One Brick Back: September 2024

Saturday, September 21, 2024

NC State's Football Rivalry With Clemson

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NC State and Clemson have met 91 previous times before today’s noon kickoff in Death Valley, a rivalry known since 1981 as the Textile Bowl.

There’s a deeper, richer history to the rivalry that dates back to 1899, when the two teams met in Rock Hill, S.C., on a weekend that the N.C. A&M also played Davidson.

I’ve written about more of those games than I imagined, so I collected a handful of stories that include big wins, big losses and close games.

Overall, it’s a pretty good snapshot of what this rivalry between two land-grant universities in neighboring states has been like through the years.

2024:    Past True-Freshman Performances
2022:    The Biggest Game in NC State Football History (podcast)
2011:    Wolfpack Rolls with 27 Second-Quarter Points
2010:    Clemson Holds Off Pack for 14-13 Win
               Avoid the Poison, O’Brien Says
2009:    Spiller Leads Clemson to 43-23 Win
2002:    Extending an Undefeated Start
1988:    Bulletin Board Material
1986:    An Upset to Remember
1980:    Kicking off the Textile Bowl
1979:    An ACC-Winning Goal-Line Stand
               GoPack.com
               Remembering Bo Rein
1965:    ‘It Was a Weird Year’ for an ACC Title
1963-80: NC State’s 11 Wins in 15 Games Vs. Clemson
1959:    Clemson-NC State Football in a Hurricane
1932:    Ruby Ray Rex Outruns Clemson’s Best
1928:    The Whole Town is a Giddy Whirl
1899:    Two Games in the Same Weekend

Friday, September 20, 2024

'Ruby' Ray Rex Outruns Clemson's Best


NC State vs. Clemson (1934) with Ray Rex in the backfield. (Agromeck photo.)

Ray Rex made a split-second decision on the afternoon of Oct. 8, 1932, in the southwest endzone of NC State’s Riddick Stadium.

The burly 6-1, 210-pound fullback and defensive back with the fastest feet on campus couldn’t possibly process all the information in front of him, but he knew that the Wolfpack’s game against Clemson was tied, 0-0, and the Tigers were on the verge of taking the lead in the important Southern Conference contest.

On fourth-and-3 from the 5-yard line, Rex found himself standing between Clemson quarterback Bob Miller’s pass and Tiger receiver Henry Woodward’s hands. If there was ever a need for a big play in front of the hometown crowd of 6,500 spectators, this was it.

If he knocked it down, under football rules of the time, it would have been a touchback and the Wolfpack would take over at the 20-yard-line.

If he caught it and was tackled in the end zone, it would be a safety. Two points might just have been the difference in a game between two evenly matched opponents, coached by College Football Hall of Fame inductees John “Clipper” Smith of State and Jess Neeley of Clemson.

If the caught it and was tackled deep in his own territory, it would have been difficult for Wolfpack quarterback George McQuage and his speedy backfield to get out of such a hole on a day when McQuage did not complete a pass and the offense made only three first downs. (Clemson was hardly any better, as Miller threw 13 passes, had six intercepted, six fall incomplete and three caught for 41 yards.)

What to do?

Rex, a four-sport collegiate standout from Decatur, Illinois, who eventually played three professional sports, was quick with his feet, but he didn’t have time to fully process all of his choices. He let his instincts kick in. He grabbed the ball out of the air—the second of the six interceptions the Wolfpack had that afternoon—and took off down the sidelines.

He sidestepped Woodward and made it through a knot of wandering offensive linemen. He sprinted down the home-team sideline of Riddick’s unlit stadium, with only quarterback Miller on his heels. The two started racing at midfield, but Rex was a certified sprinter with 10-second speed in the 100-yard dash and he ran the final 25 yards completely unopposed.

“As he neared the goal line the big State fullback nonchalantly waved his right hand at the players he’d left behind him,” reported Raleigh’s News & Observer. “Perhaps he was waving at his own mates.”

Perhaps.

The home crowd of white shirts and ties in the stands went as crazy as they could at the small stadium, though they were dampened a bit by a missed extra point.

“The world loves a gambler—when he wins,” N&O sports editor Anthony McKevlin wrote after the game.

Ray Rex won 11 varsity letters in three seasons.

The Wolfpack held its 6-0 lead until nine minutes remaining in the game when Rex’s backfield running mate Mope Cumisky ran the ball in from 1-yard out, a touchdown set up by yet another Clemson interception. The game ended with a 13-0 Wolfpack victory and was an important part of the 6-1-2 overall record and 3-1-1 Southern Conference mark, which put the Wolfpack in sixth place in the unbalanced 23-team league’s final standings.

Rex’s touchdown, even today, doesn’t have an exact measurement. Newspaper accounts of the day had his return at 101 yards. NC State’s records say it was 102 yards, a mark surpassed only by Howard Turner’s 105-yard touchdown return in 1946. His hall-of-fame plaque back home says it was 103 yards.

Since 1941, however, the NCAA has limited return yardage on kickoffs, punts, interceptions, fumbles and missed field goals to 100 yards. The last length-of-the-field interception return by an NC State defender was in 2001, when freshman cornerback Marcus Hudson went 100 yards in a 55-31 victory at Duke.

That didn’t matter to Raymond Roy “Ruby” Rex, who went on to win the 1935 Alumni Athletic Award after a three-year career as running back, basketball guard, baseball outfielder and track-and-field’s shot putter, discus thrower and sprinter. He won eight varsity letters in his final two years, 11 in all. He was named to the SoCon All-Conference football team three consecutive seasons.

"He looked like what you had in mind when you said ‘athlete,’” wrote Furman Bisher of the Atlanta Journal. “He played everything that was legal on campus.”

Rex graduated with a degree in business administration, but immediately returned to the fields of competition. He played one season of professional football with the NFL’s Boston Redskins and three years of minor league baseball in Columbia, South Carolina, and Nova Scotia, Canada. He spent two years playing professional basketball in Norfolk, Virginia.

Rex’s life after sports was similarly remarkable after he returned to Illinois, where he was considered one of the finest athletes in state history. He had been all-state in football and basketball there and helped Decatur High School win its first ever state championship.

He was drafted into the United States Army’s 72^nd Signal Corps Company, beginning his overseas service in Africa before moving on to Italy.

On June 6, 1944, the 31-year-old sergeant was one of the 34,000 American men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, the most daring and dangerous 100-yard dash of Rex’s life.

Perhaps he looked back and waved at his mates as he scrambled up the beachhead. Then again, he might have been waving to his opponents.

Rex spent the next 14 months advancing towards Germany before being discharged from the Army in September 1945 after 27 months of intense overseas duty.

After the war, he returned to his hometown, where he served as a city electrician for a while and a patrolman in the city police department for more than two decades. He was a regular in the recreational softball leagues. After an unsuccessful run for sheriff in 1947, he was eventually elected to the position for two terms in 1970-76.

Shortly after his reelection campaign, Rex was diagnosed with colon cancer and died on March 17, 1976, at the age of 63.

He was posthumously elected into the Basketball Museum of Illinois’ Hall of Fame in 1977.

Thursday, September 5, 2024

When NC State Invited Tennessee to Its Happy Jubilee

NC State running back goes around end againt Tennessee.

The week of Sept. 29, 1939, was unlike any other in NC State College history. It was the plucky little school’s Golden Jubilee, a celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the Oct. 3, 1889, opening of the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, as it was originally called.

And the best college football team in the nation was on its way over the Great Smokey Mountains by train to face the Wolfpack at Raleigh’s Riddick Stadium.

Defending national champion Tennessee, under the guidance of Robert Neyland, had recorded the first of three consecutive undefeated regular seasons in 1938 and beat Oklahoma 17-0 in the Orange Bowl, a team that is still regarded as one of the three best in college football history. This was the middle of Neyland’s three tenures at Tennessee, back when the College Football Hall of Fame coach known these days to everyone in Knoxville as “The General” was still only a major.

If anything, Neyland’s 1939 team was even better than the year before. It was the last team in NCAA football history to not allow a point during the entire regular season, part of a 17-game, 71-quarter shutout streak that are both still NCAA records.

And they started the ’39 season in Raleigh, arriving on Thursday morning on “The Volunteer Special,” a chartered train that carried a traveling squad of 37 players, 10 coaches and support personnel, and some 500 half-bear, other-half-cat fans. Somewhere as they straddled the North Carolina-Tennessee stateline, they might have seen the actual Rocky Top knob of Thunderhead Mountain (elevation 5,441 feet) that they have sung about since the early 1970s.

That was a long-anticipated week for the agricultural and technical school in the North Carolina capital. Fifty years before, it had opened its doors to the state’s agrarian and manufacturing population, ripping land-grant college status from the longer-established University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, an unforced turnover that has never been fully forgiven by the classicists in Orange County.

A large celebration was in order, despite the ominous happenings on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, where both Germany and the Soviet Union had both just invaded Poland and Europe was on a collision course to World War II.

On Thursday of that week, however, there was a campus-wide pep rally, broadcast live on radio station WPTF-AM with no thoughts that both schools would soon be sending their best and brightest into harm's way before too long. There were Homecoming festivities planned, welcoming back a half century of alumni and faculty, plus all the current students. Four of the first graduates in the Class of 1893 were on hand, including initial enrollee Walter J. Mathews of Goldsboro.

The Dean of Administration, Col. John W. Harrelson, was standing guard to welcome anyone who wanted to celebrate with him.

Both the football stadium and the basketball gymnasium were decorated red-and-white and orange-and-white, the colors of the two opposing schools in the football game in their first meeting since 1911.

Technician, NC State’s student paper, published a commemorative 50-page edition detailing the history of the school, including a comprehensive athletics summary. History professor David A. Lockmiller published a 255-page book about the school’s founding and development, from a simple idea of the Watauga Club to a thriving campus on the outskirts of Raleigh.

There was a Homecoming Dance planned for after the 3 p.m. Friday game, with all of Tennessee’s players and coaches invited to attend. The Duke Ambassadors, a famous swing band that began at the Durham college and went on to serve as the touring band for Doris Day and Bob Hope, were the featured performers.

Just so things didn’t get out of hand, NC State’s football staff, athletics administrators and student support staff were on hand after the game to serve as chaperones.

Homecoming decorations.

The crescendo of the celebration was on the Tuesday morning following the game, when NC State alum, ex-football captain and former governor of North Carolina O. Max Gardner, addressed administration, dignitaries and students at Pullen Hall, exactly 50 years after the doors of the college opened. Gardner, one of four N.C. governors produced in the school’s history, had also spoken at the 25^th anniversary in 1914.

Raleigh Mayor Graham H. Andrews had declared Oct. 3 “State College Day” and Gov. Clyde Hoey (Gardner's brother-in-law), UNC System President Frank Porter Graham and Duke President William B. Pew were all on hand to celebrate the semicentennial accomplishments of the maturing school.

To be honest, though, the football game played at recently completed Riddick Stadium was the biggest deal of the entire celebration, drawing a near-sellout of about 14,000 fans. (Riddick Field opened in 1906, added its first concrete grandstands in 1918 and added a section per year until the Great Depression. Construction was completed at the same time as the Memorial Tower, by the federal works programs the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration.)

Neyland agreed to open his team’s national championship defense as a favor to NC State coach Williams “Doc” Newton, who had been an assistant on Neyland’s 1931 team. That’s the same year Tennessee produced its third consensus All-America player, a guard still considered one of the best in program history.

That player, Herman Hickman, was now an assistant coach on Newton’s 1939 Wolfpack staff. Walter “Babe” Wood, hero of the Volunteers’ Orange Bowl victory over Oklahoma to end the 1938 season, had just been hired by Newton as an assistant coach for the Wolfpack freshman team. (Another Tennessee legend, Bettie Feathers, would later become NC State's head football coach.)

The coaching staffs, if not the players, were quite familiar with each other, well enough at least to play some mind games in the papers leading up to the contest. Tennessee suggested its star halfback George “Bad News” Cafego might not play because of a phantom knee injury and NC State floated that its top two guards and top two backs were also suffering. In fact, halfback John Savini was in the school infirmary with “a severe case of boils.”

Newton revealed to the Raleigh papers that he had some special practices to defend one of Tennessee’s greatest strengths.

“Tennessee has a bad habit of running back punts and putting the ball into a fine scoring situation,” Newton said on Tuesday before the game. “We’re going to take every precaution against these boys getting that kind of an advantage.”

As it turned out, the Volunteers had virtually no punt return yards in the game, but on the opening kickoff of the much-anticipated contest, Tennessee captain Sam Bartholomew caught the ball on the 14-yard-line and dashed 80 yards through the middle of the field before being knocked out of bounds by State’s Dick East at the 6-yard line.

Three plays later, halfback Box Foxx, went around the end for the game’s first touchdown. Savini, exposed boils and all, blocked the extra point, leaving Tennessee with a 6-0 lead two minutes into the game.

On its third drive, Tennessee had Cafego, one of the greatest pre-WWII players in college football history, carry the ball five times on six plays to gain 51 yards. He then threw an 18-yard pass to substitute back Breezer Andridge to account for the Volunteers’ second touchdown of the day, just nine minutes into the game.

While it looked like the rout was about to be on, nothing much else happened in the game. NC State had a first down in each of the last three quarters, but that was about all it had to brag about against the most stubborn defense in the history of college football.

The 13-0 loss was a victory of sorts for Newton’s Wolfpack, which played 17 sophomores in the game and didn’t give up anything of significance after the first nine minutes. Despite the leadership of quarterback Art Rooney and the play of All-America end Ed “Ty” Coon, the Wolfpack finished the season with a miserable 2-8 record, its only wins against Davidson and Furman.

That jubilee celebration game was the third meeting between the two largest schools of neighboring Southern states from 1893-1939. Remarkably, there has been only one meeting since, the 2012 Chick-Fil-A Kickoff Game at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, a game Tennessee captured 35-21.

Monday, September 2, 2024

Tennessee's 'Lost Game' Begets Its 'Lost Seasons'

NC A&M beat Tennessee, 12-6, in 1893 for the first victory over a college opponent in school history.

The first game the North Carolina School of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts—NC State College’s original name—played against another college squad happened on Nov. 7, 1893, against Tennessee at the Raleigh Athletic Field, on the edge of downtown just across from Oakwood Cemetery.

It’s a game that Tennessee does not recognize in its record books, though it does acknowledge the three other games it played during a brutal five-day trip to play football games against North Carolina’s Big Four schools.

In those five days, the Volunteers played games against North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Trinity (now Duke) in Durham, Wake Forest in the town north of Raleigh by the same name and NC A&M in the state capital.

The boys of A&M had just taken up the sport a year earlier, on March 12, 1892, when it faced the Raleigh Male Academy, a prep school located on the present site of the North Carolina Governor’s Mansion, only a couple of miles away from A&M’s west Raleigh location. Coached by University of North Carolina student Perrin Busbee, the inexperienced team from A&M won the ragged contest, 14-6, in front of about 200 spectators, including students from Raleigh’s three all-female institutions.

“The game was played most pleasantly, being free from any disputes or injury,” reported the Raleigh News & Observer.

In the intervening 18 months, NC A&M shifted to intra-class games between freshmen, sophomore juniors and seniors. Shortly after the school’s first commencement in June 1893, however, the school started up its first true varsity squad sponsored by the nascent athletics association: a football squad of 18 students, coached by Raleigh native Bart Gatling, a UNC- and Harvard-educated lawyer. (In his N&O obituary, Gatling was identified as Raleigh’s one-time postmaster, its longest-serving barrister and a member of the Raleigh Chess Club, but not as a former football coach at A&M.)

Tennessee, which did not have a coach at the time, scheduled a barnstorming tour of North Carolina in November 1893, with games played against Trinity, North Carolina, Wake Forest and the Asheville Athletic Club, a collection of former college football players led by former Trinity player named Stringfield.

In the hopes of improving their fortunes, Tennessee wired Robert “Bobbie” Winston, a former English rugby player who had starred in football at Yale, to become the school’s first trainer, or in the nomenclature of the day, “coacher.” Winston met the team in Raleigh to assess their prospects.

It was a difficult trip for the earliest version of the Volunteers. On Friday, Nov. 3, they traveled to Trinity Park in Durham, where the Trinity football team built a 70-0 lead in the first half and called the game before intermission ended. (The pre-Dukes did the same thing the next weekend against Virginia in a game played at Lynchburg, Virginia, citing bad officiating; Trinity was leading 60-0 at the time.)

The next day, Tennessee played on the university’s Chapel Hill campus, and fared no better. They lost 60-0 in two 30-minute halves.

“We don’t expect our University boys to beat trained football teams, but we had ventured the faint hope they would score one point or two,” wrote the Knoxville Sentinel on Nov. 4, 1893. “The goose eggs are growing monotonous.”

After a day off to celebrate the Sabbath and maybe say a few much-needed prayers, Tennessee’s team came to Raleigh to play Wake Forest on the school's old campus north of Raleigh. The results were similarly humiliating, a 64-0 loss to the Baptists.

Already in town, the Tennessee team sent a telegram to club officials in Asheville, saying they would not be able to make their scheduled Tuesday afternoon game. Instead, they scheduled a game to play the NC A&M at Athletic Field. Sensing it could beat North Carolina’s newest school, which had never faced a college opponent, Tennessee was hopeful it could at least score a touchdown, which it had not been able to do in its first five games as it was out muscled by a combined 250-0.

Prospects were good, in fact, through the first half of the 4 p.m. contest, for which spectators paid the huge amount of 25 cents for a ticket (modern value: $8.74). The two teams played to a scoreless tie in the first 30 minutes, with neither mounting a serious scoring threat as A&M fumbled the ball away once and Tennessee twice.

In the second half, A&M fullback William Henry Hughes Jr. of Raleigh scored the game’s first touchdown (worth five points at the time), going around the end and into the end zone. Hughes then kicked the point-after to give A&M a 6-0 lead.

Then Tennessee did something it had not done in its first five games that season: It found the goal line. Quarterback Howard Aiken Ijams scored on a center run and Barches kicked the extra point to tie the game.

Later in the second half, NC A&M halfback George Daniel Williams of Gatesville broke the 6-6 tie with a run around the end and Hughes kicked the extra point, assuring the home team of its first victory ever over another college, its first win against an interstate opponent and its first victory under Gatling.

The game was summed up in the next day’s Raleigh News & Observer this way: “The teams were pretty nearly matched, and a very good game was played. This is the first time the college has ever played a regular college team and her hard-fought for victory should be much appreciated by all.”

Things in Tennessee were less forgiving, but somewhat hopeful.

“The University football team returned last night from a week’s tour through North Carolina," reported Knoxville's Journal and Review. "They visited a number of colleges in the western part of the State and played several match games of football, but each time had the misfortune to loose [sic]. The boys report a splendid time and a royal reception wherever they went.

“Their general defeat is laid to the fact that they were not in first-rate shape, some of the men being inexperienced, while their opponents were all old men at the game and in first-class practice. The club will continue to practice almost daily and will give the visiting teams a game when they come to Knoxville.”

After the five-day trip to the Old North State, Winston took over all training and began daily practices. His improved charges beat Maryville College (32-0) and the Asheville Athletic Club (12-6), the team Tennessee jilted in favor of playing against NC A&M.

Still, the season was so humiliating, Tennessee shut down its varsity football program for the next two years, playing the equivalent of a club schedule against neighborhood opponents. Winston moved on to Georgia, where he coached for one season.

According to Tennessee athletics football media guide:

In October 1894, the Athletic Association resolved to drop varsity football and look forward to baseball in the spring. After the humiliating 1893 season (two wins and four imposing defeats), the only two athletes willing to admit they had played on the 1893 team returned to campus in 1894. To complicate matters, the practice field, located just west of the main entrance to the Hill, was being graded and improved.

Soon after this decision, W.B. Stokely, a UT senior who transferred from Wake Forest, persuaded a group of students to form a team. Stokely, who was elected captain, gave encouragement and direction to the other players. Even though the institution chose not to be represented officially on the gridiron, Stokely and his unofficial team kept football interest alive during this period when almost certainly it otherwise would have been allowed to lapse completely.

These unofficial games, referred to as “The Lost Years,” are not included in NCAA statistics nor in official University of Tennessee won-loss records.

It’s not uncommon for those earliest games not to be registered in modern athletic records. NC State, in fact, only has two games listed for the 1893 season, when in fact it played six contests: two against the North Carolina scrub (freshman/junior varsity) team and two against Oak Ridge Academy in Greensboro and one against the Raleigh Male Academy, the team it first played in 1892. (However, no newspaper accounts have been found to confirm the latter game.)

Some excellent research by NC State mechanical engineering grad Carter Claiborne (@cwclaiborne on X) chronicles all the earliest games in NC A&M and NC State history, game-by-game accounts with rosters, newspaper reports and scoring plays when available. Claiborne is a former member of NC State's marching band (2018-2021) from Charlotte who now lives in Raleigh and enjoys researching all things historical.

In his accounting, recorded by searching newspaper accounts of the day, he has uncovered 11 to 13 additional wins, six losses and one tie for NC State football from 1892-1901. It has also included three games that have no records of ever happening, the 1892 game against Raleigh Male Academy, an 1896 game against Guilford and a 1897 game against Davidson. This is not uncommon, which is why most sites like www.sports-reference.com begin after the turn of the century.

How can new games be added to the list of games some 135 years after the fact? Most of the original were passed down in handwritten or coarsely typewritten pages to unofficial record keepers during the first 50 years of the college. There were no boxscores or statistics and no yearbook or student newspaper reports to verify dates, scores and rosters. The names of nearly half of NC State's first 12 football coaches are spelled incorrectly in its own records.

Those things are a little easier to research in today’s world through searchable archives at newspapers.com and other internet resources, but since early publications did not have specific sports pages, it was incredibly difficult to find that information until papers began digitizing all of their editions. That's why I pay for subscriptions to multiple historical services to research stories such as this. (DM @PackTimPeeler for Venmo and PalPay accounts to help offset these costs.)

In his books Touchdown Wolfpack! (1995) and Pack Pride: An Illustrated History of NC State Basketball (1994), Raleigh author Doug Herakovich thoroughly researched many of these lost games, as did Claiborne and NC State history professor Bill Beezley.

Their efforts are huge for someone — like me — who depends on setting the record as straight as possible.