"The Brown-And-White From State..."

 

Aerial view of the Cotton States and International Exposition. [Photo by Fred L. Howe.]

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© Tim Peeler, 2023

When 75 students from the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts left Raleigh for Atlanta to play in the five-year-old school’s first out-of-state football game, the players had no idea who the opponent was going to be.

That means no scouting report, no berating college yells, no opposing-color ribbons to wear on the fans' lapels.

That’s because there was no one scheduled for the Oct. 25, 1895, game at the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta’s acclaimed world’s fair that hosted nearly 800,000 people during its 100-day run in what is now called Piedmont Park.

At the time, there were enough teams of this emerging new sport making their own trek to the South’s new capital to make all necessary arrangements once they got there. So Bart Gatling, the UNC- and Harvard-educated Raleigh lawyer who moonlighted for three years as A&M’s football coach, found representatives from a military school from Virginia and asked if they were free the next day.

This was an important moment in the history of North Carolina’s technical school, traveling two states away for an athletics contest on what was unofficially declared “North Carolina Week” at the exposition. The students and three accompanying professors even skipped all four days of the North Carolina State Fair, which at the time was within walking distance of the two buildings that comprised the state’s land-grant institution.

The Cotton States and International Exposition was a big draw. President Grover Cleveland opened it by flipping a switch remotely from his home in Massachusetts and made a train trip from Washington the day before the A&M-VMI football game to see the wonders of the fair. Booker T. Washington gave his controversial “Atlanta Compromise” speech a few weeks earlier. There was a “Coochee-Coochee” burlesque show just outside the main gate. [Photos from the exposition.]

The traveling students, pretty much the entirety of the school population, could see the Liberty Bell, which was delivered from Philadelphia via train and wagon. They could take in one of Buffalo Bill's daily Wild West Shows. They could see a remarkable motion-picture projection device or visited villages representing Japan, Egypt and several countries of South America. If they had too much fun, they could try a new headache and hangover remedy that was being served in Atlanta drugstores called Coca-Cola.

When the football team made it to town after a lively train ride, which included properly chaperoned students from Raleigh’s three women’s colleges, they again broke out their newest school colors, brown and white, which replaced the original pink-and-blue colors that were established with the first team in 1892.

The found representatives from the much more experienced program at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. The VMI squad had already won four games, all played at home, by a combined score of 118-0. There was little hope for the inexperienced A&M squad, which lost 36-0 to the North Carolina scrubs and tied Wake Forest 4-4 earlier in the week, the opportunity to even score against such a mighty foe as the Keydets was dim for a roster full of farm boys and someone who is likely the first native of Japan to play college football, Teisaku Sugishita.

The star player for the A&M team was Syd Alexander, known today as the namesake of Alexander Residence Hall, but the resumes of the other players on the team are mostly lost to history.

The game was called for 2:30 p.m. on Friday afternoon at the Atlanta athletic fields. The next day and the following Friday, teams from UNC and Georgia met for two games at the same location. Among the other games played during the course of the exposition was Georgia's season-ending contest against Auburn.

Cadets from both schools marched to the bleachers in formation and a total of approximately 1,500 fans ringed the sidelines for the game  

On the opening kickoff, VMI fumbled the ball and A&M player W.R. Vick picked it up and ran for a touchdown to end VMI’s scoreless streak, a hopeful start to the first road game in school history.

However...

“The six was made on a fluke—one of those accidents that happen even in as scientific a game as football,” wrote the Atlanta Journal. It turned out to be the only score of the day for the boys from Raleigh.

In fact, according to the account in The Atlanta Constitution, it was the only time AMC crossed midfield the entire game. The rest of the game – played in two 35-minute halves, with a 10-minute break in between – belonged to VMI’s cadets. They scored seven consecutive touchdowns to win the game 42-6.

VMI cadets still wear red-lined capes as part of their first-class uniforms.

“The Virginians were out in force, with their voices, their red-lined capes turned wrongside out, and their tin horns, and a better backing football team never got. In the second half, the Tar Heels never got the ball, but were crowded unmercifully all over the field,” the Constitution wrote, referring to the A&M school with the nickname used for all schools from North Carolina. “They had virtually given up at this point.”

On the way home the next day, the train carrying the A&M players, students and professors stopped in Charlotte, just long enough for the football team to post a 0-0 tie against the team from the Charlotte Commercial College at Latta Park, the team’s fourth game in a week. That game is not recognized in the NC State record books.

“Within the past week A&M has played four games, in which several of her best players were disabled,” wrote The Charlotte Observer. “Also during the past three nights the men have lost much sleep, so that they were not in good condition.”

Charlotte Commercial College was a business training school located in downtown that eventually merged with Raleigh’s King College in 1901 to become a for-profit business technology and health-care training school. It closed in 2018 due to low enrollment.

It was a fairly devastating week for AMC football, with a two losses and two ties. The students decided they no longer wanted brown and white as school colors. A poll of students in November, settled on red and white, perhaps remembering those inside-out capes worn by the VMI cadets. The faculty adopted the change, but emphatically admonished the Athletic Association that this decision must stand, “unless reversed by a vote of two-thirds of the student body.”

Such a vote has never been taken.

A month after the end of the football season, the Board of Trustees issued a short-lived ban on all intercollegiate athletics, similar to the one Wake Forest passed on its campus immediately following its 4-4 tie with A&M. While Wake’s athletic ban lasted 18 years, while A&M’s decision was reversed quickly, in time for a 1896 baseball season and a one-game football season.

 

Piedmont Park during the Cotton States and International Exposition.

Donald Ross of Dornoch, Scotland, and Pinehurst, N.C.

Purportedly, this is Donald Ross playing "The Witch," the former 17th hole at Royal Dornoch.

Here's a short celebration of Donald Ross, the quiet Scotsman who changed the game of golf and the Sandhills of North Carolina forever with his thriving design industry based in Pinehurst, his adopted hometown. Ross is a member of the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame.

This story appeared in the Greensboro, N.C., News and Record in 2000 when the paper identified North Carolina's 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

Landmark Communications, 2000

BY TIM PEELER

In Dornoch, the tiny seaside village in northeastern Scotland where Donald Ross was born in 1878, there are few markers that show America’s greatest golf course architect began his career there.

Ross is far more revered in his adopted country than his native land. But Scots aren’t really into hero worship. 

And neither was Ross.

Throughout his life, he rarely talked about the courses that he built all over the country, from Florida to California, from the Country Club of Hanvana in Cuba to the 50 some courses he built in North Carolina, including four at Pinehurst, and Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro.

“My work speaks better for me than anything I could say,” Ross once told Pinehurst president Richard Tufts. 

Tufts, who as the young grandson of Pinehurst founder James Walker Tufts, recognized the Scottish architect’s brilliance early on. He watched as Ross painstakingly fine-turned Pinehurst No. 2 course for more than three decades, while constantly traveling to build new courses and returning home to run the Pine Crest Inn, which he owned. At the height of his popularity, Ross employed some 3,000 people.

“I do not think this country has ever seen a golf course architect that was his equal," Tufts said. "He was a gentleman with the very highest standards, he knew the game of golf well, loved it and served it to the best of his ability.” 

We know more about Ross today, since his writings about the game and his philosophy of architecture, “Golf Has Never Failed Me,” were published in 1996. But there was something romantic about our lack of knowledge about the man, who trained as a clubmaker under Old Tom Morris at St. Andrews and turned himself into a thriving industry in the Sandhills.

What we still don’t know is how many courses he actually designed in nearly four decades of work because many of them were renovations of existing courses or designs based on topographical maps without ever setting foot on the property. Some estimate the number at more than 600, but realistically it is more like 380. Which is still a lot of travel by train. 

Ross -- who grew into something of an old coot in his later years, using a 5-iron as both a cane and dispute settler -- never counted his courses. He just wanted to make best use of whatever piece of property he was working with, even though many of his best efforts included a mule and a drag pan.

Most of those courses have held up exceedingly well over the years, as the world’s best golfers proved last year, when only a handful broke par at No. 2. It was the 19^th time that a Ross course has hosted the Open. 

“My grandfather felt it was quality, not quantity, that mattered,” Ross’ granddaughter, Elizabeth Shapiro, said in 1996, when she was in Raleigh for his induction into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame. “He didn’t think a course had to be longer than 7,000 yards to offer a challenge for championship golf. I think that his courses have been enduring because of that.

“People are challenged by the competitive aspect of the course, but moved by the beauty. I think there will always be a place for that.”

And there will always be an eagerness to play a course that with Ross’ name attached to it.

 

Greatest Collection of Basketball Pioneers Ever Assembled?

 In honor of today’s 125th anniversary of the birth of basketball, I dug out some stuff that has been loitering in the notebook for a while about what may be one of the greatest gatherings of basketball pioneers in the history of the game. It was a two-day basketball orgy played in a cow barn at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in March 1925.

The 14th-annual Indiana High School Basketball Tournament began only two days after the greatest tornado tragedy in U.S. history, though that really does not figure into the story, other than to set a contrasting scene for the weekend of basketball that followed. An air of sadness and revival hovered over the festivities as three states tried to figure out what caused a weather event that killed more than 800 people. While schoolboys played games, a total of 83 children died in nine leveled school houses across Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.

From the March 22, 1925, edition of the Indianapolis News.

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© By Tim Peeler, 2016

The mustachioed man followed the path of the Great Tri-State Tornado of 1925, sitting on a clattering train for 520 Midwestern miles to reach his final destination.

He left Lawrence, Kansas, on a trip to Indianapolis to see what Hell he had wrought. At least it's assumed he went on a train, because commercial air travel was still in its infancy, thanks to the Kelly Act, and there was no coherent interstate highway system for driving such a distance for a four-day trip.

In some ways, the man was beaten down by life, having peaked at the age of 30 with his greatest innovation. An ordained Presbyterian minister, a licensed physician and a former college administrator, he had been relieved of many of his duties at the University of Kansas, from chapel director and professor to basketball coach to university physician to athletics director to chairman of the department of physical education.

Of the eight coaches in the long and successful history of Jayhawk basketball, he is the only one with a losing record (55-60).

His name was James Naismith, and 125 years ago today (12/21/1891), the native of Almonte, Ontario, Canada, created basketball.

More specifically, he posted the game’s first 13 rules—a total of 474 words—on a bulletin board at the Springfield, Massachusetts, YMCA. [Hear the only known recording of Naismith talking about his invention of the game from a 1939 radio interview, weeks before his death.] If it wasn’t already such a busy time of the year, with so many other things to do, Dec. 21 should be a joint Canadian/U.S. national holiday.

In March of 1925, at the age of 64, Naismith was still a celebrated speaker, giving well-attended presentations about the benefits of physical education. But in Lawrence, he was relegated to teaching a a health and hygiene course at Kansas, using graphic U.S. Army slides from World War I to teach 60 freshmen about the dangers of venereal disease.

On this weekend, however, he was invited by Arthur L. Trester, commissioner of the Indiana State High School Athletics Association, to be the guest of honor at the 14th edition of what would become the most famous high school basketball tournament in the country, the inspiration of hoops heroes for more than a century.

Dr. Naismith agreed to attend but, as was his habit throughout his unassuming life, there was little pretense about his appearance. Frankly, he just wanted to see if his simple winter diversion had been corrupted by the IHSAA officials, who turned his “basket ball” into “Hoosier Hysteria.” When he arrived at the fairgrounds' 15,000-seat exposition hall, he had no kind of pass to get him in.  Security guards were loathe to admit an unticketed guest into the overflowing arena.

The police were called, and one of the officers eventually asked for identification. When he told them who he was, they said, “Good lord, man, why didn’t you say so long ago?”

He came to see happiness in a devastated region, in an event that had moved for the first time into a such a large arena, on a court that for the first time employed glass backboards. They were shipped in and installed a week before by the Nurre Mirror Plate Company of Bloomington, Indiana.

Naismith invented basketball—a derivation of something called “duck on a rock” that he played as a boy in Canada—in Massachusetts but it was quickly imported into Indiana a few months later at the Crawfordsville YMCA.

"Basketball really had its origin in Indiana, which remains the center of the sport," Naismith once wrote.

Naismith was stunned that his indoor activity had turned into a multiday tournament sport that needed to turn thousands of spectators away. He never understood why people would pay to see the game. In reality, he never saw the need for coaching, even though he had been the head coach of the Jayhawks for eight seasons. He thought boys should just go out and play, without regard to strategy.

His trip to Indiana changed his beliefs. He was particularly surprised that adults, even if they were not parents of participants, would pay $1 a day or 50 cents per session to watch games.

"As a guest of the IHSAA, I had the opportunity to watch the effects of their state tourney,” Naismith wrote about his experience. “The possibilities of basketball as seen there were a revelation to me. The striking features were the grade of basketball, the splendid spirit of the players and the unbound enthusiasm of the 15,000 spectators who crowded the Exposition Building. …The work of Arthur Trester cannot be too highly commended, as it is showing results throughout the state."

Trester—the father of the Indiana high school tournament and an inductee into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the shrine to basketball that anchors the town of Springfield, Massachusetts—was one of the many pioneers there that day who would end up with a plaque in Springfield.

Also sitting with Naismith was Wisconsin coach Walter Meanwell, the Big 10’s father of fast-break basketball; Iowa coach Sam Barry, the father of Pac-10 basketball while at Southern Cal; and Purdue coach Ward “Piggy” Lambert, one of the game’s great innovators with short passes and zone defenses. Future Tulane coach Clifford Wells, the rival and nemesis of one of the 16 coaches in the finals field, was in the building recruiting high school players for his summer camp. Later, he was the first executive director of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Surely first-year Indiana coach Everett Dean was there scouting the tournament’s talent. In 1942, he coached Stanford’s only national championship team.

There were legends in every corner. William Fox, editor and columnist for the The Indiana News and author of the newspaper’s influential high school basketball feature called “Shootin’ ‘Em and Stoppin’ ‘Em,” covered every game. He was called “the man who has done more than any other for high school basketball in Indiana.”

No doubt that basketball ambassador Chuck Taylor talked his way into the tournament, eager to sell his Converse All-Stars to teams across the state. Later that summer, he traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina, to give the first of his thousands of basketball clinics and launch his Hall of Fame career as basketball's global ambassador.

Future Big 10 legend Charles “Stretch” Murphy, a three-time All-American at Purdue, was a junior on Marion’s defending state championship team. When his playing career eventually ended, he was inducted into the Indiana, Helms Foundation and Naismith basketball halls of fame.

The tournament began on Friday at 9 a.m. when former Indiana State coach and tournament referee Birch Bayh Sr. tossed the opening tip-off in the first of nine games that day. The next day, when the finalists had to play three games to get to the championship, the first official ever inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, Dale Miller, called the title game—and three others on the tournament’s final day.

Somewhere in the stands with 15,000 other fans was a young Martinsville high school freshman, there to see his older brother play in Friday’s late first-round game against Muncie. But John Wooden might not have stuck around after watching Maurice “Cat” Wooden and his Martinsville teammates lose that opening-round game, 26-22. Two years later, the younger Wooden led Martinsville to the state title.

Not all of them knew at the time they were watching the future of the game Naismith had invented, but they were. The game was different then, of course—much more akin to Naismith’s 13 rules than the game now seen every night on multiple cable channels. There was a jump ball after every basket. There was no line at center court and no 10-second backcourt violation. A controversial strategy used by one of the state’s more successful and disliked coaches—everyone called the guy “Slick” because he was always looking for some kind of edge, legal or mostly legal—was a full-court stalling tactic that put a player in each corner of the court and a ball-handling guard a midcourt, lobbing passes to kill time.

Still, it was the best show on earth to these basketball pioneers.

“It was the greatest exhibition of athletics in the United States that I have ever seen,” said Meanwell, Wisconsin’s head coach. “I don’t understand how we have ever beaten any Indiana basketball team. Those boys shoot better than any man on our varsity team, and they begin to play basketball where we leave off.”

Everett Case in 1925

So what did Naismith see? A 25-year-old coaching phenom named Everett Case, leader of the Frankfort Fighting Five, a team that had traveled the 45 miles south to Indianapolis for the state finals in each of the last five seasons but had not yet brought home the coveted shield that went to the winning team. Frankfort went all the way to the finals in 1924, but lost to Murphy's Marion High.

When the regular season ended, Case and his team were all but written off because the team’s star player, Robert Spradling, had been exposed to small pox and needed an emergency injection of cow pox vaccine that caused his arm to swell to twice its size.

It turned out that Frankfort didn’t need him. In the sectionals, the Fighting Five (they didn't earn the nickname Hot Dogs until 1927) won three easy victories by scores of 40-4, 46-23 and 58-10. In the regionals the next weekend, it had wins of 49-11 and 38-12. Spradling returned for Frankfort’s only real test of the entire tournament, against Gary’s integrated Froebel High School in the first round of the 16-team finals. African-American center Andy Smith scored Froebel’s last six points, but Frankfort held on for a 25-23 victory.

The next day, March 21, 1925, Frankfort won all three of its games, beating Muncie, Washington and, in the 10 p.m. title game, fan-favorite Kokomo for the first of Case’s record four Indiana high school championships.

Case’s team was lauded for its “power, durability, wisdom, grace and grim determination, a quintet of qualities that made Frankfort a tournament team in every way, shape and form.”

When the final game was over, late on a cold Saturday night, Naismith came out of the stands with Trester to present the championship shield to Case, to shake the coach’s hand and to hang the championship medals around the necks of the players.

The Frankfort Hot Dogs, coached by Everett Case (top row, far left).

  Frankfort was declared the best of the state’s 673 teams.

It was the only time Naismith ever attended the Indiana high school tournament, which Case won again in 1929, ‘36 and ’39 before enlisting in the Navy for World War II and then coming to NC State as head basketball coach.

Case never really spoke of the day he met the inventor of the game. His closest confidante, Indiana native Vic Bubas, said “In the years I knew him, he never talked about it.”

Case came to Raleigh in 1946, won 10 Southern Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference championships and introduced the passion of college basketball to the southeast by insisting that conference champions be decided by a postseason tournament, which was not the norm at the time. He finished off his own show place, Reynolds Coliseum, in 1949 and is honored to this day every time the ACC Tournament’s Most Valuable Player is handed the Everett Case Award.

He also joined Naismith, Meanwell, Barry, Murphy, Trester, Taylor, Wells and dozens of other Indiana basketball pioneers in the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame when he was posthumously inducted in 1982.

Everett “Slick” Case—known around the ACC as “The Old Gray Fox”—kept good company.

Epilogue: You can see the hand-written notes Case took while learning under Meanwell during a summer stay in Wisconsin on the second floor of the newly renovated Reynolds Coliseum Walk of Fame and History. This notebook was given to NC State by alumnus and donor Jimbo Robbins, who acquired it by trading some landscape shrubbery years ago. He donated the black-and-white notebook to NC State’s athletics department for display.

And you can see the original copy of Naismith’s original rules of basketball in Lawrence, Kansas. They were purchased at auction by billionaire investment banker David Booth and his wife Suzanne in 2010 for $4,338,500 and gifted to the University of Kansas, where it now resides.

Reach Tim Peeler at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.