1944 was a very good year for the N.C.S.N team. Having lost only one game the team would not however, be playing in the N.I.T or NCAA tournaments at the end of the year. Neither tournaments allowed black college into their brackets. Down the road, Duke University was effectively shut down as it housed V-12 programs for both the Navy and Army. Most of the best basketball played on the the campus that year was between intramural teams, though Duke's varsity team did win the Southern Conference. Stacked with former college players, one of the better teams was that of the schools Medical College.
Sometime in early 1944 members of both squads had laid a wager as the best team in Durham while attending prayer meetings at Durham's YMCA. With the seasons winding down (due again to the segregated tournaments N.C.S.N's team would not be "dancing") the two squads picked Sunday March, 12 1944 to play a friendly game to settle the bet. N.C.S.N's Coach John B. McLendon (now a Hall of Famer who was then a 28 year old coach just making a name for himself), decided that since his squad was denied a postseason championship game, he would create his own. Orginally the game was set by McLendon for the N.C.S.N campus and would be played with an official game clock and referees.
At Duke, the proposal fell on stunned ears. Jack Burgess (who had been chased off a Durham city bus for voicing an opposing opinion of its segregated seating) wanted to play. Many of the Medical College team were intailly hesitant. Eventually pride took precident over fear. "We thought we could whup 'em," David Hubbell says. "So we decided to find out."
Sunday, March 12, dawned cold. Wisely McLendon had scheduled the game when Durham (then as now a church going town) would be in church. School administration administration had not been warned about the about the game; and when a reporter for Durham's black weekly newspaper The Carolina Times, found out, he agreed not to write anything. To insure the safety of the player and everyone else no spectators would be allowed.
Just before 11 A.M., the Duke team piled into a couple of borrowed cars. To keep from being noticed the Duke team pulled their jackets over their heads as they walked into the small brick gym. The game began with a mishaps on both ends of the court.
The N.C.S.N and Duke teams flubbed routine plays early on in the game. Easy shots caromed off the rims. Crisp passes were completed, to the opposing team. "On that particular morning, you didn't exactly need to play skins and shirts," one Duke player mentioned.
Give-and-gos, three-man weaves, and two-handed set shots off screens got the Duke team into a groove after their initial floundering. But the Eagles warmed up, too. Henry "Big Dog' Thomas knocked down four-footers, while George Parks, a towering Kentuckian, gathered rebound for N.C.S.N.
For most of the second half, McLendon's team was scoring on nearly every possession. Running one fast break after the next, they were skirting a wide-open style of play that predated the same style of basketball made popular in the 1970's.
By the end of the game, the scoreboard told the story: North Carolina School for Negroes 88, Duke Medical College 44.
At the end of regulation, the teams spilt their squads and played a second game. No score was kept during this game. One Duke player later told his family “we sure had fun and I especially had a good time, for most of the fellows playing with me were Southerners. . . . And when the evening was over, most of them had changed their views quite a lot.”
No one ever found out about the game. The Durham police never learned of the event. Both city's two daily newspapers missed out, and the black reporter kept his word. No scorecard exists, and as far as official basketball recordkeeping is concerned, the game never took place. At the end of the second game, the Duke players hid in the jackets to leave the gym and took the same winding route back to campus.
Three years before Jackie Robinson broke baseballs color barrier and was jeered by racist fans whereever he went, this game was play with amity. When black soldiers were being knifed to death in Durham for not complying with seating policies on buses, 5 white students drove on the a black campus and played basketball with and against an all black team. When taken in perspective, the "secret game" gains a certain magnitude. Looking back it makes you wonder what would have happened had the kept score.
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