 |
| Many a defender fell flat on his face trying to catch Ted Brown. |
© Tim Peeler, 2017
Ted Brown never won an Atlantic Coast Conference
championship as a member of NC State’s football team, but it's a little remembered
part of history that the league’s all-time leading rusher did help the
Wolfpack win the first 4x100-meter relay at the 1978 track and field
championships.
Like current Wolfpack leading rusher Nyheim Hines, a junior
who has helped win back-to-back 4x100-meter titles at the ACC meet and is now the football team's top rushing threat, Brown used
his natural speed in both sports, though he's mostly remembered for holding the ACC career rushing record of 4,602 yards ever since his career ended in 1978.
In fact, the NC State track program has greatly benefited
from having football players on its roster, and the football program has
benefited from borrowing track recruits. Both Danny Peebles and Alvis Whitted
were originally recruited for track, but ended up playing professional football
in the NFL.
Since that first race in ’78, NC State has won a total of 12
titles in the 4x100, the second most of any ACC school. Of those titles, 10 had
at least one football player in the lineup, including the two most recent with
Hines.
Peebles, of course, helped win four ACC titles and one NCAA
title during his career from 1985-88. His son Dylan, a freshman, ran the anchor
leg of last year’s title race with Hines.
For Brown, running track at State was just a natural extension
of his track career at High Point’s Andrews High School. Frankly, he doesn’t
remember how long he ran track at State and the records from those years are
pretty spotty.
In 1978, following a record-setting junior year in which he
rushed for 1,251 yards and 14 touchdowns, Brown helped the Wolfpack track team
set the stage for breaking Maryland’s strangle-hold on the ACC title. The Terps
won their 23rd consecutive conference crown that year, but not
without being pushed by coach Jim Wescott’s Wolfpack.
By 1982, with the help of a couple key football players and new
head coach Tom Jones, the Wolfpack started a championship streak of its own,
winning seven consecutive men’s outdoor track championships.
Brown says he never participated in a spring football
practice. In fact, head coach Bo Rein, who took over for Lou Holtz after Brown’s
freshman year, never had a spring game. He cancelled the scheduled 1976 Red and
White Game the day before it was supposed to be played at Carter Stadium and had
only spring-ending scrimmages after that.
So Brown wasn’t necessarily needed. Besides, he says, track
did him more good than football during the off-season.
“I ran track to help my speed and to be in better shape,”
Brown says. “In track, we ran every day, in bad weather, no matter what we had
going on. In football, we would lift weights one day and run gassers the next
and not always focus on sprinting.
“I always felt like I was in better shape coming into the
fall after I ran track in the spring.”
Brown was fortunate to be on the same team as a world-class
sprinter who helped the Wolfpack win that inaugural 4x100 title.
His name was Albert Lomotey, a native of Ghana who had
qualified to be on his country’s 1976 Olympic team. He never competed in the
Montreal Games, however, because of the
1976 African boycott.
Instead, the diminutive Lomotey—who stood all of 5-feet,
4-inches—enrolled at Pembroke State in the fall of 1976, but transferred to NC
State in the winter of 1977 because his country gave him a scholarship to study
agricultural science. He was not eligible to run in 1977, joined the track team
for a spectacular 1978 season. (He left school after that to return to Africa, and neither he nor
Brown ran track in 1979.)
With Brown leading the way, the Wolfpack’s relay team won
the 440-yard relay at the fifth-annual Atlantic Coast Relays hosted by NC State
at the Paul Derr Track. They were at their peak that April when they went to
Clemson for the ACC Championship meet, where all anyone wanted to talk about
was Maryland freshman sensation Renaldo Nehemiah, who had set a world indoor record
in the 110-meter high hurdles before he enrolled in college.
The 6-feet, 1-inch Nehemiah out-leaned Lomotey to win the 100-meter dash by .01
seconds, but the heralded freshman slipped out of the blocks in the 200 meters
and Lomotey won the race in an ACC-record 21.09 seconds. Nehemiah also finished
second in both hurdles races.
Brown liked being on the track because of his relative
anonymity. He had just completed his second 1,000-yard season with the Wolfpack
and was already being hyped as a Heisman candidate for his senior campaign that
fall.
“Running track, I was incognito and under the radar,” Brown
says.
He was also a huge asset in getting the Wolfpack sprinters
off to a good start.
“The reason they wanted me in the leadoff position was I had
a very quick first step and the ability to get out fast,” Brown says. “The main
goal was for us to be in position to get to Lomotey. If we got him the baton
with the lead or only one or two steps to make up, it was over.”
Kind of like when Touchdown Ted, who still owns the ACC record for career rushing touchdowns and scoring, had the ball in his hands and the end zone in his sights.
NC State’s 4x100-meter ACC
champions
|
||
Year
|
Time
|
Team
|
1978
|
40.44
|
Ted Brown, Calvin Lanier,
Darryl Patterson, Albert Lomotey
|
1980
|
40.18
|
Marcus Smith, Ed McIntyre, Brian Burns, Ron Foreman
|
1981
|
40.65
|
Auguston Young, Ed McIntyre, Greg Smith, Marcus Smith
|
1983
|
39.93
|
Perry Williams, Dee Dee
Hoggard, Alston Glenn, Harvey McSwain
|
1985
|
39.17
|
Auguston Young, Alston Glenn, Danny
Peebles, Harvey McSwain*
|
1986
|
39.59
|
Danny Peebles, Harvey
McSwain, Jake Howard, Dwight Frazier
|
1987
|
39.90
|
Malcolm Branham, Dwight Frazier, Darian Bryant, Danny Peebles
|
1988
|
40.23
|
Danny Peebles, Harvey
McSwain, Jake Howard, Dwight Frazier
|
1989
|
40.00
|
Darian Bryant, Kevin Braunskill, Michael
Brooks, Dwight Frazier
|
1996
|
39.92
|
Butch McClelland, Neil Chance, Lloyd
Harrison, Alvis Whitted
|
2016
|
39.42
|
Quashawn Cunningham, Shannon Patterson, Nyheim Hines, Jonathan Addison
|
2017
|
39.17
|
Nyheim
Hines, Cravont
Charleston, Junpai Dowdy, Dylan Peebles
|
Football
players in bold
|
||
*NCAA Champion
|
||
No comments:
Post a Comment