Saturday, October 19, 2024

A 12,000-mile Transcontinental Disaster

 

A News & Observer photo of the Wolfpack's departure for the school's longest road trip on record.

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BY TIM PEELER, © 2024

The only way to describe NC State’s first transcontinental road trip is “disastrous,” especially for a coach, Everett Case, who had known nothing but success in his first two seasons as leader of Wolfpack men’s basketball.

To be honest, he thought it would be a good idea for his experienced group of World War II veterans, led by All-America guard Dick Dickey and budding star Sam Ranzino, to play nine road games in 23 days in the transition weeks between 1948 and ‘49, the first time any Wolfpack team traveled to the West Coast for varsity competition.

During a 12,000-mile holiday barnstorming tour, the deep and talented team, ranked in the Top 5 of several college polls of the time, had the chance to dip their toes in Lake Tahoe, the San Francisco Bay, the Pacific Ocean, Lake Erie and the Hudson River.

The six-state nationwide tour took Case’s squad to some of the country’s most famous facilities, from the Cow Palace in San Francisco to Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles to Madison Square Garden in New York.

As neighboring North Carolina was preparing to send its football team to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl, State sent 11 basketball players, Case, assistant coach Carl “Butter” Anderson, athletics publicity director Ed Storey, a team doctor, team trainer Al Crawford and athletics director Roy Clogston boarded a turbo-prop plane at the old Raleigh Municipal Airport. It was early morning Dec. 18, only a few hours after the Pack whipped Pittsburgh, 77-42, at Duke Indoor Stadium. At the time, the Wolfpack played its home games at Raleigh’s Memorial Auditorium, which seated only 3,800 for basketball, because on-campus Thompson Gymnasium had been closed once for overcrowding in 1947 and condemned for basketball in 1948.

Those latter two points were one of the main reasons Case took his team West: he was looking for national opponents willing to come to Raleigh when he opened the school’s gleaming 12,400-seat, on-campus arena that was due to open at the start of the 1949-50 season.

Click to enlarge.
It was called Reynolds Coliseum.

The holiday jaunt was supposed to be a grand publicity tour, to make the Wolfpack a household name in the college basketball community and to entice national teams to plan trips to Raleigh for a holiday tournament Case was planning for NC State’s new arena.

However, the transcontinental business trip was absolutely exhausting and humiliating for a team coming off a 28-3 record and its second consecutive Southern Conference championship. It produced the first three-game losing streak of Case’s tenure, something that didn’t happen again until 1960.

Despite a pair of victories at Nevada, Case had a messy breakup with player Eddie Bartels in Reno, which proudly called itself “The Divorce Capital of the World” throughout the 20th century in all of its promotional materials.

First, however, the 1948-49 team had to survive a difficult “Reno Cure” (the polite name for divorce back then), a handful of injuries to Dickey and unfamiliar officiating. The plane ride to Reno, with stops in St. Louis and Denver for refueling, caused more than a little air sickness among the players, particularly Warren “Wimpy” Cartier.

Junior guard Joe Harand was not on the trip for the first five games and the loss of Bartels, a 6-foot-5 guard and All-Southern Conference performer as a sophomore, hit harder than anyone believed. Sometime between beating Nevada’s Wolf Pack on back-to-back nights in Reno and taking the team to San Francisco, Case received a negative report the number of times Bartels, who had scored 13 points in State’s earlier win over Pitt, cut class during the fall semester.

No sooner than the team landed in San Francisco for the next leg of the trip, Case kicked Bartels off the team, put him on a train for a 2,850-mile ride home to Raleigh and told him he was on his own to get back to his hometown on Long Island. Though Bartels had eligibility remaining, he never returned to the Wolfpack program, but did eventually play two years in the NBA.

“He had been warned previously that he must stand by the rules set up for the team on this trip,” Case said. “He refused to obey the rules and have simply done the only thing that I could do.”

After Case was hit with a pair of technical fouls in the first game against Nevada for arguing backcourt violations — a high school, college and professional rule that was instituted because of Case’s full-court, four-corners offense during his Indiana high school coaching career — and the interpretations of the block-charge rule, he criticized the version of the game played on the other side of the Rocky Mountains.

“Perhaps it is an accepted practice to allow blocking and screening out here but it is certainly in direct violation of the rulebook,” Case said.

Three-time All-America Dick Dickey.
To make matters worse, Dickey suffered a charley horse that slowed him down on the West Coast, where he had been a wartime standout for the St. Mary’s Pre-Flight in San Francisco. He never fully recovered the rest of the season, as he averaged a career-low 11.8 points per game, though he did repeat as a first-team All-Southern Conference selection and as an honorable mention All-America pick.

The team from North Carolina’s cow college should have been comfortable playing in the San Francisco’s famed Cow Palace but it was a bit battered and tired when it played the Dons of San Francisco. Dickey was held to three field goals and no one for NC State scored in double figures in the 54-47 loss.

“They never gave the cagers from Raleigh a minute’s peace,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle. “The score doesn’t even begin to indicate the way they controlled the ball game after the first 10 minutes. Nor does it reveal that USF didn’t even try to score in the last four minutes when it just played keep away.”

USF’s defense received most of the credit for the win and the Dons continued to play well enough the rest of the season to win the 1949 National Invitation Tournament, which at the time was more prestigious than the NCAA championship.

From San Francisco, the Wolfpack took a train to Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, a lonely trek for the small traveling party. Most of the players were war veterans who were married, some with children. They woke up on Christmas Day at a hotel on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, had a short workout at George Pepperdine College and then attended a party at the Pig’N’Whistle’s Melody Lane Café, thrown by Case’s old Indiana friend Jonas Fritch.

The next day, the Pack scrimmaged the varsity squad from Southern California in an attempt to shake off their holiday calories and road weariness.

Case and 1950 SoCon MVP Sam Ranzino.
The physical and emotional toll forced Case to sharpen his coaching skills by relying differently on 6-11 giant center Bob Hahn, wiry sophomore Ranzino and step-in senior guard Jack McComas, as he readied his team for a difficult Southern Conference schedule in January. With Dickey slowed by injuries, another Indiana boy, sophomore forward Sammy Ranzino, begin to emerge as a scorer for Case’s team.

Those adjustments did not work in the second-annual Los Angeles Invitational Tournament, a lavish three-day affair that brought eight national teams in for a West Coast showplace, exactly the kind of holiday event Case wanted to bring to Raleigh. The other schools participating were defending champion Marshall, host Pepperdine, Loyola of California (now Loyola-Marymount), Wyoming, Hamline College, Brigham Young and Montana.

However, Case was not happy with the team’s draw of Wyoming’s Cowboys, a surprise winner of the 1943 NCAA title and a well-established program under Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame coach Everett Shelton. In a low-scoring nailbiter as part of a tripleheader at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, the Pack led for only one brief moment (15-14) in the deliberately played game and the Cowboys took a 41-39 victory that sent the Wolfpack into the loser’s bracket.

The next night, the games moved to Lions’ Gymnasium on Loyola’s campus, and the Pack had no luck against the homestanding team. With Dickey sitting out the first half because of his bruised thigh, Loyola took a 36-31 lead. In a bit of a desperate act, Case pulled Dickey off the bench and as hm to work some magic. As teammate Ranzino scored 18 points, Dickey added 12.

Trailing by two points with four seconds to play, Dickey raced down to get a game-tying shot, which swished through the basket, but after the gun sounded to end the game.

Because of the two quick losses and projected bad weather in Cleveland, Case took everyone to the airport a day early, canceling a team trip to see Northwestern play California in the 1949 Rose Bowl.

“The boys may be a little homesick and the trip a bit too long, but I believe we have played good basketball,” Case said after the two losses. “I think we’ll be better at Cleveland.”

In the Forest City, Case and his team waited for an hour for a bus to pick them up at the hotel to take them to The Arena, an old hockey ice rink that often hosted college basketball games. Eventually, the coach stuffed everyone in cabs and raced to the game just in time for tipoff.

The Pack handily defeated the Golden Griffins of Canisius on a court placed on top of the arena’s ice, but that wasn’t the end of their frozen toes on the trip. A lake-effect snowstorm dumped nine inches of snow on Cleveland, forcing Case to cancel the team’s charter flight for the next leg of the trip, an appearance at New York’s Madison Square Garden for a North-South doubleheader that featured North Carolina playing New York University and the Wolfpack facing Long Island University.

Instead, the Pack took an eight-hour train to the basketball capital of the world, a location where Case always had a tough time succeeding. The Tar Heels lost badly to NYU, 72-48. Case’s team jumped out to a 22-5 lead in the second game but faded badly down the stretch in a 65-61 defeat, its fourth loss on the road trip.

Traveling by train to Philadelphia, Case and his team met its most difficult opponent of the trip, playing on unbeaten and Top 10 Villanova’s Main Line Field House. State led 57-55 with five minutes to play after a set jumper by a little-used reserve from Indianapolis named Norman Sloan.

Main Liners Paul Arizin and Tom Sabol took over the final moments of the game and the 62-59 loss left Case’s team with a 6-6 overall record, the last time a Case didn’t have a winning record until the beginning of the 1959-60 season, when a national gambling scandal decimated the roster of both the Wolfpack and North Carolina.

The loss was bad enough, but Dickey also suffered his second significant injury of the trip, a broken nose while scrambling for a loose ball. The media who had largely fawned over Case in his first two seasons at State openly wondered if his burgeoning dynasty had been overhyped.

“We do believe that it is too early to draw any definite conclusions that the Wolfpack’s days of greatness are over,” suggested the Raleigh News & Observer’s Dick Herbert, a longtime Case ally. “There is some speculation that the forced dismissal of guard Eddie Bartels from the squad because of infractions of the training rules is having a greater effect on the squad than was anticipated.

“It is true that Bartels, when he was playing up to his capabilities, was one of the most valuable members of the squad, but it is also true that he started the season as a second-stringer and that the squad it deep enough in talent to find an adequate replacement for him.

“The Southern Conference teams which may be licking their lips over the prospect of the loop’s champions would do well to postpone their anticipation. When the Wolfpack gets back to Raleigh and the players have a chance to settle down after their extended trip of 12,000 miles, the State team probably will roar through the opposition just as it did the last year and the year before.”

Case promised he would never undertake such an extended trip again.

“I am sure of one thing: From now on, there will be no long trips,” Case told Herbert. “We won’t go on the road for more than two or three days. Next season, we will have to coliseum and teams can come here to play.

“If we have 24 games on the schedule, 16 of them will be at home.”

Battered, bruised and baffled by losing five of the last six games on the extended road trip, the Wolfpack returned to Raleigh on Jan. 10 to prepare for its second Southern Conference game of the season — against Davidson on the road in Charlotte. With Dickey out of the lineup, the Wolfpack still managed to take a 64-47 road victory, thanks to 20 points from center Paul Horvath and 17 from McComas.

Case, the most well-traveled person in NC State history until Jim Valvano showed up in Raleigh, was weary but optimistic after his team beat the Wildcats.

“Yep, the trip was plenty tiring, riding all day, playing that night, getting up the next morning and doing it all over again,” Case told Herman Helms of the Charlotte News. “’Course, we knew that when we arranged it. But we just wanted to get the school a little recognition and get those teams down here to meet us next year.

“[Our spirit] is good. The players have been a little upset over the way things have gone, of course. But we’re back home now, and I think they’re going to be okay from now on.”

Two nights later, the Pack lost its first home game of the season, 71-70, to Louisville.

There was still some turmoil on the team. Hahn narrowly missed a call by the U.S. Army for mandatory military service, Sloan left the team in order to try out for football and the 24-year-old Army veteran McComas wondered if it was time to give up playing college basketball so he could sign a professional baseball contract. (He did.)

But the Wolfpack got hot in late January and played that way for the rest of the season, winning 16 of its final 17 contests, including 11 in a row en route to its third consecutive Southern Conference regular-season and tournament titles. It did not play in either the NIT or NCAA tournaments, which only invited eight teams, but Case and his team learned some lessons.

The next season, playing in its sparkling new home, the Wolfpack won 27 games, suffered just six losses, won another conference title, received the first NCAA bid in school history and advanced to the semifinals at Madison Square Garden.

Saturday, September 21, 2024

NC State's Football Rivalry With Clemson

 

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BY TIM PEELER, © 2024

NC State and Clemson have met 91 previous times before today’s noon kickoff in Death Valley, a rivalry known since 1981 as the Textile Bowl.

There’s a deeper, richer history to the rivalry that dates back to 1899, when the two teams met in Rock Hill, S.C., on a weekend that the N.C. A&M also played Davidson.

I’ve written about more of those games than I imagined, so I collected a handful of stories that include big wins, big losses and close games.

Overall, it’s a pretty good snapshot of what this rivalry between two land-grant universities in neighboring states has been like through the years.

2024:    Past True-Freshman Performances
2022:    The Biggest Game in NC State Football History (podcast)
2011:    Wolfpack Rolls with 27 Second-Quarter Points
2010:    Clemson Holds Off Pack for 14-13 Win
               Avoid the Poison, O’Brien Says
2009:    Spiller Leads Clemson to 43-23 Win
2002:    Extending an Undefeated Start
1988:    Bulletin Board Material
1986:    An Upset to Remember
1980:    Kicking off the Textile Bowl
1979:    An ACC-Winning Goal-Line Stand
               GoPack.com
               Remembering Bo Rein
1965:    ‘It Was a Weird Year’ for an ACC Title
1963-80: NC State’s 11 Wins in 15 Games Vs. Clemson
1959:    Clemson-NC State Football in a Hurricane
1932:    Ruby Ray Rex Outruns Clemson’s Best
1928:    The Whole Town is a Giddy Whirl
1899:    Two Games in the Same Weekend

Friday, September 20, 2024

'Ruby' Ray Rex Outruns Clemson's Best

NC State vs. Clemson (1934) with Ray Rex in the backfield.
(Agromeck photo.)



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BY TIM PEELER, © 2024

Ray Rex made a split-second decision on the afternoon of Oct. 8, 1932, in the southwest endzone of NC State’s Riddick Stadium.

The burly 6-1, 210-pound fullback and defensive back with the fastest feet on campus couldn’t possibly process all the information in front of him, but he knew that the Wolfpack’s game against Clemson was tied, 0-0, and the Tigers were on the verge of taking the lead in the important Southern Conference contest.

On fourth-and-3 from the 5-yard line, Rex found himself standing between Clemson quarterback Bob Miller’s pass and Tiger receiver Henry Woodward’s hands. If there was ever a need for a big play in front of the hometown crowd of 6,500 spectators, this was it.

If he knocked it down, under football rules of the time, it would have been a touchback and the Wolfpack would take over at the 20-yard-line.

If he caught it and was tackled in the end zone, it would be a safety. Two points might just have been the difference in a game between two evenly matched opponents, coached by College Football Hall of Fame inductees John “Clipper” Smith of State and Jess Neeley of Clemson.

If the caught it and was tackled deep in his own territory, it would have been difficult for Wolfpack quarterback George McQuage and his speedy backfield to get out of such a hole on a day when McQuage did not complete a pass and the offense made only three first downs. (Clemson was hardly any better, as Miller threw 13 passes, had six intercepted, six fall incomplete and three caught for 41 yards.)

What to do?

Rex, a four-sport collegiate standout from Decatur, Illinois, who eventually played three professional sports, was quick with his feet, but he didn’t have time to fully process all of his choices. He let his instincts kick in. He grabbed the ball out of the air—the second of the six interceptions the Wolfpack had that afternoon—and took off down the sidelines.

He sidestepped Woodward and made it through a knot of wandering offensive linemen. He sprinted down the home-team sideline of Riddick’s unlit stadium, with only quarterback Miller on his heels. The two started racing at midfield, but Rex was a certified sprinter with 10-second speed in the 100-yard dash and he ran the final 25 yards completely unopposed.

“As he neared the goal line the big State fullback nonchalantly waved his right hand at the players he’d left behind him,” reported Raleigh’s News & Observer. “Perhaps he was waving at his own mates.”

Perhaps.

The home crowd of white shirts and ties in the stands went as crazy as they could at the small stadium, though they were dampened a bit by a missed extra point.

“The world loves a gambler—when he wins,” N&O sports editor Anthony McKevlin wrote after the game.

Ray Rex won 11 varsity letters in three seasons.

The Wolfpack held its 6-0 lead until nine minutes remaining in the game when Rex’s backfield running mate Mope Cumisky ran the ball in from 1-yard out, a touchdown set up by yet another Clemson interception. The game ended with a 13-0 Wolfpack victory and was an important part of the 6-1-2 overall record and 3-1-1 Southern Conference mark, which put the Wolfpack in sixth place in the unbalanced 23-team league’s final standings.

Rex’s touchdown, even today, doesn’t have an exact measurement. Newspaper accounts of the day had his return at 101 yards. NC State’s records say it was 102 yards, a mark surpassed only by Howard Turner’s 105-yard touchdown return in 1946. His hall-of-fame plaque back home says it was 103 yards.

Since 1941, however, the NCAA has limited return yardage on kickoffs, punts, interceptions, fumbles and missed field goals to 100 yards. The last length-of-the-field interception return by an NC State defender was in 2001, when freshman cornerback Marcus Hudson went 100 yards in a 55-31 victory at Duke.

That didn’t matter to Raymond Roy “Ruby” Rex, who went on to win the 1935 Alumni Athletic Award after a three-year career as running back, basketball guard, baseball outfielder and track-and-field’s shot putter, discus thrower and sprinter. He won eight varsity letters in his final two years, 11 in all. He was named to the SoCon All-Conference football team three consecutive seasons.

"He looked like what you had in mind when you said ‘athlete,’” wrote Furman Bisher of the Atlanta Journal. “He played everything that was legal on campus.”

Rex graduated with a degree in business administration, but immediately returned to the fields of competition. He played one season of professional football with the NFL’s Boston Redskins and three years of minor league baseball in Columbia, South Carolina, and Nova Scotia, Canada. He spent two years playing professional basketball in Norfolk, Virginia.

Rex’s life after sports was similarly remarkable after he returned to Illinois, where he was considered one of the finest athletes in state history. He had been all-state in football and basketball there and helped Decatur High School win its first ever state championship.

He was drafted into the United States Army’s 72nd Signal Corps Company, beginning his overseas service in Africa before moving on to Italy.

On June 6, 1944, the 31-year-old sergeant was one of the 34,000 American men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, the most daring and dangerous 100-yard dash of Rex’s life.

Perhaps he looked back and waved at his mates as he scrambled up the beachhead. Then again, he might have been waving to his opponents.

Rex spent the next 14 months advancing towards Germany before being discharged from the Army in September 1945 after 27 months of intense overseas duty.

After the war, he returned to his hometown, where he served as a city electrician for a while and a patrolman in the city police department for more than two decades. He was a regular in the recreational softball leagues. After an unsuccessful run for sheriff in 1947, he was eventually elected to the position for two terms in 1970-76.

Shortly after his reelection campaign, Rex was diagnosed with colon cancer and died on March 17, 1976, at the age of 63.

He was posthumously elected into the Basketball Museum of Illinois’ Hall of Fame in 1977.

Thursday, September 5, 2024

When NC State Invited Tennessee to Its Happy Jubilee

 

NC State running back goes around end againt Tennessee.


If you enjoy reading "One Brick Back" and would like to help offset research expenses for stories such as this one, please make a small donation to the cause or donate at @timpeeler on Venmo to keep posts like this free of ads.


By TIM PEELER, © 2024

The week of Sept. 29, 1939, was unlike any other in NC State College history. It was the plucky little school’s Golden Jubilee, a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Oct. 3, 1889, opening of the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, as it was originally called.

And the best college football team in the nation was on its way over the Great Smokey Mountains by train to face the Wolfpack at Raleigh’s Riddick Stadium.

Defending national champion Tennessee, under the guidance of Robert Neyland, had recorded the first of three consecutive undefeated regular seasons in 1938 and beat Oklahoma 17-0 in the Orange Bowl, a team that is still regarded as one of the three best in college football history. This was the middle of Neyland’s three tenures at Tennessee, back when the College Football Hall of Fame coach known these days to everyone in Knoxville as “The General” was still only a major.

If anything, Neyland’s 1939 team was even better than the year before. It was the last team in NCAA football history to not allow a point during the entire regular season, part of a 17-game, 71-quarter shutout streak that are both still NCAA records.

And they started the ’39 season in Raleigh, arriving on Thursday morning on “The Volunteer Special,” a chartered train that carried a traveling squad of 37 players, 10 coaches and support personnel, and some 500 half-bear, other-half-cat fans. Somewhere as they straddled the North Carolina-Tennessee stateline, they might have seen the actual Rocky Top knob of Thunderhead Mountain (elevation 5,441 feet) that they have sung about since the early 1970s.

That was a long-anticipated week for the agricultural and technical school in the North Carolina capital. Fifty years before, it had opened its doors to the state’s agrarian and manufacturing population, ripping land-grant college status from the longer-established University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, an unforced turnover that has never been fully forgiven by the classicists in Orange County.

A large celebration was in order, despite the ominous happenings on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, where both Germany and the Soviet Union had both just invaded Poland and Europe was on a collision course to World War II.

On Thursday of that week, however, there was a campus-wide pep rally, broadcast live on radio station WPTF-AM with no thoughts that both schools would soon be sending their best and brightest into harm's way before too long. There were Homecoming festivities planned, welcoming back a half century of alumni and faculty, plus all the current students. Four of the first graduates in the Class of 1893 were on hand, including initial enrollee Walter J. Mathews of Goldsboro.

The Dean of Administration, Col. John W. Harrelson, was standing guard to welcome anyone who wanted to celebrate with him.

Both the football stadium and the basketball gymnasium were decorated red-and-white and orange-and-white, the colors of the two opposing schools in the football game in their first meeting since 1911.

Technician, NC State’s student paper, published a commemorative 50-page edition detailing the history of the school, including a comprehensive athletics summary. History professor David A. Lockmiller published a 255-page book about the school’s founding and development, from a simple idea of the Watauga Club to a thriving campus on the outskirts of Raleigh.

There was a Homecoming Dance planned for after the 3 p.m. Friday game, with all of Tennessee’s players and coaches invited to attend. The Duke Ambassadors, a famous swing band that began at the Durham college and went on to serve as the touring band for Doris Day and Bob Hope, were the featured performers.

Just so things didn’t get out of hand, NC State’s football staff, athletics administrators and student support staff were on hand after the game to serve as chaperones.

Homecoming decorations.
The crescendo of the celebration was on the Tuesday morning following the game, when NC State alum, ex-football captain and former governor of North Carolina O. Max Gardner, addressed administration, dignitaries and students at Pullen Hall, exactly 50 years after the doors of the college opened. Gardner, one of four N.C. governors produced in the school’s history, had also spoken at the 25th anniversary in 1914.

Raleigh Mayor Graham H. Andrews had declared Oct. 3 “State College Day” and Gov. Clyde Hoey (Gardner's brother-in-law), UNC System President Frank Porter Graham and Duke President William B. Pew were all on hand to celebrate the semicentennial accomplishments of the maturing school.

To be honest, though, the football game played at recently completed Riddick Stadium was the biggest deal of the entire celebration, drawing a near-sellout of about 14,000 fans. (Riddick Field opened in 1906, added its first concrete grandstands in 1918 and added a section per year until the Great Depression. Construction was completed at the same time as the Memorial Tower, by the federal works programs the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration.)

Neyland agreed to open his team’s national championship defense as a favor to NC State coach Williams “Doc” Newton, who had been an assistant on Neyland’s 1931 team. That’s the same year Tennessee produced its third consensus All-America player, a guard still considered one of the best in program history.

That player, Herman Hickman, was now an assistant coach on Newton’s 1939 Wolfpack staff. Walter “Babe” Wood, hero of the Volunteers’ Orange Bowl victory over Oklahoma to end the 1938 season, had just been hired by Newton as an assistant coach for the Wolfpack freshman team. (Another Tennessee legend, Bettie Feathers, would later become NC State's head football coach.)

The coaching staffs, if not the players, were quite familiar with each other, well enough at least to play some mind games in the papers leading up to the contest. Tennessee suggested its star halfback George “Bad News” Cafego might not play because of a phantom knee injury and NC State floated that its top two guards and top two backs were also suffering. In fact, halfback John Savini was in the school infirmary with “a severe case of boils.”

Newton revealed to the Raleigh papers that he had some special practices to defend one of Tennessee’s greatest strengths.

“Tennessee has a bad habit of running back punts and putting the ball into a fine scoring situation,” Newton said on Tuesday before the game. “We’re going to take every precaution against these boys getting that kind of an advantage.”

As it turned out, the Volunteers had virtually no punt return yards in the game, but on the opening kickoff of the much-anticipated contest, Tennessee captain Sam Bartholomew caught the ball on the 14-yard-line and dashed 80 yards through the middle of the field before being knocked out of bounds by State’s Dick East at the 6-yard line.

Three plays later, halfback Box Foxx, went around the end for the game’s first touchdown. Savini, exposed boils and all, blocked the extra point, leaving Tennessee with a 6-0 lead two minutes into the game.

On its third drive, Tennessee had Cafego, one of the greatest pre-WWII players in college football history, carry the ball five times on six plays to gain 51 yards. He then threw an 18-yard pass to substitute back Breezer Andridge to account for the Volunteers’ second touchdown of the day, just nine minutes into the game.

While it looked like the rout was about to be on, nothing much else happened in the game. NC State had a first down in each of the last three quarters, but that was about all it had to brag about against the most stubborn defense in the history of college football.

The 13-0 loss was a victory of sorts for Newton’s Wolfpack, which played 17 sophomores in the game and didn’t give up anything of significance after the first nine minutes. Despite the leadership of quarterback Art Rooney and the play of All-America end Ed “Ty” Coon, the Wolfpack finished the season with a miserable 2-8 record, its only wins against Davidson and Furman.

That jubilee celebration game was the third meeting between the two largest schools of neighboring Southern states from 1893-1939. Remarkably, there has been only one meeting since, the 2012 Chick-Fil-A Kickoff Game at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, a game Tennessee captured 35-21.