One Brick Back

Saturday, November 13, 2021

When Wake Forest Banned Football After a 4-4 Tie with NC State

NC A&M's 1895 football team [photo: NC State Special Collections Archive.]

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© Tim Peeler, 2021

The NC State-Wake Forest football rivalry is the second longest continuous rivalry in college football, contested every year since 1910, through war, wind and woe.

What of the first meeting in the 114-game series, the only game between the two teams played before the turn of the 20^th century? Surely, there is an interesting backstory to why these close neighbors played just once in 1895, not again until two games in 1908 and then continuously since 1910.

Indeed.

On Friday, Oct. 18, 1895—the day before the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (A&M College, now NC State) hosted Wake Forest at Raleigh’s Athletic Park—the faculty at Wake Forest announced that following the Saturday afternoon contest down in the state capital, the Baptist football team would no longer be allowed to leave campus to play games, effectively banning varsity athletics at the evangelical school.

“The faculty allowed today’s game in Raleigh on account of peculiar circumstances, but took the following action with reference to the future: That after Oct. 19^th our students be allowed to play no match game of football except on their own grounds.”

In effect, that decision shut down football for the next 12 years at the Baptist-based school in northern Wake County, becoming the state’s second religiously based school to ban the sport. Methodist-affiliated Trinity (now Duke) had chased off its president, John Franklin Crowell, who introduced college football to the state in 1888, because of his devotion to and promotion of football as a premier form of physical activity. His replacement, John Carlisle Kilgo, immediately banned the sport at Trinity in 1894.

“I have uncompromising objections to the modern football contests,” said Kilgo, hired from South Carolina’s Wofford College.

Trinity did not reinstitute the sport until 1920, when it decided it could no longer tell its student body, many of whom had served in The Great War in Europe, that football was too dangerous for them.

The faculty at Baptist-affiliated Wake Forest agreed that football was in direct opposition to its Christian values. As reported in The North Carolinian, a Raleigh publication of the day: “Wake Forest College steps into line with a rule forbidding students to play football except on the College ground. This may seem hard on the boys but in a little while they will know that it is not. Last year, 43 men were killed in the game in four months. Only 12 men were killed in Spanish bullfights in the entire year.” [NOTE: These numbers are unverified by any other published work.]

Football, of course, was still in its infancy, the rules still morphing from rugby into something vaguely resembling the game played today with the 61 rules established in 1876. It was unrelentingly brutal for the players who had little more protection than padded pants and shirts, with no helmets. Things got especially bad when Princeton’s popular blocking tactics of the 1880s evolved into “the flying wedge.”

Making things worse was the rule forbidding free substitution. Once a player was removed from a game, he could not return, which meant many of the best players who were hurt stayed on the field until they were unconscious and had to be carried off on a stretcher.

The game became so dangerous that President Grover Cleveland Alexander banned the Army-Navy game in 1893. Harvard banned football the same year following a bloody game with Yale that is often referred to as the most brutal game ever played. In 1894, the football rules committee banned all forms of wedge blocking.

Noted sportsman and future president Theodore Roosevelt wrote in the Dec. 23, 1893, issue of Harper’s Weekly: “The brutality must be done away with and the danger minimized…The rules for football ought to probably be altered so as to do away with the present mass [or wedge] play, and, I think, also the present system of interference.”

Most evangelical schools, like Wake Forest and Trinity, took a dim view of football. The Western North Carolina Conference of the Methodists, in particular, thought football was “a source of evil, and no little evil.”

Wake, Trinity, Wofford and Furman all banned the sport for decades. The Georgia General Assembly even passed a bill banning the sport and Virginia considered something similar after a player died of a fractured skull during an 1897 game in Atlanta between the states’ two universities in Atlanta. The Georgia governor vetoed the bill after the mother of the player who died wrote a letter in support of keeping the sport. “Grant me this right to request that my boy’s death should not be used to defeat the most cherished object of his life,” wrote Rosalind Burns Gammon, who is remembered as “the woman who saved football in Georgia.”

Still, the Wake Forest faculty allowed the one-game 1895 season to continue due to “peculiar circumstances.” What were they? While the news reports of the time don’t specify, it likely was because the football team from Richmond College had already boarded its train to travel to North Carolina for a crazy weekend of round-robin football played in the (not-yet-named) Triangle.

The season started in the state the previous week when the University in Chapel Hill beat A&M 36-0 on University Day. The game was notable because it was the debut of both Teisaku Sugishita, believed to be the first native of Japan to ever play in a college football game, and A&M’s newly selected red-and-white school colors, which replaced the original pink and blue colors from 1892-93 and the brown and white of 1894.

Football began in earnest when Richmond played A&M College the following Friday, with Wake Forest’s captain, John Gore, serving as the game’s referee and former A&M coach and noted Raleigh lawyer Perrin Busbee as umpire.

The game had a rocky start as Richmond’s train stalled out en route to Raleigh and the team, wearing its olive and orange colors, arrived an hour late for the 4 p.m. start at Raleigh’s Athletic Park, A&M’s regular home field prior to the Riddick Field’s opening in 1907.

The park, located across the street from Oakwood Cemetery, just north of downtown, was the regular host of college and professional baseball games and college football games for A&M, the University, Wake Forest and Trinity.

Kickoff was moved to 5 p.m. and the two halves were trimmed to 20 minutes each.

Both teams took a long time to work out the stiffness in their joints, as neither team scored a touchdown—then worth four points—in the first 35 minutes of the game. Coach Bart Gatlin's A&M team, playing without one starter who was sick and another who was ejected for allegedly slugging a Richmond opponent, finally settled the matter by recovering a fumble at the 7-yard-line with five minutes to play, then advancing it for both a touchdown and two-point drop kick for the exciting 6-0 victory.

The game attracted hundreds of fans, with “A&M rooters there with streamers of white and red.” Much of the crowd came from Raleigh’s women’s colleges, all of whom were admitted without paying the 25-cent entry fee.

The 75 or so A&M students in attendance broke into one of its many school yells following the season’s first victory.

Kak-y-Kak Kak-Bo-Kak-Bo-Kak!
Kak-y-Kak Kak-Bo-Kak-Bo-Kak!
Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah!
A and MC! A and MC!
Dixie!

Don’t ask me what any of that means.

The next day, fewer people paid to see A&M and Wake Forest play at the same field, and maybe that’s why the outcome was relatively unexciting.

“A good sprinkling of the wearers of black and gold were on the field to cheer their team to victory—but in vain,” reported the News & Observer the next day.

Both teams scored touchdowns in the first half, both teams missed their two-point drop kicks and neither team came close to scoring in the second half, as the game ended in a 4-4 tie.

A&M’s touchdown was scored by junior Bradley Wootten, who was one of two students who had petitioned the faculty to change the school colors to red and white early in the semester. Gore scored Wake Forest only touchdown.

Back Syd Alexander, namesake of a current NC State residence hall, was A&M’s top performer in the game, as both runner and punter.

Meanwhile, in Chapel Hill, Richmond played its second game in as many days as well, losing 34-0 to North Carolina on the dusty grounds of the school’s athletic field.

Games on consecutive days during those short seasons were not unusual, as regional and interstate travel was particularly difficult in the days when the only way move from town to town was on a Southern Railway train. Those consecutive games that allowed no recovery time for players only added to the brutality of the sport.

Both A&M and the University continued their seasons by hitting the rails for out-of-state games. Carolina played at Vanderbilt, at Sewanee and two games against Georgia over the next two weeks. A&M played its first ever out-of-state game, arranging a special train to Atlanta for the Cotton States and International Exposition, the fourth world’s fair held in the American South. The team had no opponent before arriving in Atlanta, but quickly arranged a contest with the Virginia Military Institute, whose team was already in town for the exposition.

After the season, NC State’s faculty voted to end varsity football as well, but that ban lasted less than a year. The team played one game in 1896, a 6-0 win over Guilford. North Carolina never banned the sport on its campus, often ridiculing those who did in the pages of The Daily Tar Heel.

“The attitude of a certain educational institution in this State in slurring at foot-ball is to a great degree sour grapish,” read an Oct. 12, 1895, editorial. “This same institution was the most enthusiastic advocate of foot-ball until its defeats came thick and fast. Then its ardor for the game waved, and now its attitude is one of open hostility.

“It doesn’t require a historian to know the college to which we refer.”

Wake Forest eventually ended its ban in 1908, when it played a game against North Carolina; two games against A&M’s Aggies, losing 76-0 and 25-0; and two games against Davidson in Charlotte. Two seasons later, the unbroken streak of games against NC State began.

Newspaper Life Was Never Easy (1991 World Series Edition)

© Tim Peeler, 2021

When you go into the newspaper business, you dream of covering big, substantial stories.

In sports, that means getting the opportunity to cover the biggest athletic events: the World Series, the Super Bowl, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament (or, for me, the ACC tournament), the Masters or the Olympics.

In the 20 years I worked in the old-style, pre-internet media, I was able to do most but not all of those things, and got close enough to a few others to be endangered.

As much as people may think sportswriters—or old-style journalists of any kind, to be honest—are biased for or against their favorite teams or causes, it’s simply not true of the real professionals in the industry. I never once pulled for a team to win or lose.

I certainly, however, pulled hard for the opportunity to cover a big story, from Piedmont hurricanes to the U.S. Open in Pinehurst and any number of annual celebrations of athletic achievement.

Thirty years ago this week, I sort of finagled my way into covering one of those big events when the Atlanta Braves faced the Minnesota Twins in the Game 7 of the 1991 World Series—even though the game was being played 1,130 miles away in Minneapolis.

A little background: I had been working for The Greenville (South Carolina) News about 18 months, covering as my main beat Furman athletics, with some high school, summer sports and other college events thrown in, with two to three shifts a week on the sports copy and design desk. It was a fun job, with some of the more interesting newspaper workers I’ve ever come across. The newspaper office was where I met my first—and so far only—wife, just a few weeks after the events of this 24-hour workday occurred. She’s pretty much kept me straight ever since.

Here’s what happened

Because of its relative proximity to Atlanta, Greenville was easily the biggest Braves town outside of Georgia. It was also the longtime home of the Braves’ Double-A affiliate, the Greenville Braves.

Even though it was two hours north, Greenville always looked to Atlanta for its professional sports fix. If, of course, you overlook the professionalism of the Danny Ford days of Clemson football.

So for years, back when newspapers did such things, The News had a sports bureau in Georgia’s capital. It was a much better assignment than the Lyman-Duncan-Welford or Golden Strip news bureaus that some of my other friends established in the second bedroom of their cheap apartments.

My man, Willie T. Smith III, capably occupied our Atlanta sports bureau, a job everyone on staff coveted because of the opportunity to cover Major League Baseball, the NBA, the NFL and any other significant events—like, say, the Olympics—that might come to town.

On Oct. 27, 1991, however, Willie and our columnist, Dan Foster, were in Minneapolis at the Metrodome covering the decisive Game 7 between the Braves and Twins. Someone needed to cover the resurgent Falcons’ home game against the Los Angeles Rams that Sunday afternoon in one of the last home games the team ever played at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

Innocently, I volunteered, with the request to stay afterwards to write a story about the city’s reaction to the outcome of the baseball game: the ecstasy of the Braves winning their first World Series title since 1957, when the franchise was still in Milwaukee, or the soul-crushing disappointment of getting so close without bringing home a title to a championship-starved city.

Covering the football game was easy. Drove down in the morning. Got to the stadium in time for lunch. Sat through a 31-14 win over the then-hapless Los Angeles Rams. Falcon quarterback Chris Miller—who had thrown four interceptions the week before against Phoenix but led Atlanta to a quick 28-0 lead by halftime—inspired me to write one of my favorite ledes ever from that game: “The problem with Atlanta’s Red Gun offense is which way the barrel is pointing—squarely at the opponent’s face or at the Falcons’ own feet.”

The football story was written and send in back to the office in Greenville on my company-issued Tandy TRS80 Model-200 portable computer, a true modern marvel of word-processing possibilities, the model with the flip-up, backlit screen. It was one of the first laptops ever made, and I can’t even explain how much easier it made the lives of newspaper reporters in those pre-internet, pre-cell phone days. The previous alternative was to send a story by Western Union, by fax or by dictating the entire thing to a news clerk back in the office.

Writing a clever or interesting story was about sixth on the to-do list for making deadline back before you could just email a story to the copy desk and be done for the night.

Transmitting a story on one of those Trash 80s, as they were often called, was a sometimes laborious process in which both stars and technology had to align with a telephone line, a plug-in, auto-dialing modem and a perfectly still transmitting table. While practically unbreakable, many of them did not survive the plunge from press box windows to the fields or parking lots below from frustrated transmitters.

I was easily done writing the football story by the time the Braves batted in the first inning of the 8:30 p.m. game, which featured a pair of future Hall of Fame pitchers, 36-year-old Jack Morris against 24-year-old John Smoltz. I carefully planned how I was going to cover the night’s activities.

The city was, as they like to say over at Georgia Tech, abuzz. Fans were packed into their favorite bars and hangouts, making the sidewalks crowded and the streets surprisingly empty. I was easily able to go back and forth from Buckhead, Brookhaven, Midtown, Five Points and downtown.

There were a few favorite places I went to so I could interview patrons and soak in the scene. There was a Longhorn Steakhouse I always liked to go to when I was in town, back when that franchise was relatively new. The Atlanta Underground was hopping. There were patio bars jammed-packed for people watching. Jocks & Jills was the perfect place to get quotes early in the evening before inebriation scaled up and sobriety scaled down. J&J was owned by NBA sideline reporter Craig Sager, Hawks star Doc Rivers and several other NBA players that became one of the nation’s most successful sports bars. For that decisive game, the bar asked all of its staff to bring in their home televisions so as many people as possible could watch the game from all angles.

Basically, I roamed the city for nine scoreless innings, writing a few paragraphs here and there as the game went along, particularly after the eighth-inning baserunning gaffe by Braves outfielder and leadoff hitter Lonnie Smith, who could have easily scored the game’s decisive run on a double by Terry Pendleton had he not come to a complete stop at second base before heading to third. Ultimately, that error allowed the Twins to keep Morris in the game, and he just kept mowing down the Braves.

In the bottom of the 10^th inning, Minnesota’s Dan Gladden doubled off Braves pitcher Alejandro Pena, who walked the next two batters to load the bases. With no one out, pinch hitter Gene Larkin lofted a deep fly ball over the head of Atlanta’s drawn-in outfield to win the Twins’ second World Series in five years.

Braves fans morosely filed out of the restaurants, bars and taverns, “heads drooping like a beer-soaked foam tomahawk,” I wrote back then.

That’s when the night began to get really bad. For all my planning, I did not have a secure place from where I could transmit my story in those homesteading days before cell phones. My laptop had no port to plug in acoustic couplers, which allowed you to use just about any public phone with a standard headset to connect to the newspaper’s toll-free modem for the typesetting computer. That process wasn’t easy, but for years I had been able to transmit from roadside telephone booths, media workrooms and various bars around town, just like Damon Runyon would have done if that technology had been available in his day.

The flip-top Tandys, however, didn’t have couplers. They had a port in the back that needed a detachable phone line, like one on a fax machine or a hotel room phone. Not exactly an easy thing to find at 1 a.m. in a depressed city after watching its team lose the World Series.

I couldn’t use a pay phone or talk my way into a restaurant manager’s office to use a phone line, the way I used to do at, say, an interstate Cracker Barrel.

In a final attempt to make deadline, I found a relatively cheap hotel that I knew had a usable landline. Except the night manager-in-training had no idea what I was asking for. If I wanted to use a phone line, I had to check into a room—which I did for exactly 20 minutes to use the phone. That was a $100 call that the newspaper never reimbursed me for.

After finally getting my story to the office, I got back into my car and started the two-and-a-half hour drive home, with an estimated arrival time of 4 a.m. Newspaper life was not easy.

Somewhere on a lonely stretch of I-85 between Anderson, South Carolina, and Greenville, I noticed a bright red beacon on my dashboard, just below the speedometer. Apparently, driving all over Atlanta for five hours trying to get quotes and color for a story, I used up all the gas I started the day with.

By the time I started looking for an all-night gas station, the engine began to sputter and my car went as powerless as the Braves’ offense. The road was desolate and dark. I had no choice but to start walking.

Before long, an overnight 18-wheeler swerved on to the shoulder after seeing me walking down the road. He offered a ride to the next exit, wherever that might be. We rode for miles before we saw the burning lights of an open truck stop, one that had a spare five-gallon gas can. I filled it up and started looking around for another good Samaritan heading south.

The northbound truck was long gone by then. I had no choice but to start walking again. For the next five miles, while sloshing gas onto my dress pants and into my shoes, I swore that my car was just over the crest of the next hill. It never was.

I eventually put the gas in my car, drove back to the truck stop to return the gas can and fill up my car. As I pulled back on I-85, the sun began to peep through my passenger-side window. By the time I got home, it was well over the horizon. I sat down just long enough to realize that I had to be at Furman football coach Jimmy Satterfield’s weekly press conference in less than an hour, giving me just enough time to wash the gasoline off of my legs and find a clean pair of shoes.

That was 30 years ago this week. I wish I could say I’ve never run out of gas again after learning a hard lesson, but that’s not exactly true. I’ve done it a dozen or so times since. Once I ran out of gas—twice—going to buy a Valentine’s Day card for my wife at a Target less than two miles from our house. It’s a long story.

The 1991 Series was the beginning of the Braves’ longest sustained success in franchise history, resulting in five National League pennants in nine years and the 1995 World Series title. The Twins haven’t been back to the Series since. I was never able to cover a real baseball playoff game, but I did go back to Atlanta many times, including for the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games and the 2001 ACC Tournament.

That night, however, the Twins went to bed World Series champions. The Braves went to bed upset that a base-running error let them down in a one-run game.

And I never went to bed at all.

Friday, September 24, 2021

"Norma Rae": Mother of the Textile Bowl?

The Textile Bowl Trophy has been in Clemson's possession since 2012.

© Tim Peeler, 2021

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. Also, I couldn't have written this or any other piece about the textile industry without the input of my friend Devin Steele, editor and publisher of eTextileCommunications.com. He is literally "The Voice of the U.S. Textile Industry," starting his successful newsletter in 2014 and building it from scratch after traditional media began to go away. Read about his journey here: Greenville Business Magazine. If you want to learn more about the textile industry, subscribe to his weekly newsletter here and follow him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Devin gave me my first job as a writer for Technician, NC State's student newspaper, in 1984 and we've both been plugging away at it ever since. I still don't know whether to thank or curse him.

In the late 1970s, the textile industry that had long propped up the economies of North and South Carolina and employed more than a million workers in each state took a couple of major hits.

First, on March 2, 1979, 20^th Century Fox Studios released director Martin Ritt’s "Norma Rae," a fictionalized account of the real-life struggle of Crystal Lee Sutton to unionize the J.P Stevens cotton mill in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, and to get her co-workers to join the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union.

The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture that year (losing to "Kramer vs. Kramer"), and Sally Field won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Sutton, a single mom with three children making $2.65 a hour folding towels at the plant who led the dangerous organizing campaign in notoriously anti-union North Carolina.

Then, the next year, the Charlotte Observer assigned a half-dozen reporters and four editors to investigate the textile industry in both states for a high incidences of byssinosis, a rare asthma-like respiratory disease caused by breathing dust particulates from unprocessed cotton.

Comparable to coal workers pneumoconiosis (CWP), or “black lung disease” among coal miners, the incurable affliction became known as “brown lung disease.” It was something plant operators, state and federal regulators chose to ignore for far too long.

On April 14, 1981, the Observer won the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service for its series “Brown Lung: A Case of Deadly Neglect,” a total of 22 articles and eight editorials that exposed the lack of industry control and concern for the health of its workers, many of whom sought disability compensation for lost wages after contracting the disease. It was the first of five Pulitzers the paper has won in its history.

Needless to say, the textile industry that provided more manufacturing jobs than any other industry in the two states at the time needed a major positive publicity boost, to take it back to the pre-World War II days when textiles accounted for 40 percent of the states' workforce.

So the N.C. Textile Manufacturers Association and the S.C. Textile Manufacturers Association came up with an idea: The Textile Bowl, pitting NC State and Clemson together in a college football game at the culmination of Textile Week in both states. They even got the Greenville, South Carolina,-based Textile Hall Corporation, the longtime promoter of the wildly popular Southern Textile Basketball Tournament, to provide a silver cup for the winner. The NCTMA and the SCTMA also kicked in $500 for each of the school’s textile scholarship funds.

At the time, both the biggest land grant universities in the two states were among a dozen institutions around the nation that had textile programs that offered a full range of textile degrees, from undergraduate to PhD., to improve the design and production of clothing goods and textile manufacturing.

The day before that inaugural game, hopes were high, as one industry official said, that both states were in “the early stages of a new textile revolution.”

Oh, how that prediction came true – but not in the way the industry leaders wanted. Despite and because of multiple interventions from federal leaders in Washington, the textile industry began a rapid decline throughout the 1980s, losing jobs to Asian manufacturers with low-cost goods and depressed labor costs. Hundreds of plants—particularly those that once employed my mom, many neighbors and parents of friends—closed in western North Carolina.

With the passage of the Canadian-U.S. Free Trade Agreement in 1988 and the North American Free-Trade Agreement in 1994—both created to eliminate trade barriers within the participating countries— textile manufacturing in both states cratered. In 2003, Fieldcrest-Cannon shut down Cannon Mills, the world's largest textile manufacturing plant, located in Kannapolis. Overnight, 5,000 employees lost their jobs.

When the Great Recession of 2007-09 hit, there seemed to be little hope of ever seeing textiles return as a viable economic sector in either state. Clemson shut down its textile school and folded its textile degree programs into departments within its engineering college, following the model of many other universities. It still does groundbreaking work in the field, but with a lesser commitment to having a college devoted to it.

That left NC State as the only university in the country with a school or college devoted solely to textile education and development, with more than 1,000 degree-seeking students enrolled annually.

Slowly, it has led the way in restoring the once-dominant industry through advanced technology.

Famously, A. Blanton Godfrey, former dean of NC State’s College of Textiles, said in 2012: “Norma Rae would have trouble getting a job [at a textile plant] today. But if she wants to sit at a computer terminal and program the reboot, that’s different. It’s a very different world.”

Higher transportation costs, tariffs and rising wages in China and other countries helped revive domestic interest in textiles, along with an emphasis on “Made In America” brands by big-box retailers.

In 2004, NC State even joined forces with UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke, six other research institutions and industry partners to create the North Carolina Research Campus on the site of the former Fieldcrest-Cannon manufacturing plant in Kannapolis. It is a thriving 350-acre research park devoted to studying human health through nutrition and developing safer, healthier foods.

In 2018, thanks to $28 million gift by Frederick “Fred” Eugene Wilson Jr. and three generations of the Wilson family, College of Textiles was renamed in their honor, becoming just the second named college at NC State.

The college is responsible for a modern resurgence of the textile industry, both in the state and nationally, thanks to a concentration on technological efficiency, sustainability and advancement, plus the development of the world’s first Nonwoven’s Institute. NC State is now a global leader in wearable technology. It even helped former Wolfpack football players in bringing new athletic products to the market.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in February 2020, the Wilson College of Textiles pivoted quickly to help companies increase production of personal protective equipment and continues to develop new and efficient processes. Now, North Carolina’s 600-plus textile and nonwoven manufacturing plants export a national leading $2 billion in goods and products and the Wilson College of Textiles churns out graduates and innovative ideas for industry partners.

But what about football? Wasn’t that the point of the Textile Bowl?

Program from the inaugural Textile Bowl

Well, 40 years ago this season, NC State jumped out to an early lead in the inaugural game, thanks to a 13-yard touchdown run by Larmount Lawson in the first quarter, the first rushing touchdown given up by the Tiger defense in its first seven games. Clemson rallied with 10 points in the second quarter, held the Wolfpack to just 63 yards of total offense in the second half and cruised to a 17-7 victory. It was the team's seventh consecutive victory en route to winning the school’s first of three football national championships.

[NOTE: Updated to reflect last year's 27-21 double-overtime win by NC State in Carter-Finley Stadium.] The Tigers, in recent years, have won 15 of the last 17 games in the series, which began back in 1899. They had won eight in a row prior to last year's loss in Carter-Finley Stadium. They own a 28-11 record in games branded as the Textile Bowl, but last year's win by the Wolfpack put the coveted Textile Bowl Cup back in Raleigh since that game.

The old rivals did not meet two years ago for the first time since 1969 and ’70, but the rivalry is now on track to continue until one of the two schools opts to move to another conference, if re-alignment ever actually happens.

Sure, Clemson has won most of the football in the rivalry, but NC State has taken an insurmountable lead in the textile industry’s revival.

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

The Ryder Cup at Kenan Stadium

UNC athletics photo from GoHeels.com

BY TIM PEELER

These are two unpublished sidebars to a story I did for the Greensboro News & Record prior to the 1999 US Open in Pinehurst. The primary piece is about how the contentious 1951 Ryder Cup brought an end to the once popular North & South Open, the professional version of the North & South Amateur that has been played for almost 120 years at Pinehurst No. 2. The first sidebar is about the British team's trip to see top-ranked Tennessee play North Carolina at Kenan Stadium, where a lavish welcome awaited all. They even served tea—not wine and cheese—to British journalists in the press box. Here is an account of that day from UNC football and state golf historian Lee Pace. The second sidebar is about American hero and Duke legend Skip Alexander and his miraculous performance in his Sunday match just over a year after he was the sole survivor of a Civil Air Patrol crash in Evansville, Ind.

CHAPEL HILL—When the Ryder Cup was played at Pinehurst in 1951, the PGA of America, which hosted the event, agreed not to play matches on Saturday, Nov. 3, because all the state's attention would be focused on the UNC-Tennessee football game played that day at Kenan Stadium.

In a gesture of good will, UNC invited the players from both the American and British teams to the football game, which the top-ranked and eventual national champion Volunteers won 27-0. Tailback Hank Lauricella rushed for two touchdowns and 150 yards, and threw another scoring pass as UT won its 16th consecutive game.

It was a courteous affair, with a big luncheon before the game with most of the British team members, but only a few Americans. British journalists were even served tea in the press box at half time.

Here are the thoughts of one writer, Desmond Hackett of the London Daily Express, on what he saw. He was little impressed with the action of the 42,000 spectators at the game. And to think, he's never even saw a game at the Smith Center.

"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 horse hair 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 and 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 1951 Ryder Cup Hero

The undoubted hero of the 1951 Ryder Cup matches was Stewart "Skip" Alexander, the former Duke golfer who survived a near-fatal plane crash a year before.

Alexander, thought to be a weak link on the American team because of his massive injuries, did not participate in Friday's Scotch foursomes, but did play on Sunday, rolling up an 8 and 7 triumph over John Panton despite still being bothered by the injuries he suffered in the crash.

Stewart "Skip" Alexander of Durham.

"The thing I remember most about the Ryder Cup, was seeing Skip Alexander on the driving range, hitting balls,'' said Harvie Ward, the famed amateur golfer who had just completed his collegiate career at UNC. "He had to wear gloves because of the injuries he had in that terrible airplane crash and every five or 10 minutes he would take those gloves off and the skin would come off with them.''

Alexander's hands bled throughout the match with Panton, yet Alexander's win was the largest margin of victory of the day for the Americans.

"I never thought he would play again,'' said Sam Snead, when introducing him at the awards ceremony.

Alexander was the lone survivor of a Sept. 24, 1950, crash of a Civil Air Patrol plane near Evansville, Ind. He suffered serious burns on his legs, head and hands and a crushed ankle that eventually ended his professional golf career because he could no longer walk the course as he played.

In all, Alexander had 17 surgeries at Duke, including the removal of three knuckles and a procedure that permanently curved his left hand so he could hold a golf club.

He eventually became the head pro at Lakewood Golf Club in St. Petersburg, Florida, a course he played the day before he died on Oct. 24, 1997, at the age of 79. A member of the North Carolina Sports, Carolinas Golf and Duke halls of fame, Alexander is buried in Durham.