Leaving the Locker Room One Last Time

Caulton Tudor was one of the lucky hundreds of media who covered NC State's 1983 NCAA championship in Albuquerque, New Mexico. No one knew more about that team and its quest for the title.

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© Tim Peeler, 2017

I followed Caulton Tudor from the locker room of Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands to a small training room in the bowels of the famed coliseum. NC State basketball coach Jim Valvano was there leaning against a table, seething with his media peeps in this ersatz interview room. Tony Kornheiser was there. Mike Lupica and Mike Fratello were too. John Feinstein, Bob Ryan and Mitch Albom were too, if memory serves correctly.

Then there was Tudor, a big-time college basketball writer with a small-town background, something I aspired to be. Toots was a guy who could weave his way into any conversation, any circumstance, whether it was college basketball, football or professional golf. I was a 24-year-old recovering hayseed whose English degree from NC State was still in its recently mailed envelope. Tudor let me tag along with him and his entourage whenever we were covering the same events, even from my earliest days as a student reporter.

Caulton Tudor.

I was proud to call him a mentor and a friend, right up until he died Tuesday night at his home in Raleigh, even though I hadn’t seen him in months. I started working with him as a The Raleigh Times summer intern in 1987. He taught me how to do 8-point agate for the Scoreboard page, mainly so he didn’t have to do it. Drudgery is sometimes the best motivation for passing along knowledge.

Few people had a bigger impact on how I covered college athletics than Tudor.

On this particular night at the end of a trying 1988-89 season was a great example. Tudor was still working for the Times and I was in my first fulltime job with The Salisbury Post.

Valvano had just endured one of the worst moments of his coaching career, a 69-61 loss to second-ranked Georgetown in the 1989 NCAA East Region semifinals. It was one of those rare losses that actually could be blamed on an official. Rick Hartzell, to be specific.

Late in the game, Chris Corchiani drove inside the paint for a short jumpshot over the outstretched arms of Alonzo Mourning, the All-America center who had already collected four fouls in the game. NC State had trailed by as many as 16 points in the second half, and Corchiani’s shot would have cut the Hoyas’ lead to one point with less than three minutes to play.

Corchiani made the shot, Hartzell blew his whistle and the world paused in great anticipation while waiting for the call, knowing that the winner of the contest would face Duke for the right to go the Final Four.

Hartzell froze in the limelight of the tournament and under the icy stare of Georgetown coach John Thompson. He couldn’t call Mourning for his fifth foul in such a huge situation in front of a national television audience of millions of people.

So he motioned a traveling violation on Corchiani—something CBS analyst Billy Packer immediately called “the worst call in the history of the NCAA tournament.”

The call changed the momentum of the game, the Hoyas escaped elimination and the Wolfpack slinked into its locker room to recite their Valvano-directed postgame comments.

“It was an unfortunate call,” the players said in near unison.

Valvano echoed the same thing in the mass interview room, where all the morning newspaper reporters got their quotes before rushing back to their Radio Shack laptop computers to burb out a final-edition story, which usually covered the bases but didn’t have as much depth. Tudor and I were both working for afternoon newspapers, and we had the luxury of next-day deadlines.

Tudor taught me to take advantage of that extra time, to wait until the morning guys had finished with the basics and to ask more probing questions that would make for a better second-day story. We could stay in the lockeroom long after the morning guys had toddled off to write their hasty ledes.

We did the same thing with Valvano, in that small training room filled with big names. I carried with me a microcassette recorder in my hand and recorded a postgame press conference unlike anything I’d ever heard before, even when I should've turned the tape recorder off. It was Valvano with his favorite group of people in the world—the national press corps.

When asked about the traveling violation, Valvano continued to repeat the company line until Lupica finally had his fill of boilerplate.

“Enough of this 'unfortunate call' bullsh*t,” Lupica said. “Tell us what you really think.”

Valvano answered: “On the record, I think it was an unfortunate call…on the record.”

After a brief pause, the coach got wound up for exactly the kind of barstool analysis that the national columnists—none of whom were writing for their next morning editions—were looking for.

“Off the record…off the record….that was the most chickensh*t thing I’ve ever seen. Gutless. He comes running in from right in front of the Georgetown bench, and he makes that call. We were right there, all ready to play Duke. We can take Duke. Our kids know we can take Duke. It was horseshit.

“It was all right there. I’ve felt it all week. We had a perfect plan to beat Georgetown and my kids fought back and pulled it off. Then this chickensh*t mother**ker makes that call. It was all in place. We could win another one [national championship].

“And then this guy…Jesus Christ, he’s one of our own guys—an ACC official. I’m going to have to call my Uncle Guido and have him take care of him. Sonofab*tch. It was the most gutless, chickensh*t thing I’ve ever seen.”

At that point, unlike the previous five minutes, Valvano became too profane for print, with more beeps than a retreating brigade of dump trucks.

We stood there in awe and silence. Even the big-time guys had no words after Valvano finished.

“On the record…on the record…,” the coach said. “It was an unfortunate call.”

It was the perfect Valvano moment, filled with humor, profanity and a serious point: he may have even known it was the last chance he had to win another national championship.

Valvano had had a trying year. The News and Observer of Raleigh published excerpts of a book by Peter Golenbock that made outlandish allegations about Valvano’s program. The Wolfpack was inundated with questions all season long and multiple investigations were launched by various organizations, including the NCAA. The scandal ended with a whimper, but the school was put on two years of probation and barred from the next season’s tournament. Both Valvano and school chancellor Bruce Poulton eventually lost their jobs.

Tudor had to write about all of those things, and more, as the Times staff was eventually absorbed into the N&O. His relationship with Valvano soured because of it, but he always had cherished memories to share from the 1983 season, when Tudor, Frank Dascenzo of the Durham Morning Herald, Don Shea of WTVD in Durham and a handful of other North Carolina reporters covered the Wolfpack from Atlanta to Corvallis, Oregon, to Ogden, Utah, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, on its way to NC State’s second national championship. He was one of the few people who heard Valvano make his famous prediction that the Wolfpack would win the championship, if it could manage to find a way to beat Pepperdine in the opening round.

Tudor was full of stories from that transcontinental trip. He even wrote the first book about that season, a collector’s item if you ever see it for sale. He was kind enough to share some of his favorite anecdotes when I began writing the story of the season in the book When March Went Mad.

Somehow, the stories Tudor told were always much better than the ones he wrote, and he was a highly decorated writer.

Because Valvano was off the record when he spoke to us that night at the Meadowlands, Tudor never wrote that story. Yet we laughed about it many times through the years, and I included the anecdote in a chapter about the late Valvano.

I’ve missed being around him since he left the N&O and I stopped writing sports full time. I saw him infrequently when he began writing for WRAL, though when I did he always greeted me the same way as he and Bruce Phillips did when I first started working for the Times: “Hey, babe…what’s happening?”

There was also a little more to our friendship. Our wives are both in the meeting-planning profession and, when we most needed it, his wife hired mine to work a couple of conventions in Orlando. That meant as much to me as any thing I ever got out our personal friendship.

 

Still, I’m thankful for everything he taught me, especially that it is better to be the last one out of the locker room than the first one out of the press room.