Even Valvano Couldn't Overshadow Danny and the Miracles

Jim Valvano: The Entertainer.

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© Tim Peeler, 2018

Of course Jim Valvano stole the spotlight.

Here we were in Kansas City for the 50^th anniversary of the NCAA Championship, the tournament the NC State coach and his Wolfpack won five years earlier in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

ACC- and East region-champion Duke was there, with junior Danny Ferry and a team that could win the national title it missed two years earlier. Pac-10- and West region-champion Arizona was there for the first of the program’s four Final Four and Lute Olsen was certain his team had a chance. Big Eight runner-up Kansas was there, with senior Danny Manny having just beaten cross-state rival Kansas State to qualify for its eighth trip to the national semifinals since 1957. And overwhelming favorite Oklahoma was there, with a high-scoring offense that averaged 96.8 points per game. (How good was Oklahoma? It allowed 99 points in a game that season--and won by 52.)

Valvano showed up without his team, which finished second in the ACC that season and lost to Duke in one of the few good games at that year’s ACC tournament in Greensboro. The third-seeded Wolfpack had lost in a huge upset to 14^th-seeded Murray State in the first round of the NCAA’s Midwest region in Lincoln, Nebraska.

That was fortuitous for me, barely three months after graduating from NC State with a degree in English and just two-and-a-half months into my first professional newspaper gig with The Salisbury Post. I switched over to cover Duke at the East Regional in the Meadowlands, where they barely survived against 11^th-seeded Rhode Island, 73-72, then blasted top-seeded Temple, 63-53.

But this was a place where I really didn’t belong. I was too green, too immature, too unprepared. I was dabbling in extended metaphor game stories.

Still, I took my place that Thursday afternoon in the media scrum in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency Hotel—the famous one where the walkway collapsed in 1981, killing 114 people and injuring 216 more—waiting for a coach/athletics director in a tailored suit to show up and talk to us.

Valvano, it seemed, was a candidate for the UCLA job, one of his many dalliances with other teams through the years. This one, though, was serious. The Bruins, according to several media reports and the words uttered right out of Dick Vitale’s mouth, were offering a five-year contract for $2.5 million guaranteed, remarkable money for a coach at the time.

Valvano, with a New York heritage and a Hollywood personality, seemed perfect for the job. After all, he had been connected with John Wooden since his time as a player at Rutgers, and the Wizard of Westwood had sent Valvano a hand-written following the ’83 championship. Los Angeles might have been the only place in the world with enough cameras and microphones for Valvano’s taste.

That afternoon, he was playing this dalliance for all he was worth.

Which, apparently, was a lot.

Valvano walked in with Georgia Tech coach Bobby Cremins on their way into the “Golden Salute to the Final Four” gala—surely, Valvano thought the red carpet was just for him—with all the other Division I head and assistant coaches and a slew of folks who paid big money to attend. Cremins giggled out the media’s view as Valvano gave a prerecorded dodge that he perfected years before.

“In a situation like this, it is always the best policy to make comments at the appropriate time,” Valvano told us. “This is not the appropriate time. When that occasion does come up, you know I’m going to have something to say.”

When pressed, Valvano went to one of his standards.

“I have this string in my back and you can pull it again if you want the same answer,” he said.

Valvano went to the gala, hitched a ride to California and met with UCLA officials. Some say he accepted the job. Then he called home to talk to his wife Pam and three daughters. They said he could take the job if he wanted but they were staying put at their home in Cary. They had found a permanent home and didn’t want to leave.

UCLA saved faced by saying it wasn’t willing to pay Valvano’s $500,000 buy-out at NC State, one of those things that can be easily negotiated. The school wanted him badly. Vitale told me years later that the Bruin administration had pulled the necessary strings to secure a sitcom for the coach. (If you’ve ever seen Valvano and Vitale’s appearance on the old Cosby show, you’ll understand why it’s a good thing this never happened.)

By Saturday afternoon, Valvano had put out a statement saying he had withdrawn his name for consideration. UCLA went trolling for both Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and Kansas’ Larry Brown, who had already coached the Bruins once, when the Final Four was over. It ended up hiring Pepperdine’s Jim Harrick three weeks later.

With that bit of local news out of the way, I was able to actually cover the events I was there to write about.

Duke played Kansas in the first semifinal, a Danny-vs.-Danny rematch of a game played earlier in the year. The Blue Devils came out nervous, missed their first eight shots and never overcame the 14-0 lead Kansas opened with.. In the nightcap, Oklahoma overwhelmed Arizona to set up only the third championship game ever between two teams from the same conference.

Like this year, the Final Four was played on Easter weekend, so I spent the day at the interminable press conferences. It was a lousy way to celebrate a holiday.

The next day, though, the NCAA gave us tickets to see the Kansas City Royals season-opener against the Toronto Blue Jays, with surly superstar Jorge Bell. He spent all of spring training complaining about being switched from leftfield to designated hitter and made it a national news story.

We did not have good seats at Kauffman Stadium—Heaven was three rows behind us—but we got to see major league history that day as Bell hit four blistering line drives to leftfield, three of which went over the fence to make him the first player in major league history to hit three home runs on opening day. It’s happened three times since then, including Thursday when Chicago White Sox third baseman Matt Davidson hit three out against the Royals, also at Kauffman Stadium.

Danny Manning and Larry Brown.

There was little chance we would see a second miracle that night, because Oklahoma was just too good for Kansas. The Sooners had two eight-point wins over the Jayhawks in the regular season, but the victories were more dominating than the scores showed.

Besides Manning, Kansas had little more than Milt Newton, who had exploded for 20 points against Duke defensive stopper Billy King, and a near-home court advantage, since Kemper is only 40 miles away from Lawrence. Valvano and the Wolfpack knew a little about that, having lost a double-digit second half lead two years before in the Midwest regional final, when crowd at Kemper Arena began screaming in Sensurround: “Rock. Chalk. Jayhawk.”

Even that was unlikely to make this Oz-like fairytale come true.

Except that Manning showed he had better powers than a wizard that night. The current Wake Forest coach scored 31 points and grabbed 18 rebounds, easily one of the best individual performances in the 50 years of NCAA title games. As a team, “Danny and the Miracles” shot 63 percent from the field to easily overcome its 23 turnovers.

It’s hardly remembered in the same way as the Wolfpack’s Cinderella victory over Houston in 1983, or Villanova’s out-of-nowhere win over Georgetown in 1985, but the Jayhawks victory that night 30 years ago still stands out as one of the unlikeliest titles in a decade of upsets.

Maybe that’s an omen for this year’s championship.

'Man, You're Bigger Than I Am'

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Coman Publishing, © 2008

BY TIM PEELER

RALEIGH, N.C. – It was hard to know who to feel sorrier for: the opponents who had to step onto the mat to face massive NC State heavyweight wrestler Tab Thacker, or that tiny moped that had to carry him back and forth from the College Inn to his classes every day, especially when pint-sized roommate Vince Bynum was riding on the handle bars.

Let’s go with the moped, since it never had the chance to avoid facing Thacker with a forfeit, as many heavyweights of his day did.

Whether on the mats, in the movies or on campus, Talmadge Lane Thacker turned heads, right up until the day he died on Dec. 27, 2007. He was 45.

A mountain of a man, the 1984 NCAA heavyweight champion stood 6-5 and weighed roughly 450 pounds. I say “roughly” because there were only a couple of places where Thacker could weigh-in, and he usually just waited until the NCAA wrestling championships every year to step on the scales.

As a junior, Thacker weighed in at 410 pounds. He worked hard on getting in condition for his senior year, because he was so driven to win a national championship. He was disappointed at having finished eighth as a freshman and sixth as a sophomore and junior. So he toned himself up, turning his ham-sized arms into muscle. Many of his friends commented on how (relatively) slim he looked. He figured after sweeping through the regular season undefeated and winning his fourth consecutive ACC heavyweight title, he had shed 30 pounds or more.

So he was more than a little shocked when he stepped on the scales just prior to the 1984 NCAA Championships in East Rutherford, N.J., and saw needle jump all the way to 447 ½ pounds.

“Surprised?” Thacker said. “Oh, yeah. I had been feeling a little thin.”

Tab Thacker (Photo by Roger Winstead from Agromeck archives.)

It didn’t matter, of course. The NCAA had no weight limitation for heavyweight wrestlers. But after seeing Thacker, who never lost a match to an ACC opponent, early in his career, the NCAA immediately imposed a 350-pound limit for heavyweights, it said for safety reasons. NC State petitioned the change on Thacker’s behalf, because he would have been ineligible to compete.

The NCAA eventually exempted Thacker and all other contemporaries who had already entered school from abiding by that limitation, which allowed Thacker to fulfill his dream of winning a national title. He completed his senior season at a perfect 31-0 and became the second individual wrestling champion in school history, winning the title on his 22^nd birthday by beating Nebraska’s Gary Albright.

But to think of Thacker as simply a wrestler is to miss the point entirely. In the early 1980s, he was an NC State icon, as recognizable – and nearly as big – as the Bell Tower, the Brickyard and Harrelson Hall.

“I have a 400-pound body and a 500-pound heart,” Thacker said with great pride.

Every athlete on campus knew where to find Thacker’s room at the College Inn. He was always there, smiling and sharing snacks. (The standing rule was: bring whatever you like to Tab and Vince’s room, eat as much as you like, Tab gets all the leftovers.) Along with the chips, cookies and quarts of milk, he dispensed advice, warning his fellow athletes to stay away from bad situations, drugs, alcohol and all the other vices that could lead them astray.

And, for a guy who could crush just about anyone who ever looked at him the wrong way, Thacker had a sweet demeanor.

“I’m a big guy trying to fit in,” Thacker once said. “I’m not big-headed and I don’t try to intimidate anybody (off the mat). I’m just trying to be average. People say to me, ‘if I was as big as you, I’d beat everybody up.’ I tell them if you beat everybody up, you won’t have any friends and nobody to care for you.”

He had friends by the dozens back then, and by the hundreds in recent years, if his crowded visitation and funeral are any indication.

“His door was always open to everyone,” said former NC State track All-America Gus Young, one of the speakers at Thacker’s funeral. “And he always told you what he thought.”

Young will never forget Thacker’s kindness. As a freshman, Young was lonely. A native of Jamaica who moved to New York with his father at the age of 12, Young came from a family of modest means and couldn’t go home for Christmas.

“Come home with me,” Thacker said. “There’s always room for another plate at the table.”

That might be debated in some circles: Tab’s father, Jimmy, weighed 280 pounds. His mother, Mary, weighed 225. His little brothers, Tray and Trel, both topped 250. But they made room for Young, and treated him like family.

“I barely knew him at the time,” said Young, a member of the NC State 4X100 team that won the 1985 NCAA Championship, a little over a year after Thacker won his heavyweight title. “But he opened up his heart and his home. I was treated just like I was a brother or a son.”

So Thacker was the best man at Young’s wedding, and a frequent recipient of his phone calls, no matter what part of the world Young, a 1^st Sergeant in the U.S. Military Police, was serving.

Obviously, Thacker’s size was intimidating. The first time Clemson football player William Perry saw him, “The Fridge” said: “Man, you make me look small.” Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood, who gave Thacker his start in the movies, called him “Condo” while he was on the set of “City Heat,” in which he had a small part as a bar bouncer.

The thing is, Thacker didn’t become a national champion because of his size. There were other big wrestlers on the scene back then who weren’t as successful as Thacker, who finished his career with an 84-13-1 record, including the perfect 31-0 senior season.

“People thought he won because he was so big, he just laid on people,” said retired NC State wrestling coach Bob Guzzo said. “That’s not true. Tab worked hard. He didn’t have great wrestling skills when he got here – he never even won a high school state championship – but he had the drive to develop his technique and make himself into a champion.

“And for a man that big, he was very nimble on his feet.”

He was quick enough to win a city-wide ping-pong tournament while in the seventh grade, and continued to take on all comers through college. He played defensive line for West Forsyth’s football team, and considered playing nose guard for Wolfpack head football coach Tom Reed after his wrestling career was over.

But his main athletic passion was basketball. He had a sweet outside jumper. While at West Forsyth High School in Winston-Salem, back before he topped 350 pounds, Thacker could dunk a basketball.

Even at NC State, when he weighed nearly a quarter ton, he could still tap the rim from a three-step start. Every now and then, he and Spud Webb would simultaneously show off their dunking skills.

But who would play against him?

“Not me,” said former NC State basketball coach Sidney Lowe, a Thacker contemporary.

But Lorenzo Charles, Ernie Myers and Cozell McQueen did, and while none of those guys backed away from the likes of Ralph Sampson and Akeem Olajuwon and Jon Koncak, they were smart enough to step aside when they saw Thacker barreling at them in a pickup game at Carmichael Gym.

“If he started coming down the lane, nobody stood in there to take a charge,” Myers said.

There was only one bitterness in Thacker’s athletics career: his failure to make the 1984 U.S. Olympic team. He always believed that politics, not his injury-hampered showings at the free-style and Greco-Roman trials, kept him from representing the United States.

He experienced the Olympics vicariously through Young, who was a member of the 1984 Jamaican track and field team that won a silver medal in the 4x100 relay.

Instead of LA, Thacker went to Hollywood, rubbing bellies with the likes of Eastwood, Reynolds and Goldie Hawn. He enjoyed the spotlight, but his roots were North Carolina. And, as anybody who ever wrestled him knew, Thacker was hard to uproot.

He returned to Raleigh, where he ran several popular night clubs and eventually used his NC State criminal justice degree to open up his own company, Heavyweight Bail Bonds.

In his later years, diabetes pinned Thacker. Three years ago, he lost a foot to the disease. Less than a year later, his right leg had to be amputated. In June, 2007, he lost his other leg.

“After he lost his first leg, he was still able to get around as much as he wanted with a prosthesis,” said Young. “At some point, he felt he wasn’t contributing to his family. He had always been such a good provider, but he never really learned how to receive.

“When he lost his second leg, it was like he lost his will to fight.”

Friends and family – all those people who had counted on Thacker for so many things over the years – helped keep his spirits up over the final months, but his condition worsened.

At his funeral at Raleigh’s Springfield Baptist Church, Rev. Daniel Sanders beautifully captured Thacker’s gentle spirit, his struggles with illness and his giving spirit, as did the handful of people who shared in the celebration of his life.

They emphasized what everyone who ever spent significant amounts of time with Thacker quickly learned: No matter what, the gentle mammoth always made you feel like you were the biggest person in the room.

The One-Legged Wanderer

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. The following post is a chapter left over from When March Went Mad, which is available on this site. This story has never been published before.

Help match Cap'n Jim's initial donation to a cancer research fund in Jim Valvano's name through this Facebook fundraising page.

© Tim Peeler, 2018

Cap’n Jim was a wanderer, a one-legged marcher that NC State picked up 35 years ago on the “Road to Albuquerque." He was also a Jim Valvano-esque dreamer who first came up with the idea to create a charity in Jimmy V’s name to benefit cancer research.

His name was really James Michael Letherer of Saginaw, Michigan, but he insisted that everyone call him by his self-appointed nickname: Cap'n Jim. He was just part of the cast of characters embraced by the Wolfpack, a guy with a world view they could appreciate.

“You see the world through a different perspective when you see it from a wheelchair or on a pair of crutches,” said Letherer, who lost his right leg to cancer at the age of nine. “You look for things that happen to the underdogs, the long shots, those who have to beat the odds just to get the little things that other people take for granted.”

No one knew what Letherer was supposed to be captain of, or where exactly he spent all of his time. This much is certain: Cap’n Jim appeared out of the blue one day in Corvalis, Oregon, having hitch-hiked from San Diego to follow the team he predicted would win the whole tournament. The day he met Valvano, he told the coach that the Wolfpack would beat Pepperdine in a game it had no business winning. That was just about the same time Valvano made his prediction to a handful of sportswriters that the Wolfpack would go all the way if it could find a way to get past Pepperdine.

Cap’n Jim claimed to be a good-luck charm, and nothing that happened over the next three weeks, as he hitch-hiked--on crutches, no less--his way from Oregon to Utah to Albuquerque to follow the Wolfpack, did anything to prove him wrong.

Cap'n Jim first had the idea to start a cancer fund inValvano's honor.

“It gives me cold chills to think about it,” Valvano said prior to the Final Four, recalling his first meeting with Letherer.

Cap’n was a little gruff, definitely a little rough and mostly full of puff. At least that’s what the players thought. He was on the court in Albuquerque the night the Wolfpack beat Houston, an uninvited guest who was allowed to join the celebration journey and enjoy the ride.

“He just showed up one day,” said Dereck Whittenburg. “Looking back, Cap’n Jim was part of that belief we had. We didn’t know if he was a war hero or what, but he is there with his crutches with all these badges and a red hat and he is with NC State. We just assumed that he was part of NC State. V just accepted him. We thought he was one of us. He’s exactly the kind of guy that some other programs aren’t going to let get close to them.

"Can you see Mike Krzyzewski saying ‘Come on Cap’n Jim, join in.’ Can you see Roy Williams doing that? That was the magical part of the late Jimmy V–he trusted a lot of people, more unwisely than not. He was carefree and he wanted to be open.”

The Cap'n's relationship with NC State grew after the NCAA Tournament ended. He moved to Raleigh weeks after the championship game, living out of his van around the Mission Valley Shopping Center. Occasionally, he would go to the apartment shared by Terry Gannon and Mike Warren for a much-needed shower. He told them stories about marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement.

Jim Letherer marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama.

“How could he march with Dr. King with only one leg?” the players wondered.

Then one day Gannon, a history major at NC State, found some pictures in an African-American studies textbook of King’s 50-mile march on Selma, Alabama, in June, 1965. There was a guy on crutches, enduring chants of “Left...left...left” from the hecklers who lined the road. He talked to the national media who were covering the event and told them his only handicap was not being able to do more to help the struggle for freedom.

The players took him a little more seriously after that. He also had the trust of trainers, staff and students around NC State. He came up with a plan to run across America to raise money for cancer research, the perfect publicity stunt for someone who had once been told he would never walk again.

He spent a year in Raleigh, working with trainer Craig Sink and assistant athletics director Wright Wayne. He lost 80 pounds. He even had some special crutches made by three engineering students from NC State’s student chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers: Bill Ridenhour, C.A. McDonald and Harry Wilfong. He gave them regular updates as he traveled the 2,550 miles to his destination, stopping along the way to give radio interviews and make phone calls back to Raleigh. In Texas, he stopped to talk to the Dallas Cowboys.

After 214 days of traveling, Cap’n Jim reached San Diego. He raised some $6,400 along the way, most of it coming from Thurl Bailey, who pledged to pay $1 per mile that Cap’n Jim ran. No one really knows where the money ever went–Letherer had a long history of raising money, but records of any donations he ever made are a bit sketchy. But his dream was to create the Jimmy V Cancer Research Charity, an idea that eventually became the Jimmy V Foundation, one of the nation’s most successful cancer-research charities.

Now in its 25th year, the Jimmy V Foundation for Cancer Research has raised more than $200 million for cancer research and is funding young scientists who have begun their careers in fighting the kinds of cancer that affected Letherer's life and claimed Valvano's.

Following his days in Raleigh, Letherer lived an adventurous life. His transcontinental trek inspired him to run a marathon and run with the bulls in Pamplona. Doesn’t mean he did either one, but he was inspired, and he inspired others, all while living a walk-about life.

“We had in our family something we called the ‘Jimmy Tax,’ which we used to bail him out of whatever he had gotten into,” said Bernard “Shirley” Letherer of Saginaw, Michigan, Cap’n Jim’s younger brother. “One time, he ended up somewhere in Asia, trying to swim across a river. They arrested him for vagrancy because he didn’t have any money. They threw him in jail, and he stayed there for about four months before we found out about it.

"I think that one cost us about $550.”

Cap’n Jim lost his right leg as a child, two years after cancer was found in the bone. He suffered a stroke in 1955 that paralyzed his left side. And he suffered even more damage when he was involved in a bus accident, which confined him to a wheelchair for years. He never let his disabilities slow him down, traveling every direction of the globe looking for adventure. He also became a huge sports fan, especially of the Seattle SuperSonics, the San Diego Chargers, Washington Redskins and, of course, the Wolfpack.

Letherer died Dec. 18, 2001, of a heart attack in Saginaw, where he had lived the last year of his life, as he fought several illnesses. He was 67. But in his first 66 years, he wandered the world, unhindered by physical limitations and unable to resist joining the journey of other big dreamers.