When the Loser Went Home

NC State's 1974 ACC Championship team. (Ed Caram photo.)

 

NOTE: This story was originally published on March 3, 1999, in the Greensboro News & Record for the 25th anniversary of the 1974 ACC Championship game between NC State and Maryland. The original link is here. Some additional details have been added. 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.

© Landmark Communications 1999

Maryland center Len Elmore issued the challenge on Super Bowl Sunday 1974.

After abusing N.C. State center Tom Burleson all afternoon - he forced the gangly, 7-foot-2 giant to miss 16 of his 19 shots - Elmore sent word to his opponent that "I am the best center in the ACC."

He might as well have tossed a gauntlet at Burleson's size 19 sneakers.

Elmore, who stood only 6-9, backed his boastful claim the rest of the season, snatching the ACC rebounding championship and being named the league's top center on the sportswriters' all-conference team.

“Tom Burleson was a great player in the history of the ACC,” Elmore says today. “But so was I.”

Elmore outplayed Burleson in Reynolds Coliseum.
(Ed Caram photo)

There's sting in Elmore's remark, even 25 years later. When he and his Terrapin teammates, one of the best teams in ACC history, were ready for their third game of the season against N.C. State that day at the the Greensboro Coliseum for the 1974 ACC Tournament championship game, they saw themselves as outsiders trying to unseat a favored son. They left drained and disappointed, but only after taking part in what is hailed as the greatest ACC game of all time, the league's own mythic version of Ali-Frazier.

“N.C. State always had the home-court advantage,” Elmore says. “Nobody wanted to see us carpetbaggers come down there and beat them. We had to be twice as good as them to even be considered equal.”

Burleson was the inspirational leader of a Wolfpack team that had captured the heart of at least half the state. He and David Thompson, his magnificently gifted teammate, were both homegrown talents, Burleson from the mountain town of Newland and Thompson from just outside Shelby.

They both felt a responsibility to bring home at least one national championship during their respective careers.

For Burleson, a senior, his final days playing for State were near and he was awash in emotions when he arrived at the Greensboro Coliseum that afternoon.

A first-team All-ACC selection as a sophomore and junior, Burleson was intent on proving that he, not Elmore, was the best center in the ACC in 1974, too. The bigger issue was winning the game, which was the Wolfpack's only path to the NCAA tournament and a shot at the Final Four, which was to be played two weeks later in Greensboro.

“That was my only chance to go to the NCAA tournament,” Burleson says. “We had to win that game.

“Besides, if we hadn't won that game, I couldn't have lived in North Carolina ever again.”

When he arrived at the coliseum on Saturday, March 9, for the title game, Burleson found a crumpled piece of newsprint taped to his locker, courtesy of Wolfpack head coach Norm Sloan.

For six weeks, Sloan had carried the clipping in his wallet, waiting to remind Burleson of Elmore's claim earlier in the season.

Burleson needed no further inspiration.

What happened that evening is still remembered as the greatest game ever played by two ACC teams, a masterpiece of endurance, execution and individual performance by Burleson that sent the winner on to greatness and the loser home: N.C. State 103, Maryland 100, in overtime.

“How can we still be talking about this game 25 years later?” Elmore says today. “Oh, it's the greatest game of all time? Yeah, yeah, yeah ...”

Setting the scene

The world was different in 1974.

Richard Nixon was in the White House. Archie Bunker and John Boy Walton ruled prime time. Perms, platform heels and polyester ruled fashion.

College basketball was different in 1974.

It was a purer game with no rough stuff inside. Shorts were shorter. Players were skinnier and less physically aggressive. They still raised their hands when called for fouls. They didn't preen or pose after big plays. Dick Vitale was a little-known first-year coach at Detroit. The C.D. Chesley regional telecast of the game featured no music or jazzy graphics, not even the score at the bottom of the screen.

Play-by-play man Jim Thacker and color analyst Billy Packer told you all you needed to know.

Dunking got you a technical foul. And if you didn't win the ACC Tournament, you went home  -- or to the NIT.

That made the ACC Tournament in those days a pressure-packed, winner-take-all affair. No matter what happened in the regular season, whoever won the title game got the league's automatic bid into the tournament.

Both N.C. State and Maryland believed they could make legitimate challenges to UCLA's annual grasp on the NCAA title. The Wolfpack, which won 57 of its 58 games from 1972-74, had lost only to the Bruins earlier that season, 84-66, in a made-for-television game in St. Louis; Maryland had lost by only one point to the Bruins at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion.

“I really believed that there were three teams that could win the national championship that year,” Sloan says today. “But I also knew that only two of them would be in the NCAA Tournament.”

A singular purpose

N.C. State was a team on a mission in 1974. The year before, the Wolfpack had gone 27-0, won the ACC Tournament and sat at home and watched as Maryland represented the league in the NCAA Tournament.

The Wolfpack was serving a one-year NCAA probation for infractions involving Thompson, the gifted, innovative athlete with a 44-inch vertical leap from rural Cleveland County.

The NCAA discovered that Thompson, who had already signed a letter of intent, had participated in an illegal pickup game with some Wolfpack players and an N.C. State assistant coach during a summer camp just prior to his enrollment at NC State.

“We took a bad lick,” Sloan says. “It was uncalled for. It was inexcusable and laughable compared to what goes on today.”

Thompson, whose ground-breaking college game mimicked his boyhood hero Jerry West and foreshadowed Michael Jordan's NBA career, was hard for any lesser athlete to guard. The Wolfpack's offense consisted of three ways of getting the ball into Thompson's hands: a pass from Burleson inside for an outside jumper, an alley-oop from tiny point guard Monte Towe or forward Tim Stoddard off a screen and penetration from the wing with college basketball's fastest first step.

“David changed the game,” Burleson says. “He was basically an unstoppable player.”

For that reason, Sloan had a hard-and-fast rule for Burleson: On any given possession, the center had to pass the ball back outside at least once before he ever took a shot.

Burleson, who was second in the ACC in scoring and first in rebounding in 1972, never minded leaving the team spotlight to Thompson, whose talents were so obvious he was a first-team All-America all three years at N.C. State and the 1975 national Player of the Year.

The emotional center, however, didn't want to take a back seat to any other big league in the conference, even though he didn't always play as inspired a game as Sloan wanted him to.

“Tom Burleson had the ability to rise to the occasion as well as anybody I have ever coached,” Sloan says. “Tom also had the ability to lower himself against somebody he didn't have respect for, as low as anybody I have ever seen. It used to frustrate me to no end.”

If Sloan is right, Burleson had more respect for Elmore than anyone he ever faced.

Burleson was always an excitable player. Maybe not as much as fiery the 5-foot-7 Towe, but he certainly didn't have the stoic personality of Thompson. You could see just how fired-up Burleson was during the pre-game introductions of the championship game, when he charged off the sidelines with fire in his eyes and his finger pistols blazing.

For the hard-luck Terrapins, it had to be an unsettling sight.

Lefty Left Out

Maryland's Lefty Driesell was the paragon of frustration in the early '70s.

For three consecutive years, Driesell had one of the best teams in the conference, thanks to a recruiting class in 1970 that is considered one of the greatest in league history.

He not only lured Elmore, Lew Alcindor's successor at New York's Power Memorial High School, to Maryland, but he also won the white-hot recruiting battle for 6-11 Tom McMillen, one of the few high school athletes ever to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. As seniors in 1974, they were the nucleus of Driesell's finest team, along with the sophomore backcourt combination of Durham's John Lucas and Mo Howard.

But that team never won an ACC title, something Driesell wanted so badly he promised to use the trophy as a hood ornament and drive his car around the state of North Carolina if he ever managed to win the tournament.

In 1972, the Terps lost to North Carolina and had to settle for the NIT, which they won with four straight victories. In 1973, they lost to N.C. State, but got to go to the NCAA tournament because of the Wolfpack's probation.

David Thompson against Maryland.

And in 1974, after reaching the ACC Tournament finals one more time, the Terrapins faced their nemesis, N.C. State, which had beaten Maryland five consecutive times going into the championship game.

The Wolfpack, with an all-time lineup, also had won 30 consecutive games against ACC opponents and wanted desperately to get a rematch with UCLA in the NCAA tournament.

Driesell's team, it seemed, was the only thing that stood in their way.

What grates Driesell, even today, is that his team always had to play critical games against the Big Four in North Carolina.

“Maybe we didn't win because of poor coaching,” Driesell says, “but it didn't help that we always had to play those big games down there.”

Driesell, now 66 and the head coach at Georgia State, still can't shake those memories of that glorious, infuriating run in the ACC.

“If I had won any of those finals we played in, I would probably be in the Hall of Fame right now,” Driesell says wistfully.

The game of a lifetime

N.C. State wasted little energy getting into the championship game. After a first-round bye, Sloan rested some of its starters in an 87-66 victory over Virginia in the semifinals. Driesell, meanwhile, played McMillen, Lucas and Elmore for a combined 104 minutes in the opening-round game against Duke (85-66) and 116 minutes in a 105-85 blowout of North Carolina.

Driesell still is criticized for playing his stars for so long in a game that was decided early.

“He thought we needed to make a statement and I think we certainly did that against North Carolina,” Elmore says. “We gave them one of their biggest whippings ever in the tournament.”

But at what price? McMillen, Elmore, Lucas and Howard all played all 45 minutes of the championship game and were clearly not at their best, even as State chose to hold the ball in overtime.

From the outset, State planned to run the Terps ragged. Maybe that's why Stoddard took the game's first shot only four seconds after the opening tip.

Tommy Burleson had one of the greatest title game performances
in ACC tournament history.

Thompson was not his usual self, despite scoring 21 points in the first half. Burleson, on the other hand, made seven of his 10 shots, keeping the Wolfpack in the game after Maryland jumped to an early 13-point lead.

Maryland led 55-50 at the half after hitting 63.4 percent of its field goal attempts. “They got the lead and it wasn't because we were flat or not playing good,” Sloan says. “It was because Maryland was phenomenal. I remember telling the team: 'Don't get upset.' I thought we were doing everything they could.”

Maryland looked as if it might fold after State scored 10 of the second half's first 12 points. Making matters worse, defensive stopper Owen Brown, guarding Thompson, picked up his fourth foul with 14:32 to play.

Driesell was forced to insert junior forward Tom Roy, a limited offensive player, in Brown's place. With help from Elmore inside, Roy shut Thompson down, allowing the All-America only seven points for the rest of the game. And the Terps surged to the lead, 77-72, on three consecutive layups by the 6-3 Howard over Towe.

“The guy we didn't want to beat us was Thompson,” says Elmore, now a basketball analyst for ESPN. “What we had to do in order to keep that from happening was leave something else open. I kind of had to play half and half, paying attention to Tommy and David. That left me vulnerable to Tom on offensive rebounds.”

In one stretch, Burleson accounted for 12 of the Wolfpack's 17 points. He scored with backwards layins off offensive rebounds and with hook shots from the deep baseline. And he passed between McMillen's legs to Phil Spence on a fast break.

Elmore, the ACC's first great shot-blocker, was frustrated because, even with his leaping ability, he could rarely block Burleson's shot without getting called for a foul or goal-tending.

“One of the problems we had back then was that officials couldn't see goaltending,” says Elmore, who went on to a successful 10-year NBA career. “The ACC didn't have shot-blockers back then, so they didn't know what to look for.”

That was never more evident than late in the game when Rivers stole the ball from a tiring Lucas and broke away for a layup. Howard, in the middle of the best game of his career, chased him down and blocked his shot from behind.

But he was called for goaltending.

“That was the turning point of the game,” Elmore says. “They took the lead on that play and all we were ever able to do was tie it. We never went back ahead.”

The Terps had their chance, though. With the score tied at 97, the Terps got the ball for a final shot in regulation. With nine seconds left, Driesell called timeout to get Lucas the final shot. But when play resumed, Lucas was forced to pass the ball away to Howard.

In a split second, as he stood free for an open jumper, Howard had to decide if he would take the shot himself. But Howard, who had hit 10 of 13 shots at that point, passed it back to Lucas, who put up a wild, off-balance jumper as time ran out.

Howard faced resentment from his teammates for not taking his 14th shot of the game. It was years before he and Lucas spoke again.

[In 2022's ESPN Films documentary "The Tournament: The History of ACC Men's Basketball" Howard said: "Even Elmore talked shit to me about not taking that shot, but I told him 'Well, my man ain't scored 38 points on me.'"]

In overtime, State chose to slow the pace of the game, and the heavy-legged Terps began to show signs of fatigue.

Two critical errant passes, one by McMillen and one by Lucas, gave the game to the Wolfpack. “I have never forgotten that pass,” Lucas said years later.

When the clock expired, the Maryland players slumped onto their bench, losers for the third consecutive time in the ACC championship game and the sixth straight time to the Wolfpack. In each of those games, Driesell's team was ranked in the top 10.

“You could tell by the way they acted on the court that they were very disappointed,” Thompson says today. “I know John Lucas was in tears, and probably some of the other guys felt like crying, too.”

In the end, relief

On March 9, 1974, you cried if you won and you cried if you lost.

Just before the Wolfpack cut the nets, Towe broke into tears.

Norm Sloan and Monte Towe. (Ed Caram photo)

“He said to me, 'The hell with it; I am going to cry,’” Sloan says. “And he sat right down in a chair and cried his eyes out.”

Burleson didn't shed tears then but he still gets misty-eyed when recalling the performance that won him the tournament's Most Valuable Player award for the second straight year.

His numbers: 38 points on 18-of-25 shooting, 13 rebounds and two assists. Not until Wake Forest's Randolph Childress showed up in 1995 did anyone ever approach his title game performance.

“It was like a thousand pounds being lifted off my shoulders,” Burleson says. “That was the only chance I had to go to the NCAA tournament, because of the probation the year before. It was completely do-or-die and I wanted badly to win that game.”

Driesell, who relived the game with Burleson last year during a trip to UNC-Asheville, still shakes his head at the remarkable performance.

“He probably played the game of his life,” Driesell says.

So, probably, did both teams. Maryland shot 61 percent from the field, N.C. State 55 percent. The teams combined for just 29 turnovers, few of which were unforced.

Elmore says now that he never meant to slight Burleson and he hopes that his Super Bowl Sunday words were not what motivated Burleson to play so well in the championship game.

“If that is the case, then it is a shame,” Elmore says. “If he needed external motivation to get ready for that game, to play for the ACC championship and the league's only berth into the NCAA Tournament, then something is wrong.

“I think Tommy was just a great competitor who didn't like to lose, not matter what the circumstances.”

Burleson and Elmore relived the game many times when they were teammates on the Kansas City Kings. They did so one more time in January when they sat down with Thompson at a Raleigh hotel and watched what videotape remains of the game.

It is just as great as they remember it.

“The bottom line is that they were the better team,” Elmore says.

Driesell has also made his peace with the loss. “We got beat by a great team, national champions,” Driesell says. “I don't think it was any disgrace.”

In the NCAA tournament, the Wolfpack went on to break UCLA's hold on the national championship with a double-overtime victory in the semifinals, also in Greensboro. In one of the most forgotten NCAA finals in history, the Wolfpack beat Marquette 76-64 to claim the title.

Driesell says he doesn't feel badly for himself or his players for losing the greatest game ever played. Besides, he says, Lucas, Elmore and McMillen all went on to greater glory in the NBA.

“That's life,” Driesell says. “Heck, all of them are millionaires now.”

For Elmore, the emotions are a little more raw. He tires of hearing so much about the game 25 years later, but he's willing for his team to take its place in history.

“When it was all said and done,” Elmore says, “all we could do was say, ‘We had our chance and it didn't happen. It wasn't in the cards.'

"We have to accept that like men and move on.”