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| ACC Player and Athlete of the Year Lou Pucillo driving in for a layup in the 1959 title game. |
This was originally published in 2019 in The Wolfpacker magazine and reprinted here. 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.
BY TIM PEELER
(C) Coman Publishing 2019
When the lights went out at Reynolds Coliseum, the game was still in doubt.
There were just seven minutes to play in the 1959 ACC championship game between the Wolfpack and arch-rival North Carolina, but those clicks of the clock were excruciating for Frank McGuire’s Tar Heels.
That’s because one of the smallest players in league history started steamrolling the Tar Heel reserves and never let up in that contest 60 years ago this week.
Tiny NC State point guard Lou Pucillo, the 5-foot-9 senior from Philadelphia, knew he and three other starters were playing the last game of their careers. An exceptionally harsh probation prevented them from accepting the ACC’s bid to the NCAA Tournament, just as it had prevented football coach Earle Edwards’ 1957 league champion football team from participating in the Orange Bowl.
No matter what the outcome, the Tar Heels were leaving two days later to face Navy in the NCAA opening-round game at Madison Square Garden to face former UNC coach Ben Carnavale, the guy who took the 1945-46 Carolina team to the program’s first Final Four.
For Case, winning the conference title was perhaps a bigger goal than going to the 20-year-old, 23-team NCAA tournament, still in its infancy among national sporting events. The NCAA championship game wasn’t nationally televised until 1963.
So this title game would be the pinnacle of the season. And it was shrouded in controversy.
Both NC State and North Carolina had spent most of the season ranked in the top 5 nationally. Early in the year, after taking the Dixie Classic with wins over unranked Louisville, No. 2 Cincinnati and No. 7 Michigan State, Case’s Wolfpack was briefly ranked No. 1 – right up until North Carolina defeated the Wolfpack in overtime in Reynolds Coliseum the day after that historic ranking came out.
Near the end of that game, McGuire called time out to savor the victory over the top-ranked Wolfpack, a moment State fans never forgot.
Later that season, the top-ranked Tar Heels won the second meeting, at Woollen Gym, won the second matchup as well, 74-67, but that didn’t prevent the two teams, who both finished 12-2 against ACC opponents, from tying for the league’s important, but unofficial, regular-season championship.
The league had no tie-breaking procedures at that time so it flipped a coin to determine who owned the tournament’s top seed. The Wolfpack won.
Case’s team knew its season would end when the tournament was over. The Wolfpack was in the next-to-last year of the NCAA’s harshest probation ever, a four-year postseason ban on all varsity sports, due to violations during the 1956 recruitment of Louisiana high school legend Jackie Moreland.
Case’s biggest crime? Recruiting against Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp, who hired a private investigator to shadow Case and his assistants while visiting with Moreland and his family in tiny Minden, Louisiana. Eventually, both NC State and Texas A&M, where Rupp’s bitter rival and former Kentucky football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant had fled to get away from Rupp, both received NCAA sanctions for pursuing Moreland.
The sanctions did not prevent Case, who won nine conference titles in his first 10 seasons in Raleigh, from having what he called the best team of his tenure at NC State. All four of his seniors – All-Americans Pucillo and John Richter, with Bob MacGillivary and George Stepanovich – averaged in double figures, with Richter putting in 17 points and grabbing 14.2 rebounds per game.
Pucillo, with his flashy dribbling skills, had already hit two last second shots, both from halfcourt or beyond.
UNC coach Frank McGuire – who had a young lineup that featured sophomores York Larese and Doug Moe with juniors Lee Shaffer, Harvey Salz and Dick Kepley – had hinted before the tournament he would hold his starters out of the game to rest for the NCAA tournament, but it was an empty threat.
His team cruised to an opening-round win over Clemson and then a narrow semifinal win over third-seeded Duke. Case’s team, perhaps looking ahead to a title-game showdown, struggled to an overtime win over South Carolina in its opener and a close win over fifth-seeded Virginia.
The sell-out crowd for the championship game was evenly split between NC State and North Carolina fans, and the game was tight until the Wolfpack took an eight-point halftime lead against a steady mix of UNC starters and reserves.
“Everett wasn’t too happy about that, them playing so many reserves,” said longtime assistant Vic Bubas.
State started to pull away, behind the scoring of Pucillo, who had 23 points, and Richter, who had 15. Then, with the Pack leading 65-52 and 6:51 on the clock, McGuire pulled his starters for the last time. An irate Wolfpack fan found the master switch in the expansive basement of Reynolds Coliseum and turned out all the lights, causing an eight-minute delay in the game.
Pucillo begged Case to let him run out the final minutes on the clock by dribbling on a darkened court. Case refused, perhaps because he wanted everyone in the building to see what happened in the final moments.
When the lights came back on, the Wolfpack did anything but hold the ball, eventually winning 80-56, which is still one of the most lopsided wins in ACC championship game history.
With four seconds to play, the Wolfpack called timeout to savor the win and to prepare to cut down the nets on what turned out to be Case’s fourth and final ACC Tournament title.
“That was some of the boys’ doing,” Case said afterwards. “I had nothing to do with it. In fact, I wished they hadn’t done it. But you know how boys are.”
He might have even winked as he said it.
McGuire got into a shouting match with a reporter who suggested that his team hadn’t performed at its highest level.
“You always want to win the game you are playing,” McGuire said. “That’s basketball. We put the second string in there to rest our regulars. Don’t forget, the game was lost when the regulars were in there. Not when the subs went in. The game was lost with about eight minutes to play.”
Even later, while savoring the win at his Cameron Village home, Case told a handful of collected reporters: “When Knute Rockne was coaching Notre Dame football, he said ‘The ingredients of greatness are perseverance, ambition, desire and intellect.’
“Against North Carolina, we abounded in all of these. Never have I seen a team more prepared for a game in the dressing room. I had told them after we beat Virginia to reach the finals that a victory over Carolina for the conference championship would give State College its greatest basketball year.”
The Tar Heels lost to Navy in the NCAA opener, while Case and his team sat at home, reveling in the fourth ACC championship in school history and the fact the Pack finished No. 6 in the final Associated Press poll while the Tar Heels finished No. 9.
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