This Rings a Championship Bell

 

© By Tim Peeler, 2021

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A couple of weeks ago in a guestroom at the Music Road Resort in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, a member of the housekeeping staff found a piece of jewelry rolling around on the carpet as she vacuumed. She turned it in to her boss, as she does with all lost-and-found items, and went back to her daily duties.

The jewelry was a gaudy, oversized baseball championship ring, gold with a red-ringed face and diamond insets, encircled with the words “NC State 2003 Regional Champions.” There are school and conference logos, notations for the No. 12 national ranking, the team’s 45-18 record and an interior inscription that reads “Start to Finish.” In the collectibles market, it might bring $50 at a weekend hobby show or on ebay.com, if someone were interested in such a thing.

On this particular ring, however, one side is embossed with the single surname: “Winkworth.”

That makes this ring invaluable to NC State baseball coach Elliott Avent, to me and to any other followers of the NC State baseball program who knew Bruce Winkworth, the baseball’s longtime communications director. It belonged to Bruce, and was one of seven championship rings stolen from his home on Dec. 10, 2012, in a random neighborhood break-in. I have no idea how it ended up lying unaccompanied on the floor of an East Tennessee hotel; who among us, right?

It’s the exact same ring that was given to all players, coaches and staff after the 2003 Wolfpack team won its first NCAA regional and advanced to a three-game Super Regional at Miami. That was a year of difficulty for the Pack because its home stadium, Doak Field, was going through a massive renovation that forced the team to play all its home games that season and the four-team NCAA regional about an hour away at Wilson’s Fleming Field.

That season was an exciting, exhausting haul for every member of the team, and Bruce worked endless hours promoting the accomplishments of players like Joey Devine, Michael Rogers, Vern Sterry, Colt Morton, Matt Camp, Jeremy Dutton, Chad Orvella, Joe Gaetti, Justin Riley and all the others.

When a career’s worth of memorabilia was stolen from Bruce’s Raleigh home, it pissed him off unlike anything ever has. Few things in the world can compare to Bruce when he was annoyed, whether it was a minor indignity like being served three pieces in the basket of bread at Amedeo’s when two of us were having lunch together or, to such a lifelong liberal, a major affront like Donald Trump being elected president.

Making Bruce mad was a dance that could be a slow waltz or a full-on rave, and it was always fun to see what emotion the daily music of life would elicit during our regular visits.

Nothing rated higher than losing his championship rings, which explicitly made him part of any team’s accomplishments, a tangible token of all the hard work he put into being scorekeeper, note-maker and Avent-adviser/suppressor.

“Elliott, they could have taken anything in my house, other than my albums or my rings, and I would have been fine,” Bruce told the coach after the break-in. “I wouldn’t have cared. But I want those rings back.”

Losing his record collection would have been devastating. In a lifetime of loving music, he had collected some 55,000 albums and bootleg concerts, almost all of which were saved on three redundant 2 terabyte hard drives. He gave one of them to me just before he died on May 17, 2019.

How fateful, then, was it that one of Bruce’s greatest treasures was found at the Music Road Resort? It would have never been returned if it weren’t for Director of Housekeeping Laura Lakins, who put in extra effort to search for its rightful home, even though it’s hotel policy not to actively seek the owner of lost property.

She posted it on her Facebook page, asking for advice for who to contact.

“I knew someone probably worked pretty hard to get that, and I wanted to make sure it was returned,” Lakins says.

Eventually, she left a question on the Wolfpack Club’s customer service page. WPC assistant director Hannah Willoughby forwarded the message to associate director Buzzy Correll, who forwarded it to me. After we verified the ring, Lakins mailed it to Correll, who gave it to me last week.

I’ve been working the last two years to close out Bruce’s estate, one of the last things he ever asked me to do for him and his wife Rita. If you’ve never done it before, know what you are getting into before you agree to such a thing. It can be a mess.

In the grand scheme of the troubles we have been through over the last year, this is hardly a significant global event. For me, however, it restored some faith in the kindness of others. It made me want to plan a trip to Pigeon Forge and stay at the Music Road Resort. And it made me happy to call his brother Doug – Bruce’s sole heir – to tell him I was mailing the last bit of money in the estate account and to tell him about what the housekeeper found.

At least Bruce got one of his rings back.