Bio
Art Chansky is the author of three books on basketball: The Dean’s List, Dean’s Domain, and Return To The Top. As sports editor of the Durham Morning Herald for seven years, Chansky wrote extensively on Duke athletics, from the retirement of Vic Bubas in 1969 through the hiring of Mike Krzyzewski in 1980 and beyond. He has covered every Duke-Carolina game since 1968 and written numerous articles and columns on both teams and the rivalry for magazines and other publications, including his feature on Dean Smith’s retirement for GoHeels.com. Chansky has been published in Sports Illustrated, Basketball Times, the official NCAA Tournament program, and alumni magazines of both Duke and UNC, plus he has appeared on ESPN and CNN/SI specials on the rivalry.
Chansky still lives on the Chapel Hill-Durham border with his family and White German Shepherd, Hurley, who was named for the feisty Duke guard and Carolina nemesis of the early ’90s.
Project Description
The Duke-Carolina basketball rivalry—a fifty-plus year rivalry that has featured countless brawls, endless controversy, and some of the best basketball ever played in the history of the sport—is not your typical friendly rivalry with just bragging rights on the line. Duke-Carolina basketball is about downright hate. There is a reason students at both schools camp out for days to get tickets; a reason adults lose their tempers and say childish things to each other; a reason that games between the archrivals have received the highest regular-season TV ratings in history. It’s simple: the Blue Devil fans hate UNC, and Tar Heels can’t stand Duke. And the fact that the two highly respected academic institutions are separated only by nine miles along Tobacco Road just adds fuel to an already intense fire.
In Blue Blood (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, Fall 2004), veteran journalist and author Art Chansky examines the rivalry as it has evolved over the last fifty years. And with both teams ranked in the Top Ten for the 2003-2004 season, and the return of Roy Williams to Chapel Hill, the timing is perfect for such an exploration into the culture of Duke-Carolina basketball. Blue Blood will not be the worn formula of a season inside, but rather it’s a detailed and colorful study of the greatest rivalry in college sports, which now pits the two best coaches in the nation against each other in what are always intense and dramatic games.