school was a powerhouse only in academia, not the new Atlantic Coast Conference. Its banner basketball achievement: a one-and-done cameo in the 1955 NCAA tournament.
Heck, it was only recently Mewhort learned of the place at all.
As a third-team all-state forward for DeVilbiss in 1958 — in the same Ohio class that included Jerry Lucas (Middletown) and John Havlicek (Bridgeport) — the 6-foot-4 Mewhort had offers to play for Ohio State and Michigan, but couldn’t make up his mind.
Fate had its opening. One night his senior season, he caught the eye of a Duke assistant, who happened to be in town recruiting one of his DeVilbiss teammates. The coach told Mewhort he’d love to have him visit.
“And I said, ‘Where's Duke?’” Mewhort said.
Next thing he knew, it was Easter weekend, and he was flying there. Almost from the second he walked onto the school’s Gothic wonderland of a campus, then into Duke Indoor Stadium (later renamed for former coach Eddie Cameron), he was sold.
“Number one, I thought, this is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen, and it rained the whole weekend,” he said. “Number two, as I started to get a flavor of the early ACC, the Blue Devils played a great, running style of basketball. I thought, ‘Geez, that looks like it would be fun. I can live in a different part of the world and I can’t decide between Michigan and Ohio State. Let’s do it.’”
So he did, and never looked back.
Neither did Duke.
His sophomore year, under first-year coach Vic Bubas, the Blue Devils took off — at least when the calendar flipped to March.
“We had been whooped on so bad during the regular season by both Wake Forest and Carolina, and it was embarrassing,” Mewhort said. “But we were still 12-10 and coach had us believing we were going to be fine. The first night [at the ACC tournament in Raleigh], we were in the locker room, and he comes in with a newspaper. There was an article that basically said we were going to get killed. He said, ‘I don’t know how you guys feel, but here’s how I feel.’ He set the newspaper on fire, dropped it on the floor, and sent us out. We went running out and knocked over and broke a water cooler.”
With Mewhort as a key reserve, the Blue Devils didn’t stop until they had stunned North Carolina and Wake Forest to win the tournament and secure the ACC’s automatic bid to the big tourney. They kept it going there, too, beating Princeton and St. Joseph’s — coached by the great Jack Ramsay — at Madison Square Garden before falling to New York University in the Elite Eight.
Mewhort played a bigger role his final two years, including as a co-captain in 1961-62 on a team that featured Art Heyman and Jeff Mullins, both top-five NBA draft picks. (“My job was to make sure there was reasonably equal distribution to those two guys,” he said.)
Beset by the same win-the-league-tournament-or-else reality that MAC teams know today, Duke missed the then-25-team NCAA tournament both seasons despite a top-10 ranking.
But, no matter, the program was on the map, and on its way.
From there, Bubas led Duke to the Final Four in 1963, ‘64, and ‘66, and, a bit later, in 1980, along came some guy from Army with a hard-to-spell last name. Krzyzewski’s done OK, too, now in his 13th Final Four and in pursuit of a sixth national championship.
Meanwhile, Mewhort has watched it all with pride.
After attending law school at Duke, he and Martha returned to Toledo to raise their three children. But he remained an avid supporter of the school — his two daughters also went to Duke (son, Don, was a basketball standout at Wittenberg) — and, when he retired in 2017, he knew just where he wanted to be.
Back to his blue heaven in “God’s country.”
Back to where, as he savors Duke’s latest great March run, the reminders of its first are never far away.
“That banner that we won in 1960, that hangs in Cameron today,” Mewhort said. “Every time I go into Cameron, it's just nice to see. Even though it was gazillion years ago, that's where it started.”
First Published March 30, 2022, 7:25 p.m.
