Legends of NC State Basketball: Les Robinson

Les Robinson as an NC State player.

 

This chapter on Les Robinson was part of Legends of NC State Basketball, published in 2004 by Sports Publishing LLC and reproduced by Skyhorse Publishing in 2014. 

BY TIM PEELER

 Les Robinson was pissed.

            Here he was, a 17-year-old freshman, invited to go to the movies with the senior captain of the basketball team, a big night out on the town for a kid from St. Albans, West Virginia. But before they went to the theater, Stan Niewierowski parked his car in front of a bar on Hillsborough Street.

            "Even better," Robinson thought, "we're going to get some beer."

            But as Robinson reached for the door handle to get out, Niewierowski shot him a nasty look and said, "
Wait here."

            Little did Robinson know that Niewierowski was going inside to place a bet. Little did he know there were State Bureau of Investigations officers watching everything that was happening. Little did he know that going on all around him were the events that would kill the Dixie Classic and break Everett Case's heart.

            All Robinson wanted was a glass of beer and a trip to the movies.

Niewierowski was one of four Wolfpack teammates that admitted participation in the point-shaving scandal that rocked college basketball in the early 1960s, leaving a major scar on the Wolfpack program, a disgrace Case never fully overcame. The Dixie Classic was cancelled and basketball was de-emphasized at both N.C. State and North Carolina.

As it turned out, it was Robinson's first brush with many troubled times he would face at N.C. State, the school and program he loved dearly. Even though he had to make some personal and professional sacrifices to help fix those problems — he never got to finish his playing career, he lost his job when Press Maravich abruptly left the school for LSU and he was forced to resign from his dream job as the Wolfpack's head basketball coach — it never diminished Robinson's love of what Case had built when he arrived in 1946.

            As a player, Robinson barely got off the bench in his two years as a varsity letter-winner. In his own self-deprecating manner, Robinson loves to tell the story about the 1963 ACC Tournament, when the heavily favored Wolfpack was down by 12 points to Clemson — Clemson, of all teams — in the second half. Robinson knew Case had thrown in the towel when the coach put Robinson into the game. But Robinson's hustle helped the Wolfpack come back to tie the game in the waning minutes.

            During a timeout, Case apparently caught on that Robinson was still in the game.

            ""What's he doing in there?'' Case bellowed at assistant Press Maravich. ""We can win this thing.''

            And the Pack did, 79-78, the last of Case's 15 ACC tournament victories.

            As a coach, Robinson arrived at his alma mater during the aftermath of the Jim Valvano era, when there was great distrust between the school's athletics and academics. He not only had to handle the after-effects of the one-year probation that the school served in Valvano's last year, he had to recruit under extremely tight academic restrictions that were far tougher than any other schools in the ACC.

            Besides the scholarship reductions and off-campus recruiting limitations that were part of the NCAA sanction, the school required all freshmen basketball players to have at least a 1.8 grade point average after their first year, a restriction above NCAA limits that no other school had to follow.

            Robinson lost one of his first recruits, Chuck Kornegay, because of a clerical problem regarding that steadfast rule, and from that point on, opposing coaches used the restrictions against Robinson and his staff on the recruiting trail.

            "We were just killed in recruiting," Robinson says.

            He lost players like Donald Williams and Jerry Stackhouse, who both indicated that they were coming to N.C. State, to North Carolina.

            It didn't help that from 1991-93, Duke and North Carolina won three consecutive NCAA titles, while the Wolfpack was trying to overcome a lead weight in recruiting.

            Robinson still maintains, however, that he never wanted to coach anywhere else.

            "I made it clear," Robinson says, "that there was no place in America that I would rather coach. I even had some other offers — South Carolina called me after my first year at State — but I only wanted to coach here.''

            Robinson immediately reinstituted some of the traditions Case brought with him from Indiana, like turning down the lights for pregame introductions. He replaced the rubbery Tartan playing surface at Reynolds Coliseum with the wooden floor that had been moth-balled two decades before. He brought up memories of Case every chance he got.

            But, working under restrictions imposed by the athletics department, he couldn't win in the recruiting wars and was rarely successful on the court, though he is awfully proud of his five wins over North Carolina, including a season sweep in 1991-92.

            After taking the Wolfpack to a 20-11 record and its only NCAA Tournament appearance under him in 1991, Robinson had five consecutive losing seasons. Because of the Wolfpack's frequent finishes in bottom part of the standings, fans around the conference began to call the ACC Tournament play-in game the ""Les Robinson Invitational,'' something that made even Robinson laugh.

            So, should Robinson, who played and coached during the two least successful decades in Wolfpack basketball history, be considered a legend of the program?

Absolutely.

            He was the perfect healer during two eras of distress and unrest at N.C. State, exactly what you might expect of a guy who was once the volunteer fire chief of Cedar Key, Fla. He was always willing to make personal and professional sacrifices to extinguish the flames of discontent with his affable nature.

            "I always hoped that I would be someone who helped bring the people back together," Robinson says.

Robinson spent one year as a full-time assistant under Maravich, but turned to the high school ranks when Maravich went to LSU following the 1965-66 season. He went 41-9 in two years, then took an assistant's position at Western Carolina for one season before taking a similar post at the Citadel. He was promoted to head coach at the Charleston, South Carolina, military school in 1975, the same position Norm Sloan once had.

Robinson stayed at that job for 11 years, winning more games than any coach in school history. In 1979, he guided the Bulldogs to 20 wins and was named the Southern Conference coach of the year.

            In 1985, Robinson was hired to take over an East Tennessee State program that was coming off probation. He built a Top 25 program there, winning two more Southern Conference Coach of the Year awards.

            In December, 1990, Robinson brought his Buccaneers to Reynolds Coliseum for a preholiday nonconference game. Valvano had survived the initial investigations into his program with a relatively light probation, but that season brought new allegations about point-shaving and drug use by some of his players. On that very day, the Wolfpack players had been devastated to learn that center Avie Lester would not be eligible to play his entire senior season because of an administrative miscommunication.

Before the game began, the embattled Valvano met Robinson at half court.

            "He said precisely, and I will swear this on the Bible: 'This might be a damned good place for you to coach, because my ass is out of here at the end of the season,'" Robinson says.

            The Buccaneers, led by an electric point guard named Keith "Mister" Jennings, beat the Wolfpack, 92-82, and Wolfpack fans had an automatic favorite to be Valvano's replacement when the inevitable finally happened.

            He was hired in the spring of 1990 to take over the reins Case once held, making a fast effort to re-recruit the players who were supposed to return. He went for a jog with Chris Corchiani, who had vowed to transfer if Valvano was forced out. He went to Maryland to visit with Rodney Monroe. He spent time with Tom Gugliotta, Bryant Feggins and Kevin Thompson.

Robinson counts that recruiting effort among his first successes. When he settled down in the job, however, he began to realize the dire nature of the situation he was inheriting, with the massive schism between the school's academics and athletics.

"The faculty hated men's basketball," Robinson says. "That's not overstating it in the least. The general consensus was, they would have been happy to do away with college basketball and go to Division III."

            Robinson eventually discovered that there were some reasons for that hatred. Valvano was the highest paid coach in college basketball. He had graduated only eight of the 40 players he recruited during his 10 years at the school. He was responsible for recruiting Chris Washburn, the 6-foot-10 All-America high school player who, it was later learned in court documents, scored only 470 on the SAT. In all, Valvano recruited and the school admitted eight players who scored less than 600 on the SAT.

            Still, foremost in the minds of the academics, in 1985, Duke professor Victor Strandberg stood up in front of the national convention of Phi Beta Kappa and denounced NC State's application for admission into the prestigious organization because the graduation rate of the basketball program was "absolutely reprehensible."

"I did a little checking into that," Robinson says. "Then I started thinking, and I thought if I was an English professor on this campus and any other unit on campus kept me from having the same prestige as North Carolina, Duke and Davidson, I'd be mad too.

"But without taking sides, I still don't understand what basketball's graduation rates have to do with the Phi Beta Kappa chapter."

Robinson helped, in some small way, to fix that problem too. In 1994, the school resubmitted its application and was granted a chapter, joining UNC, Duke, Davidson, UNC-Greensboro and Wake Forest among the state schools in the selective organization.

Robinson often joked that his epitaph would read: "Couldn't coach a lick, but he got 'em in Phi Beta Kappa."

He also recruited one of the chapter's first members, 6-foot-10 center Todd Fuller, who was an academic All-America in 1995 and '96. Robinson remembers that, after all the hubbub, when Fuller graduated in 1996, having made only one B his entire college career, that there was no one around to congratulate the feat.

"I got my wife (Barbara) to take a picture of the two of us," Robinson said, "but that was it."

            In March, 1996, following his fifth consecutive losing season, Robinson resigned as basketball coach. He had been offered a two-year contract extension, but he chose not to accept it because he had gotten angry mail from frustrated Wolfpack supporters who were again eager for more success on the court. One fan even sent a picture of two wolves in a death struggle.

           "That had as much as anything with me deciding to step down," Robinson says. "I didn't want the wolves fighting with each other. Plus, I didn't like where the game was going, especially in recruiting. I didn't want to walk back out there and deal with the people you had to deal with in recruiting."

            Robinson accepted an associate athletics director position at the school, but only four months later he was named as Todd Turner's replacement as athletics director, a position he had held for four years at East Tennessee State. He remained a link to the school's past, yet took the athletics department into the future by overseeing the completion of the long-awaited $158 million Entertainment and Sports Arena.

            A favorite memory of Robinson's sense of humor came in 1999, as the men's basketball team was preparing for one of its many last-games in Reynolds Coliseum. Robinson took a group of reporters through the halls and basement of Reynolds, remember the old coliseum's heyday. We ended up in his office, and Robinson showed off various plaques and citations on the wall. He eventually stopped in front of a framed certificate that read "Distinguished West Virginian."

            "They gave me that for marrying outside my immediate family," Robinson said.

            One of his last acts as athletics director was conducting a protracted search for a football coach after the school fired Mike O'Cain. He went after, and procured, another N.C. State graduate to fill the job, Chuck Amato, who had been an assistant coach to Bobby Bowden for 18 years at Florida State.

            With the opening of the ESA (then RBC Center, then PNC Arena, now Lenovo Center) and the hiring of Amato, after disappointing performances for nearly a decade in basketball and football,  NC State signaled that it was ready to begin competing on the same level as the rest of the ACC again.

And Robinson, who dearly loves his alma mater, should get credit for helping heal some of the wounds he inherited when he replaced Valvano in 1990.

"A lot of people don't appreciate the job that Les did," says former Wolfpack star Vann Williford. "He had restrictions that nobody else had and most people don't know about. Les never for a minute would say it was not a level playing field.

            "I think he did an admirable job with it. We couldn't recruit the way everybody else did, but he would never sit up and say: "This is why.'"

            Former star Chris Corchiani, who played his senior season under Robinson and maintained close contact with his former coach, agreed that Robinson had an important tenure at N.C. State, even if there were more losses than wins.

"I thought Les Robinson had a great impact on Wolfpack basketball," former point guard Chris Corchiani says. "He was a bridge from the troubled times when he came in to the success that the program is having now.

"He didn't have as much success as he would have liked, or as much success that the Wolfpack faithful would have liked him to have, but he put the train back on the track."