America's "Winter Home of Golf" Will Be Hot This Summer

NOTE: This was written in advance of the 1999 U.S. Open, the first held in the village of Pinehurst, and published in the Greensboro News & Record. While much has changed in the 25 years since, it is still the most sizzling place in the Sandhills. 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
 

BY TIM PEELER, Greensboro News & Record

PINEHURST -- Listen closely during a rainstorm, they used to say, for the sizzle. It was the sound of water going straight through the sand and striking the fires of hell.

They used to say that anyone buried here needed a large dose of fertilizer thrown over the grave even to have a chance of rising from the dead come Judgment Day.

They used to laugh and laugh when they thought about how Walter Hines Page of Aberdeen hoo-dooed that sickly Yankee, James Walker Tufts, into buying 5,000 acres of sapped-out, clear-cut pine barrens for about $1.25 an acre in 1895, where the soda fountain maker from Boston planned to build a ``health resort,’’ similar to the one built eight years before in nearby Southern Pines.

Now, there’s knee-slapper, even for famed writer and Watauga Club member Page, who was certain that Tufts would disappear into barrens like the red-cockaded woodpecker.

“He gave me his check for $500 to bind the bargain, but I am afraid that I will never see him once he gets home and thinks it over,” Page wrote in a letter to a friend.

So how did this remote little outpost in the hellish environs of Moore County become golf’s heaven on Earth, a New England village with a distinctly Southern drawl?

It started with Tufts’ vision: an easily accessible community that catered to retired school teachers, military personnel and clergy, offering the restorative powers of sand and pine sap. He went straight back to Massachusetts, where he hand-delivered a low-ball offer to an old acquaintance, world-renown landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, asking him to lay out something distinctive on his scruffy new property.

The village’s first building was a hotel, the Holly Inn. The second order of business was to lay out dairy land and build a barn, which proved to be a fortuitous choice.

By 1897, Olmstead – who won lasting fame for his design of Central Park in Manhattan and the grounds of George Vanderbilt’s the Biltmore House in Asheville – had brought in some 225,000 pine seedlings, trees and shrubs that began the transition from wasteland to wonderland.

In two years, Tufts’ legion of workmen, engineers and planners had built the inn and 38 cottages, the Department Store and the Casino. Rooms, which started at $3 a night, were filling up fast. But there was little to do in the village, except soak up the mild winter climate and kill time.

Visitors eventually took to hitting golf balls in the pastures, which caused a local farmer to complain that the tourists were disturbing his cows. It wasn’t long before golf was the passion of the village. Neither Tufts nor his son Leonard were golfers, but they bet the village’s future on this ancient Scottish game, scrapping plans to plant a peach orchard and installing a crude nine-hole golf course instead.

Donald Ross

Even after Donald Ross arrived in 1901 and began his redesign of the course into an 18-hole layout, golf was an iffy proposition. Little grass grew in the sand, and serious consideration was given to pulling up what little sod was there and making the entire course nothing but sand. The resort went so far as to buy a steamroller to regularly roll the fairways flat.

Richard Tufts, grandson of Pinehurst’s founder and a well-decorated golf enthusiast, grew up playing golf with a black ball, which he could find more easily on the white sand of the golf course.

The village thrived, attracting a wealthier clientele. Sometime before 1899, a five-foot fence was erected around the 100-acre village to keep out the wild razorback hogs that were disturbing Olmstead’s handiwork. Some cynics say the village has been trying to keep the pigs out ever since.

Pinehurst celebrated the arrival of the 20th century with the grand opening of the Carolina Hotel, which was dedicated on Jan. 1, 1900, and remains the resort’s centerpiece for lodging. The village, meanwhile, matured and was noted for its quietness and quaintness. A law once was passed prohibiting any resident from owning a rooster, lest it crow in the morning and disturb the out-of-town guests.

It’s said that you could overlay a transparency of today’s village on a picture of the town during those golden years and the only thing that would be different is the make of the cars. The Theater still stands proudly, home to shops and a restaurant. The Casino serves as the offices for Pinehurst Properties. And the Holly Inn, which fell into disrepair when it was abandoned in the 1970s, recently went through a $10 million renovation and is open for business again.

One thing that certainly hasn’t changed is the tiny town’s love of golf. It has soaked into every building, every crack in the sidewalk and is passed into every soul that walks the streets.

“There isn’t any ambivalence that golf is the centerpiece of Pinehurst,” said Tom Stewart, a former 30-year golf pro who owns a golf shop in the village. “If you go into any restaurants, people are talking about it. You see people driving their golf carts down the main road. People are always practicing their swing in their back yards.”

That spirit brewed for many years, as celebrities, Presidents, adventurers and golf lovers filed through the America’s “Winter Home of Golf.”

Amelia Earhart (Tufts Library).

Annie Oakley lived here, and Amelia Earhardt passed through. John Philip Sousa vacationed here, and Warren G. Harding did too, leading a flood of presidents that included William Taft, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Gerald Ford. Bing Crosby came, not for the golf that he loved so much, but to go riding and hunting.

Gen. George C. Marshall bivouacked here after he retired from the military. The list is impressive and endlessly boring.

Maureen Orcutt, an accomplished amateur from New York who happened to be a sportswriter for The New York Times, remembers the golden years of Pinehurst, when she and Glenna Collett, Virginia Van Wie and Helen Hicks were the talk of the village. Those were the days of Walter Hagen, Tommy Armour, Horton Smith and Henry Picard. Bobby Jones used to visit after he retired from competitive golf.

“It was a fun time to play golf at Pinehurst,” said the 92-year-old Orcutt, who has lived in Durham for three decades. “Not much has changed, really, in the village. It is such a lovely place.”

Pinehurst is credited as the place where America’s love affair with golf began. It’s also the home of the nation’s first driving range and miniature golf course.

Over the years, the village and resort have thrived on more than just golf. Pinehurst is still the best place in the state to put on a pair of white pants, a starched white shirt and a pair of tennis shoes for an afternoon of lawn bowling. Defy any expert to name a better place to play croquet.

Equestrian training is still popular, especially in Southern Pines, the adjacent town with a penchant for hosting writers. The gun club, where Oakley once served as the resident pro, was grassed over a few years ago by designer Tom Fazio, who built resort's Centennial No. 8 golf course on top of it.

Rod Innes, 87, remembers Pinehurst’s glory days, too. As an apprentice to Ross, Innes watched the thriving little village become a magnet for moneyed Northerners looking for a place to relax and get away from harsh winters.

“These were people who were used to dressing up for dinner,” Innes said. “They brought their servants with them. When the movie house opened three nights a week, there would be people dressed in tuxedos and evening dresses.

“It was quiet a lovely sight.”

Alas, as Innes tells it, that crowd died out and their descendants were more attracted to ocean resorts in Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head and Florida’s vast coastline. Golfers still showed up, but by the time the resort was sold in 1970 to Diamondhead Corp., Pinehurst was no longer at the top of the list for wealthy patrons.

“A new breed of cats came in after the resort was sold,” Innes said. “It became a real-estate venture. The place changed.”

In 1984, the resort was taken over by a consortium of northern banks and eventually sold to Robert Dedman’s Dallas-based Club Corporation of America, which set about restoring the reputation the resort enjoyed during the golden years.

It’s hasn’t always been easy. The retirees in town, the biggest part of the village’s 8,300 population base, don’t always get along with CCA. But the company has spent some $90 million during its 15-year ownership to bring the resort – and the community – back to life, not unlike what James Walker Tufts did to the Pine Barrens more than 100 years ago.

“It’s been a huge investment of money and time,” said Pinehurst CEO Patrick Corso.

Bringing the U.S. Open to Pinehurst and re-opening the Holly Inn, the village’s first construction project, is the culmination of that restoration.

“They have done a bang-up job of putting Pinehurst back to where it used to be,” Innes said. “I can’t say enough about that.”

The village, which became the first golf-based community to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, will no doubt be receiving plenty of publicity during the course of the Open, which may spur more people to choose to live here.

They will find a close-knit community, one that is resistant to too many outside recommendations and steadfastly against too much intrusion by common modern growth.

“There is a respect for what the history is here and what the traditions are here,” said Stewart, who moved up from Southern Florida nearly three years ago. “There aren’t many places like this left, so everybody is conscious of trying to protect it. We know it’s going to grow.

"But this little oasis that is Pinehurst, I think will be preserved for another 100 years.’’

Roman Gabriel: 'More Moves Than a Clock'

College Football and NC State Athletic Hall of Fame member Roman Gabriel.

This story was originally published at www.GoPack.com in support of Roman Gabriel's nomination for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. It has been updated to announce Gabriel's death on Saturday, April 20, 2024. 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.

By Tim Peeler
© NC State Athletics, 2011

ROMAN GABRIEL

• No. 18 (retired jersey)

• 1960, ’61 All-America Selection

• 1961 Academic All-America

• No. 1 overall pick of American Football League (Oakland Raiders)

• No. 2 overall pick of National Football League (Los Angeles Rams)

• Four-time Pro Bowl Selection 

• 1969 NFL Most Valuable Player, 1972 NFL Comeback Player of the Year

The day Roman Gabriel told head coach Earle Edwards he would attend NC State might have been the greatest day in Wolfpack football history, even though Gabriel’s announcement was secondary to the other events of that day.

It was Nov. 23, 1957, and the Edwards’ Wolfpack was playing South Carolina in Columbia, S.C., with an outside chance to win its first ACC football championship. Halfback Dick Christy turned in the greatest individual performance in conference history, scoring all 29 of his team’s points in the 29-26 victory, including a field goal with no time left on the clock. Before the team loaded the bus for the celebratory ride home to Raleigh, Gabriel sent word to Coach Edwards that he would play for NC State.

Earle Edwards and Roman Gabriel

Roman Ildonzo Gabriel Jr. (b. Aug. 5, 1940) chose NC State over the other 71 college scholarship offers because the coaching staff had no problem with him playing multiple sports. He wanted to play football, basketball and baseball for the Wolfpack, just as he had at New Hanover High School in Wilmington, N.C., with much success.

The tall, rangy quarterback – who died Saturday, April 20, 2024, at the age of 83 – was an all-state and All-America selection in football, an all-state pick in baseball and the conference and state tournament most valuable player in basketball. The New York Yankees came calling with a contract after his senior year. Legendary NC State basketball coach Everett Case wanted him to play basketball exclusively. Three Wolfpack coaches visited Gabriel and his parents for an in-home recruiting visit – football defensive coordinator Al Michaels, baseball coach Vic Sorrells and freshman basketball coach Lee Terrill.

It was Gabriel’s trip to campus that sealed the deal for the oversized quarterback. He met Case at Reynolds Coliseum during the 1956 Dixie Classic and knew immediately he wanted to be part of the excitement. The one place Gabriel never got around to visiting? Crumbling Riddick Stadium, where he eventually played all of his football games during a Hall of Fame college career. [Gabriel is in the College Football Hall of Fame and was an inaugural inductee into the NC State Athletic Hall of Fame.]

“One of the main reasons I went to NC State, other than to get a fine education, is that I did not know at the time which sport I liked the best,” Gabriel says. “I played all three and North Carolina State was one of the few schools that would allow me to play my freshman year, as long as I could keep my grades up.”

Gabriel played three sports at NC State.

Gabriel played on the freshman basketball team in 1958 and spent three years with the baseball team, leading the Wolfpack in home runs (5) and RBIs (18) as a junior.

It was on the football field where Gabriel became a record-setting All-America quarterback. He threw eight touchdown passes in five freshman games in 1958. As a sophomore in 1959, Gabriel quickly won the starting job at quarterback. An injury kept him out of three games, but he led the nation by completing 81 of his 134 passes, a school-record 60.4 percent.

Gabriel also became the first NC State quarterback to throw for more than 800 yards. As a junior, he had his best passing season, throwing for 1,182 yards and was 10th in the nation with 1,356 yards of total offense. Those numbers may not raise eyebrows in the current era of West Coast offenses, in which quarterbacks routinely throw for more than 500 yards per game. But in the 1960s, Gabriel’s arm was a weapon that few other schools could match. By himself, he accounted for more than 50 percent of his team’s total offense as a junior and senior and he was responsible for an ACC-record 34 touchdowns in his career.

The Wolfpack did not enjoy great success as a team during the Gabriel era, winning just 11 games during his three varsity seasons. Some of that can be attributed to the fact that the Wolfpack generally played only three home games a season at Riddick Stadium, a 20,000-seat, on-campus facility that dated back to the early 1900s. Edwards, instead, chose to take his team on the road, using the money he got from guarantees to fund the athletics program and raise the money needed to begin construction on what is now Carter-Finley Stadium.

Gabriel in action.

“Gabe had a terrific impact on the football team,” Edwards once said of his most famous player. “He sent us in a new direction and much of it he had to do on his own because we didn’t have the kind of supporting cast he deserved. He started us in a new direction and others followed.” 

Immediately after Gabriel’s career ended, under Edwards’ guidance, the Wolfpack won outright or shared four of the next seven ACC championships and moved from Riddick to its new football home, Carter Stadium, near the North Carolina State Fairgrounds.

The superstar signal-caller never played in a post-season bowl game with his teammates. He was, however, on the 1962 College All-Star team that played against the NFL-champion Green Bay Packers and he scored the winning touchdown in the second-annual East-West All-Star Game.

“He is going to be a great passer,” legendary Packers coach Vince Lombardi predicted during Gabriel’s rookie season. “He has more moves than a clock.”

He was the prototype for today’s strong-armed, oversized quarterbacks who look more like tight ends or linebackers than signal callers.

Early in his career, Gabriel did play in the defensive secondary. As a junior, in the annual match-up against arch-rival North Carolina, Edwards told Gabriel, the biggest player on the roster, to play linebacker, as the team clung to a 3-0 second-half lead. The Tar Heels took advantage of him early in the drive, marching to the 1-yard line. But when the opposing quarterback tried to sneak the ball over the goal line, Gabriel hit him so hard that the quarterback fumbled into the end zone, where Pack defender Claude “Hoot” Gibson picked it up and ran to the 29-yard line. Later in the game, Gabriel halted another Carolina drive with a spectacular left-handed interception on the 4-yard line that secured the Wolfpack’s 3-0 victory.

“He eventually reached the point that he was too valuable for us to play on defense,” Edwards once said. “The one disagreement that I specifically remember was over how much defense he should play. Roman didn’t like sitting on the bench while the team was out there.”

Gabriel was the most celebrated college player of his era and every professional football team wanted the chance to have the quarterback of the future. He was the No. 1 pick of the American Football League by the Oakland Raiders and the No. 2 overall pick of the National Football League by the Los Angeles Rams.

For five years, Gabriel bided his time on the bench, looking for an opportunity to play. That finally came when George Allen took over as head coach of the Rams. In 1967, Gabriel and Allen led the Rams to a 17-1-1 record. In 1969, he was the NFL’s Most Valuable Player. And in 1973, he was named the NFL’s Comeback Player of the Year.

He grew into one of the biggest celebrities in a town of celebrities, especially after he began his acting career. He had significant roles in two major motion pictures, “Skidoo” and “The Undefeated,” which co-starred John Wayne and Rock Hudson. He had minor roles on several television shows, including “Gilligan’s Island” and “Wonder Woman.” In the former, he played a native headhunter on a Pacific island; in the latter, he stretched out his acting skills to play a professional quarterback.

Throughout his 16-year NFL career, the outspoken Gabriel maintained a superstar’s presence with both the Rams and the Philadelphia Eagles. He passed for 29,444 yards, completed 52.6 percent of his passes and threw 201 touchdown passes.

After retiring from football in 1977, Gabriel focused on a variety of projects, primarily involved with sports. By his own accounting, he raised nearly $7 million for various charities, primarily through golf tournaments. For the last quarter century, he has participated in an event with his New Hanover High School teammates to raise mortgage money for the widow of a teammate who died of multiple sclerosis.

He has been a college and professional coach, and was involved in minor league baseball and football ventures in Charlotte and Raleigh. He has also spent time in the broadcast booth, as a radio and television analyst.

For the last two decades of his life, he lived in Little River, S.C., less than 45 minutes away from his hometown Wilmington.

Gabriel reconnected with his alma mater in retirement. Three close friends, including one of his former offensive linemen, Collice Moore, donated $150,000 in his honor to name the finishing hole at the Lonnie Poole Golf Course – No. 18, just like his retired jersey number – in Gabriel’s honor.

The NC State-UNC Basketball Portal

Bernie Mock taking a shot for NC State in 1943.

NOTE: This story was originally publish at www.GoPack.com just before NC State had a 100-year anniversary celebration in 2011. It has been updated to reflect the passing of both Bernie Mock and Fred Swartzberg. 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.

BY TIM PEELER
© NC State Athletics, 2011

Bernie Mock (July 30, 1921-June 8, 2012)
Fred Swartzberg (March 16, 1927-July 31, 2013)
Horace "Bones" McKinney (Jan. 1, 1919-May 16, 1997)

RALEIGH, N.C. – Bernie Mock couldn't make it to 2011 reunion of more than 100 former NC State basketball players, coaches, managers and support personnel to celebrate the program's 100th anniversary. But, oh, how he wished he had.

At the time, the 89-year-old former captain of the Red Terrors lived in Waynesville, N.C., and was taking care of his ailing wife of 67 years. As one of NC State basketball’s oldest living former basketball players, he has plenty of stories to tell of the days when on-campus games meant trudging to Thompson Gymnasium, not the palatial arena that was under construction to replace it. He was a Red Terror, back before all varsity teams became the Wolfpack in 1948.

Mock came to NC State in the fall of 1941 from Boonville, N.C., just before the start of World War II, the event that forever changed college campuses, many of which were turned into military training facilities, and the game of basketball, which became the primary indoor spectator sport for enlisted men all over the world, whether in gymnasiums on college campuses or airplane hangars on a South Pacific island.

He played one season each for a pair of NC State College alumni, Bob Warren, who was called into active duty in 1943, and Leroy Jay, who moonlighted from his job as an official in the North Carolina Transportation Department as the Red Terrors part-time coach.

Horace "Bones" McKinney was a skinny drink of water.

He played one season with the legendary Horace “Bones” McKinney, and another year with long-forgotten stars like Howard “Touchdown” Turner, a dual-sport star who was an All-Southern Conference selection in football; Paul “Buckwheat” Carvalho, Fred Swartzberg and Leo Katkavek. In 1944, they advanced to the semifinals of the Southern Conference tournament, something that had not happened since NC State won the tournament in 1929.

“I played center at 6-foot-3,” Mock remembered. “Today, I wouldn’t be big enough to be a water boy.”

Of his former teammates, only Swartzberg and Bill Jackson remain. Both attended the 100-year reunion, the culmination of the school’s celebration of 100 years of basketball, to talk about the days before basketball was North Carolina's biggest sport.

They played at a time after the steel girders of what would eventually become Reynolds Coliseum were erected, but before it was completed. And it was before the great seismic shift in athletics – caused by the arrival of legendary Indiana high school coach Everett Case in the summer of 1946 – to make that arena a reality.

Mock and Swartzberg saw it all put into motion. Both had to leave NC State for military service, but both returned to their home state to play at UNC-Chapel Hill, earning degrees there after the war ended. Mock was elected team captain at both schools, the only player in history to do so.

McKinney, the Durham High kid everyone called "Bones," was the first State College player to leave for the Army then enroll at Chapel Hill. His former Red Terror teammates went to Fayetteville's Fort Bragg to play against McKinney's U.S. Army team that featured...

"They beat the hell out of us," said Swartzberg, who enrolled at NC State at the age of 16 in 1943, enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1945 and graduated from UNC in 1948. [Watch an interview with Swartzberg about his Navy experiences here.]

McKinney was a member of UNC’s 1946 team that played for the national championship under coach Ben Carnavale. Mock and Swartzberg played for the Tar Heels a year later, after Carnavale left for Navy because he could earn more money and was replaced by Tom Scott. It was the same season Case took over NC State and brought big-time basketball to the South.

“The first time [Case and his team] came over to Chapel Hill, they threw a full-court press on us, something we’d never seen before,” Swartzberg said. “They beat the hell out of us too.”

Fred Swartzberg (left) at the 2011 reunion.

The Tar Heels didn’t even get to avenge loss. When they were scheduled to play the return game in Raleigh, the NC State campus was so crazy over basketball, it overflowed aging Thompson Gym, forcing the Raleigh fire marshal to cancel the game.

“We barely got in the front door,” said Swartzberg, a native of High Point who lived there until his death in 2013. “There was a mob inside and down into the dressing rooms downstairs. The officials had to come into the building through the windows in the bathroom.

“There were so many fans, they were hanging off the backboard.”

From that point forward, college basketball was never the same. Case won nine championships in his first 10 years at NC State. The Wolfpack has since won eight more, made four trips to the Final Four and is one of 17 NCAA schools to win two or more national championships.

 

 

A Persistent Myth

1983 ACC Tournament MVP Sidney Lowe and his teammates.

This is an excerpt from my 2008 book "When March Went Mad: A Celebration of NC State's 1982-83 NCAA Championship" that long ago dispelled the myth that Jim Valvano and his team would not have received a bid into the 1983 NCAA tournament without beating Virginia in the title game. It includes scuttle before, during and after the tournament and memories from long ago. The book is available at
resale sites and used book stores, but is currently out of print in the current market. 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
"When March Went Mad," © 2008

A myth that has persisted over the last 40 years is that the Wolfpack needed to win the 1983 Atlantic Coast Conference tournament or it would not have gotten an invitation to the NCAA Tournament, something not that is not remotely true. Late-season wins over North Carolina, Duke and Wake Forest and Whittenburg’s return to the lineup put Valvano’s team in good position as far as the NCAA Selection Committee was concerned, despite the 10 regular-season losses. Valvano was a little worried about getting into the tournament, but only if his team lost the opener against Wake Forest.

The way the coach had it figured, both Virginia and North Carolina were locks for the national tournament, even if neither won the ACC Championship. That seemed unlikely for most of the fans and media that showed up for the tournament – they all assumed that the storyline for the weekend would be whether or not the defending conference- and national-champion Tar Heels could prevent Virginia All-America Ralph Sampson from getting the elusive ACC title that he was thought to be his birthright when he arrived in Charlottesville four years earlier. For Valvano, the league tournament was about securing one of the four bids he thought the ACC would earn to the NCAA Tournament. The league had never sent more than that into Big Dance, and he didn’t expect this year to be any different, even if the field had just been expanded from 48 to 52 teams. Valvano believed that Maryland, with 20 regular-season wins and a third-place finish in the final ACC standings, would also join the Cavaliers and Tar Heels in the Big Dance, despite being upset in the first round of the ACC Tournament by Georgia Tech. That left the league’s likely final spot between NC State, which had lost two of its last three games, and the slumping Demon Deacons, which had lost four in a row at the end of the regular season. The main difference between the two teams was the regular-season finale in Reynolds Coliseum, a 130-89 rout in which the Wolfpack set an ACC record for the most points scored in a league game.

So when Lorenzo Charles hit a free throw with three seconds to play to give the Wolfpack a 71-70 victory and its 18th win of the season, Valvano believed his team had secured the league’s fourth NCAA bid. One more win would make it a certainty, in Valvano’s mind, but he knew that beating North Carolina would be more difficult.

The Tar Heels, a big winner over Clemson in the first round of the 1983 tournament, eliminated NC State in each of Valvano’s previous trips to the ACC Tournament, games that were not close. The Tar Heels won 69-54 in a first-round game in Landover, Maryland, in Valvano’s ACC Tournament debut in 1981 and 58-46 in a semifinal game in 1982 in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Not much was known about the selection process back then, since the NCAA had only been seeding teams in the tournament since 1979. There was no daily discussion of a team’s ratings percentage index (RPI), the NET, no strength-of-schedule formulas, no talk about how a team performed in its final 10 games before the NCAA Tournament, no discussion of the concessions the selection committee made for teams who had an injured player return to the lineup. If there had been, the Wolfpack would have been a shoo-in, based on its brutal non-conference schedule. “I wish we could have won more games,” Valvano told the N&O’s Joe Tiede the week before the ACC Tournament. “[But] we haven’t lost to anybody who wasn’t somebody.”

Considering the larger field, Whittenburg’s return and the team’s mini-hot streak, there was no question that the Wolfpack belonged in the field after winning just one ACC Tournament game. The myth that Valvano and his team needed to win the ACC Tournament has been perpetuated over the years because some people believe it makes the Wolfpack’s Cinderella story better. Frankly, the story is good enough as it is.

“I do recall that going into the tournament, NC State did have some more work to do,” Dave Gavitt told me in a 2007 telephone interview. Gavitt, a Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame member as the founder of the Big East, was the Selection Committee chairman for the 1983 NCAA Tournament. “I don’t think we ever got to the point in the deliberations that people in the room felt they had to [win the ACC] to get into the tournament,” he said. “Their total body of work over the course of that season was impressive. What happened in those years was that the ACC, the Big East and the Big Ten were so strong that even some losses didn’t hurt you because of who you were losing to.”

The Wolfpack also had a not-so-secret weapon in the room during the selection process: then-Metro Conference Commissioner Vic Bubas, a former NC State player and assistant coach under Everett Case and the former head coach at Duke. In 1949, Bubas scored the first points in the history of Reynolds Coliseum. Though he left the room for the vote, Bubas informally enlightened his fellow committee members about the Wolfpack’s trials and triumphs during the course of the season, especially since Metro-champion Memphis State had played the Wolfpack earlier in the year.

Following the Wolfpack’s 91-84 overtime win over the Tar Heels, Valvano told his team that there was an easy way to remove all doubt about its NCAA-worthiness. Since its inception in 1953, the ACC used its post-season league tournament to crown a champion and determine who received the league’s automatic bid into the national tournament. In the old days, when only one team per conference was invited to the NCAAs, the league tournament was imbued with a fingernail-biting tension that reached its peak in 1974, when NC State beat Maryland 103-100 in overtime in what is still regarded as the greatest ACC game ever played. By 1980, the NCAA opened the field to an unlimited number of teams per conference, though the ACC Tournament winner still received the league’s automatic invitation. What Valvano told his team just before they headed to the court to play the Cavaliers for the championship game was this: “Guys, I’ll tell you what – if we win this game, we are definitely in.”

Maybe that's where the memories of some have decided to turn myth in to fact.

Getting into the big tournament was not something the players thought about as much as winning the ACC title, something NC State had done eight previous times. They were just trying to stay on the roll that had begun against the Demon Deacons in the regular-season finale. “We didn’t think a lot,” Whittenburg said. “Coaches have a certain thought process during that time. Fans have a completely different thought process. As kids, we didn’t think a whole lot about it. We just went out and played and moved on to the next game. We were awaiting our instructions, just like in the military. We knew what we had to do. We just went out and played.”

They also knew how important winning a championship was to their coach: in each of his first three years at NC State, Valvano made his players practice cutting down the nets and carrying him off the court on their shoulders. Just in case they won a championship together.

“He was a dreamer, and he made us share his dream,” Thurl Bailey said.