A Victory for the Accused

Photo courtesy of NC State athletics.

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, 2017

No one likes to be called a cheater, especially former NC State coach Chuck Amato.

Or Philip Rivers, Jerricho Cotchery or Dantonio Burnette.

They all took it a little personally, then, when Notre Dame coach Tyrone Willingham and his staff accused the the Wolfpack of just that in the days leading up to the 2003 Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida.

And it’s one of the primary, if little remembered, reasons that Amato’s team wanted so badly to smash the Fighting Irish in that New Year’s Day game at Alltel Stadium.

The rhetoric started before the teams ever arrived in Jacksonville when Willingham and defensive coordinator Kent Baer both questioned the legality of a Wolfpack formation in which four players ran off the field after the offense broke the huddle and four substitutes ran on before the ball was snapped.

They even began lobbying, from afar, the Conference USA crew that was scheduled to officiate the game.

ACC coordinator of officials Tommy Hunt seemingly put the matter to rest with authority, saying as long as the new players were in position for at least three seconds before the snap. It had not been an issue for any team during the regular season, in which the Wolfpack won its first nine games, lost three in a row, then beat Florida State in its finale to earn a surprising bid to the Gator Bowl for its first ever meeting with the Irish.

“There is nothing wrong with what they do,” Hunt said before the game.

Twice during the regular season the Wolfpack had been flagged for illegal substitution and both times the penalty was waved off.

But Willingham, who had coached at NC State for three seasons in the early 1980s, pushed the issue to Defcon 1 with some of his pre-arrival words in which he questioned not only the legality, but also the sportsmanship of the move.

“I think I’m concerned about it in terms of the legality of it and how it affects the overall flow and the sportsmanship and especially our function as a defensive team,” he said. “Is that not permitted in the rules? Then it should be prohibited. If it is, then the defense should be allowed equal opportunity to get their people on, so we can match up.

“I would imagine that the Conference USA officials will get films from both our teams and if they see things that are outside the rules, they will make decisions on them. I’m not contending any point of view. I’m just saying if the officials look at this particular patter of substitution and they view it not within the structure of the rules or sportsmanship, that they will make a decision.”

Amato, of course, didn’t take the veiled pressure on the officials lightly and he went on his own offensive.

“Well good, we'll tell the officials to look at the Purdue game and watch [Notre Dame] beat the crap out of the center on extra points and field goals,'' Amato said.

Notre Dame was penalized for that against the Boilermakers.

It made for some interesting pregame chatter for two teams that had little in common other than Willingham’s brief stint as an assistant under Tom Reed with the Wolfpack and a shared relationship with former head coach Lou Holtz.

The Irish came into the game as college football’s most storied program, while the Wolfpack and its brash coach yearned for national prestige and acceptance.

Throughout that week, the Irish coaching staff was chafing like a sweaty golfer walking 36 holes on a hot day. They had to deal with a slew of injuries that cost them two offensive linemen and a starting linebacker in their season finale. And they had they distraction shortly after arriving of dealing with senior safety Chad DeBolt was arrested for trespassing after “rowdy and rambunctious” behavior at a Jacksonville Beach nightclub. His bloody mug shot, with both eyes swollen shut and visible marks on his face, was plastered on the front of the local sports page.

Willingham, quite forcefully, refused to talk about the incident and would not discuss DeBolt status for the game.

“Let's make sure we all start on the same page: There will be no reference to Chad DeBolt,” Willingham told a gaggle of reporters at practice after the incident. “Just so you know. All right, let's start.''

Amato and his team, huge underdogs against the No. 11 Irish, were loose throughout for several reasons, one of which was the inclusion of a five recruits who joined the team for the bowl trip, including future All-America defensive end Mario Williams.

Williams, linebacker Ernest Jones and offensive lineman Yomi Ojo had just finished their high school careers and were planning to enroll at NC State when its winter break was over 10 days after the bowl game. The early enrollment was something Rivers popularized three years earlier, but going to the bowl game was a new wrinkle Amato added just for this game. Two remnants from the previous recruiting class, Garland Heath and LaMart Barrett, also joined the team in Jacksonville, as tight end Sean Berton, a transfer from West Virginia, had done the previous year at the Tangerine Bowl.

They all participated in practices, attended team activities and received the same copious amounts of bowl-branded loot that included a watch, a travel bag, a travel alarm clock and various pieces of logoed apparel. They also got championship rings after the game.

It was all perfectly legal, of course, something that Amato had thought about doing at Florida State, but never really found many takers in graduating high school and enrolling early in college. Rivers changed all that, and others followed.

It was a perk that helped Williams—one of the most highly recruited defensive players in the nation—chose NC State over Ohio State, Tennessee and Clemson, all of whom quickly offered up an invitation to join them at their bowl games after they heard Williams’ plan to go to Jacksonville.

“Well, why didn’t they think of it first?” said the former coach.

The acrimony of the week spilled over into the game. In the first quarter, with the Irish seemingly headed for a touchdown, NC State linebacker Dantonio Burnette knocked Fighting Irish quarterback Carlyle Holliday out of the game with a separated shoulder. The Irish had to settle for a field goal and a 3-0 lead. Carlyle’s replacement, Pat Dillingham, threw three interceptions, all to Wolfpack safety Rod Johnson, while the Wolfpack had no turnovers.

Photo courtesy of NC State athletics.

The Wolfpack scored three touchdowns in the second quarter, two rushing by freshman T.A. McLendon and a 9-yard pass from Rivers to Cotchery. The first of those drives covered 96 hard-fought yards to give NC State a lead it never gave up. Notre Dame added another field goal after a goal-line stand, but the Wolfpack answered with a touchdown on a 7-yard pass from Rivers to All-ACC tight end Sean Berton.

Notre Dame, hampered by the loss of DeBolt, two suspended linemen and one injured linebacker, committed five personal fouls in the game, as the teams combined for 19 total penalties.

One of those penalties was late in the game, when Amato ran onto the field to argue that Notre Dame broken its huddle with 12 players, an infraction that wasn’t called. It was exactly the violation Willingham and his staff had accused the Wolfpack of earlier in the week.

The penalty gave Notre Dame a first-and-goal on the NC State 1-yard line. Amato put his first-team defense back on the field. It stuffed the Irish on four consecutive plays with less than a minute to play and prevented them from entering the painted end zone, as it had done all day long.

The final score, 28-6, didn’t seem to indicate just how much the Wolfpack dominated the game.

 “I didn't expect to win this game so easily,” Berton said afterwards. “I thought they would play hard. But it was an easy win. You saw it.

“We expected to win, but we didn't expect it to be this easy.”

For a while, the victory gave the Wolfpack the national respect Amato and his players craved. Rivers was on the front page of USA Today the next day. The team finished No. 12 in the final Associated Press poll, the second highest finish in school history. Sports Illustrated ranked them in their preliminary Top 10 for the 2003 season.

“It was a day we wanted to make one last statement,” said Burnette, who is now the Wolfpack’s strength and conditioning coach and its designated chief motivator for games against Notre Dame. “It seemed like we were the ‘other team’ here all week. It was Notre Dame this, Notre Dame that.

“We thought we had something to prove, not just against [the Irish] but to the nation. People have said we were a fraud, that we didn’t play anybody, that we were a flukey team, even though we knew we were a good team.

“What do they say now? We just smacked Notre Dame around. What do they say now?”

One thing they couldn’t say was that the Wolfpack cheated their way to the victory.

October 1977: The Cruelest, Greatest Month

The WCBS radio broadcast of Game 6 of the 1977 World Series.


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, 2017

I have no idea how my dad talked my mom into letting me skip school for most of a week in the middle of October 1977. There we were, however, on a Tuesday afternoon, packing up his black Ford pickup, hitching up his 14 ½-foot fiberglass boat and heading towards Harkers Island on the North Carolina Outer Banks.

We probably had a few days off from school, and I wriggled out of practice for my eighth-grade football team. He knocked off from work as a plant engineer for a local tool-making company. At the age of 12, it was the first time I remember going east of Interstate-95, a full world away from our little three-bedroom house tucked deeply into the western North Carolina foothills.

Fishing was something we had done—grudgingly, on my part—since I was an infant, when my dad used to put a couple of bottles of formula in his tackle box and could make dual use of cloth diapers as hand towels after cleaning his daily catch.

We spent countless hours as a family on that old boat on Lake Norman, buzzing from crappie hole to crappie hole, trying to catch enough fish to fill the freezer. Sometimes we did, but often we just sat on the lake, turning pinker by the hour and sweating like a ham steak in a frying pan.

What made this trip special was that it was boys-only. No sisters, no mom. Along with a couple of dad’s fishing buddies from work, we were going to catch and prepare all of our own meals for the week. We were going to stay in a hotel near the beach. We weren’t going to go to bed at any particular time.

First, however, we had to get there in an uncomfortable, un-air-conditioned truck with nothing but an 8-track tape player, an AM/FM radio and set of speakers that seemed to be little more than a set of low-tech kazoos. From foothills to lighthouse, it was about 10 hours.

Oh god, the music. Three songs alternated on radio playlists that October:  “You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone, “Nobody Does It Better” by Carly Simon and “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” by Crystal Gayle. I hate them all to this day.

What I really wanted to hear, like all junior high boys at the time, was Southern-style rock, the marriage of blues, country, folk and heavy metal, perfected by the Allman Brothers and Tom Petty, but also practiced by a handful of other bands with three guitars and long hair that we often heard on WROQ-FM in Charlotte.

With an abundance of good taste, dad had no interest in my music.

What we settled on, as we drove through the night towards the coast, was Game 6 of the 1977 World Series—played 40 years ago tonight at the old Yankee Stadium in the Bronx—

We listened to a lot of baseball on the radio when we were driving at night. The call-letter jingle for WOWO radio of Fort Wayne, Indiana, still echoes in my memory. Besides, the rare television entertainment we had at home came from WRET-TV, a UHF station in Charlotte owned by Ted Turner that had an evening lineup of comedy shows: “Sanford and Son,” “Bewitched” and the Atlanta Braves.

I never much liked the Braves, other than Hank Aaron and Biff Pocoroba. Back then, my only athletic devotion was to the West Lincoln Junior High, the Washington Redskins and the Boston Red Sox, the latter of which I knew only through  Monday Night Football halftime highlights and two-day old boxscores in the Charlotte Observer.

I became a Red Sox fan two Octobers before, watching the 1975 World Series on a 15-inch black-and-white television. My favorite players were outfielders Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Rice, two guys I later learned were as cuddly and lovable as feral cats. Didn't change my opinion of them, of course, nor my quest to collect every baseball card that featured either of them, something that ultimately failed thanks to the Fleer and Donruss corporations.

Dad has been a Dodgers fan since birth and a baseball player from the time he started walking. The first book I ever remember seeing him read was Roger Kahn’s Boys of Summer.

We bonded over baseball and an aversion to all Yankees, which were defined in our part of North Carolina as anyone from Catawba County to Canada. The pinstriped ones from New York, those swept by the beloved Reds in the 1976 World Series, were the worst. Like most non-Yankee fans, the player we disliked the most was hired gun Reggie Jackson, the controversial outfielder who had signed with the Yankees in the off-season as a free agent after one season with Baltimore. He had been tolerable when he played for Charlie Finley and Billy Martin, and alongside North Carolina native Jim "Catfish" Hunter, with the Oakland A’s, but his big personality made the insufferable Big Apple even less sufferable.

That night, we hoped the Dodgers would tie the series, which stood at 3-2 after they won two nights earlier in Los Angeles, thanks to a Don Sutton complete-game, 10-4 victory. Burt Hooton was on the mound for Tommy Lasorda’s Dodgers and Mike Torrez was pitching for the Martin's Yankees. After a first-inning error by Yankees shortstop Bucky Dent, Steve Garvey tripled to give the Dodgers a 2-0 lead.

Jackson came up in the bottom of the second and, with no regard for anyone, walked on four pitches. Couldn’t even be bothered to swing against Hooton’s dodging fastball. Chris Chambliss tied the game in the next at-bat with a two-run homer. The Dodgers retook the lead on a solo homer by Reggie Smith, but he was the last good Reggie to hit a home run that evening.

Jackson saw three more pitches in the game, from three different pitchers. He planted each of them over the outfield wall, three home runs on three consecutive swings. He had a two-run shot off Hooton, a two-run shot off Elias Sosa and a solo shot off knuckleballer Charlie Hough, becoming only the second player in World Series history, after Babe Ruth in 1926 and ’28, to hit three homers in a single game. Of his series-leading nine hits, five flew out of the park. He scored 10 runs and drove in eight, a postseason performance that still stands 40 years later. There was absolutely no denying his title as “Mr. October.”

We drove silently through the night to our inlet-side hotel.

The fishing trip was better than I could've imagined. We took dad’s little boat a couple miles out into the ocean, where we stumbled into a school of blues that filled our coolers. We got up in the morning and tooled around Cape Lookout, in the shadow of the lighthouse, just because we could. We dragged the boat onto the beach of Shackleford Banks, where the curious wild horses came right up to the boat to watch us cast our nets for bait.

It couldn’t have been more perfect.

The morning we left, Oct. 21, we managed to get reception again on the truck radio as we drove off Harkers Island. They were still talking about Jackson on the sports report, but the lead news was of a plane crash the night before that took the lives of three members of a Southern rock band, shortly after leaving a concert a concert in Greenville, South Carolina. It took three more top-of-the-hour updates to learn that the band involved was Lynyrd Skynyrd, which lost founder Ronnie Van Zant, singer Steve Gaines and his sister, Cassie, a backup singer, along with both pilots and an assistant road manager.

They played their last show at Greenville's Auditorium, a place where I later drove by every day to work for the Greenville News and Piedmont, where I covered Furman Paladin basketball and where I saw my only Bob Dylan concert.

I don’t remember the ride home from the Outer Banks. The Yankees had won the World Series. Jackson had become a hero of Ruthian proportions. And my favorite version of Southern rock had died somewhere in the woods of Gillsburg, Mississippi.

Through the years, I made peace with Yankees of all sorts and moved on from provincial music of the American South. But 40 years later, I still get a little blue whenever I hear the name Reggie Jackson or the song "Free Bird."

When Billy Cowher's Pre-Game Speech Brought Down Pittsburgh

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, 2017

Former NC State linebacker and ex-Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Bill Cowher.

Bill Cowher is a Pittsburgh hero, a hometown boy who wandered away for college and then returned to lead the local team to a Super Bowl championship.

It’s inconceivable that Cowher would ever say something negative about the town where he grew up or any of its institutions.

Except…

On Dec. 23, 1978, just before Cowher played in the final game of his NC State football career, he stood up in the locker room of Orlando Stadium to let the 16th-ranked Pittsburgh Panthers absolutely have it in a profanity-laced pregame speech before the 33rd Tangerine Bowl that obviously had an impact on the unranked Wolfpack.

Maybe the senior linebacker was remembering how his hometown school never offered him a scholarship.

Maybe he believed the newspaper report from earlier in the week that said Pittsburgh’s players forced the patients at an Orlando-area children’s hospital to trade their Wolfpack souvenirs for Panthers memorabilia during a bowl-week visit. Pitt spent much of the week before the game playing in Orlando, going to Disney World, Sea World and competing in a tug-of-war contest with an elephant at Ringling’s Circus World facility.

Maybe he just didn’t like any of coach Jackie Sherrill’s players, which included defensive tackle Hugh Green, quarterback Rick Trocano and running back Freddy Jacobs, who were either members of or were recruited immediately following the Panthers’ national championship of 1976 with Heisman Trophy-winning tailback Tony Dorsett.

Or maybe he was just taking advantage of the dissension on the Pitt coaching staff. Linebackers coach Jimmy Johnson had been hired as the head coach of Oklahoma State after the regular season but had been allowed to stay for the bowl game, along with some other coaches he was taking with him. (Future Pitt head coaches Dave Wannstedt and Foge Fazio were also part of the Pitt staff.)

Whatever his motivation, Cowher and his teammates were certainly fired up, or in the words of the Orlando Sentinel the next day “aroused.”

“I'd be happy to repeat [the speech],'' Cowher said in a telephone interview in 2001, when he was still the head coach of the Steelers and I was still reporting for the Greensboro News & Record, “but I don’t think you could print any of it. It was one of those things that came from emotion. It was my last game as a senior and we were playing Pittsburgh, which is where I am from.

“It got pretty emotional.”

Cowher grew up in the Pittsburgh-adjacent borough of Crafton, only a few miles west of downtown. He had hoped he would be recruited to play for the Panthers, but never received a scholarship offer from Hall of Fame coach Johnny Majors or any member of his staff.

Instead, Cowher came south as part of Lou Holtz’s final recruiting class, which also included another linebacker, Kyle Wescoe of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and a quarterback, Kevin Scanlon, who had broken all of Joe Namath’s passing records at Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, High School.

(Scanlon played in only one game in two seasons with the Wolfpack, as the backup to Johnny Evans, and was later re-recruited by Holtz to play at Arkansas, where he was the 1979 Southwest Conference Player of the Year after leading the league in total offense and passing accuracy and taking the Razorbacks to the 1980 Sugar Bowl.)

There were also three running backs from North Carolina in that class, a tailback from Greensboro’s Ragsdale High School who was considered the top recruit in the state, Rickey Adams; Nebo-native Scott Wade; and an undersized scatback from High Point’s Andrews High School, Ted Brown.

Cowher and Wescoe played side-by-side their entire careers, and were known as the emotional leaders on defenses that included stars like Woodrow Wilson, Donnie LeGrande, Simon Gupton and Bubba Green. That group was led by another Pennsylvania native, linebackers coach Chuck Amato, who never let Cowher and Wescoe forget the snub of their hometown team, especially when the Wolfpack was invited to face the No. 16 Panthers that December afternoon in Orlando.

As good as his performance was on the field that afternoon—unranked State upset Pitt 30-17 in a totally dominant performance—his pregame speech is the memory that has lasted a lifetime for his teammates.

“It was completely X-rated,” Amato said. “But it was awfully good.”

Said former senior associate athletics director David Horning, who was a sophomore defensive end on that team: "His speech brought out the best in us all that day."

Cowher didn’t let the hyper-extended elbow he suffered in the first quarter of the game dampen his emotions. Mainly because he was not about to lose to another team from his home state in his final season. The Wolfpack had lost to Penn State, 19-10, in early November.

“No way he was coming out,” Amato said.

Neither was Brown, who was knocked out of the game twice, once after he ran into a truck on the sidelines that held a television camera platform and hurt his wrist. That didn’t keep the All-American running back, who had finished fifth in Heisman voting that season, from rushing for 120 yards on 28 carries, postseason stats that are not included in his 4,602 career rushing yards. (None of his bowl stats are.)

To this day, Cowher blames his minor knee injury on Pittsburgh tackle Russ Grimm, who was later a member of his Steelers’ coaching staff.

“He always said that he wasn’t playing offense at the time,” Cowher said, “but I still think it was him.”

The Wolfpack jumped out to a 17-0 lead before halftime, forcing Pitt quarterbacks Trocano and Jeff Delaney to throw 48 times in the game. State’s swarming defense intercepted four of those, including one by Mike Nall that he returned 66 yards for a touchdown.

Tiny State placekicker Nathan Ritter, who had led all NCAA kickers in field goal accuracy that season, booted three more in the game, including a Tangerine-record 51-yarder.

Things were so bad for the Panthers, according to stories that were circulated years after the game, Sherrill fired Johnson and the members considering going with him to Stillwater during halftime.

“Our defense played an emotional football game,” said Wolfpack head coach Bo Rein said after the game. “They were quicker and stronger, and gave us big plays when we needed them. Never underestimate emotions in a football game.

“Without that ingredient, these were two evenly matched teams.”

Fueled by Cowher’s emotions, the upset victory propelled the Wolfpack to a No. 18 finish in the final Associated Press poll of the season, a satisfying accomplishment for the third-year head coach and his staff who led the Wolfpack to the 1979 ACC title.

“Pitt was very good that year,'' Amato said. ""We weren't supposed to have a chance.''

The game featured not only Brown, but also two future Outland Trophy winners in Pitt's Mark May and N.C. State's Jim Ritcher and legendary Pitt defensive end Green, who finished second in the Heisman voting of 1980, his senior year.

“What I remember most about that game is that we won and I always thought it was fitting that I was able to play my last college football game against Pitt,” said Cowher, whose 195 tackles that season still stands as a single-season school record. “That was a special win.”