Tebell Left a Lasting Legacy for Red Terrors, Cavaliers

 

Gus Tebell helped put the Red in his Terrors.

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© Tim Peeler, 2023

Gus Tebell is a long-forgotten but important figure in the history of NC State College athletics, a three-sport coach who led the football Wolfpack to its first conference title in 1927 and the basketball Red Terrors to its first league championship in 1929. He was also hired to be the school's freshman baseball coach.

He’s also important in the history of Virginia and the city of Charlottesville, too, since he landed there after folks in Raleigh thought he spent too much time worrying about the indoor winter sport and not enough effort on his gridiron duties.

Tebell is the only multi-sport coach to lead both schools, who will meet on the football field at Scott Stadium tonight in their annual ACC contest.

Had it not been for Tebell, however, Virginia may never have never been the ACC’s first expansion team six months after the league was formed in Greensboro on May 8, 1953.

NC State was one of the seven charter members of the Atlantic Coast Conference, along with North Carolina, Wake Forest, Duke, Clemson, South Carolina and Maryland. From the beginning, the new collection wanted one more team, with Virginia, Virginia Tech and West Virginia being the most likely choices.

Morgantown, West Virginia, was deemed too remote for all-sports competition and, at the time, the rest of the league was uninterested in the Hokies.

Virginia’s president, Colgate Darden, did not want his school to join the breakaway league, mainly because Virginia was fairly comfortable as an independent, having left the Southern Conference in 1936 in reaction to University of North Carolina President Frank Porter Graham’s radical plan to de-emphasize college athletes.

There was talk that Virginia would be a better fit to rejoin the Southern Conference, of which it was a charter member dating back to 1921. Its main rivals -- Virginia Tech, William & Mary, Virginia Military Institute, Richmond, George Washington and Washington & Lee -- were left behind by the breakaway ACC. Still, the new league invited Virginia to be its eighth member in August, just before the start of football season.

Darden had been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and Governor of Virginia before he became the fourth president of Thomas Jefferson's school. His opposition came with political heft.

Still, Tebell went over his president’s head to convince the school’s Board of Visitors to accept the ACC’s invitation, which it did on Dec. 4, 1953.

Tebell wielded such influence among his new colleagues in the ACC that he was one of just two candidates to be named the first commissioner of the ACC, but he ultimately lost to Wake Forest athletics director Jim Weaver on a 6-2 vote.

Imagine, a former NC State football and basketball coach as commissioner of the ACC.

Tebell had a colorful career in athletics, as a successful coach, master marketer and talented administrator. He was also adept enough as a politician to be elected mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, just after World War II.

Tebell originally came to Raleigh in 1924 after a successful three-sport career in college and professional sports. In 1924, he was hired as an assistant football and head basketball coach. He was elevated to head football coach a year later when Buck Shaw left after just one season at the helm.

Tebell became the first coach in the history of the Southern Conference to win championships in both sports. He also launched the career of the most famous shoe salesman basketball has ever known, Chuck Taylor, whose signature on Converse All-Stars is just as famous today as it was a century ago.  And Tebell offered many ideas that helped create interest in both sports as the school began to grow in the years following World War I.

At the age of 19, Gustave Kenneth Tebell (b. Sept. 6, 1897 in St. Charles, Ill.- d.  May 28, 1969, Charlottesville, Va.) enlisted as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army for service in World War I in 1917. Immediately after he was discharged following the war, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, where he played football, basketball and baseball.

On the hardwoods, Tebell learned the game under Naismith Hall of Fame coach Dr. Walter Meanwell, who brought order to the sometimes rough-and-tumble game of college basketball. The “Meanwell System” relied on short passes, fancy dribbling and zone defenses and was later adopted by one of Meanwell’s other summer camp pupils, Everett Case of Frankfort (Indiana) High School. (Case’s notebook from his days under Meanwell’s mentorship is on display at the Reynolds Coliseum Walk of Fame and History.)

As a basketball player, Tebell was a three-time All-Big Ten performer who helped the Badgers win conference championships in 1921 and ’23.

Following his college career, Tebell spent 1923 as an end and part-time head coach for Columbus Tigers of the American Professional Football League, a predecessor of the NFL.  He alternated coaching duties with Pete Stinchcomb, while also scoring a team-high 37 points on three touchdowns, seven extra points and four field goals. He was named first-team all-pro by the Green Bay Press-Gazette, the leading authority of the time.

Besides Meanwell, Tebell became friendly with some influential people in the development of the game, including an Indiana-born player named Charlie Taylor, who had coached at Columbus High School in Indiana a year before Case did. Tebell gave the kid a boost by inviting him to Raleigh in 1925 to conduct a basketball clinic during for the grand opening of Thompson Gymnasium, the school’s first indoor physical activities center.

By then, Taylor was known to everyone as “Chuck” and he had taken a job as a salesman for the Converse Rubber Shoe Company. Thousands of similar clinics later, Taylor was known as basketball’s biggest global ambassador and Converse rewarded him by naming a pair of high-top basketball shoes with a patch on the ankle in his honor.

As a coach at North Carolina State College, Tebell introduced such advances as bright red uniforms in basketball, the annual spring football game, a dorm and training table set aside solely for athletes and the first basketball game programs.

It was under his guidance that all NC State teams other than football were named the “Red Terrors,” because of his silken uniforms and the fast-paced play led by forward Rochelle “Red” Johnson, at a time every other sport on campus was led by a ginger star: football’s Red Lassiter, wrestling’s Red Hicks and track’s Red Hamrick.

In 1927, Tebell led the football team to a perfect 4-0 Southern Conference record and a 9-1 overall mark to record NC State’s only conference championship on the gridiron until Earle Edwards arrived in 1953.

Two years later, Tebell took the basketball team to Atlanta for the Southern Conference tournament, beating Tennessee, Clemson, Mississippi and Duke over the course of four days for the school’s only league tournament title until Case arrived for the 1946-47 season.

In the spring of 1930, after compiling a 21-25-2 record in football and a 76-39 record in basketball, Tebell announced that he would leave NC State to become an assistant football coach and head basketball coach at the University of Virginia. It was a relief to some...until his disastrous replacement, John Von Lieu, was named and didn’t even complete his only season as head coach.

In 21 seasons at Virginia, Tebell compiled a 240-190 record on the hardwoods, which still ranks as third all-time in career wins. He led the Cavaliers to its first appearance in a post-season tournament, losing in the first round of the 1941 National Invitation Tournament to City College of New York. He also spent three years as football head coach from 1934-36 and almost a decade as the school’s baseball coach.

Even after he left Raleigh, Tebell still had an impact on NC State athletics. He helped fuel the fire between long-time rivals Case and Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp. In 1950, both the Wolfpack and the Wildcats were among the best teams in the nation, with Case’s Southern Conference champions ranked No. 5 with a 25-5 record and Rupp’s SEC champions ranked No. 3 with a 25-4 record.

Tebell, the chairman of the Region 3 selection committee, suggested that the two teams decide the NCAA bid with a one-game play-off, a decision that decidedly favored NC State. Case agreed to play “any time, any place.” Rupp, whose team had won the previous two NCAA titles, didn’t believe his team needed to prove itself and refused to participate in a playoff game.

So the committee voted to take NC State over the Wildcats, infuriating Rupp and furthering the divide between him and Case, something that had festered for years.

The Wolfpack took advantage of the opportunity, advancing to the national semifinals for the first time in school history. Though it lost to City College of New York in the first game, the Case’s team beat Baylor in the consolation game, to claim third place in the tournament, the highest the Wolfpack ever finished in the national tournament until 1974’s national championship.

Tebell entered the world of politics in 1946 as a member of the Charlottesville City Council, where he served until 1954. That included one two-year term (1948-50) as the city’s mayor. When Virginia athletics director Norton Pritchett died in the summer of 1951, Tebell gave up his job as basketball coach to take over that position, which he held until his retirement in 1962.

Tebell remained for more than two years as a professor of Physical Education, before his final retirement in 1965. He died in May 28, 1969.

Both Wisconsin and Virginia present annual awards to male student-athletes in Tebell’s honor and, on occasion, NC State’s football, basketball and baseball teams still wear bright red jerseys.

 

Heart-to-Heart? Nope. Cheek-to-Cheek.

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.

Much of the information in this story was gleaned from the NCSU Libraries archives and the book “The Wolfpack…Intercollegiate Athletics at North Carolina State University,” by former NC State history professor Bill Beezley.

It was originally published in The Wolfpacker magazine.

© Coman Publishing, 2005

BY TIM PEELER

Maybe the newly installed floodlights weren’t working very well: Fans figured it had to be a trick of the lighting when they saw State College’s quarterback line up in the season opener against High Point College, butt-to-butt with the center.

Turns out, it wasn’t the lighting that was bad in the first home night game ever played at Riddick Stadium: that was exactly the way new head coach John Van Liew wanted things to run in his newly unveiled offensive system. Fans were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, this was a guy who was personally recommended by legendary Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne to be the new head coach of the Wolfpack.

The quarterback faced his two split running backs, taking a blind snap from center, then pitching the ball either right or left to his backs.

State College had no idea what it had gotten itself into, in what may be may be the most curious season in the history of State College football.

So first a little background: In the pre-Depression days of the 1920s, supporters of the Wolfpack (yes, the football team used that nickname even back then; the basketball team was called the Red Terrors) thought the best way for the school’s team to be successful was to install the Notre Dame offense that had worked so well for Rockne. From 1924-36, State hired five different coaches who were intimately familiar with Rockne’s system, with the hope of matching the three national championships the world-famous coach had brought to South Bend, Ind.

None of his would-be protégés—even Heartly “Hunk” Anderson, who succeeded Rockne as Notre Dame head coach when Rockne was killed in an airplane crash and then came to NC State—ever reached that goal, thanks in part to player dissention, alumni meddling and an overall lack of funds in the financially strapped State College athletics department. And one of them—Van Liew—was an absolute utter failure.

 His hiring, from East High School in Des Moines, Iowa, came after Gus Tebell was forced to resign under pressure, just two seasons after winning State College’s only Southern Conference Championship, when the incomparable Jack McDowall led the team to a 9-1 record and the school’s only conference title of any sort in football from 1892 until 1957. There was a lack of follow-up success, and the small matter of 16 missing hand-towels from a Pullman car that the football team used on its trip to play at Michigan State in 1928. Valued at 13 cents apiece, the towels had to be replaced, forcing the athletics department to come up with $2.21 it didn’t have to cover such unexpected costs.

 So Tebell resigned in the spring of 1930 to take a job as an assistant football coach at Virginia. He later on became the Cavaliers’ basketball coach, athletics director and mayor of Charlottesville. Tebell won 246 basketball games in his 21 years as the hoops coach of the Cavaliers.

That left an opening that the State College athletics department really didn’t have the money to fill. In the spring of 1930, the department was in debt $10,500 on an annual of budget of just $25,500.

So the 33 candidates who sent in applications to replace Tebell had absolutely no shot of getting a rich contract. There was some question as to whether the coach who was ultimately selected would be allowed to hire an assistant coach.

Davidson head coach William “Monk” Younger wanted the job, with strong support from Charlotte textile journal publisher Dave Clark, a big-time booster who controlled much of what happened in the athletics department at the time.

Younger said he would consider taking it for $6,500 per year. But that was $1,300 more than the faculty athletics council said it was willing to pay Tebell’s successor. Clark suggested announcing a salary of only $5,200, so Tebell’s feelings wouldn’t be hurt, then coming up with a way to get Younger another $800. In the end, Younger opted to stay at Davidson, later becoming an athletics administrator at Virginia Tech. (He is a member of the Hokie Hall of Fame.)

Wabash coach Pete Vaughn, a former player and assistant coach at Notre Dame, also wanted the job – at $6,000 for the first year and $6,500 for the next two years. “His application was set aside,” according to the faculty athletics committee minutes of the day.

In the end, however, athletics director Dr. Ray Sermon did offer Wisconsin coach Guy Sundt $5,500 to take the job. He declined.

So with its top two choices overpriced for State College’s budget, the job went to Van Liew, a long-time high school coach in Des Moines, Iowa, who came highly recommended by Rockne, even though he never played or coached for the Fightin’ Irish. According to Beezley, Rockne’s sole knowledge of Van Liew came from the latter’s attendance at Rockne’s coaching clinics in South Bend.

Apparently, Van Liew did not take good notes.

John Van Liew

From the moment he stepped on campus, Van Liew’s weird offensive system and strange behavior created problems with his team. After the Wolfpack’s 12-0 loss to Davidson (coached by Younger, if you will recall) in Charlotte, players threatened to go on strike. They were convinced – from what they had seen, and what had been suggested to them by powerful boosters – that Van Liew didn’t know what he was doing.

He forgot his players’ names, and refused to change his offensive style, even though, by then, every opponent had figured out how to stop it. After a 34-0 win over High Point, the Wolfpack was shut out in its next four games, losing to Davidson, Florida, Clemson and Wake Forest.

Oddly enough, it was State’s second – and final – win of the season that ended Van Liew’s tenure with the team. With his team leading Mississippi State at the half, Van Liew wandered off from Riddick Stadium.

The players scurried all around to locate him before the second half began, finding him sitting beside a creek that ran through campus, daydreaming.

The next day, Van Liew was demoted from his position as head coach to assistant coach by the school’s president and replaced by Sermon, who was already serving as athletics director, basketball coach and head athletic trainer. The Wolfpack did not win another football game the rest of the season, which ended up at 2-8.

Though it's not reflected in the current school record books, Sermon should be listed as the head coach of record for the final four losses of the 1930 season, in which the Wolfpack was outscored 52-6. That includes a 2-0 loss to Presbyterian in a game played in Asheville.

According to Beezley, Sermon did have an explanation for Van Liew’s strange behavior:

“Sermon said that just before leaving Des Moines, Van Lieu (sic) had received a head injury – one story said that while riding he had fallen and was kicked by his horse. Arriving in Raleigh, Van Lieu stayed with the Sermons for six weeks. During that time, Doc gave him osteopathic treatments. Both Doc and his wife noticed the coach suffered frequent lapses of memory loss and poor muscular control – he occasionally fell down and had difficulty grasping a water glass with one hand.”

Van Liew returned to Des Moines, and disappeared into the anonymity of high school coaching.

Of course, things never really got much better during this dark decade in Wolfpack football history. Van Liew’s successor, former Notre Dame All-America John “Clipper” Smith, lasted only three years. His downfall? He failed to show up for spring practice in 1933, leaving his players to work out on their own while he was on an eight-day bender in New Jersey.

Only 27 when he was hired, Smith left NC State after the 1933 season and became a successful coach at Villanova and Duquesne. In 1975, he was inducted into the National Football Foundation College Football Hall of Fame.

NC State hired one more Notre Dame protégé: Heartley “Hunk” Anderson, the guy who was elevated to head coach at Notre Dame for two years after Rockne died in an airplane crash in 1929. Again, he was supposed to be the guy who could make NC State a Fightin’ Irish style powerhouse.

He was fired after three seasons, amid dissention between a team made up of predominantly Northern players and a fan-base that wanted more local players on the team. A student named Parker Rand complained to the school’s top administrator at the time that NC State was operating a “gas chamber” for coaches. “We put them in, get them groggy, turn them out and they go elsewhere, recover and make good,” Rand wrote.

The school never did hire a coach with Notre Dame ties, though two former Wolfpack coaches went on to lead the Fightin’ Irish: former head coach Lou Holtz and former assistant Tyrone Willingham.

"The Brown-And-White From State..."

 

Aerial view of the Cotton States and International Exposition. [Photo by Fred L. Howe.]

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, 2023

When 75 students from the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts left Raleigh for Atlanta to play in the five-year-old school’s first out-of-state football game, the players had no idea who the opponent was going to be.

That means no scouting report, no berating college yells, no opposing-color ribbons to wear on the fans' lapels.

That’s because there was no one scheduled for the Oct. 25, 1895, game at the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta’s acclaimed world’s fair that hosted nearly 800,000 people during its 100-day run in what is now called Piedmont Park.

At the time, there were enough teams of this emerging new sport making their own trek to the South’s new capital to make all necessary arrangements once they got there. So Bart Gatling, the UNC- and Harvard-educated Raleigh lawyer who moonlighted for three years as A&M’s football coach, found representatives from a military school from Virginia and asked if they were free the next day.

This was an important moment in the history of North Carolina’s technical school, traveling two states away for an athletics contest on what was unofficially declared “North Carolina Week” at the exposition. The students and three accompanying professors even skipped all four days of the North Carolina State Fair, which at the time was within walking distance of the two buildings that comprised the state’s land-grant institution.

The Cotton States and International Exposition was a big draw. President Grover Cleveland opened it by flipping a switch remotely from his home in Massachusetts and made a train trip from Washington the day before the A&M-VMI football game to see the wonders of the fair. Booker T. Washington gave his controversial “Atlanta Compromise” speech a few weeks earlier. There was a “Coochee-Coochee” burlesque show just outside the main gate. [Photos from the exposition.]

The traveling students, pretty much the entirety of the school population, could see the Liberty Bell, which was delivered from Philadelphia via train and wagon. They could take in one of Buffalo Bill's daily Wild West Shows. They could see a remarkable motion-picture projection device or visited villages representing Japan, Egypt and several countries of South America. If they had too much fun, they could try a new headache and hangover remedy that was being served in Atlanta drugstores called Coca-Cola.

When the football team made it to town after a lively train ride, which included properly chaperoned students from Raleigh’s three women’s colleges, they again broke out their newest school colors, brown and white, which replaced the original pink-and-blue colors that were established with the first team in 1892.

The found representatives from the much more experienced program at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. The VMI squad had already won four games, all played at home, by a combined score of 118-0. There was little hope for the inexperienced A&M squad, which lost 36-0 to the North Carolina scrubs and tied Wake Forest 4-4 earlier in the week, the opportunity to even score against such a mighty foe as the Keydets was dim for a roster full of farm boys and someone who is likely the first native of Japan to play college football, Teisaku Sugishita.

The star player for the A&M team was Syd Alexander, known today as the namesake of Alexander Residence Hall, but the resumes of the other players on the team are mostly lost to history.

The game was called for 2:30 p.m. on Friday afternoon at the Atlanta athletic fields. The next day and the following Friday, teams from UNC and Georgia met for two games at the same location. Among the other games played during the course of the exposition was Georgia's season-ending contest against Auburn.

Cadets from both schools marched to the bleachers in formation and a total of approximately 1,500 fans ringed the sidelines for the game  

On the opening kickoff, VMI fumbled the ball and A&M player W.R. Vick picked it up and ran for a touchdown to end VMI’s scoreless streak, a hopeful start to the first road game in school history.

However...

“The six was made on a fluke—one of those accidents that happen even in as scientific a game as football,” wrote the Atlanta Journal. It turned out to be the only score of the day for the boys from Raleigh.

In fact, according to the account in The Atlanta Constitution, it was the only time AMC crossed midfield the entire game. The rest of the game – played in two 35-minute halves, with a 10-minute break in between – belonged to VMI’s cadets. They scored seven consecutive touchdowns to win the game 42-6.

VMI cadets still wear red-lined capes as part of their first-class uniforms.

“The Virginians were out in force, with their voices, their red-lined capes turned wrongside out, and their tin horns, and a better backing football team never got. In the second half, the Tar Heels never got the ball, but were crowded unmercifully all over the field,” the Constitution wrote, referring to the A&M school with the nickname used for all schools from North Carolina. “They had virtually given up at this point.”

On the way home the next day, the train carrying the A&M players, students and professors stopped in Charlotte, just long enough for the football team to post a 0-0 tie against the team from the Charlotte Commercial College at Latta Park, the team’s fourth game in a week. That game is not recognized in the NC State record books.

“Within the past week A&M has played four games, in which several of her best players were disabled,” wrote The Charlotte Observer. “Also during the past three nights the men have lost much sleep, so that they were not in good condition.”

Charlotte Commercial College was a business training school located in downtown that eventually merged with Raleigh’s King College in 1901 to become a for-profit business technology and health-care training school. It closed in 2018 due to low enrollment.

It was a fairly devastating week for AMC football, with a two losses and two ties. The students decided they no longer wanted brown and white as school colors. A poll of students in November, settled on red and white, perhaps remembering those inside-out capes worn by the VMI cadets. The faculty adopted the change, but emphatically admonished the Athletic Association that this decision must stand, “unless reversed by a vote of two-thirds of the student body.”

Such a vote has never been taken.

A month after the end of the football season, the Board of Trustees issued a short-lived ban on all intercollegiate athletics, similar to the one Wake Forest passed on its campus immediately following its 4-4 tie with A&M. While Wake’s athletic ban lasted 18 years, while A&M’s decision was reversed quickly, in time for a 1896 baseball season and a one-game football season.

 

Piedmont Park during the Cotton States and International Exposition.