When 3 Points Made All the Difference

Dick Braucher scored NC State's final three points in the infamous 12-10 game. (ACC photo)

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© Tim Peeler, 2018

Press Maravich didn’t recruit many players in his brief two-season stint as head coach of NC State basketball. And the most important one he recruited—his own son Pete—never had the opportunity to enroll at NC State because he never could reach the ACC’s mandatory score on the SAT.

Just after Maravich, the replacement coach for ailing Everett Case, led the Wolfpack to the 1965 ACC championship, though, he had the makings of what appeared to be the greatest recruiting class in school history, with two first-team Parade All-America high school players committed to his nascent program.

That five-player national all-star team was something else: It had center Lew Alcidnor of Power Memorial Academy in New York, forward Simmie Hill Jr. of Midland, Pennsylvania, and Don Ross of Waterloo, Iowa. It also had Maravich’s backcourt of the future: Pete and versatile swingman “Rich” Braucher of Kutztown, Pennsylvania.

He added three more players—forward Joe Serdich, centers Robert McLean and Bob Lewis and guards Nick Trifunovich and Jerry Rivlin—to fill out his roster, and to give newly hired freshman coach Les Robinson something to do.

Obviously, Maravich and Braucher were the program’s future.

Dick Braucher

Braucher, known as "Dick" throughout his NC State career, had great court vision and was “the best player I’ve ever seen at breaking a zone defense," according to Maravich. He was the second consecutive Lehigh Valley Player of the Year to come south to play for a North Carolina team. Larry Miller of Catasauqua had also been selected first-team Parade All-America before signing with UNC’s Dean Smith and leading the Tar Heels to three consecutive Final Fours. NC State teammate Pete Coker was also from the same area.

Braucher hoped he and the younger Maravich could restore the Wolfpack to its place at the top of the ACC while playing in Reynolds Coliseum. At the time, Pennsylvania was a hotbed of basketball talent, as the elder Maravich well knew since was born in Aliquippa on the western side of the state.

“I should have played my whole career with Pistol Pete,” says Braucher, now 71 and living near his hometown in the Keystone State. “But he couldn’t get into school. So I played my whole career without him and for a coach that didn't recruit me.”

Braucher played on the Wolflets’ freshman team in 1965-66 for Robinson. Pete, however, did not enroll with him. He spent the entire season playing for newly renamed and coed Southwood College in the Sampson County, North Carolina, town of Salemsburg, averaging 33 points a game for the former all-male Edwards Military Institute.

Meanwhile, the Wolfpack varsity returned to the ACC title game in Maravich’s first full season as head coach. Alas, it was also his last. Shortly before Case died, Maravich announced he was leaving to become the head coach at Southeastern Conference member Louisiana State, which happened to have lower standardized test score requirements. Pete was going with him.

That left Braucher and his teammate to play for NC State alum Norman Sloan, who had coached at Presbyterian, the Citadel and Florida prior to returning to his alma mater.

Coach Norman Sloan and Dick Braucher.

In Sloan’s first year—playing without All-ACC guard Eddie Biedenbach, who had a year-long back injury—the Pack won just nine games, the only single-digit win total in the coach’s career. Braucher was second to junior Billy Krezter with 11.3 points a game.

The second year, the Wolfpack returned to the top half of the ACC, finishing third behind second-ranked North Carolina and sixth-ranked Duke. Braucher was a big part of it, averaging 12.6 points a game, just behind senior Biedenbach’s team-leading 14.1 points a game.

But it was a trio of points that Braucher scored in the Wolfpack’s next-to-last game that season that etched his name in Wolfpack lore, in perhaps the most unusual game ever played in the ACC tournament.

Fifty years ago today at the old Charlotte Coliseum (now called the Bojangles Coliseum), Sloan’s unranked Wolfpack defeated Duke in a slowdown showdown 12-10, the lowest scoring game in tournament history.

The game has been well-recognized through the years, including several stories this week commemorating the half-century anniversary, although Braucher’s name somehow has faded from most fans’ memory.

It shouldn’t.

With less than 40 seconds remaining and the Wolfpack trailing the Blue Devils 9-8, Braucher stole the ball out of the hands of Duke All-America center Mike Lewis after Kretzer missed a free throw. The basket gave the Wolfpack a one-point lead with 37 seconds remaining.

It was a veritable flurry of action in a second half in which Kretzer dribbled the ball uncontested near center court for 13 minutes and 45 seconds with his team trailing 8-6. Biedenbach tied the game with 2:29 to play.

After Braucher gave his team its second lead of the game (the first being a 2-1 advantage with 12:22 to play in the first half), a rusty Duke offense double-dribbled on the other end of the court. Wolfpack sophomore Vann Williford, a native of Fayetteville who Sloan gave a scholarship to when he realized Pistol Pete Maravich would never enroll at NC State, was fouled and made one free throw to extend the  Wolfpack’s lead.

Duke’s Dave Golden was fouled on the other end of the court, but he only made one of two free throws, leaving the Wolfpack with an 11-10 advantage. Braucher, fouled with three seconds left, made one of two free throws to complete the action in the lowest scoring game in ACC history.

The fight for the final rebound.

“We never really planned to hold the ball that whole game,” Braucher says, “but Duke wouldn’t come out to defend Kretz. We were going to run running a five-man weave to try and force Lewis away from the basket. Duke coach Vic Bubas told Lewis not to guard Kretzer. So the game just evolved into a slowdown.

“Duke should’ve played. They kept us in the game by electing not to.”

Bubas, star guard of Case’s 1950 Final Four team and a former Wolfpack assistant coach, has always claimed his Duke team was too slow to guard NC State’s undersized team. So he let Kretzer just dribble the ball.

“We were too slow to guard a team a grandmothers,” Bubas once said, “much less a team as quick as NC State was that year.”

The loss ended the Blue Devils’ hopes of returning to the NCAA Final Four for the fourth time since 1962. Instead, they lost in the second round of the National Invitation Tournament.

The Wolfpack advanced to the ACC title game for the third time in Biedenbach’s career, but was pummeled by the No. 2 Tar Heels, 87-50, in one of the most lop-sided outcomes in ACC championship game history.

It didn’t matter much to Sloan’s Pack, which was on a gradual ascension to the top of college basketball. Two years after the 12-10 game, Williford led the Pack to Sloan’s first ACC title. The coached signed Tommy Burleson and David Thompson in successive recruiting seasons, along with the complementary players he needed to help eventually unseat UCLA as college basketball’s seven-time defending national champions. During that time, the Pack won ACC titles in 1973 and ’74, compiled a 57-1 record and beat UCLA and Marquette in Greensboro for the school’s first NCAA title.

Braucher, however, was not part of it. His senior year was hampered by a serious bout of the Hong Kong flu and an eye injury that significantly bothered his one-handed jumpshot. He married his high school sweetheart Karen between his senior basketball season and before his fifth year of college. 

 They eventually moved back to Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, where they still live today in an 1750s chestnut log home Braucher restored himself.

However, for the last 40 years, Braucher has been affected by troubles with a brain tumor he developed at the age of 32. It was successfully removed at one point with a seven-hour surgery, but returned five years later and needed to be treated with radiation. He retired 12 years ago after a 31-year career at a state-run facility for children with special needs, but the brain injury in his younger years has limited some of his enjoyment in retirement.

He’s never been back to Raleigh, though he likes to call his corner of the Keystone State “Wolfpack Country.” Biedenbach, known as the Pittsburgh Pickpocket during his playing days, calls frequently and visits when he’s in the area.

“What a wonderful experience NC State was for me,” Braucher told late Wolfpacker writer Carter Cheves in 2004. “I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Everything at NC State was great. The athletics department, the fans, the sponsors, my teammates, my friends. I had some great times there.”