The Jan. 17, 1948, game against Duke was canceled after Frank Thompson Gym was condemned. |
© Tim Peeler,
2015
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NOTE: If you enjoy reading "One Brick Back" and would like to help offset research expenses for stories such as this, please make a small donation to the cause and help keep these posts free of ads.
What if someone held a sporting event and no one came?
The Baltimore Orioles and Chicago White Sox will find out
today when they meet at Orioles Park at Camden Yards with no fans allowed to
attend because of violence that has disrupted the city for the last week. It’s
the first game in Major League Baseball history to be played in front of an empty
stadium, the last four years of the Montreal Expos notwithstanding.
(There was a Miami Marlins doubleheader on Aug. 24, 2011,
where the unofficial headcount for first pitch was 347, thanks to the impending
arrival of Hurricane Irene.)
It certainly won’t be the first sporting event without
spectators, however. In my first job as a sportswriter, I worked at the Salisbury (N.C.) Post during
an outbreak of red measles in 1989 that resulted in a three-week quarantine and
suspension of all athletics activities in Rowan and Cabarrus counties.
Measles are highly communicable, of course, and just because
you are immunized doesn’t mean you are protected because the immunization, at
the time, was not 100 percent effective.
Schools from other counties refused to play Rowan County teams. Catawba College canceled its men’s and women’s basketball seasons
after Jan. 9 and didn’t play again. More than 1,000 area high school students had to postpone taking the SAT.
The outbreak was nationwide and hit North Carolina
particularly hard, with cases reported in 60 of 100 counties. Even at NC State,
after a student was diagnosed with measles, students who couldn’t show proof of
immunization were not allowed to attend class. A quick immunization center was
set up at the student center to give shots to more than 1,200 students and 150
faculty who didn’t have immunization records.
As the outbreak eased, there was a limited quarantine that
allowed the Rowan and Cabarrus county high schools to resume their seasons with an odd solution: Only players
and support personnel who could prove they were vaccinated were allowed to
attend.
I got my immunization records from my parents and was able
to cover several of the games without fans. You think it’s loud in a sold-out basketball
gym? The sound of one ball bouncing, echoing off the walls and empty stands, is
surprisingly deafening.
This went on for a couple of weeks. Teams were not allowed
to make up all the games that were missed because the North Carolina High
School Athletic Association limited all its teams to just three games per week.
The tournament seedings were based on won-loss percentage. (College basketball
was also affected: the East Coast Athletics Conference played its entire
tournament that year without spectators.)
There was also a long-forgotten NC State men’s basketball
game that was played in an empty arena, during the first season after men’s
basketball changed its name from the Red Terrors to the Wolfpack.
On Jan. 17, 1948, a game between the Wolfpack and
neighboring Duke was canceled when Thompson Gym was condemned by order of Raleigh
city building inspector Pallie Magnum because the building had inadequate fire
exits for a crowd of more than 1,200. A game against North Carolina a year
before was also canceled by the fire marshal because there were too many fans
in attendance.
The Wolfpack was forced to move its final seven home games in '48 to Raleigh’s downtown Memorial Auditorium.
There wasn’t enough time, however, to get the auditorium
ready for the Pack’s next home game, against High Point College, since the
floor needed to be refinished, sidelines and free-throw lines needed to be
painted and baskets needed to be erected.
After initially canceling the game, officials from both
schools agreed to play at Thompson Gym with no fans in attendance. Only
a few reporters and college officials were allowed to see the high-scoring contest.
Red-headed All-America forward Dick Dickey had a school-record 29 points in the contest and teammate Jack McComas added 23. Case’s
Wolfpack ran rough-shod with a 110-50 victory over the
High Pointers.
It was the highest-scoring game in NC State history until
David Thompson came along three dozen years later. It was also the last game
Case ever coached in Thompson Gym, where he compiled a perfect 18-0 record in
his one-and-a-half seasons as his first home court.
The move to downtown Raleigh lit a fire under school
officials to complete the shell of the on-campus coliseum that had been
standing dormant since 1941. It didn’t hurt that during an 81-42 victory over
North Carolina at the Pack’s substitute home, students finished off the game by
chanting “We want a coliseum. We want a coliseum.”
Construction restarted on what would become Reynolds
Coliseum in the summer of 1948 and the doors opened on Dec. 2, 1949, in a Southern Conference game
against Washington & Lee.
The vagabond Pack didn’t seem to be affected by its
home-court flux throughout the season. It was the highest-scoring team in the nation
for most of the season and it earned the school’s first No. 1 ranking in the
national polls. Thanks to a 19-game winning streak from December-March, the
Pack finished 29-3 overall, was a perfect 12-0 in the Southern Conference
regular season and won the second of six consecutive league tournament titles,
despite Dickey being out of the lineup with a case of the mumps.
Passed over by the NCAA in favor of eventual
national-champion Kentucky for the eight-team NCAA Tournament, the Wolfpack accepted
its second consecutive bid to the National Invitation Tournament. Without
Dickey, the Pack lost to DePaul in the first round at Madison Square Garden.
Still, it was the most successful season in NC State
basketball history until the 1972-73 team posted a perfect 27-0 record, when
the stands were full for every game.
You need to check your math or the dates for David Thompson. (Maybe "two dozen years" after 1949?)
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