With Duke football about to take on No. 14 Ole Miss in the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl, the Blue Zone takes a look at a big-time game from back in the day:
By the time 1945 rolled around, Duke football had spent a quarter of a century middling in postseason mediocrity. The team had qualified for only two bowl games since reappearing on the gridiron in 1920. Both contests — the 1939 and 1942 Rose Bowls — had ended in defeat.
But when the Blue Devils earned themselves a 1945 Sugar Bowl appearance, they decided to ring in the new year with new success. The team delivered a 29-26 upset against Alabama to bring home Duke’s first-ever bowl game victory following a tumultuous final three minutes.
“The greatest comeback ever staged in the Sugar Bowl classic turned defeat into one of the most thrilling victories in football history,” The Chronicle wrote after the game. “Little Harry Gilmer of Alabama found on New Year’s Day, 1945, that even a great heart and an uncanny passing arm aren’t enough to beat a team that refuses to be licked.”
The Blue Devils entered the game with a 5-4 record and a highly explosive offense that had earned the nickname “the Whiz Kids.” Running backs George Clark and Tommy Davis, who had led the team on the ground all season, still had their work cut out for them against an un-scouted Crimson Tide squad. Alabama’s T-formation posed another challenge since the Blue Devils had suffered a 27-7 loss to Army’s similar scheme style.
Despite the uncertainties, spirits were high in New Orleans as the game kicked off. Clark scored the first touchdown for the Blue Devils off a quick five-play drive that included a 52-yard run. The success was short-lived when Alabama’s quarterback, Harry Gilmer, threw for three subsequent scores and delivered Alabama a 19-7 lead. Duke head coach Eddie Cameron responded by putting in tailback Cliff Lewis, who took the ball 26 yards as part of a 63-yard scoring drive. When Davis scored the touchdown from the Crimson Tide’s 1-yard line, Duke narrowed its halftime deficit to 19-13.
After reemerging from the locker room, the Blue Devils doubled down on their running game. Davis carried the ball on 11-of-12 plays in Duke’s opening second-half drive, scoring another 1-yard touchdown to take a narrow 20-19 lead. However, Alabama’s Bobby Morrow ended the group from Durham's next chance with the ball when he returned an interception 75 yards for a touchdown. The Crimson Tide, who then led 26-20, managed to take possession again with less than three minutes to play.
The Blue Devils refused to back down, and Alabama eventually took an intentional safety so Gilmer could punt from the 20-yard line. But Clark returned the ball all the way to the Crimson Tide 39, and halfback Jim LaRue tore away for a 19-yard gain on the following reverse. Clark recorded a final, dramatic 20-yard run to put Duke over the goal line and ahead 29-26.
The team secured its win when Gordon Carver — team captain and a three-sport athlete for the Blue Devils — pulled down an Alabama receiver by his stocking on Duke’s 24-yard line as the clock hit zero. Had he not made the tackle, the Crimson Tide would have sprinted across the goal line and left the Blue Devils with yet another postseason defeat.
“I sure was glad to hear that final whistle,” Carver said in the locker room after the game.
In all, Duke tallied 361 total yards to the Crimson Tide’s 246, managing to win the game despite Gilmer’s perfect 8-for-8 passing. The lead changed hands four times throughout the contest, and famed sportswriter Grantland Rice summed up the exhilaration as simply as he could: “The Sugar Bowl classic of 1945 must go down in the book as one of the greatest thrillers of all time.”
Back in Durham, the victory inspired a flurry of excitement. The Public Relations Office aired footage — “play-by-play” photographs “as seen from the press box” — in Page Auditorium the following Monday. The Duke News Service busied itself with compiling a “bowl scrapbook” of Sugar Bowl coverage from newspapers across the South. Cameron even made a scrapbook of his own using photos from the game, and the memento is still housed in the University Archives.
It would be 10 years before the Blue Devils made another postseason appearance — winning against Nebraska in a 1955 Orange Bowl matchup attended by then-Vice President Richard Nixon — but the 1945 Sugar Bowl was long celebrated as one of the most exciting bowl games in football history. Its legacy lives on nearly 80 years later as Duke football continues to grow in reputation and postseason success.
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Abby DiSalvo is a Trinity sophomore and assistant Blue Zone editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.