Spindly as a Spider: Jack McDowall Made His Hall of Fame Debut vs. Richmond

Jack McDowall was posthumously elected into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1975. At a regular-season game against Florida, his family was invited to celebrate the award. Pictured here, left to right are Rudolph Pate, Vice Chancellor for Foundations and Development; Dick Herbert, Executive Secretary of the American Football Coaches Association; Mrs. Sally McDowall; Fred "Tubby" Logan, Captain of the 1926 Football Team; and the McDowalls' daughter, Sally F. Blake. The Wolfpack beat the Gators, 8-7.

 

© Tim Peeler, 2026

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The only previous time NC State opened its home football season on a Friday night against Richmond, as it will this week at Carter-Finley Stadium, the Wolfpack found a star.

In fact, he became one of the biggest names in the history of the football program, plastered between the upper and lower decks in a stadium where he never played.

He was a kid from Florida who was deemed too small to play for the Gators. They wouldn’t even talk to him. One day, while McDowall loitered around the pool hall in his hometown of Newberry, Florida, a traveler from North Carolina stopped in as asked if he would be willing to move to the Old North State to play high school football.

McDowall had nothing else to do, so he said "sure." He moved into a boarding house in the Richmond County town of Rockingham and helped the local high school to a runner-up finish in the 1923 eastern state championship. He went back to Florida with the hopes of getting a favorable look from the Gators, but they weren’t interested.

In 1924, NC State freshman team coach Gus Tebell convinced McDowall to come to Raleigh, perhaps because Tebell watched McDowall, as a Rockingham High senior, throw a 25-yard touchdown pass in a 7-3 victory to beat the NC State freshmen the year before.

Tebell took over as head varsity coach in 1925 and the first game of his tenure was at old Riddick Field against Richmond’s Spiders, a team that State had beaten in all seven games of a rivalry that dated back to 1895.

Both teams were rather unknown going into the opener. Richmond had lost six starters that still had eligibility. State, with little history of success, was welcoming its eighth new coach in the span of 11 years.

The game was supposed to be played on Saturday, Sept. 26, but was moved up a day so it wouldn’t conflict with the North Carolina-Wake Forest game at Emerson Field in Chapel Hill.

McDowall earned a starting position from the outset and lined up at left halfback beside senior Johnny Jennette, voted "best looking man on campus" and known as a pretty good running back.

No one knew what to expect from McDowall, who was a legitimately great athlete but still an unknown quantity in Raleigh. When the Wolfpack intercepted a pass early in the game, McDowall and Jennette lined up in the backfield and looked like contenders for real players for a squad that managed just a 2-6-2 record the year before under one-year coach Buck Shaw.

On its second possession, State’s Charlie Shuford plunged 1 yard into the end zone for the first score and McDowall converted the extra point with a pass to captain A.A. Johnston.

Taking over, McDowall was responsible for State’s final two scores in the 20-0 victory, a 5-yard pass to Jennette and a 10-yard pass to Walter Shuford, Charlie’s brother.

McDowall set up field position for the final touchdown with a 75-yard kickoff return down the sidelines that was a precursor for earning his longtime college football nickname of “Spindle Legs.”

The headline in the next day’s News & Observer: “State Uncovers Brilliant Young Man in Jack McDowall, of Rockingham.” The NC State student newspaper called him: “The fast-stepping halfback from Rockingham.”

State finished the season just 3-5-1 but two years later, in McDowall’s final season, Tebell’s team won the only Southern Conference football championship in school history. McDowall was the team’s MVP, an All-Southern selection and the winner of the Norris Athletic Trophy as the school’s top-performing athlete. He was recognized as the top athlete in the school’s first 50 and first 75 years of athletics.

After spending 30 years as an administrator at Rollins College in his home state, McDowall was elected to the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame (1965), the College Football Hall of Fame (1975) and the NC State Athletic Hall of Fame (2014).

And it all started with a Friday night home-opener against Richmond.

 

Here’s a feature story about McDowall from a 2014 issue of The Wolfpacker, when he was inducted into the NC State Athletic Hall of Fame.

BY TIM PEELER

© Coman Publishing, 2014 

RALEIGH, N.C. – One afternoon on the dusty backroads of central Florida, Jack McDowall was at a gas station playing pool with friends. The spindly legged halfback had completed his high school football career and chose not to go back for any more classes.

Out of the blue, someone from Rockingham, N.C., possibly out-of-state high school coach Shorty Lawrence, stopped to get gas. Whether the stranger was a recruiter, a bird dog or just someone who knew about the skinny kid from Newberry, Fla., isn’t exactly clear. But the guy offered McDowall room and board, plus $25 a week if he would move to North Carolina and play football one more year at Rockingham High School.

Longtime Rollins College administrator, Jack McDowell. 

McDowall, who came from an abusive home, didn’t need convincing. He sneaked out of his bedroom window in the middle of the night and headed north for athletic glory.

“They recruited in high school back then,” McDowall explained in a newspaper feature. “I stayed in a boarding house in Rockingham and the people there treated me fine.”

After helping Rockingham High finish second in the 1923 eastern state finals, McDowall went back to his homestate hoping to play for Florida, but the Gator coaching staff thought he was too small. He was lured back to NC State College to play freshman ball in 1924 and he went on to become the most successful student-athlete in the school’s first three quarters of a century. His accomplishments are largely unknown by fans who get their new via videos and social media.

Mostly all that remains of his accomplishments – he twice won all-Southern Conference honors in football, basketball and baseball -- are on the yellowed newspapers of a scrapbook that now belongs to his grandson. But now that he has been elected into the NC State Athletic Hall of Fame, his name will be etched into the granite of history.

All because he was found in a pool hall while playing hooky from school. For years after he became a successful athlete, coach and administrator, every time he passed by a filling station and saw directionless loiterers, he would say: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

There’s never been an athlete at NC State quite like John Witherspoon McDowall. A multi-sport star, he did a little of everything, and excelled at all of them.

He was captain and star of NC State’s only Southern Conference football champion (1927). He also played basketball under football/basketball coach Gus Tebell. (As a sophomore basketball player in 1925, he scored a buzzer-beater in a 28-27 victory over Duke.) He was a member of the baseball team, but double-timed in the spring as a member of the track and field team, often leaving the baseball field in his uniform to do his high jump, then return for his turn at bat.

In 1928, he set the state record in the high jump – 6-feet, 1-1/4-inches – a record that was expected to last a long, long time.

“He was one of those ‘Saturday Athletes,’” Tebell once said of McDowall. “He never exerted himself during the week in practice, but he did unbelievable things in a pinch. I have coached many fine athletes, but I never saw one who could touch him.”

The Norris Cup, a precursor to the Alumni Athletics Trophy, was an award voted on by the students for the top student-athlete on State College’s campus. McDowall, who won it in 1927 and ’28, is the only person to win it twice.

In 1927, the most successful season in NC State football history until Earle Edwards arrived in the early 1950s, McDowall returned to his native state to face Florida, the hometown school that didn’t bother to recruit him. It was a chance for personal redemption in a couple of ways, since it was the only time in his life that McDowall’s father ever saw him play college football.

In the game, McDowall threw a touchdown pass and returned an interception 75 yards for a touchdown, both scores in the Wolfpack’s 12-6 upset in Tampa. The win propelled the Pack to its only Southern Conference football title thanks to a perfect 4-0 league record.

McDowall helped solidify that trophy with a pair of 65-yard runs against Davidson in Greensboro. Tebell’s Pack won its final eight games that season to finish 9-1 overall.

McDowall left school in 1928 to take a head coaching position at Asheville High School, though he kept in touch with the folks in Raleigh since his younger brother Luke also played football at the school. In his lone season in Asheville, his football team won nine of 10 games and his basketball team won 21 consecutive contests.

He returned to Florida in 1929 to become the head football coach at Rollins College in Winter Park. He was barely older than the players he coached, many of whom he recruited from the mountains of North Carolina.

“He bought a big house near the campus, with lots of different bedrooms,” said McDowall’s grandson Mason Blake, an attorney in Melbourne, Fla. “They all lived there with him and my grandmother and helped them raise my mother.

“He always prided himself on the relationships he developed as a coach and was always very proud of the accomplishments of his players.”

McDowall spent three decades as the football coach, physical education teacher and athletics director at Rollins. He earned a master’s degree from Duke and became a professor of psychology at Rollins. He retired from active teaching in 1956, but remained part of the campus community until his death in 1969.

He served as lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during World War II and was elected to several political positions in Orange County (Fla.).

In 1965, he became the first NC State graduate and second Wolfpack representative elected to the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, a year after legendary basketball coach Everett Case was part of the hall’s second class. In 1975, the halfback known as “Spindle Legs” was voted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

Sally, the daughter raised by McDowall's players in the family boarding house, had three children: two sons who live in Florida and a daughter who lives in Tennessee.

“We couldn’t be happier that he has been honored by NC State,” Mason Blake said. “The school meant so much to him because of the opportunity it provided.”

Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.

The Babe in North Carolina Woods

 

Camp Bryan hunting buddies (left to right): William Blades Jr., Fred Sutton, Carl Goerch, Babe Ruth and John Kieran. (Photo courtesy of the Fred I. Sutton Papers, East Carolina manuscript collection, J.Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University.)

NOTE: 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 and help keep posts like this free of ads.

© Tim Peeler, 2026

As most people know, Babe Ruth hit his first professional home run in Fayetteville, N.C. There’s even a highway marker that commemorates the event from March 7, 1914.

It might be the least interesting thing the Babe ever did in the Old North State, which he visited frequently as a player, a hunter and a consumer, on at least one occasion, of a 40-pound wild pig.

He lived big here, and once reportedly died here.

Ruth is most frequently associated with the good people of Cumberland County, which gleefully basks in the honor of hosting his first professional home run at the Cape Fear Fairgrounds Park in an exhibition game during 1914 spring training.

“I hit it as I hit all the others, by taking a good gander at the pitch as it came up to the plate, twisting my body into a backswing and then hitting it as hard as I could swing.” Ruth said in his later years. “I got to some bigger places than Fayetteville after that, but darn few as exciting.”

The thing the roadside marker doesn’t tell you — and the tidbit that Fayetteville is loath to accept — is that Ruth’s big bash came in a Baltimore Orioles intrasquad game that needed five local sportswriters filling spots in the lineup because there weren’t enough paid players on hand to fill out two rosters.

Before the Babe: George Herman Ruth in 1914.
(Photo from the Fayetteville Observer.)

 

At the time, Ruth was an oversized kid in his first minor league season who mostly took an interest in riding the elevator in the old downtown LaFayette Hotel, a hobby that, combined with his legal adoption by Baltimore manager Jack Dunn, made his slightly envious teammates to call him “Dunn’s newest babe.”

The nickname stuck like a Sandhills sandspur.

Ruth, who was signed out of an orphanage in Baltimore, was legally adopted by Dunn to keep the often rowdy young pitcher with his hometown team, then a minor league franchise, and officially hands off from everyone else.

The story about Ruth’s first home run has been turned into North Carolina lore, but it barely scratches the surface of the Bambino’s association with the state.

Ruth’s career — and life — almost ended at the Asheville train depot in the spring of 1925. Baseball’s emerging slugger was with the Yankees on a southern barnstorming tour, making their way north from St. Petersburg by playing exhibition games against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Ruth wasn’t feeling well in games at Atlanta, Chattanooga and Knoxville. The Babe was suffering from what was thought to be a case of the flu, but he participated in most of the post-spring training contests. Arriving in North Carolina, however, the belting behemoth collapsed in a pile on the mountain station floor and was rushed to the city’s Battery Park Hotel in hopes of reducing his 101-degree temperature.

Rumors immediately began to spread about the cause of what came to be known as “The Bellyache Heard Round the World.” Shortly after, international newspapers picked up a story that originated in Canada that Ruth had died, exacerbated by reports that Ruth fell and wedged himself between the toilet and sink, knocking him unconscious in his specially built Pullman car as the Yankees pulled into Philadelphia’s Union Station.

His death was a surprise to the Babe.

One popular myth, written by a respected sportswriter W.O. McGeehan, was that Ruth’s body rebelled after he ate 12 hot dogs and drank too many carbonated sodas on the barnstorming tour. Another one, spoken only in the presence of men, was that Babe’s other big appetite caused him to contract a venereal disease. One other rumor—that Ruth had too much North Carolina rotgut moonshine—was easily dismissed because Ruth had just entered the city when he collapsed.

All of them, however, were imminently possible.

The most likely cause of abdominal distress was an intestinal abscess caused by a combination of his poor eating, frequent imbibing (even in those days of Prohibition) and excessive indigestion. When he arrived in New York, Ruth had surgery and spent the next two months on bed rest in the hospital. He stayed there until May 27, just four days before he made his 1925 debut.

It’s true that Ruth had the worst offensive season since the end of the deadball era, but his .290 average, with 25 home runs, 67 RBIs and 104 hits would earn him a long-term, multi-million dollar contract in today’s world of swing-and-miss sluggers batting .230.

Exactly one year and a day after his collapse, as the Yankees prepared to play the Dodgers at Charlotte’s Wearn Field, Ruth gave a press conference to update his health and the upcoming 1926 season while laying nude in his hotel room’s king-sized bed, covered only by a thin top sheet as he smoked a large cigar.

Ruth’s collapse and poor season had somewhat of a tempering effect on his lifestyle. He began playing more golf and hunting with friends, including Yankees Hall of Fame general manager Ed Barrow and other elite New Englanders. His appetite was still big but he managed to hide himself in nature, which led to the most productive part of his mammoth career. The Yankees won the American League pennant in 1926 and, the following year, Murderers Row captured New York and the baseball-consuming public by winning the pennant by 19 games and sweeping the Pirates in four games.

How did Babe celebrate his record-shattering 60 home runs, 165 runs batted in and .356 batting average?

He returned to North Carolina.

In the early weeks of 1928, Ruth bolted the celebrations in New York to spend 10 days at one of the country’s most exclusive private hunting clubs, Camp Bryan, some 57,428 acres located about 25 miles south of New Bern in Bladen County near the modern grounds of the Croatan National Forest and the Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point.

For the next seven years, Ruth made an annual pilgrimage to the log cabin with some of the most influential men in New England and eastern North Carolina to see the natural wonders of European settlers’ first hunting grounds.

One of those influencers — Frank Mozley Stevens, the hot dog king of New York — was the concessionaire for most major sporting venues in New York, including the Saratoga race track, Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds and, long after Ruth had died, Shea Stadium. His father is credited with falling in love with Virginia super extra-large peanuts on a similar hunting trip, turning them into a ballpark staple at every concession stand the family operated.

Another friend was Harry “Bud” Fisher, creator of America’s first cartoon strip, “Mutt and Jeff,” and a lifelong thoroughbred horse owner. Fisher liked to doodle on the walls of the hunting lodge, engraving caricatures of the many men who were part of the legendary quests for game.

Barrow, who had managed the Red Sox during Ruth’s days as a pitcher and eventually converted him to a slugging outfielder, was lured south by his old friend George Nicoll, a Boston photographer and businessman who moved to New Bern for health reasons about the same time Stevens first began hunting in that area around 1910.

Nicoll was one of the earliest three dozen members of Camp Bryan, which was founded in 1898 as a hunting preserve across three counties by former Confederate officer and Democrat legislator James Augustus Bryan.

The local hosts of these boisterous trips to the private hunting club included lawyer and politician Frank Sutton Sr. of Kinston and William Benjamin Blades Jr., son of a prominent land developer and lumber mill owner of Beaufort. They often met Ruth’s traveling party for coffee at the Williams Café in Goldsboro, where they changed trains on the main Atlantic Coast Line to the Norfolk Southern route that took them to New Bern.

The friendships were tight and lasting.

When word got out that Babe was switching trains in Kinston or Goldsboro, hundreds of kids showed up to greet the slugger, dragging their parents with them. On at least two occasions, local schools were dismissed to give every kid the equal opportunity to walk away with a signed hat or baseball.

On September 10, 1929, some three full years before his famous called shot against the Chicago Cubs in the 1932 World Series, Ruth received his new friend Sutton in the Yankee Stadium lockerroom between games of a doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers. Sutton mentioned that his son, Fred Jr., was celebrating his fourth birthday. Babe said he’d try to catch a good pitch and hit the young tyke a homer.

Babe Ruth (second from right) with Fred Sutton Jr.
on the Suttons' boat The Decoy)

Sure enough, Ruth came to the plate in the bottom of the ninth with two men on base and the Yankees trailing 9-6, found a pitch he liked and clubbed the ball over the rightfield fence for a 3-run homer to tie the game and give young Fred the finest birthday present Ruth ever promised. The Yankees won the game 10-9 a few minutes later when Detroit reliever Emil Yde walked Yankees pinch hitter Cedric Durst with the bases loaded.

Ruth was an avid hunter and fisherman, like Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams who hunted and fished the same woods while stationed at Cherry Point during the Korean War. Ruth and his friends tramped all over North Carolina’s eastern shores throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, lured back by turkey, waterfowl, collard greens and their own personal barbecue pitmaster, Dave Sampson, Camp Bryan’s personable cook. They fished in the Pamlico Sound and traveled all the way to Ocracoke Island with private guides.

In December 1930, Ruth said: “[There’s] no place like eastern North Carolina, and I’ve hunted most places in the United States.”

He liked the food, too. Babe the hunter had just as prodigious an appetite as Babe the slugger, something he and four friend proved one evening when they ate the 40-pound wild piglet one of them shot.

“He ate as much as several average men,” Sampson said in one news account. “Duck, roast pork, cold pork, asparagus tips on toast, creamed potatoes, baked white potatoes, sweet potatoes, Saratoga (kettle) chips, collard greens, corn, muffins, light bread, toast, prunes, puff prunes, pickled peaches, plum jelly, apple jelly and hot coffee.”

Ruth once ate so many collard greens on a hunting excursion, Stevens, the concessionaire, predicted the slugger might start a North Carolina-based collard greens company when he retired from baseball.

According to camp cook Sampson, Ruth ate them at every meal, including four helpings at dinner, along with multiple corn muffins slathered in butter and sorghum (molasses).

Our State magazine founding publisher Carl Goerch, one of North Carolina’s most prominent participatory journalists, heard about the Bambino’s exploits at Camp Bryan and asked to tag along in the winter of 1931.

To his everlasting surprise, Goerch and Ruth not only shared a room in one of the two rustic camp cabins, they also shared a double bed, an unfilmed precursor to John Candy and Steve Martin in the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

Goerch’s take?

“Babe Ruth wears silk pajamas.”

Specifically, Ruth wore flamboyant sleepwear, red with white trim on top and white with red waistband and cuffs on bottom. To compete, Goerch pulled out his flashy green-and-orange silks and the two climbed into bed, a pair of oversized jockeys trying to get a little rest after a busy day of hunting.

“Listen, bo—do you snore?” Ruth asked as he lit a chunky bedtime cigar.

Goerch said he had never been told so.

“I certainly hope you don’t,” Ruth said. “I’ve got a habit of hauling off and hitting folks when they snore.”

Between Ruth's lit cigar and cocked leg, Goerch never fell into a deep enough sleep to snore.

It was such a successful trip that season, Ruth almost lost his New York domestic help. When he returned to his Upper West Side apartment with 31 ducks and two geese, his maid balked, refusing to clean that many ducks. She relented to clean the two geese, but most of the ducks were given away to well-heeled neighbors.

Babe Ruth's geese-hunting haul at Camp Bryan.
(Photo from ECU digital collection.)

“What until the two deer show up, horns and all,” the Babe told his second wife Claire.

The next year, Claire went with him to Camp Bryan, but she quickly decided it was too rustic and masculine for her tastes. In subsequent trips, she sent her brothers in her place and always smirked at the gallons of concocted barbecue sauce her husband took with him. (No word if it was Eastern NC-style vinegar sauce or Western NC-style red sauce.)

After years of hunting the eastern part of the state, Ruth returned to his original North Carolina roots in the final days of his playing career, participating in an exhibition game in Fayetteville with the Boston Braves on April 5, 1935.

The beloved but wilting home run champ returned to the same fairgrounds, now renamed Highland Park, for “Babe Ruth Day” to face the Red Terror baseball team from North Carolina State College. As a reported crowd of 6,700 fans excitedly ringed the field waiting for a foul ball or home run, nervous NC State sophomore pitcher Olney Ray “Lefty” Freeman fell behind 3-0 to the legend who was once the most feared hitter in the game.

Freeman followed with three consecutive curveballs that corkscrewed Ruth into the batter’s box and gave Freeman a story to tell for the next 75 years. There was more to the story, however, as athletics director R.R. Sermon and football coach Heartley “Hunk” Anderson carried on a feud for the next five years, with one of the more heated disputes being Anderson accusing Sermon of using an athletics department slush fund to purchase 20 baseballs from a Raleigh sporting goods store to get them autographed by Ruth. The sordid affair was eventually resolved by the state’s General Assembly and Gov. Clyde Huey by restructuring the athletics department, releasing Anderson of his head coaching duties and keeping Sermon as a coach but not as athletics director.

In retirement, Ruth was disillusioned by baseball because neither the Yankees nor any other franchise would hire him as manager. He turned to golf as his primary passion, once claiming to have played 365 rounds in a single year, doubling up on rounds at his St. Albans Country Club in Queens. He also took up bowling up to five times a week, trying to work his way down from nearly 300 pounds.

He still hunted and fished on occasion but never again at Camp Bryan.

As far as newspaper accounts reveal, Babe never returned to the Old North State before his death of esophageal cancer on Aug. 17, 1948, and the North Carolina Collard Company never got off the ground.

The Tragedy of 'Rock Chalk Jayhawk'

 

Nate McMillan.

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RALEIGH, N.C. – Jim Valvano knew when he took his team to Missouri for the 1986 Sweet Sixteen he might have a difficult time advancing to the Final Four.

He realized just how hard late in the second half of the Wolfpack’s Elite Eight contest against second-ranked Kansas. The game was played at Kansas City’s old Kemper Arena, a dirty-white arena with all the warmth and friendliness of a maximum-security prison.

What made the environment even more inhospitable was that the Wolfpack’s opponent was located just over the border, about 40 minutes away, and played at least one home game a year at “Allen Fieldhouse East.”

So it wasn’t just the lineup of Greensboro-native Danny Manning, Cedric Hunter, Calvin Thompson, Greg Dreiling, Ron Kellogg and sixth man Archie Marshall that made the Jayhawks so dangerous. It was the partisan crowd, about 90 percent of which were wearing Kansas’ colors when the game began.

The Pack, making its second consecutive and fourth overall NCAA appearance under Valvano, was something of a late-season sensation. After a fast start, the Pack lost six of seven late-season games, including a first-round loss to Virginia in the ACC Tournament.

Something changed in Valvano’s Seven & Seven lineup, a nickname that originated from the number of veterans and newcomers on the team, after the calendar changed from February to March. It grew better and stronger, thanks to the play of do-everything leader Nate McMillan and a pair of young big men, sophomore Chris Washburn and freshman Charles Shackleford.

After beating Iowa in the first round and surviving a double-overtime scare against Arkansas-Little Rock in Minneapolis, the Wolfpack gained confidence. It won a narrow 70-66 game over Iowa State to advance to the Elite Eight for the third time in four years.

Having lost to the Jayhawks earlier in the season in Greensboro, 71-56, Valvano believed his team would know enough about its opponent to have a chance to win at the end of the game.

And it did.

Late in the contest, State had a commanding double-figure lead. That’s when Valvano took notice of a thundering whisper in the arena, a sound that swelled every time Manning and Dreiling scored another basket.

Rock…Chalk… Jayhawk! Rock… Chalk… Jayhawk!

“I thought we might be in a little trouble,” Valvano said.

It was a season of major transition within the NC State athletics department. Midway through the season, some six weeks after long-time athletics director Willis Casey announced that he would retire at the end of the school year, the board of trustees named Valvano as his successor.

He punctuated his popularity that season by beating top-ranked North Carolina, eighth-ranked Kentucky and 16th-ranked Louisville at Reynolds Coliseum. He grabbed a few headlines after a loss to UNC in Chapel Hill when he grabbed the game ball, dribbled through the crowd of Tar Heel fans and made a layup, just so he could lay claim to making the final basket in the history of Carmichael Auditorium.

He had a team that was well-seasoned and talented.

Senior Ernie Myers was the lone holdover from the 1983 national championship. McMillan, a Raleigh native who spent two years at Chowan College, played four different positions for the Wolfpack and was the leader of a team that appeared at times to be undisciplined.

The other senior on the roster was Panogiotis Fasoulas, one of the most unusual one-year players in NC State history. The Pack had played against him the previous summer in a barnstorming trip across Greece. Fasoulas had played one year of at a Massachusetts junior college seminary in Massachusetts in 1980-81, but returned to Greece where he played professionally for four years. When promising sophomore forward Russell Pierre transferred to Virginia Tech after the 1985 NCAA Tournament, Valvano scrambled to see if Fasoulas might be interested in coming to Raleigh.

Fasoulas, who played with a floppy mop of hair and quickly became a crowd favorite, may have been the last player in ACC history to enjoy a cigarette in the postgame lockerroom and is certainly the only player in the annals of the NC State to play an entire season with his name misspelled (“Fascoulas”) on his home jersey. After a long professional career in Greece, "The Spider" served from 2006-2010 as the mayor of Piraeus, Greece’s third largest city, and was later elected to the international FIBA Hall of Fame.

The team’s only junior was forward Bennie Bolton, who followed the pipleline from Dematha Catholic in Hyattsville, Md., that brought Kenny Carr, Hawkeye Whitney, Dereck Whittenburg and Sidney Lowe to NC State.

Valvano had a host of gifted young players, led by the multi-talented Washburn, a native of Hickory, N.C., who became the most recruited player in the nation. He chose NC State shortly after its 1983 NCAA championship. Washburn had unparalleled grace and poise for a big man, and was highly coveted by the NBA following the 1986 season. He was the sixth overall pick by the Golden State Warriors later that spring.

The rest of the sophomore class – Vinny Del Negro, Quentin Jackson and John Thompson – didn’t see much action that season.

Valvano also brought in one of the largest recruiting classes in school history, a total of seven new players including mop-headed Fasoulas: Shackleford, a lithe big man from Kinston, N.C.; 17-year-old freshman Chucky Brown of Navassa, N.C.; Parade and McDonald’s All-American Walker Lambiotte, a swingman from Virginia; guard Kelsey Weems; junior forward Teviin Binns, who came from the same Texas junior college that produced Spud Webb; North Carolina high school scoring standout Kenny Poston of Cherryville.

Despite the late-season swoon, the Wolfpack was one of the nation’s top teams by the time March Madness rolled around. As the tournament progressed, Washburn and Shackleford were practically unstoppable inside.

Brown, despite his tender age and size, showed that he would develop into a great rebounder, a tenacious defender and he could be a strong scorer when needed. Myers and McMillan provided the leadership Valvano’s team needed to survive and advance.

In the Midwest Region final game, one step away from the Final Four, the Wolfpack had a 57-52 lead with nine minutes to play, with ACC free-throw champion Myers on the line. He was unable to convert a three-point play, McMillan charged into Greg Dreiling on a questionable call and the thunderous chant took over the building.

“We were a game away each of my two years from reaching the Final Four,'' McMillan one said. “If we are not playing Kansas in Kansas City, we would have probably gone to the Final Four (in 1986).”

 

 

 

Old North State Football Rivalry

Torry Holt gets loose in Chapel Hill.

NOTE: 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 and help keep posts like this free of ads.

© Tim Peeler, 2025

Here’s a selection of NC State-UNC-Chapel Hill content ahead of Saturday’s 115th meeting between the two Old North State rivals, going all the way back to the 1899 tie that Wolfpack cadets regretted throughout the winter of 1900.

Why? Read “Burning Down the (Out)House” below.

Also, hit subscribe to the blog and podcast if you enjoy. And feel free to donate at the link above if reading about the history of this rivalry and stories about sports in my home state.

As a member of the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame board of directors, a podcaster on the North Carolina Sports Network and the unofficial historian of NC State athletics, I’ve dedicated a career to telling these kinds of tales.

So, for better or worse, here’s a deep dive into the Wolfpack-Tar Heel rivalry.

Podcasts

This Was Then: A Controversial Onside Kick
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jMiUMvpcDk&list=PLhNWG3ZFjvp0q4uikrLXysddMGx2Ehl-k&index=9&t=39s

One Brick Back (https://timpeeler.blogspot.com)

Lame Duck Coaches (2024)
https://timpeeler.blogspot.com/2024/11/mack-brown-isnt-first-lame-duck-coach.html

An NC State-UNC-CH Football Trophy? (2023)
https://timpeeler.blogspot.com/2023/11/an-nc-state-unc-trophy-idea.html

Mostly Mild Rivalry Pranks (2023)
https://timpeeler.blogspot.com/2023/11/innocent-fun-contemplated-nc-state-vs.html

A Football-Baseball Great Who Beat the Tar Heels (1906)
https://timpeeler.blogspot.com/2020/11/on-shoulders-of-giants.html

Burning Down the (Out)House (1899)
https://timpeeler.blogspot.com/2018/11/win-one-for-old-no-7.html

Tearing Down the Goal Posts: An Official Plan (1958)
https://timpeeler.blogspot.com/2025/11/political-pliability-and-wooden-goal.html

The Wolfpacker (On3.com)

A Runaway Mascot and a Big Win (1960)
https://www.on3.com/teams/nc-state-wolfpack/news/tim-peeler-remembering-a-lost-mascot-and-an-nc-state-win-over-the-tar-heels/

T.A. McLendon: In or Out? (2004)
https://www.on3.com/teams/nc-state-wolfpack/news/nc-state-football-t-a-mclendon/

Broadcasting Farewell (2025)
https://www.on3.com/teams/nc-state-wolfpack/news/nc-state-radio-analyst-tony-haynes-reflects-on-career-ahead-of-his-final-regular-season-broadcast/

When UNC-CH’s Carl Snavely Poisoned His Own Players Before Playing NC State (1934)
https://www.on3.com/teams/nc-state-wolfpack/news/carl-snavleys-unc-nc-state-blue/

Dick Sheridan’s UNC-CH Domination
https://www.on3.com/teams/nc-state-wolfpack/news/dick-sheridan-nc-state-football-unc-rivalry/

NC State athletics (GoPack.com)

Pack Wins 4th Straight vs. Tar Heels (2010)
https://gopack.com/news/2010/11/20/Pack_Wins_4th_Straight_Over_Tar_Heels_29_25

Political Pliability and Wooden Goal Posts

 

Political Pliability and Wooden Goal Posts

Goal posts at Kenan Stadium coming down (photo: 1959 Agromeck).

BY TIM PEELER, © 2025

NOTE: 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 and help keep posts like this free of ads.

In a stunning flip-flop by one of North Carolina’s most astute political minds of the 20^th century, Jim Hunt changed his mind.

Immediately after his school, NC State, beat North Carolina 7-0 to open the 1957 football season for both teams, students from the Raleigh institution rushed the field at Carolina’s Kenan Stadium to begin the process of tearing down the goal posts in the south end zone. Tar Heel fans defended their turf and the local police got involved, accusing State students of brandishing glass bottles as they poured onto the field. Three fans were arrested for disorderly conduct.

It was called “a near riot” in the local newspapers, though that same description was not used two months later when Carolina fans tore down the goal posts at Duke Stadium after beating the Blue Devils.

The Monday following the Wolfpack-Tar Heel contest, State chancellor Carey Bostian and UNC chancellor Clyde Aycock met with the student body presidents of both schools — Hunt and UNC-CH’s Sonny Evans — to come up with some sort of solution so that such things would never happen again.

Their idea was a collegial postgame ceremony after all future games between the schools in which a representative of the losing team would hand over the goal posts to the winning team, with everyone else staying in the stands.

That never happened.

Hunt and Bostian did not like the way State students were portrayed for beating the Tar Heels in the ’57 game, calling newspaper accounts “highly exaggerated.”

“For example,” Hunt and Bostian said in a joint statement, “numerous eyewitnesses have said they did not see any students with bottles.”

Aycock and Evans were all for giving the goal posts away, rather than letting the agriculturalists loose on an open field: “We feel that the action of the police in trying to control the crowds around the goal posts were taken not in order to protect the $15 worth of goal-post structure but with a view to preserving law and order and to prevent a scuffle from becoming something worse.”

Newspapers were more succinct.

“Officials of North Carolina State College and the University of North Carolina decided today it’s best to give away a set of goal posts rather than have heads cracked in post-football game ruckuses,” reported the Durham Herald.

By the next fall, as the two teams again prepared to play their season-opener in Chapel Hill, Hunt kicked off a rare second term as State’s president by leading the effort to back out of the agreement. In a front-page plea in Technician, NC State’s student newspaper, Hunt wrote an open letter to his fellow students explaining his decision.

Jim and Carolyn Hunt at his 1984 inaugural ball at Reynolds Coliseum.

“The idea of ‘presenting the goalpost’ is a fine one in theory—in practice it is unworkable,” said Hunt, who went on to become North Carolina’s only four-term governor and an advisor to politicians throughout his time in office, focused specifically on education. “No such policy will be followed at the Carolina game on Saturday. This was decided after correspondence between the president of the student body at Carolina and myself during the past summer. At a conference in Chapel Hill last Friday, it was confirmed.”

There were some concessions made between the two schools in order to get the agreement changed.

First, the Chapel Hill police agreed not to get in the way of students and fans as they rushed the field.

Second, losing fans were asked to stay in the stands.

Third, and most incredible of all, the UNC athletics facilities staff agreed to replace the standard steel goal posts with a specially designed wooden frame, decorated with paper streamers, that could be more easily taken down after the game, splinters and all. The “safe, sane and realistic policy” was supposed to be in the name of removing risk to the winning team. Read all the details here.

And so it happened, after Wolfpack coach Earle Edwards and his team beat the Tar Heels in 1958 for the third year in a row, State fans were unobstructed as they tore down the goal posts yet again at a stadium that was often their home-away-from home in the rivalry. The two teams alternated being the home team as the teams played 18 out of 20 games in Chapel Hill from 1943 until 1966 because Kenan Stadium was almost twice as large as State’s Riddick Stadium. (The two rivals have alternated between Raleigh and Chapel Hill since Carter-Finley Stadium opened in 1966 and will play for the 115th time on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.)

In the early days of the Atlantic Coast Conference, unlike the league’s strict guidelines today that fine athletic departments for simply rushing the field, tearing down goal posts was common during rivalry games. (State paid $50,000 to the league after students rushed onto the field earlier this year after a win over No. 8 Georgia Tech on Nov. 1, which violated the league’s new “event security policy.”)

In 1958, however, three opposing teams tore down Carolina’s goal posts: NC State did so in the season-opener at Kenan Stadium after a 21-14 victory, Notre Dame did so on its home field in South Bend, Indiana, following the final home game in a 6-4 season; and Duke did so in the annual season-ending game between the Blue Devils and Tar Heels, 7-6, with 10 seconds still left on the scoreboard.

The wooden posts were eventually replaced by H-shaped aluminum posts in the 1960s and the unilever single posts made with a steel base and aluminum crossbars in the 1970s.

Storming the field was still relatively common until the 21st century. Wolfpack fans first tore down the goal posts in 1941 after beating UNC-CH in Kenan Stadium. After beating Florida State 3-0 in 1966, students tore down the goal posts and the school tore down the stadium following the final game ever played at Riddick. They did so as recently as 1998 after beating No. 2 Florida State and in 2000 Georgia Tech, but anything similar in Saturday’s game will escalate the fine.

To celebrate, this year's winning players will have to limit themselves to dancing on logos or planting their flags on the field, both of which have spiced up this particular rivalry in recent years.