Win One for Old No. 7

J. Platt Turner and future NC Governor O. Max Gardner

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© Tim Peeler, 2018

Barely two minutes into the game, the Farmers from the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Raleigh gave the University of North Carolina the surprise of its football life.

They scored.

In a game played on Oct. 28, 1899, at the old N.C. State Fairgrounds across Hillsboro Street from the current location of NC State’s D.H. Hill Library, the fledgling Farmers of A. and M. College caught the university boys completely off-guard.

While not played during the State Fair, the game drew a large crowd, one that eventually stormed the field during a game-halting controversial call as either: (A) time expired or (B) 17 seconds remained on the clock, depending on which timekeeper you chose to believe.

At the time, each team traveled with its own timekeeper in an effort to prevent such disputes.

Early in the game, however, it was a student named J. Platt Turner who grabbed the headlines. Soon after the overconfident University boys ended their game-opening drive with a failed forward pass on fourth down, the young halfback on Dr. John McKee’s team plunged through the line for the first touchdown ever scored by the school now known as NC State against UNC-Chapel Hill.

Here’s the great thing about Turner’s touchdown more than 12 decades ago: His son told me all about it. Former NC State football player Raeford Turner often recounted how his dad scored that day against the Tar Heels at Wolfpack Club events. He even told it while playing in a spring alumni football game with Roman Gabriel back in 1985, when he was a spry 57-year-old receiver.

Raeford Turner of Greensboro.

The younger Turner, if he can be called such, played one game for the Wolfpack of Beattie Feathers in 1947. He suffered a significant injury in the season-opener against when he ran full speed into a steel goalpost early in the game.

(It was just as well: Turner had already played seasons at Baylor and Carson-Newman and was likely ineligible, even by the NCAA’s lax post-World War II standards of the day.)

“We didn’t have much luck anyway against North Carolina and Choo-Choo Justice,” says Raeford Turner, who operated Turner Landscaping in Greensboro for decades.

His father, though, should be remembered as a Wolfpack hero, having ended North Carolina’s scoring streak at 212-0 against A&M, which worked on a limited athletics budget during its first decade. The school’s board of trustees limited the financial contribution to all athletics to just $50 and had already once voted to end all participation in college football, a vote that was overturned midway through the 1896 season.

Carolina had established varsity and scrub (or second team) football as early as 1888 and clearly had the upper hand in the early years of the rivalry. The first time the two teams faced each other, in the spring of 1893, A&M sent a collection of untrained students to face UNC’s scrub team. The second-string Tar Heels beat the Farmers 22-0.

That game is not recognized by either school in this sometimes heated rivalry. The two schools played a pair of games against each other in 1894, with the UNC varsity beating A&M 44-0 in the first game and the UNC scrubs winning a little less handily 16-0 in the second. The teams met three times over the next three years, varsity against varsity, but the Farmers failed to score in any of those games.

When the 1899 season opened in Chapel Hill, McKee’s team fell once again, 34-0. Newspaper reports of the day, however, said the Farmers “played a plucky game,” despite a lopsided score.

The second game that season was held at the open fields of the Raleigh fairgrounds. The outcome was completely different and unexpected from the first game, as the undefeated Tar Heels may have been looking ahead to its game two days later against Maryland or the ones that followed against powerhouses Navy, Princeton, Georgia and mighty Sewanee.

A&M held a significant 11-5 halftime lead, following touchdowns by Turner and Bill Person, whose long scoring run in the first half was called “a hair-lifter” by one of the newspapers covering the game.

North Carolina tied the score in the second half and was moving in to score the game-winning touchdown as the dual game clocks wound down, one in the pocket of A&M time keeper Charles Pritchett and one in the pocket of UNC timekeeper Mr. Carr.

With North Carolina on the 2-yard line, Pritchett announced that the game was over, while Carr said 17 seconds remained—time for at least one more play.

1899 A&M football squad.

“An argument ensued, and the crowd rushed the field. While this was going on, the [UNC] Varsity team lined up and put the ball across the goal line, while their opponents stood away,” read the next day’s account in the Raleigh Morning Post. “The Carolina players claimed the touchdown, which, if counted in the score, would give the University 16 points and A. and M. 11.”

But the home team won the final argument, claiming a final—and official—11-11 tie.

“The game was a red-hot one from start to finish,” the Morning Post said. “The A. and M. team put up a corking game, which was a surprise to everyone. The teamwork was excellent, and it showed the result of hard training and excellent coaching.

“The Varsity 11 was handicapped by the absence of three of its best players, who are laid up with injuries: Cunningham, the centre [sic], and guards Captain Stull and Bennett, did not take part in the game. Carolina’s team play was poor. Fumble after fumble was made, which cost the team dearly.”

State’s military cadet student body, some of whom had just returned from fighting in the Spanish-American War, celebrated the unexpected tie as a victory, quickly taking to the streets of the state capital for hours after the game ended at 2 p.m.

“The A. and M. boys owned the city last night,” The Morning Post reported. “They celebrated the result with great demonstration. The greater part of the students marched into the city, beating drums, blowing horns and making every conceivable kind of noise. They were gaily bedecked in college colors. On Fayetteville Street the college yell was shouted every few minutes. The boys rejoiced as much as if they had won a victory.”

It was a night to remember, by all accounts.

“It sent the A. and M. students off on a wild celebration in Raleigh,” reported the News & Observer. “With drum and bugle and flags, they paraded the streets, leaving a perfect din in their wake and stopping now and then to give the college yell.”

In fact, the students were still so rowdy when they returned to campus they decided to torch “Old No. 7,” which is what they called the school’s original outhouse. (At the time, State’s campus had just six school buildings and dormitories, all of which were identified numerically.)

It was a regrettable decision for the students, who had no indoor plumbing at the school, other than 10 showers that had been retro-fitted in the basement of Watauga Hall after two young women attending a summer teacher’s course died of typhoid caused by a lack of running water.

R.H. Morrison

“[T]he students wished many times they had not been so rash on that night, for it was a long way to the woods across the railroad,” R.H. Morrison wrote in an account of his A&M days in the November 1956 edition of Statelog.

But the deed was done, and the A&M gridiron heroes went on to beat Bingham Academy of Asheville, and play scoreless ties against Guilford and Davidson. It ended the season with a 10-0 loss to Oak Ridge Academy, to finish with a 1-3-2 record

That didn’t prevent the overexcited A&M fans from laying claim to a mythical state championship of colleges and schools, which conveniently left out the University, which at the time was the largest school in the state.

A&M, led by future North Carolina governor and team captain O. Max Gardner, produced two more ties with UNC, in 1902 and 1904. But the teams began to feud over eligibility standards and UNC ended the rivalry from 1906-1918.

That meant A&M’s two best teams, in 1907 and 1910, did not play against UNC while rolling to undefeated seasons that earned them the self-proclaimed South Atlantic Championships.

The two teams were firm in refusing to face each other in football, but they did schedule a regular-season basketball game in 1913 in downtown Raleigh, shortly after both schools began their varsity programs. A&M rolled to a 26-18 victory in that game, which the News & Observer described as “the Techs of Raleigh against the classicists of Carolina.”

And in March 1919, after both basketball teams laid claim to the state championship, the administrations of the two schools agreed to play a special championship game, again in Raleigh’s downtown auditorium, to decide the title.

The Farmers won that game, as well, 39-29. More importantly, the tensions between the two athletics departments eased significantly, and they agreed to face each other again in football. North Carolina won the first game in the renewed rivalry, 13-12, in front of 8,000 fans on the Thursday of the 1919 State Fair.

The rivalry game became an annual attraction, and in the following season, NC State College, as the school was now known, finally scored its first victory over its blue-and-white opponents.

John “Runt” Faucette dominated the Tar Heels for two consecutive years, setting up a pair of second-half touchdowns in a 13-3 victory in 1920 and scoring the game’s lone touchdown in a 7-0 victory the following year on a 30-yard fumble return.

By then, the school had been fully equipped with indoor plumbing, and there were no outhouses to ignite in celebration of either victory.

Quarterback of the Rising Sun

1895 N.C. College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts football team.

Editor's note: Originally published Sept. 10, 2010, on www.GoPack.com.

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BY TIM PEELER

RALEIGH, N.C. - In the long history of NC State football, which dates back to 1892, who is the most interesting quarterback to ever take a snap from center?

Is it former Super Bowl champion Russell Wilson, a two-sport standout at NC State who wanted nothing more in his college days than to be an ESPN broadcaster? Look at him now.

Is it NFL star Philip Rivers, the Alabama native who wanted so badly to come to NC State that he waited out the school's 44-day coaching search and became Chuck Amato's first recruit when the coach was hired shortly after New Year's Day in 2000? He's still going stronger than ever.

Is it Erik Kramer, who never started a game in his two years at junior college, yet came to NC State, earned the starting job, was named ACC Player of the Year in 1986 and had a long NFL career with the Atlanta Falcons, Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions and San Diego Chargers?

Is it Jim Donnan, offensive leader of the 1967 Wolfpack, who was an ACC champion tennis player who went on to have a Hall of Fame college football coaching career?

Is it Roman Gabriel, the Wilmington, N.C., native who was recruited here to play football, basketball and baseball? On his recruiting trip, the football coaches deliberately refrained from taking him to crumbling Riddick Stadium. Instead they wowed him at Reynolds Coliseum with three consecutive days of the Dixie Classic.

Is it Artie Rooney, the first cousin of NFL founder and Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney, who played for Doc Newton's Wolfpack in the late 1930s?

Don't cast your ballots until you know a little bit about one of the first quarterbacks in school history: Japanese-born Teisaku Sugishita, the second international student to graduate from the North Carolina School for the Agriculture and Mechanic Arts and one of the first Asians to ever play college football.

Teisaku Sugishita

Just how this native of Kofuku, Japan -- a tiny town in the central Gifu Prefecture, about 100 miles from Tokyo -- made his way to Raleigh, North Carolina, in the late 19th century is a mystery that is lost to the vestiges of time. Perhaps he fled the region following the devastating Mino-Owari earthquake of 1891, the largest earthquake to ever hit central Japan.

Or perhaps he was part of the Japanese government's attempt to modernize during the Meiji period of industrialization on the island nation.

"One of the ways Western technology was imported was by sending Japanese students abroad and supporting their study in American and European universities," said John Baugh, director of the North Carolina Japan Center and an NC State professor of civil engineering. "While British railroad engineers, Dutch civil engineers and other foreign advisors were hired by the Japanese government, providing scholarships for Japanese engineers to study abroad was seen as a more cost-effective way to gain access to the best ideas and technology.

"Between the 1860s and `80s, about 20 Japanese had been sent to the United States to study in various fields of engineering, with most of them returning to work in government positions, as did Mr. Sugishita, who worked for the Imperial Railway of Japan immediately upon returning."

The sparse school records of the time show that Sugishita enrolled in the civil engineering program in the fall of 1894, as part of the fourth freshman class in school history.

Shortly thereafter, he joined the football team. He clearly wasn't scared away by the less-than-virile school colors of pink and blue that the football team wore at the time, or the brown and white it switched to for the 1895 football season. Sugishita surely liked it, though, when students voted in the fall of 1895 to change the colors yet again, this time to the same red and white that adorned the famous flag of his native "Land of the Rising Sun."

How he learned the game of American football - which didn't become popular in Japan until about 40 years after Sugishita migrated to Raleigh - is a bigger mystery still. Likely, he learned the game like all the other farmers and engineers enrolled at the North Carolina School for Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, on the plowed agricultural fields surrounding the campus.

Like all students at the time, he was proficient enough in English, mathematics and North Carolina history to gain admittance into the land-grant university on the west edge of the state capital. He probably complained, like most of the other students of the day, about the three hours of military training and marching he had to do every single day and the 12 hours of manual labor he was required to do every week (probably in the blacksmith shop). But he paid his $38 a year for tuition, room and board, and in four years earned his degree.

Not much is known about Sugishita's playing career, though the Atlanta Constitution referred to him as "the young Japanese, who played such a good quarter back and made a number of beautiful tackles throughout the game" in its story about NC State's 42-6 loss to Virginia Military Academy on the grounds of the Cotton States and International Exposition on Oct. 25, 1895.

Two years later, he was teammates with Edwin Bentley Owen and George Frederick Syme, two future NC State leaders who have on-campus dormitories named in their honor. That team lost to Guilford, 18-0, and North Carolina's scrub team, 40-0, but beat Davidson, 19-0, in its third and final game of the year.

At most, Sugishita played in 12 collegiate games while at NC State, two fewer than Rivers played in his junior season of 2002 alone.

Of course, the quarterback was hardly the same kind of leader of the offense he is today. It was one of four backfield positions in the earliest days of football. The fullback - the deepest back behind the line of scrimmage - was the most important player on offense. The halfbacks lined up halfway between the fullback and the line of scrimmage and the quarterback lined up a quarter of the way between the fullback and the line of scrimmage.

A&M's campus in 1895.

Football at the time was a violent sport, and Sugishita would have been a ball carrier in the offensive schemes of the day. Using brutally effective military tactics like the flying wedge was hard on unpadded and unhelmeted players of the day. Four players were crippled for life in the 1894 game between Yale and Harvard, leading to the suspension of several popular rivalries. But NC State has never missed a season since it began sponsoring a varsity team in 1892.

Sugishita earned his degree in civil engineering as part of the 16-member class of 1898. His senior thesis detailed the design of a steel highway bridge.

Soon afterwards, he returned to Japan and began working in the lucrative silk trading industry. After he was drafted into the Japanese Army during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), his life took many twisting and tragic turns, and he stopped communicating with his friends back in North Carolina.
In 1923, former teammate Sydeham Brevard Alexander Jr. of Charlotte began a quest to find his long-lost friend, after a full two decades without hearing from him. Through Alumni director Tal Stafford, Alexander contacted the American Embassy in Tokyo and received the following letter, dated May 19, 1923, from Charge d'Affaires Hugh Wilson:

With reference to your letter of April 13, 1923, regarding Teisaku Sugishita, a Japanese who was graduated from the North Carolina State College in the Class of 1898 and has not been heard from by the College since the Russo-Japanese War, I beg to state that the Embassy has been informed that Mr. Sugishita's present address is No. 11, Kawata-cho Ushigome-ku, Tokyo, Japan.

After his graduation from the North Carolina State College, Mr. Sugishita became a member of the Survey Department of Tokyo, then a director of the Hida Industrial and Products Bank, and later president of the Silk Yarn Company of Gifu Prefecture. At present time Mr. Sugishita is suffering from paralysis, but according to Mrs. Sugishita is gradually improving.

 A letter that followed from Sugishita's nephew, S. Hara, on August 24 told a much sadder story.

I am very sorry to say that he is now in bed, being suddenly stricken by `cerebral-hyperaemia' - congestion of the brain - last December. He had been at one time very critical, fortunately got narrow escape of his life, but can't speak nor write a letter to you.

Since he had graduated from the state university of North Carolina and then returned to Japan about 15 years ago, he engaged in agriculture and raw silk trade. He recently came up to Capital and located at No. 11 Kawadacho, Ushigome-Ku, Tokio. He like the liquor very much and this is really the cause of his present disease. In Japan where there is no legal prohibition of alcoholic drinking, there is a great many liquor intoxicating people. I earnestly hope that Japan will soon be a `dry country,' following the example of your country.

Sadder still was what happened next: Before Alexander had a chance to respond, shortly before noon on Sept. 1, 1923, Tokyo was rocked by the deadliest earthquake in Japanese history. The Great Kanto quake, as it was known, registered more than 8.0 on Richter scale and lasted nearly 10 minutes. The devastating disaster hit right around lunchtime, when residents and street vendors were cooking over open flames, and deadly fires swept through a good part of central Japan.

In all, an estimated 140,000 people died in the natural disaster, a number greater than the single-day death tolls at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

In the November issue of the NC State Alumni News, a short update was included about Alexander's successful quest to find his old friend, followed by this editor's note: "It is very probable that both Sugishita and his nephew perished in the Japanese fire and earthquake."

Every Sept. 1 is Disaster Prevention Day in Japan, established as a memorial to the Great Kanto Earthquake, in which one of NC State's most interesting football players perished.

The Return of Fasoula(s)

Former NC State star Ernie Myers and Vanderbilt junior center Mariella Fasoula.

https://www.contra.gr/Columns/zan-pres/ntokoymento-o-fasoulas-sto-ncaa-video.5368124.html
 
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

Rarely do I get this excited about the arrival of an opposing player to face an NC State basketball team.

Don’t judge me.

You probably weren’t here for the 1985-86 NC State basketball season, but those of us who were will never forget the greatest one-and-done player of the 1980s: Panagiotis Fasoulas.

Arriving practically unannounced from Thessaloniki, Greece, Pano was a 7-foot center with a gloriously floppy mop of shoulder-length hair. He had a bright smile he flashed whenever someone asked question he didn’t understand, which happened quite frequently when his Greek understanding met with Southern sportswriters, one of whom was actually nicknamed “Country.”

He could block shots by the dozens. He had a decent baby hook shot. He never passed, at least not to someone who made a shot. He went the entirety of his only season at NC State without an assist. Had he been available to play in the NCAA tournament, head coach Jim Valvano may have won his second national championship in four seasons.

Tonight, Pano’s daughter Mariella Fasoula, a junior center for the Vanderbilt women’s basketball team, returns to the place of her father’s greatest college basketball glory to face the Wolfpack in a 7 p.m. game at Reynolds Coliseum. She played twice before against the Wolfpack, scoring 20 and 19 points in two seasons at Boston College, but never at Reynolds Coliseum.

“My dad loved NC State, and he loved his coach,” says Fasoula, who will become the first child of a Jim Valvano-coached player to play at Reynolds since the school announced it was naming a portion of the coliseum the James T. Valvano Arena. “He talked about it all the time when I was growing up.”

Fasoula, whose name is sans “S” because Greek uses different feminine and masculine surnames, vaguely remembers seeing her dad play. He retired when she was just 3, so her recollection of the Greek National team star known as “The Spider” is opaque at best.

So here’s how Pano’s teammate Ernie Myers, the former Wolfpack star who is doing color analysis for tonight’s ACC Network Extra television broadcast, and I told Mariella about her father’s Pack days.

There was something electric about the big Greek center who Jim Valvano found one day in the shadow of the Acropolis, when he took his 1983-84 team on a preseason tour of Greece. Fasoulas played two games against the Pack, one for his club team and one for the Greek National team. The 7-0, 225-pound center with the size 17 shoes played well against Charles Shackleford, Chris Washburn and the rest of the Wolfpack lineup in those two games.

So well, in fact, that Valvano said, “If you are ever in the States and are looking for a place to play, I’ll have a spot for you.”

Fasoulas had played the 1980-81 season at Hellenic College—where else would a native of Greece go to play basketball?—a junior college seminary in Brookline, Massachusetts, leading them to an undefeated season.

And the he left, dissatisfied with the level of competition. Four years later, he spent a two-week vacation with some old friends in Boston. He called Valvano up and said, “I’m here.”

Unfortunately, the coach had 15 scholarship players and the spot on he promised Fasoulas was not available.

Suddenly, in September, junior forward Russell Pierre announced he was leaving NC State for Virginia Tech, and Pano’s path to NC State was cleared. He enrolled in school and began practicing with his former foes a few weeks later.

The jersey was never corrected.

For whatever reason, Fasoulas became a big fan favorite. He was a big, gregarious man of intrigue. Students came to games wearing frizzy Pano wigs. He played the entire season with his name misspelled on the back of his No. 13 jersey as “Fascoulas.” (When someone pointed it out to Valvano, he said “Hell, he’ll never see it.”) It was spelled "Fassulas" in the student telephone directory and "Fasulis" and "Fassoulos" in local newspapers.

A wily Technician sports editor and a local sportswriter noticed that through more than a dozen games, Pano had not recorded a single official assist. The paper began publishing the weekly “Pano Watch,” tallying up his opportunities. He never did get one in his 29 games with the Wolfpack.

Fasoulas never started a single game, coming off the bench as a substitute for Shackleford and Washburn. The last time was in the regular-season finale at No. 14 Oklahoma, when students and fans taunted him mercilessly before the game ever started, causing him to go after an entire student section. He was held back by his teammates and an arena security guard.

Then, in the postseason, Fasoulas disappeared. He didn’t play in the Wolfpack’s 64-62 loss to Virginia in the first round of the ACC Tournament. He was not dressed out for games against Iowa and Arkansas-Little Rock. When asked, Valvano said Fasoulas had a back injury.

In 29 games, Fasoulas blocked a team-high 56 shots.
(Agromeck photo by Roger Winstead.)

As it turns out, though, Fasoulas was being held out of postseason games because NC State athletics director Willis Casey was worried that he would be declared ineligible and any NC State wins would be invalidated. The week before the ACC tournament, St. John’s Italian-born center Marco Baldi had been declared ineligible, as had LSU’s Marco Vargas of the Dominican Republic. The NCAA was determined to make sure international players who might have been paid playing for club teams weren’t undermining the concept of amateur athletes.

“If we had had your dad in the 1986 tournament,” Myers told Fasoula Thursday afternoon at Vanderbilt’s pregame shootaround, “we would have gone to the Final Four.”

Late in its Elite Eight game against second-ranked Kansas, played less than 40 minutes away from the Jayhawks’ campus at Kansas City’s Kemper Arena, State was leading by double-digit points. That’s when the partisan crowd began chanting “Rock..Chalk…Jawhawk.”

The sound swelled every time Danny Manning and Greg Dreiling scored another basket. When Myers missed a free throw on a three-point play and Nate McMillan was called for a questionable charging foul, the Jayhawks took control of the game and advanced to the Final Four with a 75-67 victory.

Fasoulas was drafted in the second round of the 1986 NBA Draft by Portland, one pick before the TrailBlazers took Croatian superstar Drazen Petrovic. He never played a regular-season game, deciding to head home, where he became an international superstar. He played for years for the Greek National Team, helping his squad win the 1987 EuroBasket Championship and a silver medal at the 1989 event. He played for Greece in the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta, averaging 13.4 points and 5.1 rebounds.

With eight assists.

In retirement, he used his electric personality to win consecutive terms as mayor of Piraeus, the third largest city in Greece, from 2006-10. He helped his home country secure the 2004 Olympic Games, carrying the torch into the Olympic stadium for the Opening Ceremonies. And he's been active in developing women’s basketball.

He taught his daughter to love rebounding and blocking shots, which she will attempt to do against the Wolfpack in tonight's game.

Fasoulas made a remarkable transition from fan favorite to international basketball superstar. Only four people affiliated with ACC basketball have ever been inducted into the FIBA Hall of Fame: Michael Jordan and Dean Smith of North Carolina and Kay Yow and Panagiotis Fasoulas of NC State.