A 12,000-mile Transcontinental Disaster

 

A News & Observer photo of the Wolfpack's departure for the school's longest road trip on record.

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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 20^th 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.