A Stitch in Time – 15 of Them, in Fact

Longtime trainer Herman Bunch treating the gash in David Thompson's scalp as Phil Spence looks on.(Photo courtesy of Phil Spence.)

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© Tim Peeler, 2020

Here's a story you may never have heard about legendary NC State All-American David Thompson, who turned 66 yesterday.

The day of the NCAA semifinal game against UCLA at the Greensboro Coliseum, Thompson was still recovering from the horrific fall he suffered six days before against Pittsburgh in the NCAA East Region Finals at Reynolds Coliseum.

He wasn’t fully recovered from that crowd-silencing spill, which had every Wolfpack fan worried not only about the game against the seven-time defending champion Bruins, but about Thompson’s ability to ever play basketball again.

He had suffered a severe concussion and had 15 stitches in the back of his head. He would have never made it through the current protocol to play in the game against John Wooden’s team featuring Bill Walton and Keith Wilkes.

In addition to the stitches, Thompson had a bald spot on the back of his head where his mini-Afro had been shaved while being treated at the old Rex Hospital near downtown Raleigh the day of his fall.

Thompson didn’t want to appear weak in his rematch with Walton and the rest of the dominant Bruins, who had handed the Wolfpack its only loss in two years earlier that season in St. Louis in a made-for-television showdown between two teams that had finished the 1972-73 season undefeated.

And he didn’t want to show up for what was then the most-watched game in the history of college basketball with a big bare spot on the back of his head.

“Here, David, I’ve got something for you,” said team trainer Herman Bunch, who told me this story at a North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame press conference honoring the 1974 championship team and confirmed by Thompson a year or so later.

Thompson sat down and Bunch fiddled around with something behind him and a black magic marker. When Bunch finished, Thompson looked in the mirror and gave his approval.

In the biggest game of his life, during one of the greatest performances of his career (28 points, 10 rebounds), in the game that NC State ended UCLA’s stranglehold over college basketball, David Thompson had a black-painted sponge glued to the back of his scalp, covering up the place where his head had been split open the week before.

Two nights later, the Wolfpack beat Marquette for the first team national championship in school history.

Pat Dye: The Bear Bryant of Eastern North Carolina Football

Patrick Fain Dye, the day he was hired as East Carolina's head football coach. [East Carolina University Digital Archives Collection.]

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© Tim Peeler, 2020

There have been more important times in the state of North Carolina’s football history, but it’s hard to beat the winter of 1979-80 for outright turbulence and madness.

NC State won the ACC championship with a 7-4 overall record and a 5-1 mark against conference opponents. It did not play in the postseason. Instead, second-place Clemson was invited to the Peach Bowl. Fifth-place North Carolina, with a 3-3 record in the seven-team conference, was invited to the Gator Bowl, where it upset Michigan, 17-15. And fourth-place Wake Forest, with a 3-2 ACC mark, was invited to the Tangerine Bowl, where it lost to LSU, 34-10.

East Carolina, having tied North Carolina and gone unbeaten in their final seven games, finished with a 7-3-1 record, the fourth consecutive season the Pirates had finished with seven or more wins under its young phenom coach Pat Dye. After not receiving a bowl bid – the Pirates had upset Louisiana Tech in the 1978 Independence Bowl the year before – Dye quit.

While he was rumored to have other possibilities, he did not have another job. He just up and resigned, then blasted his athletics director and chancellor for not giving enough support to the football program, in terms of facilities and funding.

Dye called his $38,000 base salary and his overall $60,000 take-home pay “more than enough.” He said the athletics director off him a raise, thinking “he could keep me here with money. But I wanted his support for the football program, not the money.”

Dye had been a hot commodity for a while. In 1977, the season after he led the Pirates to their only Southern Conference football championship, he interviewed to become the head coach at North Carolina. East Carolina, discouraged by system president Bill Friday from pilfering a coach from a sister institution, wouldn’t let Dye out of his contract and the Tar Heels chose to hire Ohio University head coach Dick Crum instead.

"I'm not sure North Carolina wants a national championship football team," Dye told The Charlotte Observer's Tom Sorensen in 1981. "I probably shouldn't say this...I'm not sure they want that much athletic success. Going to the Gator Bowl seems successful enough for them."

In 1978, Mississippi State offered Dye its head coaching position, but Dye declined.

“I could have left any year I was here,” Dye said after his resignation from ECU. “Just last year Mississippi State made a very lucrative offer and everyone – my staff, my family – want to pack up and go. But every year I always looked for a good reason to stay. This time, I didn’t even bother. I knew before the season even began that I would leave. I knew I couldn’t be enthusiastic like I was in the past. I knew I needed a change of scenery, a new challenge.”

At the same time, NC State coach Bo Rein, still the youngest head coach in Division I football at the age of 34, left after his fourth season at NC State to become the head at Southeastern Conference superpower Louisiana State. By all reasonable accounts, Rein did not think he could challenge for a national championship at NC State in the same way he could at LSU.

(Rein never got the opportunity to coach the Bayou Bengals. His plane went down on a recruiting trip not long after he was hired and he and the pilot both perished.)

Dye quietly campaigned for the NC State job. He said he could definitely win a national championship in Raleigh. Instead, Wolfpack athletics director Willis Casey formed an eight-person screening committee to hire a new coach. Casey was in the middle of an extended stay at Rex Hospital recovering from “an undisclosed illness.” From his bed, Casey considered Dye and a pair of former Wolfpack players from the school’s successful 1967 team, quarterback Jim Donnan and linebacker Chuck Amato.

Dye was the feisty sort, as presidents and athletics directors in the SEC eventually discovered. He was never feistier, however, than the 1979 season.

“I had something happen in the beginning of the year in 1979,” Dye told the East Carolina fansite Bonesville in 2004. “I didn’t want to release a player. We had a kid who played backup quarterback and had gone through the entire spring and then decided he wanted to transfer to Duke. I didn’t want him going there and running their scout team all fall when we had to line up and open the season for them. But, the athletics director and the president released him anyway. They decided to release him against my wishes and, actually, I didn’t even know that they did it.”

Duke, with the former Pirate quarterback running the scout team the week before the game, beat ECU 28-14 in the third game of the 1979 season.

“[The president] started telling us how to do our jobs,” Dye said in the Bonesville interview. “I learned that what I thought was true and I kept that in the back of my mind until the end of the season. I didn’t want it hanging over my head. We had a good year in 1979 and certainly the good times outweighed the bad…[but] I couldn’t work for someone I couldn’t trust. So, rather than trying to fight the institution – which is always more important than the individual – I thought it was best to move on. I didn’t want to damage East Carolina. I don’t regret the decision because I knew it was the right thing to do. I hated leaving those players and leaving East Carolina and Greenville. At the time, I was 40 years old and I had some good years left. I wasn’t worried about finding a job because I knew… I knew I could coach… for somebody.”

In six years at East Carolina, Dye had built a successful, winning program, leading the Pirates to the 1976 Southern Conference championship and an all-time 48-18-1 record. He won at least seven games in each of his six seasons and left Greenville with a 72.4 winning percentage. In his final season, the Pirates led the nation in rushing with Dye’s ground-grinding wishbone offense.

Pirate fans wanted the second most successful coach in school history to stay put, for obvious reasons. Someone in Greenville made a small fortune selling bumper stickers that read, “Keep Pat – fire the rest.”

Dye thought he would land at NC State. Dye had been an assistant coach at Alabama under Bear Bryant when NC State chancellor Joab Thomas was an Alabama professor of biology, the assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the vice president of student affairs in Tuscaloosa (1961-75).

Dye, the son of a Georgia cotton farmer and a former captain of Georgia’s football team with quarterback Fran Tarkenton, seemed like the perfect fit for the school’s fanbase.

NC State’s screening committee backed off Dye because of his comments, according to Charlotte Observer columnist Bob Quincy. The coach quickly issued an apology in an attempt to regain favor, but the damage was done.

"I just told it the was it was," Dye told the Raleigh News & Observer's Chip Alexander in a 1985 interview. "Sometimes, the truth hurts, you know. And, yes, it probably cost me the job at State."

Some were also concerned that the wishbone offense Dye learned under Alabama’s Bear Bryant was too conservative. Never mind that the Wolfpack was just a year removed from Rein’s highly successful twin veer option, featuring all-time ACC rushing leader Ted Brown.

So the committee recommended to Casey that the school hire Lou Holtz defensive lieutenant Monte Kiffin from Arkansas. The 39-year-old Kiffin was hired less than a week after Rein’s resignation.

Dye landed at Wyoming, where he immediately upset the school by suggested leading the Cowboys to success would open doors for other opportunities. He quickly had to back-track those comments.

“This is in no way a stepping stone for me,” Dye said. “I hope it will be a stepping stone for some of our assistant coaches, because we do have an outstanding staff. As far as my position at Wyoming, I’d like to build a program here where, if we’re at Laramie 15 years from now, we can look back and be proud that we were a part of it.”

He left after taking the Cowboys to their first winning season in eight years to become the head coach at Auburn, ending his one-year exile west of the Mississippi. He took the job at Alabama's biggest rival against Bryant's advice.

"The people of Wyoming are talking about rodeoing in July," Dye said. "In Alabama, they are talking about the Auburn-Alabama game."

Dye had nine 9-win seasons in 18 years of coaching before he abruptly retired from Auburn following the 1992 season at the age of 51, as the NCAA began to poke around his recruiting practices. In 12 seasons, he compiled a 99-39-4 record with the Tigers, won at least a share of the SEC championships in 1983 and ’87-’89, coached Heisman Trophy winner Bo Jackson and won at least 10 games four times.

He won three SEC Coach of the Year awards and was the 1983 national coach of the year.

But he never won a championship at NC State.

A Fan-Free, Secret Game That Changed Everything

© Tim Peeler, 2020

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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.