Friday, February 16, 2018

The Rarest Score on the Rainiest Day



(From the Miami News)


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© Tim Peeler, 2018

A conscientious World War II objector, a late-season Atlantic hurricane and the rarest score on the gridiron—mix it all up and what you get might be the strangest victory in NC State football history.

It was 11 months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor when coach Williams “Doc” Newton took his 33 Wolfpack players by train to Miami for a Nov. 7, 1942, game at what was then called Burdine Stadium (later named the Orange Bowl). It was one week after Newton’s team pulled off a stunning 21-14 Halloween upset over rival North Carolina at Riddick Stadium.

After that game, however, the team’s star offensive blocking back and defensive tailback—not to mention baseball pitcher/outfielder and future women’s basketball coach—Robert "Peanut" Renfrow Doak was shipped off to Camp Pokomoke in Powellville, Maryland, for training in the Civilian Public Service for conscientious objectors.

Doak was the son of longtime NC State baseball coach Charles “Chick” Glenn Doak, namesake of the Wolfpack’s baseball stadium, and the younger brother of Charles “Chick” Wilson Doak, who played baseball at State in 1941 and ‘42. Both Peanut and the younger Chick were drafted into the Army in the fall of 1942, but as devout Quakers, they petitioned for relief from military duty on religious grounds and voluntarily entered homeland service, spending much of the war working in domestic hospitals.

Peanut ended his college football career out with a bang, serving as game captain for the Wolfpack’s second consecutive victory over the Tar Heels.

“That was the last time I ever put on a State College uniform,” Doak said in a 1974 interview.

He was replaced in the lineup for the Miami game by Joe Suniewick, a freshman from New Jersey who had played quarterback much of the season.

The game was not without difficulties.

The Wolfpack’s train arrived in Miami on Friday evening, about the time an unnamed Category 2 hurricane bounced between Cuba, the Florida straits and Miami proper. Public schools and all three of Miami’s high school football games that night were canceled.

Rain and winds lingered throughout the next day and there were talks about moving the college game to Sunday or Monday. The storms lightened by the afternoon, so both teams agreed to keep the scheduled 4:30 p.m. kickoff.

Besides, Newton and the NC State athletics staff had sprung already for three dozen rare steaks for that Saturday morning’s pregame meal, and with voluntary meat rations the norm in Miami during those war years, they knew there would be no chance for another such banquet any day in the coming week.

The field, however, was a sloppy mess when 11,267 spectators filed through the turnstiles that afternoon. Neither team could maintain traction in the wind and the rain.

Miami had nine first downs the entire game. NC State had three. Miami gained a grand total of 128 yards in total offense, while NC State had just 22. Of the 10 total passes attempted in the game, Miami completed two on its final possession and NC State had just one the entire afternoon. The biggest advantage came in penalties, as the Hurricanes were flagged for 50 yards while the Wolfpack had 15.

It was a rough and sloppy game, despite the loss of only one fumble. Three different on-field skirmishes led to the ejection of six players, three from each team.

“Up where we come from we’re not used to that sort of ball playing,” Newton said. “In fact, we do not tolerate it.”

After three quarters, the game was still a scoreless tie. The only thing of note to that point was a wind-aided 83-yard punt by NC State’s Eddie Teague, which is tied for the longest punt in school history, though not currently listed in the NC State football record book.

Another deep punt in the fourth quarter pinned Miami back on its 11-yard line. That’s when Hurricane coach Jack Harding, with the wind at the team’s back, decided to punt on first down. At the time, it was a good strategy, a chance to perhaps flip the field and set up a game-winning score. Besides, Miami’s biggest running back, Al Kasulin, was also the team’s punter.

Kasulin was standing near the goal line when the ball was snapped directly to him, NC State charging right guard Eddie Gibson broke through the Hurricane line and got his hands on the ball. It bounded over Kasulin’s head and between the two goal posts at the back of the end zone for a two-point safety.

It was described this way in a local newspaper: “Eddie Gibson’s sudden bolt from his line like the Mad Monk of Siberia bursting from his cell with a helluva yell to camp right on top of Kasulin’s great toe, catch the impact of the punt full on his manly bosom and see it bound into the air through the east goal posts and wobble crazily around in the end zone with Gibson and Bob Douglas and Kasulin himself in full pursuit.”

Miami had two threats in the red zone in the final quarter, but did not attempt a field goal because of the swirling winds. They were stopped one-yard short both times. The fourth-quarter safety was the game’s only points, and the 2-0 Wolfpack victory remains the only game with that outcome in program history.

But not in Miami’s. The Hurricanes won the most recent college football game decided by a 2-0 score, beating Oregon on Dec. 6, 1958, at the Orange Bowl in the only game ever played between those transcontinental schools.

I don’t have a definitive list of 2-0 games in college football history, but it is much rarer than any other score, by a longshot. The last scoreless college football game was a 0-0 tie between, oddly enough, Oregon and Oregon State in 1983.

Charles "Chick" Glenn Doak
As for the Doaks, the elder Chick was NC State’s baseball coach and a teacher at the school for 34 years. From 1924-39 with the baseball team, he compiled 145 wins, 131 losses, 6 ties. (Little known fact: before he was NC State's baseball coach, he was the basketball coach at both North Carolina and Trinity [now Duke] and the baseball coach at UNC.)

He died of a heart attack 10 months after retiring from his NC State physical education teaching position in July 1958.

The younger Chick played professional baseball after the war and settled into the business world when his playing days ended. He bought the Wilson Candy Company in 1977 and moved it to Rocky Mount. One Sunday morning he surprised a burglar and was hit in the head and strangled with a giant candy cane made at the plant. Two days later, he died from those injuries on Aug. 31, 1988. At the Doak family’s insistence, the convicted killer was spared the death penalty.

Peanut completed his service in 1944 and returned to his native North Carolina to play minor league baseball for the next nine years. In the off seasons, he spent time as the head football coach at Guilford High School, multiple sports at New Bern High School and the football coach at Presbyterian Junior College in Laurinburg (now St. Andrews College).

Robert "Peanut" Renfrow Doak
From 1969-74, Doak handled the Raleigh operations for the American Basketball Association’s Carolina Cougars, which split time between Raleigh, Greensboro and Charlotte.

When NC State athletics director Willis Casey decided to elevate the women’s club basketball team to varsity status in 1974, he chose Peanut Doak to be the team’s interim first-year coach, while he searched for a permanent leader of the program.

Doak led the inaugural Wolfpack women to a 13-4 overall record and a NCAIAW tournament championship in Wilmington, in his only season as head coach.

Casey eventually found who he was looking for in Elon College coach Sandra Kay Yow, who spent 35 years as the Wolfpack women’s head coach until her death of cancer in 2009.

Friday, February 9, 2018

The Great Banner Heist of 1986


The NBC broadcast, featuring Al McGuire and Dick Enberg



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, 2018

No one condoned what they did, then nor now.

It was dangerous, perhaps even a felony.

What happened the week of Feb. 16-23, 1986, was about as close to the perfect college prank as one group of fans could pull on its rival, without being expelled or incarcerated.

It was a time when NC State and North Carolina students regularly tried to out-do each other before big football and basketball games. The student newspapers would make fake copies of the other school’s paper and replace the real ones on campus on game day. Sometimes, stealthy UNC students would sneak into the Free Expression Tunnel and paint it light blue and white.

Sometimes, fans went a little too far, as when UNC fans spray painted the base of the Memorial Tower on Hillsborough Street light blue after a Tar Heel win in Reynolds or when a student stole the wolf mascot head following a club hockey game in Greensboro.

One of those pranks even played a part in the Wolfpack winning the 1983 NCAA championship.

Even the coaches were into it. Earlier that season, when NC State played the Tar Heels in the last game ever at Carmichael Auditorium, as soon as the final buzzer sounded an NC State team manager threw a game ball to head coach Jim Valvano, who dribbled in for a layup so he could forever say he scored the last basket at UNC’s fabled gym.

In its next game, North Carolina hosted Duke at its brand new, state-of-the-art Dean E. Smith Student Activities Center. It was college basketball’s shiniest new penny, a $34 million dome that Tar Heel fans everywhere were two-carat-engagement-ring proud of, especially the fact that it was paid for solely with private donations.

The new arena had just about everything, except perhaps appropriate media seating and a high-tech security system. It was well-appointed with banners that celebrated every program championship, both real and imagined. The light blue banners hung from every available spot in the rafters.

Sometime on Sunday morning, Feb. 16—a week before the rematch between the No. 17 Wolfpack and the top-ranked Tar Heels—a half dozen of the banners, several logoed scoreboard signs and six nets from the basketball rims mysteriously disappeared from the Smith Center. An unknown liquid was found on the arena floor.

The perps entered the arena from a tunnel that connected it to the unfinished adjacent natatorium. They climbed onto a catwalk 120 feet above the floor to remove the banners, and proved to themselves, some 30 years before it was apparent to others, that the ceiling really was the roof.

UNC campus police recovered the six metallic signs in the woods behind the Smith Center and one championship banner was found in the lower parking lot of Hinton James Dormitory on the UNC campus.

Five, however, were still missing. They were for the 1983, ’84 and ’85 NCAA tournament appearances and the 1983 and ’84 regular-season ACC basketball championships, which that the time was not officially recognized by the conference.

That Tuesday night, NC State students camping out in front of Reynolds Coliseum for tickets to that Sunday’s game against top-ranked North Carolina were treated to a brief glimpse of the banners. The roar from the crowd was audible from the Technician offices on the third floor of the Student Center.

Both campuses were tremendously roiled by the Great Banner Heist of 1986.

As the rivalry weekend approached, the banners began to resurface on NC State’s campus.

Friday afternoon, one was displayed on the top of Dabney Hall.

Saturday night, as students settled in for a late-night showing of “Nightmare on Elm Street” in Stewart Theatre, a banner was unfurled in front of the movie screen, to great applause and surprise.

At sunrise on game day, one of the missing banners was attached to the arm of a 50-foot-tall construction crane at Carmichael Gym, adjacent to Reynolds Coliseum. Two other homemade flags—one that read “[action verb] the Tar Heels” and “UNC [action verb]”—flew on either side.

The nationally televised game tipped off at 1 p.m. and was one of the classic contests between nationally ranked rivals, despite the fact that the Wolfpack had lost three consecutive ACC contests and the Tar Heels had just suffered their first loss ever at its new arena, an overtime defeat to Maryland.

The Wolfpack, who practiced twice the day before the game to prepare for the Tar Heels, came out smoking behind the leadership of senior Nate McMillan and the scoring of sophomore Chris Washburn and junior Benny Bolton. The Tar Heels, missing point guard Steve Hale and center Warren Martin to injuries, were flat the whole game and missed 10 of their first 11 shots.

Valvano’s Wolfpack scored the first basket, led by 11 at the half and never once trailed in the contest. 

During a timeout midway through the second half, the fourth missing banner came flying from the westside balcony, nearly blowing the top off the infamous Reynolds Coliseum noise meter. It was retrieved by a UNC cheerleader.

The closest the Tar Heels got in the second half was five points, but the Wolfpack virtually cruised the rest of the way, beating the Tar Heels in Reynolds for the third time in four years.

What of the final banner?

Following the game, the culprits were in the process of hanging it on an Interstate-40 overpass in Cary so that the defeated Tar Heels would see it as they returned to Chapel Hill. But several UNC fans saw it first and retrieved it.

All five were back in Chapel Hill and hanging from the rafters two days after the game.

No suspects were ever identified or charged in the theft of the banners.

“From the way they were yelling when we took down the banner [from the top of the crane], I have a pretty good idea that it was someone from Owen Dorm,” NC State campus police detective Laura Reynolds said.

No one condoned what they did, then nor now.

It was dangerous, perhaps even a felony.

It's hard to match the electricity of ACC and Big Four rivalries of the 1980s.

 

Friday, February 2, 2018

Too Many Cinderellas



Sophomore guard Terry Gannon at the free throw line.

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. Or, if you want to know why, some 35 years after the final buzzer, Gannon still holds a grudge against Dereck Whittenburg for the final seconds of the 1983 NCAA Championship game, buy a copy of “When March Went Mad” from the same link.

© Tim Peeler, 2018

Terry Gannon’s life was made for this shot.

There were just five seconds left on Feb. 12, 1983, and NC State trailed Notre Dame, the only school Gannon ever wanted to attend, by one point with just seconds to play. He'd practiced this shot every night in his dreams.

And made it, every single time.

Here he was, with the ball in his hands, ready to stick it to Digger Phelps and the program that chose Dan freaking Duff over Gannon to be its shooting guard.

Gannon grew up Joliet, Illinois, side-by-side with his father, high school basketball coach Jim Gannon, going to Chicago White Sox baseball games, Notre Dame football games and playing basketball whenever and wherever he could. (He doesn’t talk as much about it, but he also took four years of tap-dance from his mother, who was a professional dance instructor.)

He used to play pickup basketball games at Notre Dame’s Athletic and Convocation Center with an older family friend, a 22-year-old equipment manager for the Fighting Irish football team named Daniel Eugene Ruettiger, a habitual hustler who talked his way onto the football team, played one play on senior day against Georgia Tech in 1975 and had a movie—Rudy—made about himself.

Gannon and his dad were among the first people to greet the unlikely star following his brief appearance with first-year coach Dan Devine’s Fighting Irish. Gannon, then 12 years old, sneaked Rudy’s helmet out of the locker room after the game.

Gannon later became a star at Joliet Catholic High School, the best thing to come out of that industrial town since Jake and Elwood Blues. He wanted desperately to play for Digger Phelps’ basketball team, even getting Rudy put in a good word for him.

“He’s too small,” Phelps said, crushing Gannon's spirit with just three words.

A couple of other schools showed interest, but one of Gannon’s high school friends, Mike Pesavento, had come south to Raleigh and NC State to pitch for Sam Esposito’s Wolfpack baseball team. Pesavento mentioned Gannon to Esposito, who talked to Wolfpack men’s basketball coach Jim Valvano about recruiting the smallish shooting guard.

Valvano went to visit Gannon, spent the whole time talking basketball with Gannon’s dad in the family kitchen and told Terry to follow him to Raleigh as part of his second-year recruiting class that included Cozell McQueen, Mike Warren, Walter “Dinky” Proctor and sleeper recruit Lorenzo Charles.

Valvano casually mentioned that the Wolfpack was in the midst of a six-game series with Phelps’ Fighting Irish, which sealed Gannon’s decision.

“I’ll go down there and show those sons of bitches,” he said to himself.

He played both basketball and baseball his first season with the Wolfpack, but didn’t contribute much to either team. He barely even entered the game when the Valvano’s basketball team went to South Bend, Indiana, and beat the Irish, 62-42.

Gannon opted to concentrate on basketball during the 1982-83 season for several reasons, not the least of which was the home game against Notre Dame on Feb. 12, 1983, at Reynolds Coliseum and the ACC’s decision to implement an experimental 17-feet, 9-inch 3-point line that was the shortest in the nation. (There was no standardized distance before the NCAA officially adopted the 3-point goal in 1986-87.)

Gannon became the team’s designated cannon that season, burning the nets with 53 3-pointers on 90 shots, a .593 shooting percentage that is still the best ever recorded by an ACC player.
When the Irish came to town, the Wolfpack was just starting to find its rhythm after losing senior guard Dereck Whittenburg, who had suffered a broken foot in January and was thought to be lost for the season. After two losses, the Pack reeled off four straight wins, thanks mostly to freshman sensation Ernie Myers.

Wolfpack senior guard Sidney Lowe, who had also wanted to play at Notre Dame as a prep player at DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, wanted his third win in four games against the Irish too. He had been passed over by Phelps for All-America point guard John Paxson.

The Pack’s chances looked dim, however, with Whittenburg out and senior power forward Thurl Bailey recovering from both the flu and a bad reaction to the medicine he was taking.

The game settled into one of those dreary early 1980s slowdown contests, played without either the three-pointer or a shot clock. (In non-conference games that season, coaches agreed to one, both or neither before tipoff.)

With 90 seconds left to play Duff, the shooting guard Phelps chose over Gannon two years earlier, missed a pair of free throws. The Wolfpack held the ball for a final shot and ran the play that it ran throughout the season with the game on the line: No. 32. Lowe had the ball in his hands, with Gannon and Myers on the wings and Bailey and Charles underneath. Lowe drove to the free-throw line and found Gannon wide open for the game-winning shot.

It was Gannon’s time to be a hero, to hit the game-winning shot he dreamed of ever since Phelps broke his heart and took Duff instead of him. He couldn’t wait to out-Rudy Rudy with an easy 18-foot jumper from the wing.

But he missed.

The ball bounced off the front of the rim and into the waiting hands of Notre Dame’s Tim Kempton. The game ended in a 43-42 victory for the Fighting Irish.

“It still kills me to this day,” Gannon said from his home in Los Angeles recently. “It felt so good leaving my hands. It was right on target. It was perfect.”

Terry Gannon shooting over Michael Jordan.
You know what happened next, however. In the next game out, the Wolfpack crushed UNC-Wilmington, then beat defending national champion North Carolina for the first time in Valvano’s tenure. Whittenburg returned to the team, just as he had as a senior in high school at DeMatha when his prep career was thought to be finished. The re-energized team began to roll. Gannon was the leading scorer in a 130-89 victory over Wake Forest in the regular-season finale.

The Wolfpack won the ACC tournament championship in Atlanta, thanks in great part to a steal the diminutive Gannon had against Virginia giant Ralph Sampson. Though there was no 3-point shot in the NCAA tournament, Gannon continued to contribute his outside shooting and quick-handed defense.

In the national championship game against Houston, Gannon against made perhaps the biggest defensive play of the game when he took a charge against Cougar All-America guard Clyde Drexler, his fourth personal foul in the first half. He had another in the second half when he slapped the ball off Benny Anders' knee as the Houston guard drove to the basket.

When the Wolfpack went down by seven after halftime, it used the outside shooting
ship—makes Gannon philosophical about his Notre Dame miss.

“I’ve worked this out in my head many, many times through the years, and have convinced myself that we don't win the national championship if I make that shot against Notre Dame,” Gannon says. “There are only so many miracles you can have in a season, only so many Cinderella stories.

“It would've been too much.”

It helps him sleep at night.