 |
A News & Observer photo of the Wolfpack's departure for the school's longest road trip on record.
|
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 or
donate at @timpeeler on Venmo to keep posts like this free of ads.
BY TIM PEELER, © 2024
The only way to describe NC State’s first transcontinental
road trip is “disastrous,” especially for a coach, Everett Case, who had known
nothing but success in his first two seasons as leader of Wolfpack men’s
basketball.
To be honest, he thought it would be a good idea for his experienced
group of World War II veterans, led by All-America guard Dick Dickey and
budding star Sam Ranzino, to play nine road games in 23 days in the transition weeks
between 1948 and ‘49, the first time any Wolfpack team traveled to the West
Coast for varsity competition.
During a 12,000-mile holiday barnstorming tour, the deep and
talented team, ranked in the Top 5 of several college polls of the time, had
the chance to dip their toes in Lake Tahoe, the San Francisco Bay, the Pacific
Ocean, Lake Erie and the Hudson River.
The six-state nationwide tour took Case’s squad to some of
the country’s most famous facilities, from the Cow Palace in San Francisco to Pan-Pacific
Auditorium in Los Angeles to Madison Square Garden in New York.
As neighboring North Carolina was preparing to send its football
team to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl, State sent 11 basketball players, Case,
assistant coach Carl “Butter” Anderson, athletics publicity director Ed Storey,
a team doctor, team trainer Al Crawford and athletics director Roy Clogston boarded
a turbo-prop plane at the old Raleigh Municipal Airport. It was early morning Dec.
18, only
a few hours after the Pack whipped Pittsburgh, 77-42, at Duke Indoor Stadium.
At the time, the Wolfpack played its home games at Raleigh’s Memorial
Auditorium, which seated only 3,800 for basketball, because on-campus Thompson
Gymnasium had been closed once for overcrowding in 1947 and condemned for
basketball in 1948.
Those latter two points were one of the main reasons Case
took his team West: he was looking for national opponents willing to come to
Raleigh when he opened the school’s gleaming 12,400-seat, on-campus arena that
was due to open at the start of the 1949-50 season.
 |
| Click to enlarge. |
|
It was called Reynolds Coliseum.
The holiday jaunt was supposed to be a grand publicity tour,
to make the Wolfpack a household name in the college basketball community and
to entice national teams to plan trips to Raleigh for a holiday tournament Case
was planning for NC State’s new arena.
However, the transcontinental business trip was absolutely
exhausting and humiliating for a team coming off a 28-3 record and its second
consecutive Southern Conference championship. It produced the first three-game
losing streak of Case’s tenure, something that didn’t happen again until 1960.
Despite a pair of victories at Nevada, Case had a messy
breakup with player Eddie Bartels in Reno, which proudly called itself “The Divorce
Capital of the World” throughout the 20th century in all of its
promotional materials.
First, however, the 1948-49 team had to survive a difficult “Reno
Cure” (the polite name for divorce back then), a handful of injuries to Dickey
and unfamiliar officiating. The plane ride to Reno, with stops in St. Louis and
Denver for refueling, caused more than a little air sickness among the players,
particularly Warren “Wimpy” Cartier.
Junior guard Joe Harand was not on the trip for the first five
games and the loss of Bartels, a 6-foot-5 guard and All-Southern Conference
performer as a sophomore, hit harder than anyone believed. Sometime between beating
Nevada’s Wolf Pack on back-to-back nights in Reno and taking the team to San
Francisco, Case received a negative report the number of times Bartels, who had
scored 13 points in State’s earlier win over Pitt, cut class during the fall
semester.
No sooner than the team landed in San Francisco for the next
leg of the trip, Case kicked Bartels off the team, put him on a train for a 2,850-mile
ride home to Raleigh and told him he was on his own to get back to his hometown
on Long Island. Though Bartels had eligibility remaining, he never returned to
the Wolfpack program, but did eventually play two years in the NBA.
“He had been warned previously that he must stand by the
rules set up for the team on this trip,” Case said. “He refused to obey the
rules and have simply done the only thing that I could do.”
After Case was hit with a pair of technical fouls in the
first game against Nevada for arguing backcourt violations — a high school,
college and professional rule that was instituted because of Case’s full-court,
four-corners offense during his Indiana high school coaching career — and the
interpretations of the block-charge rule, he criticized the version of the game
played on the other side of the Rocky Mountains.
“Perhaps it is an accepted practice to allow blocking and
screening out here but it is certainly in direct violation of the rulebook,”
Case said.
 |
Three-time All-America Dick Dickey.
|
To make matters worse, Dickey suffered a charley horse that slowed
him down on the West Coast, where he had been a wartime standout for the St.
Mary’s Pre-Flight in San Francisco. He never fully recovered the rest of the
season, as he averaged a career-low 11.8 points per game, though he did repeat
as a first-team All-Southern Conference selection and as an honorable mention All-America
pick.
The team from North Carolina’s cow college should have been
comfortable playing in the San Francisco’s famed Cow Palace but it was a bit
battered and tired when it played the Dons of San Francisco. Dickey was held to
three field goals and no one for NC State scored in double figures in the 54-47
loss.
“They never gave the cagers from Raleigh a minute’s peace,”
wrote the San Francisco Chronicle. “The score doesn’t even begin to
indicate the way they controlled the ball game after the first 10 minutes. Nor
does it reveal that USF didn’t even try to score in the last four minutes when
it just played keep away.”
USF’s defense received most of the credit for the win and
the Dons continued to play well enough the rest of the season to win the 1949 National
Invitation Tournament, which at the time was more prestigious than the NCAA championship.
From San Francisco, the Wolfpack took a train to Los Angeles
on Christmas Eve, a lonely trek for the small traveling party. Most of the
players were war veterans who were married, some with children. They woke up on
Christmas Day at a hotel on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, had a short
workout at George Pepperdine College and then attended a party at the Pig’N’Whistle’s
Melody Lane Café, thrown by Case’s old Indiana friend Jonas Fritch.
The next day, the Pack scrimmaged the varsity squad from Southern
California in an attempt to shake off their holiday calories and road weariness.
 |
Case and 1950 SoCon MVP Sam Ranzino.
|
The physical and emotional toll forced Case to sharpen his
coaching skills by relying differently on 6-11 giant center Bob Hahn, wiry
sophomore Ranzino and step-in senior guard Jack McComas, as he readied his team
for a difficult Southern Conference schedule in January. With Dickey slowed by
injuries, another Indiana boy, sophomore forward Sammy Ranzino, begin to emerge
as a scorer for Case’s team.
Those adjustments did not work in the second-annual Los
Angeles Invitational Tournament, a lavish three-day affair that brought eight national
teams in for a West Coast showplace, exactly the kind of holiday event Case
wanted to bring to Raleigh. The other schools participating were defending
champion Marshall, host Pepperdine, Loyola of California (now Loyola-Marymount),
Wyoming, Hamline College, Brigham Young and Montana.
However, Case was not happy with the team’s draw of Wyoming’s
Cowboys, a surprise winner of the 1943 NCAA title and a well-established
program under Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame coach Everett Shelton. In a
low-scoring nailbiter as part of a tripleheader at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium,
the Pack led for only one brief moment (15-14) in the deliberately played game
and the Cowboys took a 41-39 victory that sent the Wolfpack into the loser’s
bracket.
The next night, the games moved to Lions’ Gymnasium on Loyola’s
campus, and the Pack had no luck against the homestanding team. With Dickey
sitting out the first half because of his bruised thigh, Loyola took a 36-31
lead. In a bit of a desperate act, Case pulled Dickey off the bench and as hm
to work some magic. As teammate Ranzino scored 18 points, Dickey added 12.
Trailing by two points with four seconds to play, Dickey
raced down to get a game-tying shot, which swished through the basket, but after
the gun sounded to end the game.
Because of the two quick losses and projected bad weather in
Cleveland, Case took everyone to the airport a day early, canceling a team trip
to see Northwestern play California in the 1949 Rose Bowl.
“The boys may be a little homesick and the trip a bit too
long, but I believe we have played good basketball,” Case said after the two losses.
“I think we’ll be better at Cleveland.”
In the Forest City, Case and his team waited for an hour for
a bus to pick them up at the hotel to take them to The Arena, an old hockey ice
rink that often hosted college basketball games. Eventually, the coach stuffed
everyone in cabs and raced to the game just in time for tipoff.
The Pack handily defeated the Golden Griffins of Canisius on
a court placed on top of the arena’s ice, but that wasn’t the end of their frozen
toes on the trip. A lake-effect snowstorm dumped nine inches of snow on Cleveland,
forcing Case to cancel the team’s charter flight for the next leg of the trip,
an appearance at New York’s Madison Square Garden for a North-South doubleheader
that featured North Carolina playing New York University and the Wolfpack
facing Long Island University.
Instead, the Pack took an eight-hour train to the basketball
capital of the world, a location where Case always had a tough time succeeding.
The Tar Heels lost badly to NYU, 72-48. Case’s team jumped out to a 22-5 lead in
the second game but faded badly down the stretch in a 65-61 defeat, its fourth loss
on the road trip.
Traveling by train to Philadelphia, Case and his team met
its most difficult opponent of the trip, playing on unbeaten and Top 10 Villanova’s
Main Line Field House. State led 57-55 with five minutes to play after a set
jumper by a little-used reserve from Indianapolis named Norman Sloan.
Main Liners Paul Arizin and Tom Sabol took over the final
moments of the game and the 62-59 loss left Case’s team with a 6-6 overall
record, the last time a Case didn’t have a winning record until the beginning
of the 1959-60 season, when a national gambling scandal decimated the roster of
both the Wolfpack and North Carolina.
The loss was bad enough, but Dickey also suffered his second
significant injury of the trip, a broken nose while scrambling for a loose
ball. The media who had largely fawned over Case in his first two seasons at
State openly wondered if his burgeoning dynasty had been overhyped.
“We do believe that it is too early to draw any definite
conclusions that the Wolfpack’s days of greatness are over,” suggested the
Raleigh News & Observer’s Dick Herbert, a longtime Case ally. “There is
some speculation that the forced dismissal of guard Eddie Bartels from the squad
because of infractions of the training rules is having a greater effect on the
squad than was anticipated.
“It is true that Bartels, when he was playing up to his
capabilities, was one of the most valuable members of the squad, but it is also
true that he started the season as a second-stringer and that the squad it deep
enough in talent to find an adequate replacement for him.
“The Southern Conference teams which may be licking their lips
over the prospect of the loop’s champions would do well to postpone their
anticipation. When the Wolfpack gets back to Raleigh and the players have a
chance to settle down after their extended trip of 12,000 miles, the State team
probably will roar through the opposition just as it did the last year and the
year before.”
Case promised he would never undertake such an extended trip
again.
“I am sure of one thing: From now on, there will be no long
trips,” Case told Herbert. “We won’t go on the road for more than two or three
days. Next season, we will have to coliseum and teams can come here to play.
“If we have 24 games on the schedule, 16 of them will be at
home.”
Battered, bruised and baffled by losing five of the last six
games on the extended road trip, the Wolfpack returned to Raleigh on Jan. 10 to
prepare for its second Southern Conference game of the season — against
Davidson on the road in Charlotte. With Dickey out of the lineup, the Wolfpack
still managed to take a 64-47 road victory, thanks to 20 points from center
Paul Horvath and 17 from McComas.
Case, the most well-traveled person in NC State history
until Jim Valvano showed up in Raleigh, was weary but optimistic after his team
beat the Wildcats.
“Yep, the trip was plenty tiring, riding all day, playing
that night, getting up the next morning and doing it all over again,” Case told
Herman Helms of the Charlotte News. “’Course, we knew that when we
arranged it. But we just wanted to get the school a little recognition and get
those teams down here to meet us next year.
“[Our spirit] is good. The players have been a little upset
over the way things have gone, of course. But we’re back home now, and I think
they’re going to be okay from now on.”
Two nights later, the Pack lost its first home game of the
season, 71-70, to Louisville.
There was still some turmoil on the team. Hahn narrowly
missed a call by the U.S. Army for mandatory military service, Sloan left the
team in order to try out for football and the 24-year-old Army veteran McComas
wondered if it was time to give up playing college basketball so he could sign
a professional baseball contract. (He did.)
But the Wolfpack got hot in late January and played that way
for the rest of the season, winning 16 of its final 17 contests, including 11
in a row en route to its third consecutive Southern Conference regular-season
and tournament titles. It did not play in either the NIT or NCAA tournaments,
which only invited eight teams, but Case and his team learned some lessons.
The next season, playing in its sparkling new home, the
Wolfpack won 27 games, suffered just six losses, won another conference title, received
the first NCAA bid in school history and advanced to the semifinals at Madison
Square Garden.
