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| 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.
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| 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.
