Eddie Cameron

The Pennsylvania coal-and-rail towns east of Pittsburgh in the 1910s produced a particular kind of boy: physically built for football, raised on discipline, sent away to military academy to be polished into something the family could be proud of. Edmund McCullough Cameron — born April 22, 1902 in Manor, Pennsylvania, a Westmoreland County coal patch outside Irwin — was one of them. His family had the means to send him to Culver Military Academy in Indiana, which in the early twentieth century was where wealthy and aspirational Midwestern and mid-Atlantic families sent their sons to learn to march, ride horses, and play football. From Culver he went south to Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, where he became a small-college Renaissance man — three varsity letters in football, three in basketball, captain of both teams, and an economics major.

He was a fullback. A 6-foot, two-hundred-pound battering ram who in the autumn of 1924 tied for the national scoring title in football and was selected to the All-South Atlantic team. The game people would remember for the rest of his life was a 1923 contest against the University of Virginia. Cameron's mother had died that week. He went home to Manor for her funeral and came back to Lexington in time to play. He scored the game's only touchdown. Decades later, sports historians would call it one of the greatest fullback performances of the era. He was 21 years old.

He graduated in 1924 with a Bachelor of Arts and stayed on for one season as Washington and Lee's head basketball coach. He went 8-5. Then his coach, Jimmy DeHart, was hired away to coach the football team at a small Methodist university in Durham, North Carolina that had just renamed itself for an industrialist's family. The school was Duke. DeHart said yes — but only on the condition that he could bring his 24-year-old protégé Eddie Cameron with him. The school agreed. Cameron arrived in Durham in 1926 to coach the freshman football, basketball, and baseball teams. He had no idea he was going to stay for the next forty-six years.

For three years Cameron coached freshmen and lived in Durham as DeHart's anonymous assistant. Then everything changed at once. In 1929 DeHart was fired. Wallace Wade — the legendary Alabama coach who had just won his third national championship in seven seasons — shocked the football world by leaving Tuscaloosa to coach at little Duke. The school administrators, terrified of losing the only assistant the program had any continuity with, asked Wade to keep Cameron on. Wade did better than keep him. He made Cameron his backfield coach, his chief scout, and his recruiter. In the same year — 1929 — Duke handed the 27-year-old Cameron the head basketball job too. He kept both jobs simultaneously for the next thirteen years.

What followed in the basketball program was the kind of quiet, sustained excellence that doesn't get written about because it isn't supposed to be possible. 226-99 across fourteen seasons. A .695 winning percentage. 119-56 in the Southern Conference. Three Southern Conference Tournament championships (1938, 1941, 1942). Cameron's basketball teams reached the Southern Conference championship game eight times in fourteen tries. They were ranked nationally in seasons when "nationally ranked" still meant something. The 1929-30 team, in Cameron's second year as head coach, went 18-2 with a fifteen-game winning streak. His 1937-38 squad — nicknamed "the never a dull moment boys" because they were maddeningly erratic all year and wouldn't have made the conference tournament without an upset of UNC in the regular-season finale — won the championship anyway. His final team, in 1941-42, went 22-2, the highest single-season winning percentage in Duke basketball history until the 1986 Final Four team. The 1941 team won the Southern Conference Tournament and was passed over for the NCAA invitation in favor of UNC. Cameron, asked about it later, said simply that Duke had been "too busy" with the war to extend its season.

But the work for which everyone remembers Eddie Cameron didn't happen on the floor. It happened in 1935, in a conversation he had with Wallace Wade about the embarrassingly small gym they had been playing in. Card Gymnasium — built in 1930, named for the program's founder Wilbur "Cap" Card — was a 2,500-seat box that they were already selling out. Cameron and Wade sat down with a pencil and, by legend, sketched out the rough plan for a new arena on the back of a matchbook. The matchbook has never been found. The myth has never gone away. Duke's archives confirm that Cameron drew up the basic plans for the project in 1935.

The Philadelphia architectural firm of Horace Trumbauer — the same firm that had designed most of Duke's West Campus, including Duke Chapel — was hired to draw the architectural plans. Trumbauer was a heavy drinker dying of cirrhosis. His chief designer, a Black architect named Julian Abele, did most of the actual design work. Abele had studied at Penn and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was the first Black graduate of Penn's school of architecture. He was almost certainly the principal designer of Duke Chapel as well, though Trumbauer's signature went on the drawings during his lifetime. Trumbauer died in 1938 before the Indoor Stadium was finished. The architectural drawings for Duke Indoor Stadium are the first drawings the firm produced that Julian Abele signed as the lead architect. Abele could not, in the segregated South of 1940, have walked into the building he had designed as anything but a service worker. He never visited Duke's campus. He sketched the Gothic exterior, the column-line interior, the seating arrangement that brought every fan close to the floor — all of it from his Philadelphia office, in pencil, while a country that wouldn't let him through the front door spent $400,000 to build what he had drawn.

Trumbauer's firm thought 4,000 to 5,000 seats would be plenty. Duke pushed for 8,800. "For your information," Trumbauer wrote to Duke President William P. Few in 1938, "Yale has in its new gymnasium a basketball court with settings for 1,600. I think the settings for 8,000 people is rather liberal." Cameron and Wade insisted. Duke Indoor Stadium opened on January 6, 1940 with a crowd of 8,000 in the seats — the largest crowd ever to attend a basketball game in the South. Cameron coached the opener. Duke beat Princeton, 36-27. At the time, the arena was the largest basketball gymnasium in the country south of the Palestra in Philadelphia.

He coached basketball in his own building for two more seasons. Then the war intervened. Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941. The 1942 Rose Bowl, scheduled for January 1 in Pasadena, was moved to Durham — the only time in the bowl's history it has been played outside California — because the West Coast was considered vulnerable to Japanese air attack. Duke hosted, lost to Oregon State 20-16, and watched as Wallace Wade — 49 years old, a veteran of World War I — re-enlisted in the United States Army the next morning. Wade would eventually fight in the Battle of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, earn the Bronze Star and the French Croix de Guerre, and reach the rank of lieutenant colonel. Cameron, who at 39 was eligible but not enlisting, was handed the football team.

He coached the football program for four seasons (1942-1945) while Wade was overseas. He went 25-11-1. He won three straight Southern Conference championships (1943, 1944, 1945). His teams never lost a football game to North Carolina in his four years as head coach. On January 1, 1945, the Duke football team played in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans — the program's first bowl-game appearance with Cameron at the helm — and beat Alabama 29-26. It was Duke's first bowl win in any sport. Cameron's personal participant's trophy from that game, a gilt-metal football mounted on a column engraved E. CAMERON / COACH, would surface at auction seven decades later. He gave the football team back to Wade in 1946 when Wade returned from Europe. He gave the basketball team to Gerry Gerard in 1942 and never coached either sport again. He was 43 years old, and he had — outside of three early years coaching freshmen — never lost a head coaching job to anything other than the United States military.

He moved into administration. From 1946 to 1951 he was Duke's Director of Physical Education and Athletics. In 1951, when Wade retired from coaching and became commissioner of the Southern Conference, Cameron was promoted to full Director of Athletics. He held that title for the next twenty-one years.

The job he is most remembered for in college athletics circles — beyond the building with his name on it — is what he did in 1953. The Southern Conference had grown to seventeen teams and become unwieldy. Cameron, along with athletic directors from six other large Southern schools (UNC, NC State, Wake Forest, Maryland, Clemson, South Carolina), led the breakaway from the Southern Conference to form a new league. At the founding meeting, when the seven athletic directors were searching for a name for their new conference, it was Cameron who suggested they call it the Atlantic Coast Conference. The name was adopted. The ACC was born. Duke is a charter member because Eddie Cameron drove the breakaway and then named the thing.

He chaired the ACC's basketball committee for nineteen of his twenty-one years as Duke AD. He chaired the basketball committees of the Southern Conference before that. He served on the selection committee for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He served on the governing committee for the United States Olympic team. He hired Vic Bubas in 1959 — the single most consequential hire in pre-K Duke basketball history. He hired Bucky Waters in 1969 to replace Bubas. He hired Bill Murray and Tom Harp and Mike McGee for the football program. He hired the people who would, between them, define Duke athletics for a generation. "Eddie Cameron was huge in my life," Bucky Waters said in 2012, on the fortieth anniversary of the arena's renaming. "He brought me to Duke, twice. He was a man's man, a handshake guy."

On January 22, 1972, with Cameron about to retire at the end of the academic year after forty-six years at Duke, the university renamed Duke Indoor Stadium Cameron Indoor Stadium at halftime of a Duke-North Carolina game. The Tar Heels were ranked third in the country and featured the eventual three-time NBA scoring champion Bob McAdoo. Duke was unranked, undermanned, coached by Cameron's protégé Waters. With eight seconds left and the game tied at 74, Robby West — a senior reserve who had been a footnote on the season — caught the ball seventeen feet from the basket and buried a pull-up jumper at the buzzer. Duke won 76-74. Cameron stood on the floor afterward with his wife Mary and accepted the honor as the building behind him took his name. Robby West, who would finish his Duke career with 142 total points and a single legendary basket, recalled later: "It was smaller scale back then. Everyone knew everyone. We saw Mr. Cameron all the time. But at 21 you don't realize his national significance. Bucky made everyone well aware of it." Cameron, asked about it then and again later in his life, called the renaming "his most cherished honor." He retired as Duke's Athletic Director on August 31, 1972, age 70.

He didn't move. He never moved. Eddie and Mary Toms Cameron — they'd been married for over fifty years by then; they had four children — had lived in Durham continuously since 1926, first at 2822 Chelsea Circle and then, after 1962, in a new home they built right next door at 2818 Chelsea Circle in the Hope Valley neighborhood. He kept showing up at games. He kept advising people. He kept being Eddie Cameron of Duke, which by 1972 was a designation that essentially meant the founder of the place. He was honored repeatedly in the years that followed — North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame (1969, just before his retirement), Duke Athletics Hall of Fame (1975), National Football Foundation College Football Hall of Fame (1976), ACC Sports Writers Hall of Fame (1988), Washington & Lee Hall of Fame (1988, posthumously announced). In April 1980, in his late seventies, he watched Duke hire a 33-year-old Army assistant coach named Mike Krzyzewski to take over a basketball program that had spent the previous two seasons winning the ACC Tournament and reaching the NCAA Final under Bill Foster.

By the mid-1980s the long illness that would eventually kill him had begun. He spent his last years quietly at home on Chelsea Circle, watching Duke basketball games that Krzyzewski's program — still building, not yet a juggernaut — played in the building Cameron had drawn on a matchbook and that Julian Abele had drawn for real. Wallace Wade, his coach and his predecessor and his closest professional partner across half a century of Duke athletics, died at age 94 on October 6, 1986, also in Durham. Cameron outlived him by two years.

Edmund McCullough Cameron died at his home at 2818 Chelsea Circle in Durham on November 25, 1988, three days after Thanksgiving, of complications from a long illness. He was 86 years old. He was survived by his wife Mary, four children, and what by then had become — through three jobs across forty-six years — the modern Duke athletics department, the Atlantic Coast Conference, and a building.

The building is the building. It is the one Bleacher Report ranks as the number-one college basketball arena in America. The one Sports Illustrated ranked fourth on its list of the top twenty sporting venues of the twentieth century. The one USA Today calls "the toughest road game in the nation." It is where Christian Laettner ended Kentucky's season with a turnaround jumper, where Jay Williams led the 2001 team to a national title, where Cooper Flagg played his college career, where the Cameron Crazies pack 1,200 students into a section designed for fewer and produce 121 decibels of noise that has been compared to a jackhammer at three feet. It is, to put it plainly, the most distinctive and most famous building in college basketball. The man it is named for designed it on the back of a matchbook in 1935 and then spent the next 53 years of his life around it, in it, eventually retiring from it and finally dying two miles down the road from it.

There is a piece of moral asymmetry worth naming here. The architect who turned Cameron's matchbook sketch into a Gothic landmark of American sport — Julian Abele — could not, in the segregated American South of 1940, have walked through the front doors of the building he had designed. He died in 1950, a decade before the first Black students were admitted to Duke as undergraduates, fifteen years before Claudius Claiborne walked onto the Cameron floor as Duke's first Black varsity basketball player. The Cameron Indoor Stadium that Duke fans love wears two names on its plans: Trumbauer (whose firm officially produced it) and Abele (whose pencil actually drew it). It is named for a third — the man who imagined a gymnasium twice as large as Yale's, who insisted on it when his own architects thought he was being grandiose, who coached the first game in it, and who, in front of his wife and his coaching tree, watched it take his name on a January afternoon in 1972.

Cameron called the renaming his most cherished honor. He outlived every major figure in pre-K Duke athletics with the brief exception of Wallace Wade. Coach K had been the head coach at Duke for eight seasons when Cameron died and had not yet won a Final Four. The first Krzyzewski national championship was twenty-eight months away. The man for whom the arena is named never lived to see Duke win an NCAA title. But every championship banner that has hung from those Gothic rafters since 1991 has hung in a building Cameron drew on the back of a matchbook, in a conference Cameron named, beside a court that, in 2000, would be given a second name — Coach K Court — in honor of the coach the man Cameron hired (Vic Bubas) once trained as a player at NC State (Krzyzewski did not play for Bubas; the connecting thread is the program itself). When Krzyzewski won his thousandth game at Duke in November 2017, he stood at midcourt under the rafters Cameron's matchbook had built and told the crowd: "The most important thing for me is being in this gym. It's an amazing thing when you have great moments individually, but when you can share great moments is the best." The gym he was talking about is Cameron.

A school's most important building is rarely named for one of its administrators. Duke's is. The reason is that, between 1926 and 1972, Eddie Cameron did three jobs to championship standard, designed the arena where most of the school's national reputation would eventually be built, and named the conference that turned Tobacco Road into a national basketball power. Trinity College became Duke University in 1924. Eddie Cameron arrived in 1926. For the next forty-six years, if it had to do with Duke athletics, it eventually had to do with him.