"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.

'Follow Your Bliss,' Even If The Path Is Weird

The following is a Q&A I did for the Greensboro News & Record with current Miami coach Manny Diaz prior to the 2002 Gator Bowl, back when he was an NC State assistant talking about his non-traditional path to becoming a football coach. Friday night at Carter-Finley Stadium will be the first time he has faced NC State as a head coach. 

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© Landmark Communications Inc., 2002 

 

            BIOGRAPHY: Manny Diaz
            AGE: 28
            POSITION: Linebackers coach for NC State's football team
            FAMILY: Wife, Stephanie; Son, Colin, 5
            COLLEGE: B.A. in Communications, Florida State University, 1995

BACKGROUND: Let's put it this way: Manny Diaz didn’t take the typical path to becoming a football coach, just like his father didn't take the typical path to becoming a politician.

The 1995 graduate of Florida State, with a degree in communications, figured the only way he could have a career in sports was as a watcher, either for a newspaper or with a television crew. So he went to work after he graduated at ESPN.

During his two years there, he broke down film for the cable network's Sunday morning NFL shows, something he does now on a regular basis as a Wolfpack assistant coach.

But he got a bug to coach in 1997, moved back to Tallahassee and begged his way into a volunteer job in the FSU football recruiting office. The guy who interviewed him? Seminole assistant Chuck Amato, who got strong recommendations from ESPN NFL analyst Sterling Sharpe.

""The biggest thing that ESPN taught me was professionalism,'' Diaz said. ""The big lesson I learned was that going from ESPN to Florida State football was that the level of professionalism and attention to detail were the same at both places.''

When Amato became head coach at N.C. State in 2000, be brought Diaz with him as a graduate assistant. Last year, after two defensive assistants left, Amato hired Diaz as a full-time assistant.

Diaz never played college football, but Amato saw a spark that impressed him.

""He was just so, so sharp,'' Amato said. ""He is super intelligent, with a lot of common sense. He had common sense and street sense. I was told by [Sterling] Sharpe, from ESPN, "I don't know why this guy is doing this. If he stays here four or five years, he'll be sitting in front of the cameras on SportsCenter.'

"He probably would have."

Similarly, Diaz's father never expected to become Mayor of Miami. But the elder Diaz was thrown into the spotlight as the lawyer for U.S. relatives of Elian Gonzalez, the young Cuban boy whose mother died as they tried a daring escape from Cuba.

The elder Diaz became mayor last November after a hotly contested runoff.

The News & Record's Tim Peeler talked with the younger Diaz recently, as he helped the Wolfpack prepare for Wednesday's game against Notre Dame in the 58^th Gator Bowl.

Q. You spent a couple of years working at ESPN after you graduated college. How did you get from there to here?

A. From a very young age, I always wanted to be involved in sports. If I couldn't play, I figured the next best thing would be sports journalism. When I was in college, I wasn't sure if I wanted to be in newspapers or television, but I knew I wanted to be in sports. I got an opportunity to intern at ESPN while I was in college and I went back there with the intent of getting on-air with sports television. After I was there for about a year and a half, working on the Sunday morning NFL shows with Chris Berman and Mike Tirico. I got really close with Sterling Sharpe in particular. After we finished the Monday night Countdown show, would go out to an Outback Steakhouse in Bristol, Conn., and we would watch the Monday night game and talk about football. He always joked about wanting to get into coaching. I had always had a bug to get into coaching, but I didn't think it was possible, because I didn't play in college. I was on this television track and thought that it was the next best thing. The pivotal moment for me came in 1997, we were covering the Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Green Bay Packers in New Orleans. I tagged along with Tom Jackson on an interview with Bill Parcells. I wasn't working, I just wanted to meet Parcells. Sitting there at that moment, there were two chairs, both with guys who were arguably a the top of their profession. I was sitting there listening to the dialog and thinking to myself: Best case scenario, which would I rather be doing? No question, I would rather be in Parcells' chair, answering questions instead of asking them. It's not even close. I decided to try to pursue getting into coaching.

Q. That's a pretty big leap, especially since you had a good job at ESPN. Was it a difficult transition?

A. When you work at ESPN, that's kind of like an "Oh, wow" job. Your parents are proud of you. Then I called them on the phone and told them I was going to move back to Tallahassee, Fla., and try to volunteer in the football office because I have a dream to get into coaching. That doesn't fly too well. When I told my father the Parcells story, he said, "What makes you think you are ever going to be Bill Parcells?" The only answer I had was, "What makes you think I am ever going to be the guy asking the questions?" I went to FSU, volunteered for a year, then I got a low-level graduate assistant job, then I came up here with Coach Amato.

Q. What exactly were you doing in that first year as a volunteer?

A. If you are a college graduate, under NCAA rules, you can't volunteer in any football capacity. The only place they could put me was in the football recruiting office, which was separate from football. I stuffed envelops, I mailed out tapes, I made copies of tapes, I addressed envelops. It was strictly mailroom kind of stuff, just to be in the office. When it became recruiting season, I was the guy that picked kids up at the airport, handle the dirty work jobs. I was able to show the coaches that I was dependable, even in a small role. You know how coaches are, when a job came open, they aren't interested in conducting any big searches. I was standing there, and they said, "You seem like a decent enough guy. You do it.''

Q. So how exactly did you support yourself?

A. The key to the whole story is simple: I have a saint of a wife. To show you just how smart I am, when we moved to Florida State, we were expecting our first child. She had to support me for five years.

Q. Since you are getting ready to coach against Notre Dame in a New Year's Day bowl, I assume you don't have any regrets.

A. It was a pretty amazing combination of timing and luck. Things have worked out beyond expectations.

Q. Would you recommend the same career path for someone else?

A. The only advice I have is follow your bliss. Everyone I knew who was in their 20s was either not making any money doing what they wanted to do, or making a lot of money and not doing what they wanted.

Q. Give me a quick critique of how Chuck Amato handles the media.

A. The thing about Chuck is that he enjoys being playful and people don't always understand that. He's a hard guy to understand sometimes when he is being serious and when he is joking. Sometimes, he likes it when people don’t understand the difference.

Q. How do you think the media in this area handles him and football in general?

A. I think it is improving. I still wish every day the fans here could read something about one of their teams in football. Some kind of news and notes. Football in places like Tallahassee is a year-round deal. But I think attention to recruiting has gotten a lot more intense. I think the thing that will help is that the teams are getting better. I understand, nobody wants to read about a loser.

Q. You mentioned your dad earlier. It has to be a big advantage in recruiting to have someone who is the son of the mayor of Miami on staff, right?

A. Well, he did bring me up here before my dad was ever in politics, so it's not like it was because of that. He was the attorney for the Gonzalez family. He had never held any political office and he just went ahead and ran. He had some momentum and won. The best thing about his job right now is that there isn't much being written about him.

Q. Is coaching different than what you thought it would be?

A. Well, it's not that much different from television. It's a little bit of who you know and trying to get to a bigger market and such. Coaching is like parenting. Coaching is your personality. I am not a big yell-scream theatrics kind of guy. I am always kind of defensive of coaching. Especially football coaches. They are the ones who have the stereotype of being the big dumb guy with the hat, the whistle, the clipboard board and the polyester shorts hiked up too high, the ones who end up getting stuck teaching history in high school. To me, what I love about this, is that it is the most cerebral thing I have ever done. From an intellectual stand-point, it's the most stimulating thing I have ever done.

A Fan-Free, Secret Game That Changed Everything

© Tim Peeler, 2020

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.

It’s long-forgotten now, but there was a time NC State hosted a men’s basketball game against High Point College that was played without spectators.

It wasn’t because of illness though, like the current worldwide coronavirus pandemic that forced NCAA president Mark Emmert today to ban all unnecessary personnel and family from this year’s men’s and women’s NCAA Championships.

It was because NC State’s home court, Thompson Gymnasium, was actually condemned by Raleigh officials.

The “secret game,” as the newspapers called it back then, that followed was one of the seminal moments of March Madness in North Carolina, even though it was played in January.

The saga began in 1947, Case’s first season, when a Red Terror home game against North Carolina was cancelled because of too many spectators. Thousands of students, most of whom were World War II veterans enrolled on the GI Bill, flooded through the second-floor windows and up through the basement lockerrooms to see the first of two scheduled games against the two neighboring rivals.

When fans sat on each other’s laps and crowded into the aisles, fire marshal W.C. Butts called the game, setting off riots on NC State’s campus. The Terrors went on to beat the White Phantoms, as Carolina teams were often called then, in Chapel Hill, 48-46, the first of 15 consecutive victories over UNC-CH and the beginning of a 24 out of 27 streak against State College’s biggest rival over the next decade.

That inaugural season, Case’s team finished with a 26-5 record, its first Southern Conference championship in nearly two decades and a berth in the National Invitation Tournament at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Case became a hero, even though his team played in a decrepit old gym that barely held 4,000 spectators.

By the 1947-48 season, interest in NC State basketball was so high students could only get tickets to half the games and were not allowed to bring dates, which was problematic because almost all of the military veterans enrolled in school were already married. No staff, faculty or general admission tickets were sold for home games after December.

On Jan. 23, 1948, Duke was scheduled to play at Thompson Gym, but Raleigh building inspector Pallie Mangum and city manager Roy Braden conducted a surprise inspection the afternoon of the game and decided that it had to be canceled because the building had inadequate fire exits for more than 1,200 spectators.

The Wolfpack was forced to move its final seven home games that year to Raleigh’s downtown Memorial Auditorium.

There wasn’t enough time, however, to get the auditorium ready for the Pack’s next home game, a Friday night contest against High Point College. The auditorium was built in 1934 to be basketball ready, since the Southern Conference moved its tournament to Raleigh when seven schools broke away to form the Southeastern Conference. But the floor had not yet been refinished, the sidelines and free-throw lines needed to be painted and baskets needed to be installed in order to play seven unexpected games in February and March.

After telling everyone on campus and in Raleigh that the High Point game was cancelled, officials from both schools agreed to secretly play in condemned Thompson Gym, with no fans in attendance. Only a few reporters and college officials were allowed to see the game featuring Case’s Wolfpack, the nation’s highest-scoring team.

Red-headed All-America forward Dick Dickey poured in a school-record 29 points and teammate Jack McComas added 23. Case’s Wolfpack ran roughshod over the High Pointers with a 110-40 victory.

Case’s free-wheeling team made 44 of 97 shots – in front of no one.

The vagabond Pack weren’t affected by its home-court flux throughout the season. It was the highest-scoring team in the nation for most of the season and it earned the school’s first No. 1 ranking in the national polls. Thanks to a 19-game winning streak from December-March, the Pack finished 29-3 overall, was a perfect 12-0 in the Southern Conference regular season and won the second of six consecutive league tournament titles, despite Dickey being out of the lineup with a case of the mumps.

At least it wasn’t the Covid-19.

It was the highest-scoring game in NC State history until David Thompson came along three dozen years later. It was also the last game Case ever coached in Thompson Gym, where he compiled a perfect 18-0 record in his one-and-a-half seasons at his first home court.

Passed over by the NCAA in favor of eventual national-champion Kentucky for the eight-team NCAA Tournament, the 1947-48 Wolfpack accepted its second consecutive bid to the National Invitation Tournament. Without Dickey, the Pack lost to DePaul in the first round at Madison Square Garden.

Still, it was the most successful season in NC State basketball history until the 1972-73 team posted a perfect 27-0 record.

The move to downtown Raleigh lit a fire under school officials – as Case slyly expected – to complete the shell of the on-campus coliseum that had been standing dormant since 1941. It didn’t hurt that during an 81-42 victory over North Carolina at the Pack’s substitute home, students finished off the game by chanting “We want a coliseum. We want a coliseum.”

Few of the surviving folks at that game would know if Mangum and Braden, the two elected city officials, were truly looking out for the well-being of those wanting to see the game, or if they were in cahoots with Case, a legendary sneak who usually got what he wanted.

What is known for certain, however, is that the palatial on-campus basketball coliseum the coach was promised when he interviewed for the job the year before was re-envisioned, expanded on the fly and completed within 18 months of the fan-free game.

Called Reynolds Coliseum, it hosted more spectators for college basketball games than any other on-campus facility during its 50 years as the home of NC State’s men’s basketball team, the host of the Southern and Atlantic Coast Conference tournaments, the Dixie and Triangle Classics and the NCAA Championships. The home of the Wolfpack Women’s program since 1973-74, renovated and updated Reynolds will soon surpass the men’s half-century of service.

So, who knows? Wednesday’s decision by the NCAA to host fan-free tournaments may reinvigorate college basketball, not destroy it.