Booted: How a Basketball Championship Cost NC State Baseball Pitcher Dan Plesac a Win

Lefty Dan Plesac visited by coach Sam Esposito.

© Tim Peeler, 2025

NOTE: If you enjoy reading "One Brick Back" and would like to help offset research expenses for stories such as this, please make a small donation to the cause and help keep these posts free of ads.

Has there ever been a greater betrayal of NC State’s longstanding baseball-basketball partnership than the afternoon of April 13, 1983?

For years, NC State baseball legend Sam Esposito served double-duty as head coach on the diamond and assistant coach for Norm Sloan’s championship basketball program. He once was intentionally ejected exactly one pitch into a baseball game so he could make it to an important basketball game two hours away.

His baseball program, which won ACC titles in 1968 and 1973-75, frequently utilized basketball players like Eddie Biedenbach, Mike Dempsey, Tim Stoddard, Monte Towe and Terry Gannon, just to mention a few.

That particular afternoon, however, his Wolfpack team, with four future major league players on its roster, was playing a doubleheader against UNC Charlotte, attempting to pad its record in an eight-game homestand during the school’s annual spring break.

Future three-time major league All-Star Dan Plesac, one of the most underrated professional athletes in school history, was on the mound, cruising with a 7-2 lead in the seventh inning. The lefthanded Plesac, who was also recruited to NC State to play basketball by assistant Monte Towe to play for Sloan’s program, needed a win because he had struggled in the early season with blister issues, and this one seemed in the bag.

That’s when basketball betrayed Esposito’s Pack.

Most students, who were returning from spring break that Sunday afternoon, were keeping their eyes on the Atlantic Coast Conference basketball tournament in Atlanta, where Jim Valvano’s Wolfpack had advanced to the championship game against Virginia. The senior-heavy team had escaped with a one-point first-round win over Wake Forest, thanks to sophomore forward Lorenzo Charles, and an overtime upset of defending ACC and NCAA champion North Carolina.

Students in the stands were listening to Wally Ausley and Garry Dornburg on the radio and many others who lived in Lee and Sullivan dormitories on the other side of the fence from Doak Field were running in and out of their rooms, watching the ESPN telecast with one eye and the baseball game with the other.

With one out in the top of the seventh, Plesac needed two outs to secure the win. Charlotte added a baserunner, perfectly setting up a game-ending double-play. An easy grounder to freshman shortstop Doug Strange should have secured the win, but just as he was making the throw to first base, Valvano’s team finished off its 81-78 victory over Ralph Sampson and the Cavaliers, causing a great roar from the crowd listening on their transistor radios and on televisions in the residence halls.

And Strange threw the ball off the wall of the old press box down the first-base line.

The 49ers scored five unearned runs to tie the game and send Plesac to the showers, thanks in part to a two-run homer after Strange’s error. In the top of the ninth, Barry Shifflett sealed the 10-7 victory with another two-run homer.

“Strange’s fatal error occurred at exactly the same time Wolfpack basketball team wrapped up the ACC Tournament championship and the roar from the campus seemed to unsettle the freshman shortstop,” reported my friend Bruce Winkworth in Technician, NC State’s student newspaper. “Esposito wasn’t sure if Strange’s error was caused by the sudden noise, but he did say that the basketball tournament was on his players’ minds.

“We’ve played the last two days while the basketball team was playing, and it’s been a distraction,” Esposito said at the end of the weekend. “We’ve been pulling hard for them to win and maybe that was a factor.”

Strange, who played nine years in the majors for six different franchises, took full blame for the loss when I talked to him 25 years later for When March Went Mad. He was even able to laugh about it.

“I heard this big roar and I threw the ball over the second baseman’s head and up against the old pressbox on the first base line,” Strange said back then. “Plesac gave me a couple of dirty looks about that play, but I think once everyone realized the basketball team won, I don’t think they gave a damn that I threw the ball away.

“Looking back on it now, I think it’s funny as hell.”

Plesac found it within his heart to put the error aside almost immediately.

“Hell yes, I forgave him,” Plesac said earlier this week. “Doug always played his heart out. I forgot about it two minutes after it happened.”

Strange, a native of Greenville, South Carolina, made the most of the remainder of his college career. He was taken in the seventh round of major league draft of amateur players by the Detroit Tigers in 1985 and made his big league debut in 1989. He also played for the Chicago Cubs, the Texas Rangers, the Seattle Mariners, the Montreal Expos and Pittsburg Pirates.

In nearly 2,000 at-bats, he belted 31 home runs and drove in 211. He now serves as an assistant general manager for the Pirates.

In the end, Plesac didn’t need the win against the 49ers. Despite a modest 4-2 overall record and a 5.62 earned run average his junior year, he was taken with the 26^th pick of the draft later that year by the Milwaukee Brewers, becoming the initial NC State player to be taken in the first round. After a couple years in the minors as a starter, Plesac became an extraordinary relief pitcher, taking over for Hall of Fame closer Rollie Fingers in 1986 with the Brewers and appearing in three consecutive All-Star Games.

In an 18-year career—the longest by a former Wolfpack player—Plesac pitched in more than 1,000 games, one of fewer than 10 relievers in major league history to hit four-digits with 1,069 innings pitched. Plesac is now a star analyst on the Major League Baseball Network’s MLB Tonight recap show.

Still, it’s hard to forget the college win that got away—thanks to basketball.

Bring in Da Noise

For decades, the noise meter added to Reynolds Coliseum's unique atmosphere.

NOTE: 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. This blog entry was originally published on GoPack.com before NC State hosted North Carolina at the arena now known as the Lenovo Center.

NC State Athletics, © 2010
(Updated, 2025)

Longtime Friends Help Bring Noise Back to Reynolds | A Little Piece of Reynolds

BY TIM PEELER

Granted, we didn’t really need three electrical engineers with advanced degrees from NC State’s College of Engineering  to refurbish and update the old Reynolds Coliseum noise meter for Tuesday night’s game against North Carolina.

But the trio of former employees of a recently closed Research Triangle Park company have all had some time on their hands since the end of December and were willing to volunteer over the last few weeks to make sure the tower of lights was in perfect working order when it was rolled out to midcourt of the RBC Center for pregame introductions.

The ring-leader was Tracy Fulghum, who has a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate from NC State. He was ably assisted by Anthony Fugaro, Kevin Gard and a couple of kids who were looking to kill some time during a day off from school. (Full disclosure: Tracy was my roommate at NC State and two of the three kids were mine. This small part of the on-going effort to restore and save NC State’s athletics history got us all out of the house on a Wake County teacher work day.)

The idea to bring the noise meter back was hatched during the summer, when we started dusting off some of the items stored in the basement of Reynolds Coliseum. The goal was to have it appear once during the 100^th season of NC State basketball, then retire to a less dirty environment.

Personally, I believe it will be the perfect centerpiece in an NC State athletics museum/hall of fame, along with some other items that have been tucked away for safe keeping, when it is time for that project to proceed.

For younger Wolfpack fans and students who may not have grown up going to men’s basketball games at Reynolds, the old noise meter was a device suggested by legendary NC State basketball coach Everett Case, who wanted a little something to “pump up the volume”  long before coliseums had piped in anthems blaring over loudspeakers.

The 13 white bulbs on the meter would light up, one-by-one, as the crowd in the coliseum got louder. When the noise reached its peak – as it did many times during the David Thompson era, and in particular on a hot February afternoon in 1983 when the Wolfpack beat defending national champion North Carolina – the red light on top of the meter would flicker on, spurring the crowd to get even louder.

Opponents knew all about it. And so did the Wolfpack players.

“No question about it, you could hear when the game was revving up because the crowd saw the lights go higher and higher and they would get louder and louder and louder to get it up to the top,” said head coach Sidney Lowe. “It was one of the great traditions of Reynolds Coliseum and NC State basketball.”

No NC State player ever had to look up to see if the red light was on.

“You couldn’t really see when the top light came on,” said Rodney Monroe, the Wolfpack’s all-time leading scorer. “But you sure could feel it.”

Though I am not completely positive, the noise meter was likely built by Larry Earp, who was in charge of maintenance for all athletic facilities for decades.

“Larry could do or make anything,” said assistant athletics director for outdoor facilities Ray Brincefield, who learned a thing or two while working with Earp. “I’m sure Coach Case had the idea and Larry made it for him.”

The meter first appeared in pictures of Reynolds as early as 1954, just five years after the coliseum opened. It hung from the catwalk in the rafters, thanks to a heavy-duty cable strung through four eye-hooks, for nearly half a century.

The simplicity of the meter’s design is ingenious: it’s a sheet of quarter-inch plywood ripped into four 12-inch strips and nailed over a 10-foot-long frame made of 2X2s. There are standard light sockets for each bulb, with the wiring on the inside of the meter. For maintenance purposes, one side panel of the tower is hinged, so it can be opened for access to the wiring.

For proprietary reasons, I can’t completely explain the highly sophisticated auditory control mechanism [cough… ears] that measured the decibel level in the arena to make the lights rise and fall.

Okay, by now most people know that the meter was controlled by a facilities staff member, by running a specially made wooden block across a row of 14 light switches.

Three of the people who used to manually operate the old meter in their younger days – Brincefield, golf coach/facilities coordinator Richard Sykes, Shannon Yates – are now associate or assistant athletics directors. Brothers David and Brad Bowles, who both followed in their father’s footsteps of working in facilities at NC State, often sat in one of the upper level barges in Reynolds running the old meter. David remembers doing it as a 10-year-old, drunk with power, whipping the crowd into a total frenzy.

“It would get the crowd going like you would never believe,” Sykes said.

Even though the noise meter had been stowed in the basement ever since renovations began at Reynolds in 2004, there wasn’t a lot that needed to be done to get it back in working order. Fulghum connected all the wires and we plugged it into an outlet adjacent to the rifle range in the Reynolds basement.

Right after we located the nearest fire extinguisher. Just to be safe.

The facilities guys moved it over to the ticket office of Vaughn Towers at Carter-Finley Stadium so we could make some adjustments for its big appearance Tuesday night. We knew it wouldn’t be possible to hang it from the rafters of the RBC Center, so we had to come up with a boxed-in base with wheels to make it portable.

The thing is big – fully 10 feet tall before it was mounted onto the rolling cart. Or, as my 7-year-old said, “It’s even taller than Mr. Burleson.”

But it would have been totally dwarfed in the rafters of the RBC Center.

To make sure it was sturdy, we reinforced the frame with some 12-foot long 2X4s and screwed it tightly on the rolling cart. That probably doubled the original weight, but we didn’t want it to tip over and turn into a pile of splinters on national television.

We replaced all 52 of the 25-watt white bulbs, which might have been the most difficult part of the entire process. No one store carries that many low wattage incandescent bulbs anymore. So we’d like to thank the Lowes stores in Durham, Cary, Raleigh and, yes, even Chapel Hill for letting us raid their supplies. (We briefly considered going green, but figured that three-second delay that comes with flipping on CFLs would ruin the effect.)

And Fulghum bought four red 40-watt bulbs for the top row of lights. They were an improvement over the white bulbs that had been spray-painted red that were used originally. After several fresh coats of paint on Monday and Tuesday, we transported it over to the RBC Center on Tuesday afternoon several hours before the game.

Thanks to Wolfpack Sports Marketing interns Kristen Haller, Virginia Pace and Jessica Thurston for not tipping it over during its pre-game trek to midcourt. And thanks to the sell-out crowd for making enough noise to make the red light shine before and during the game.

Alas, Tuesday will probably be the noise meter’s only appearance at the RBC Center. It’s held up nicely for nearly half a century, but moving it from place to place takes a mighty big toll on the fragile plywood.

It’s nice to be connected with a piece of history that belongs to Coach Case and the hundreds of players that followed, but the splinters in our hands from the 50-year-old wood still hurt. There are several major dings on the corners and no one wants to see this unique icon deteriorate further.

But, as long as the sounds of Reynolds Coliseum echo in the ears of Wolfpack fans, the noise meter will have its place in the history of NC State basketball.

You may contact Tim Peeler at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.

What it Was, Was the 1951 Ryder Cup

NOTE: 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, 2025

Imagine if North Carolina-born comedian Andy Griffith had been British. The accent would still be distinct, though vastly different. The confusion was practically the same. The conclusion was a little different.

What it was, was football.

Specifically, college football in Chapel Hill.

In Griffith’s case, it was the comedy routine that made him famous, a country bumpkin’s experience of wandering into a college football stadium (almost certainly UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan Stadium) and seeing two groups of men squaring off in between to large banks of people, monitored closely by seven or eight convicts. He recorded the routine in 1953 and it has been played innumerable times in the three quarters of a century that followed.

That routine was predated, however, by a handful of Brits and Irishmen going to the exact same venue to see something that confused them just as much as the game Griffith saw.

“I simply don’t understand what is going on,” wrote Henry Longhurst, a reporter for the London Sunday Times. “All I know is that I am doing OK as long as I holler ‘To Hell with Tennessee.’”

Three English journalists, three Scottish writers, a couple of Irish writers and nine of the 10 members of the British Ryder Cup team found themselves sitting in the press box of Kenan Stadium on a specially scheduled day off from the ninth-annual battle between U.S. and British golfers, which turned the biennial two-day competition into perhaps the greatest three-day weekend of sports anyone in the state at that time could remember. (This year's Ryder Cup will be held at Bethpage Black in New York.)

When the Pinehurst Resort owner Richard Tufts offered up Pinehurst Resort's No. 2 course to the PGA of America to host the Cup competition—fending off an effort to postpone the event to the next spring to accommodate the busy schedule of the British team—it was with the idea of having two great events over two consecutive weekends, the Ryder Cup and the North and South Open, the professional tournament that had been played for 49 years at No. 2, Donald Ross's masterpiece in the Sandhills. While there was money on the line—a total purse of $7,500 and free room and board during the week of the tournament—the North and South was not officially sanctioned by the PGA.

For $12.50, fans could attend all days of both events.

To amplify the spectacle even more, the PGA organizers agreed to take the two Saturdays of the events so that visiting golfers and writers from around the world could see American college football. The first weekend, North Carolina’s football team host top-ranked Tennessee in Chapel Hill, about 60 miles north of Pinehurst; the second weekend Duke hosted Wake Forest in Durham. It was typical for the North and South to take the day off so it would not conflict with college football in the state.

Chuck Erickson, North Carolina’s assistant athletics director and varsity golf coach at the time, came up with the idea of inviting the international golf community to the Carolina-Tennessee game and sent a letter of invitation all parties involved.

“There will be no activity at Pinehurst on Nov. 3 and Nov. 10, since football games are scheduled in this area on the two Saturdays and Pinehurst knows better than to attempt to buck a football day in this State,” wrote Durham Sun sports editor Hugo Germino. “As a matter of fact, the British first protested the proposal to have the matches played Friday and Sunday, skipping over Saturday.

“When the Englishmen were told that the North Carolina and Tennessee would play a football game on that day, they gave in—and gracefully accepted invitations to be special guests of the University of North Carolina at the game in Chapel Hill.”

There was a large reception before the game for the golfers and the press (all of 30 American and six British journalists) before the game at an alumni building adjacent to the football stadium. Only three of the American players, who were quite familiar with football, bothered to attend, with most of them taking the opportunity to go elsewhere for paid exhibitions. 

U.S. captain Sam Snead drove from Pinehurst to Florence, South Carolina, for an exhibition, earning him the nickname in local papers of “Scrammin’ Sammy. North Carolina natives Clayton Heafner of Charlotte and Skip Alexander of Lexington went to the game. Alexander, less than a year after being the lone survivor of a military airplane crash, was the sentimental hero of the weekend.

While some of the British golfers were familiar with the sport of American football, the foreign press pool was not. Not even halftime tea—a seemingly perfect intermission snack in Chapel Hill—made them feel more comfortable.

Here are the thoughts of Britain’s most acclaimed sportswriter of the day, Desmond Hackett of the London Daily Express, as he watched along with 42,000 spectators as the Volunteers rolled up a 27-0 victory over the Tar Heels en route to its first ever national championship.

“They tried to tell me that this was a tough-guy game, a piece of legalized mayhem that made bullfighting look sissy. No sir. Any professional rugby club in England could eliminate the heavily armored characters who ambled in and out of this game.

“The England men do not need the insurance policy of crash helmets and more padding than a horsehair couch. They wear extremely brief shorts and cotton shirts and in this rig I feel sure they could beat the long pants off these American huskies. That is merely my opinion, an opinion which I freely express because I shall be able to duck out of town.

“Back in England, the men of rugby football play forty minutes each way with one 10-minute interval. They would gulp at the idea of bringing in substitutes or that amazing all-change system when a team breaks off the defense shore and moves on the attack.

“We love your beautiful North Carolina girls who so sweetly led the organized cheering.  We feel sure they mean well but most of their best efforts appeared to inspire brisker action from the opposition members.

“The England crowd do not need any of this artificial stimulant, they up and roar their heads off when they feel so inclined. And this goes for the carriage trade in the grandstands. A polite hand clap was the nearest thing to a bust of enthusiasm that the upper set could arouse.

“There seemed to be considerable respect for the extensive panel of referees and the supporting cast of the chain gang who appeared to be taking constant ground survey in the middle of the affair. The English crowd stand up for their right to question the verdict of the referee. They are not slow to state their willingness to buy him glasses on account of his short-sightedness, or to suggest that he could not move so well because of the money tucked into his boots by the rival managers.

“But this American way of football is gay and colorful and I suppose a great game if you can guess what is going on. It is way ahead of England in its setting. This dignified arena in the glade of the deep green pines is among the finest sporting prints I have ever seen. So thanks for a wonderful memory.”

The parties all returned to Pinehurst after the game and, the next day, watched the Americans finish off a 9 ½ to 2 ½ victory against the overmatched Brits. Tennessee went on to win a disputed national title, despite following a perfect regular season with a loss to Southern Conference member Maryland in the Sugar Bowl. Coach Carl Snavely's Tar Heels finished a limp 2-8.

And no one stepped in anything.