Was Steve Spurrier trying to embarrass North Carolina back in 1989, when his Duke football team rolled up a 41-0 victory over the Tar Heels, then posed for an infamous photo in front of the Kenan Stadium scoreboard?

Yes.

"A lot of people get upset about a little of everything, I guess," Spurrier said Tuesday.

Now at South Carolina, which will be in Kenan Stadium on Saturday to face the Tar Heels, Spurrier has talked this week about some of the many aspects of his interesting interaction with UNC over the years.

"I don't need to get into that game, 18 years ago," Spurrier said.

Then he did.

Spurrier said his motivation for sticking it to the Tar Heels in 1989 — even after building the 41-0 lead against a team that finished 1-10, he called a double reverse, a flea-flicker and a flanker pass — stemmed in part from a Duke-UNC game almost a decade earlier.

Then an assistant coach at Duke, Spurrier watched angrily in 1980 as North Carolina put the finishing touches on a 44-21 victory over the Blue Devils in Chapel Hill. Late in the game, UNC coach Dick Crum re-inserted tailback Kelvin Bryant so Bryant could join teammate Amos Lawrence as a 1,000-yard rusher for the season. The way Spurrier tells the story, Bryant carried the ball five straight times, and the Kenan Stadium public-address announcer kept the crowd updated on Bryant's statistics after each play.

In 1989, when Duke captured its only ACC football championship (actually a co-title with Virginia) since the early 1960s, Spurrier took full advantage of his opportunity for revenge against a UNC team coached by Mack Brown, whom Spurrier derisively called "Mr. Football" because of Brown's willingness to focus on recruiting and public relations rather than play-calling and strategy.

The Blue Devils racked up a whopping 37 first downs and 656 yards against the Tar Heels that day, in Spurrier's last regular-season game with the Blue Devils. (He left to coach at Florida, his alma mater, after the team's bowl game.) In addition to the trick plays and the scoreboard photo, Spurrier allowed one of his tight ends, Dave Colonna, to kick a George Blanda-style, straight-on extra point to complete the 41-0 margin.

Running up the score?

"Anybody that accuses Duke of running up the score, they ought to be embarrassed," Spurrier said. "That's what I say. ... We were bad in the red zone that day. For all the yards we got, we didn't score that much."

Spurrier sends similar zingers in all directions on a regular basis. One of his classics came many years ago, when he was told that a rival SEC school's academic center had been destroyed in a fire: "The worst part was, most of the books hadn't even been colored in yet."

Asked about UNC's football success, Spurrier talked about the Tar Heels' impressive recruiting. (Translation: They get lots of great players, so why don't they win more often?) Asked this week about the USC-UNC matchup, which has been played only nine times in the last 30 years, he tossed another stick of dynamite toward Chapel Hill.

"I just sort of believe we ought to play them every year," Spurrier said. "But I guess that's not going to happen."

Perhaps the most intriguing angle about the Spurrier-UNC drama is that there was a very real chance, not long ago, that the Ol' Ball Coach could have ended up coaching the Tar Heels himself.

As reported in the ACC Sports Journal and at ACCSports.com at the time, a prominent UNC booster (who more recently aided in UNC's pursuit of Butch Davis) contacted Spurrier in 2004 to gauge his interest in the UNC job. The Tar Heels were struggling under John Bunting, and Spurrier was out of coaching after leaving his job with the Washington Redskins. Spurrier's response to the inquiry became a moot point when the Heels rallied to make a bowl. After the 2004 season, he took the South Carolina job.

"Coaching, where you coach, is all timing," Spurrier said this week. "Who knows what would have happened if that job was open when I was free and available?"

Spurrier said UNC would have been a "wonderful place" to coach. Then, in his inimitable style, he got in one more zinger.

"The place has got a lot of resources, just like here," Spurrier said. "For some reason, they have not done all that great there."