What it Was, Was the 1951 Ryder Cup

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© Tim Peeler, 2025

Imagine if North Carolina-born comedian Andy Griffith had been British. The accent would still be distinct, though vastly different. The confusion was practically the same. The conclusion was a little different.

What it was, was football.

Specifically, college football in Chapel Hill.

In Griffith’s case, it was the comedy routine that made him famous, a country bumpkin’s experience of wandering into a college football stadium (almost certainly UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan Stadium) and seeing two groups of men squaring off in between to large banks of people, monitored closely by seven or eight convicts. He recorded the routine in 1953 and it has been played innumerable times in the three quarters of a century that followed.

That routine was predated, however, by a handful of Brits and Irishmen going to the exact same venue to see something that confused them just as much as the game Griffith saw.

“I simply don’t understand what is going on,” wrote Henry Longhurst, a reporter for the London Sunday Times. “All I know is that I am doing OK as long as I holler ‘To Hell with Tennessee.’”

Three English journalists, three Scottish writers, a couple of Irish writers and nine of the 10 members of the British Ryder Cup team found themselves sitting in the press box of Kenan Stadium on a specially scheduled day off from the ninth-annual battle between U.S. and British golfers, which turned the biennial two-day competition into perhaps the greatest three-day weekend of sports anyone in the state at that time could remember. (This year's Ryder Cup will be held at Bethpage Black in New York.)

When the Pinehurst Resort owner Richard Tufts offered up Pinehurst Resort's No. 2 course to the PGA of America to host the Cup competition—fending off an effort to postpone the event to the next spring to accommodate the busy schedule of the British team—it was with the idea of having two great events over two consecutive weekends, the Ryder Cup and the North and South Open, the professional tournament that had been played for 49 years at No. 2, Donald Ross's masterpiece in the Sandhills. While there was money on the line—a total purse of $7,500 and free room and board during the week of the tournament—the North and South was not officially sanctioned by the PGA.

For $12.50, fans could attend all days of both events.

To amplify the spectacle even more, the PGA organizers agreed to take the two Saturdays of the events so that visiting golfers and writers from around the world could see American college football. The first weekend, North Carolina’s football team host top-ranked Tennessee in Chapel Hill, about 60 miles north of Pinehurst; the second weekend Duke hosted Wake Forest in Durham. It was typical for the North and South to take the day off so it would not conflict with college football in the state.

Chuck Erickson, North Carolina’s assistant athletics director and varsity golf coach at the time, came up with the idea of inviting the international golf community to the Carolina-Tennessee game and sent a letter of invitation all parties involved.

“There will be no activity at Pinehurst on Nov. 3 and Nov. 10, since football games are scheduled in this area on the two Saturdays and Pinehurst knows better than to attempt to buck a football day in this State,” wrote Durham Sun sports editor Hugo Germino. “As a matter of fact, the British first protested the proposal to have the matches played Friday and Sunday, skipping over Saturday.

“When the Englishmen were told that the North Carolina and Tennessee would play a football game on that day, they gave in—and gracefully accepted invitations to be special guests of the University of North Carolina at the game in Chapel Hill.”

There was a large reception before the game for the golfers and the press (all of 30 American and six British journalists) before the game at an alumni building adjacent to the football stadium. Only three of the American players, who were quite familiar with football, bothered to attend, with most of them taking the opportunity to go elsewhere for paid exhibitions. 

U.S. captain Sam Snead drove from Pinehurst to Florence, South Carolina, for an exhibition, earning him the nickname in local papers of “Scrammin’ Sammy. North Carolina natives Clayton Heafner of Charlotte and Skip Alexander of Lexington went to the game. Alexander, less than a year after being the lone survivor of a military airplane crash, was the sentimental hero of the weekend.

While some of the British golfers were familiar with the sport of American football, the foreign press pool was not. Not even halftime tea—a seemingly perfect intermission snack in Chapel Hill—made them feel more comfortable.

Here are the thoughts of Britain’s most acclaimed sportswriter of the day, Desmond Hackett of the London Daily Express, as he watched along with 42,000 spectators as the Volunteers rolled up a 27-0 victory over the Tar Heels en route to its first ever national championship.

“They tried to tell me that this was a tough-guy game, a piece of legalized mayhem that made bullfighting look sissy. No sir. Any professional rugby club in England could eliminate the heavily armored characters who ambled in and out of this game.

“The England men do not need the insurance policy of crash helmets and more padding than a horsehair couch. They wear extremely brief shorts and cotton shirts and in this rig I feel sure they could beat the long pants off these American huskies. That is merely my opinion, an opinion which I freely express because I shall be able to duck out of town.

“Back in England, the men of rugby football play forty minutes each way with one 10-minute interval. They would gulp at the idea of bringing in substitutes or that amazing all-change system when a team breaks off the defense shore and moves on the attack.

“We love your beautiful North Carolina girls who so sweetly led the organized cheering.  We feel sure they mean well but most of their best efforts appeared to inspire brisker action from the opposition members.

“The England crowd do not need any of this artificial stimulant, they up and roar their heads off when they feel so inclined. And this goes for the carriage trade in the grandstands. A polite hand clap was the nearest thing to a bust of enthusiasm that the upper set could arouse.

“There seemed to be considerable respect for the extensive panel of referees and the supporting cast of the chain gang who appeared to be taking constant ground survey in the middle of the affair. The English crowd stand up for their right to question the verdict of the referee. They are not slow to state their willingness to buy him glasses on account of his short-sightedness, or to suggest that he could not move so well because of the money tucked into his boots by the rival managers.

“But this American way of football is gay and colorful and I suppose a great game if you can guess what is going on. It is way ahead of England in its setting. This dignified arena in the glade of the deep green pines is among the finest sporting prints I have ever seen. So thanks for a wonderful memory.”

The parties all returned to Pinehurst after the game and, the next day, watched the Americans finish off a 9 ½ to 2 ½ victory against the overmatched Brits. Tennessee went on to win a disputed national title, despite following a perfect regular season with a loss to Southern Conference member Maryland in the Sugar Bowl. Coach Carl Snavely's Tar Heels finished a limp 2-8.

And no one stepped in anything.

Zero First Downs and a Win Over Virginia

© Tim Peeler, 2025

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After being dormant for 37 years, NC State and Virginia renewed their college football rivalry on Sept. 30, 1944, in a showcase game in the middle of World War II in the nation’s biggest Navy town.

So of course it was raining harder than an Atlantic squall on the deck of an aircraft carrier. The turf at Norfolk’s Foreman Field was sloppier than pig racing at the State Fair.

The Wolfpack won 13-0 despite having a half-blind halfback, a war-reduced travel roster of just 28 players and a kicker whose German surname literally meant “goat foot.”

Also, the Wolfpack didn’t make a first down in the entire game, the only time in NCAA history a winning team failed to make 10 yards on a possession.

It’d be nice to say the game was a war-time anomaly, but scoring wasn’t too common for the Pack and Feathers’ version of the wing-T offense. It didn’t help that the team’s pre-game walk-through the day before in Newport News, Virginia, was cancelled because of rain. The Wolfpack didn’t cross midfield in the first half and did so only once in the second.

On gameday, neither the Wolfpack nor the Cavaliers could move the ball effectively. Virginia was better on the ground, putting up more passing and rushing yards and gaining 14 first downs, but they fumbled the ball eight times in the water-logged game.

The Wolfpack, under first-year coach Beattie “Big Chief” Feathers, didn’t really even try to move the ball, punting it away on first or second down on every possession of the first half. At the height of the rain, Virginia also took to punting on third down just to get rid of the soggy and slippery pigskin.

There were a couple of extenuating circumstances that caused such limitations.

First, the game was played fewer than 15 weeks after D-Day, the Allied invasion to retake the European continent. As there were more important global matters at the time, every team in the country had limited access to qualified players, except for some of the pre-flight programs that actively recruited top-notch athletes to train as bomber and fighter pilots.

At State, most of the regular students had 4-F status, which meant they were unfit for military service for health, mental or moral reasons. State star running back Howard “Touchdown” Turner, a three-sport standout in football, basketball and baseball, was denied U.S. Army service because of poor eyesight three times during his NC State career.

There were more than 4,000 perfectly fit trainees on campus during that time, but the Army did not allow its officer trainees to compete in college athletics, unlike the U.S. Navy trainee programs at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke.

Both State and Virginia had reduced rosters. State traveled with just 28 players, which was more than dressed out for the season-opening 27-7 victory the week before against Milligan, in Feathers’ first game. Feathers, however, went into the game planning just to use one platoon (no substitutes) on offense and defense.

Secondly, that afternoon, Norfolk’s Foreman Field was practically under water as nearly two inches of rain fell during the course of the game, which was the first meeting between the neighboring schools since 1908. Even State’s practice the day before in Newport News was canceled because of rain.

For three quarters, neither team could move the ball. In fact, State didn’t even try in the wet conditions, punting the ball away to Virginia on either first or second down of every possession. The Cavs, mostly buried in their own territory, made it past midfield a few times, but never really threatened the goal line and also began kicking the ball on third down.

Early in the fourth quarter, as the heavy rain started to subside, Virginia half back Dick Michels attempted to punt the ball away on third down. The center snap flew over his head and when he tried to recover it, the ball squirted into the end zone.

There, NC State running back Lum Edwards of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, fell on the ball for the first touchdown of the game. Kicker Mendel Zickefoose of Buckhannon, West Virginia, kicked the extra point for a 7-0 lead.

Five plays later, Virginia again had the ball deep in its own territory following a clipping penalty on the kickoff, a 2-yard loss on a rushing attempt and an 8-yard loss on a fumbled snap.

When Michels tried to punt the ball away near his own end zone, the snap was low and it slipped by the kicker and into the end zone. NC State’s Tony Gaeta fell on the loose ball for the second gift of the game. Zickefoose's PAT attempt failed.

The Wolfpack recorded the shutout win despite just 10 yards of total offense and no first downs. It was the first of four wins against teams from Virginia, Feathers' home state, in his debut season.

NCAA records are rare for most teams, unless they are one of the major football factories. For State, kicker Marc Primanti still owns the NCAA individual record for his perfect 1996 season, in which he made all 20 field goals and all 26 PATs en route to winning the Lou Groza Award as the nation’s best kicker. Linebacker Nate Irving owns the individual record for making eight tackles for loss against Wake Forest on Nov. 18, 2010.

State owns two other team NCAA records, one for the most consecutive passes attempted without a running play (32 at Duke on Nov. 11, 1989, in a 35-26 loss) and another for the most tackles for loss in a single game (24 vs. Florida State on Nov. 11, 2004).

When Lee Corso Didn't Drown At Riddick Stadium

 © Tim Peeler, 2025

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Lee Corso as Mr. Wuf 

Lee Corso almost didn’t make it through his second season as Florida State’s quarterback, much less 38 years of broadcasting on ESPN, thanks to a 1954 game at NC State’s Riddick Stadium.

“We’re going to drown, Buddy,” Corso told his college roommate as they lay at the bottom of a pile up at the Wolfpack’s one-time on-campus stadium. “We’re going to die right here on the football field.”

Buddy Reynolds, of course, became more famous as an actor when he changed his named to Burt and moved to Hollywood, pushed out of footballbecause of a game against the Wolfpack three years later.

On Oct.16, 1954, many people thought they were going to die, mainly because the most powerful hurricane to ever hit the North Carolina,Hazel, was still trailing its way across the East Coast. It made landfall the day before on the North Carolina-South Carolina border and caused some damage in Raleigh, including blowing the roof of the Riddick Stadium press box. In all, the Category 4 hurricane killed 95 people in the United States.

Florida State’s football team wasn’t sure their players would be healthy, either, having escaped the largest polio outbreak in state history, which was raging across the panhandle. It was a mild version of the rampant disease, but so pervasive it was later named “The Tallahassee Strain.”

None of that mattered to Lee and Buddy that night on the field that later became main campus’ biggest parking lot, as water streamed through the ear holes of their helmets. They were unable to get up because of the defensive tackles laying on top of them on the notoriously swampy field.

“We’re going to die,” Corso gurgled one last time.

They didn’t, of course. In fact, they went on win the game 13-7, as Corso rushed seven times for 22 yards. The decisive play was a controversial punt block in the fourth quarter that put a damper on Homecoming crowd of 9,000.

Corso had other opportunities to stand out against the Wolfpack, particularly during his 1956 return to Riddick Stadium. He was the star of the Seminoles’ 14-0 victory on Oct. 13, 1956. He scored the Seminoles’ first touchdown on a 35-yard run and set up the other with a 61-yard punt return.

“They have a fine player in that Corso,” said NC State coach Earle Edwards. “He was the difference. He had more to do with the outcome than any other individual.”

For the game, Corso had 10 carries for 108 yards, completed five of his run-option passes for 74 yards and had a big day as punt returner.

Corso did have another significant interaction with the Wolfpack at its new field, Carter Stadium. On Oct. 4, 1975, Corso was the head coach at Indiana, trying to get a scouting report on an undersized freshman running back in the Wolfpack backfield.

That running back, Ted Brown, had almost quit the team two weeks before, but was inserted into the starting lineup by Wolfpack coach Lou Holtz after his veteran tailbacks fumbled the ball away five times the week before in a regionally televised 37-15 loss at Michigan State. Brown was joined by fellow freshman Scott Wade, who gained 55 yards, and Ricky Adams, who gained 62.

Corso and his staff didn’t figure out a way to stop Brown, who rushed for 121 yards and two touchdowns. The High Point native finished his career as the Atlantic Coast Conference’s all-time rushing leader with 4,546 yards (plus 399 uncredited bowl yardage), a record he still owns almost a half century after his career ended.

“We just got beat,” Corso said after the game. “When you get beat, you take your bat and ball and go home, and you get ready for the next game.”

The next season in Bloomington, Indiana, Brown ran for another 141 yards on 23 carries with two more touchdowns against the Hoosiers.

On the positive side, no one drowned.

The ECU-NC State rivalry began with the theft of Mr. Wolf

 

A returned Mr. Wolf leads three live dog mascots into Carter-Finley Stadium in 1970.

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© Tim Peeler, 2025

The first game in the NC State-East Carolina rivalry began with thievery. The most recent one ended in fisticuffs on the grounds of a military academy.

Fortunately, no weapons were involved.

There has always, however, been some amount of battlefield-level conflict between the two state schools that dominate the eastern part of North Carolina because of their passionate fanbases, their overlapping recruiting territories and their general disregard for each other’s positive attributes.

That conflict will return tonight at Carter-Finley Stadium when the schools renew the rivalry that began in 1970 and was played annually until 1987, when all hell broke loose.

Again.

Writing about that conflict has been a big part of my college football coverage through the years, when I worked at newspapers around the state and when I worked for the NC State athletics department. I even spent time on a university-led committee to find solutions for the rowdiness, along with an assistant housing director who later ended up being East Carolina's athletics director. 

After three years of covering the State-ECU rivalry in the press box for the student newspaper, Technician, I actually was on the opposite side of the stadium in the student section for 1987's earth-shaking game, thinking it would be nice to enjoy the game with friends in my last semester at school.

When the Pirates took and early and raucous lead in what turned out to be a 32-14 ECU win, I turned to my date and said: “Let’s get the hell out of here before this turns ugly.”

It turned ugly. (The game, not my date.)

What happened afterwards has been well-chronicled through the years. Mostly Pirate fans took the field and tried to uproot the goalposts. NC State athletics director Jim Valvano canceled all future games against East Carolina. The Peach Bowl decided to renew it on New Year’s Day 1992. The two teams have played multiple times, though not annually, since then.

And the Military Bowl paired the two teams together last December, re-inflaming the rivalry and some of the animosity that has flared up through the years with a postseason game.

To be fair, the difficulties began before the rivalry did, thanks to an automobile break-in on a Raleigh sidestreet. On the Wednesday before the first ever matchup between the Wolfpack and Pirates (Oct. 10, 1970), someone broke into senior Dick Scott’s car, parked on Furches Street in between Hillsborough and Clark Avenue.

The villains stole the only thing of value Scott had in the backseat: The Mr. Wolf mascot costume.

He kept it in there throughout the week so no one on campus would take it, but when he went to his off-campus parking spot the fuzzy gray felt body suit and floppy felt head were gone. He reported the value of the setup at $210 for the suit and $40 for the newly remodeled head (about $2,100 in today’s dollars).

So Mr. Wolf, long before his name had to be shortened to Mr. Wuf, was not on the field for the game. Scott sat with the cheerleaders, the lonelier than a freshman at a frat party. It didn’t much matter, though, as State easily won the game, 23-6.

Mr. Wolf seems happy to be back in action.

Scott and his cheerleading teammates were quite upset, because a new suit would have cost about $400 to replace before basketball season, when they would be expected to help head coach Norm Sloan and team defend their Atlantic Coast Conference championship.

“However, we are desperate to have the suit back in time for our remaining conference football games,” told Technician, NC State’s student paper.

Scott promised that if the hooligans who stole the wolf costume returned it in time for the Duke football game, he would let them borrow it back for Halloween.

At the time, it was too hard for students on campus to get too worked up about the loss of Mr. Wolf. They were too enraged that Vice President Spiro Agnew had just accepted an invitation to address a rally of Republicans at Reynolds Coliseum, dispelling rumors that Led Zepelin and Jefferson Airplane would play a free concert on the Brickyard to protest the Agnew appearance (as reported by UNC-Chapel Hill’s Daily Tar Heel), a telephone threat of two bombs planted in the air conditioning ducts in Harrelson Hall and the discovery of a cigarette baked into a hamburger bun at Harris Cafeteria.

Two of those proved to be hoaxes. (Hint: the cigarette was real and the only effective protest of the Agnew rally was campus security towing two Secret Service limos from the parking lots behind Reynolds.)

No one could firmly put the theft’s blame on Pirate skullduggery, and Mr. Wolf’s absence did little to hinder the 24-6 win for a Wolfpack team that had been winless in its previous eight contests going back to the end of the 1969 season (0-6-2).

While the suit’s theft was well-covered in local media, its return was never announced. However, there are pictures of the mascot in football games after East Carolina and at all home basketball games.

That, however, was the atmosphere in which the rivalry started.

My introduction to college football was on Sept. 10, 1983, the first weekend of my freshman year, which is the unofficial kickoff to the rivalry’s heated passion. It was a late-night game that bumped the Atlanta Braves off cable superstation WTBS, so that a national audience, if it cared to, could watch what unfolded that evening.

Fans of both schools were well-lubricated prior to the 8 p.m. kickoff and were rowdy throughout.

Or, as my late friend Bruce Winkworth put it in his column after the game, “It always hurts to lose to East Carolina because of their fans, for they may well be the most obnoxious and insufferable lot of bumpkins around. I walked the parking lots prior to the game and nothing I saw at any of their tailgate parties did anything to enhance my extremely low opinion of [Pirate] fans.”

State took a two-touchdown lead through the first three quarters, but turnovers and some big plays by the Pirates made the game close in the final minutes of head coach Tom Reed’s first game.

An estimated crowd of 57,700, then the largest number of spectators to see a sporting event in the state, stayed in their seats or stood at their standing-room-only ground until the final play.

East Carolina had taken a 22-16 lead thanks to a Wolfpack turnover, and the teams traded fumbles twice more in the final four minutes. State had a chance to retake the lead with 15 seconds remaining on the clock. On fourth-and-1 from the 10-yard line, new quarterback Tim Esposito ran the only option play of the game, pitching the ball to halfback Vince Evans.

He was knocked for a 7-yard loss that ended the game, ruining a good offensive performance that included 160 yards on 21 carries by junior tailback Joe McIntosh.

East Carolina flooded the field, a precursor to similar celebrations in 1985 when a restraining fence at the bottom of the grassy bank was uprooted and the total takeover of the field and goalposts in 1987. State fans did their part, as well, raining empty liquor bottles on to the field from the student section. Eyewitness accounts said dozens flew on to the field, with each miss eliciting groans from the crowd.

It made Winkworth rethink who the worst fans were.

“I was ashamed to be from the same university,” he wrote.

(The 1983 loss is so unpalatable that since 1999, the NC State football media guide has recorded that game as being played in Greenville, seemingly unwilling to accept that all the disruptions in that game and all that followed began in the state capital. Wikipedia and College Football Sports-Reference have recorded it the same way. State’s first visit to ECU’s Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium was Nov. 20, 1999.)

The five games in the 1980s turned what had been a mostly assured State victory into a competitive series, which has been great for football in the state, which is only diminished by the rabble behavior in the stands and on the field.

Here's hoping the 2025 game, the first in the rivalry ever played on a Thursday night, is free of such things.