"When March Went Mad:" Third Excerpt

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"When March Went Mad:" Third Excerpt

Dec 10, 2007

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"When March Went Mad"

By Tim Peeler

Chapter 13: "Who Goes to a Hotel Without TVs?"

N.C. State's regular-season victory over North Carolina was the start of the Wolfpack's stunning run that year. State was unranked going into the ACC Tournament but beat No. 5 Carolina in the semifinals and No. 2 Virginia in the final. Even then, few expected State to get on a roll in the NCAA Tournament. State was sent west, to Corvallis, Ore., where it became a memorable trip for unexpected reasons.

Jim Valvano knew that the high his team experienced at the ACC
Tournament and in their subsequent return to Raleigh would not last.
And nothing brought the skeleton traveling party of Wolfpack players,
coaches, administrators, and the smattering of fans down to earth
quicker than getting to Corvallis, Oregon.

Including a few dozen fans, about 50 people flew from Raleigh to
Eugene, Oregon, to see the ACC champions play the first-round game
against Pepperdine. They loaded two aging activity buses for the hour-long
ride to Corvallis. No one was expecting limousine service and a
room at the Ritz, but few were prepared for the Riverview Motel,
either. It was a relatively new but decidedly lowbrow roadside inn and
restaurant, hard by the north-flowing Willamette River. …

So much for the ACC champions’ spoils of victory.

“It didn’t have televisions,” said reserve player Mike Warren. “Who
goes to a hotel room that doesn’t have a television?”

Even Alvin Battle, who had seen his share of dumpy hotels while
traveling up and down the West Coast during his two years at Merced
Junior College in California, wasn’t sure what to think. “Who booked
this room?” he wondered when he and Thurl Bailey checked in.

The proprietor of the Riverview was a big guy who used the hotel
bar as his office. “He was always in there with his accounting books
and whatnot,” said N.C. State board of trustees chairman Wendell
Murphy, who traveled with the team throughout the 1983 postseason.
“I remember most of the time his britches had fallen about halfway
down his crack, and I don’t think he was bothered by it at all. That’s the
kind of place we were in.”

The Riverview had one big redeeming feature: a British-style double-
decker tour bus in the parking lot. No one was sure if it was in
working condition, but everyone wanted to take the party bus through
the streets of Corvallis, and the owner of the Riverview promised he
would let them if the Wolfpack beat Pepperdine and Nevada-Las
Vegas. …

Valvano loved showing off his honeymoon suite at the Riverview,
with its Vegas-style finery that included a heart-shaped bed with a
blue velvet comforter, velour wallpaper, an in-room, two-person
Jacuzzi, and mirrors on the ceilings. “The first thing he did when he
saw the room,” said Gary Bryant, a team manager for the Wolfpack
that year, “was send me out for some wine. His wife and kids weren’t
with us yet. I think he enjoyed that trip more than any other we took
that year.” Mainly, the sleepy little town gave the master storyteller
even more material. “Corvallis made Fuquay-Varina look like New York
City,” Valvano said after his team returned home.

It was a place of fortune for the Wolfpack players, even without
taking into account the results of the Pepperdine and Nevada-Las
Vegas games. ...

The Wolfpack … picked up one of its postseason good luck charms, “Cap’n” Jim
Letherer, a one-legged civil rights activist and sports fan from San
Diego who watched the Wolfpack win the ACC championship and
decided to follow his new favorite team the rest of the tournament. So
he packed up the car he had been given by football star Kellen Winslow
and showed up unannounced in Corvallis, ready to latch on to
Destiny’s Darlings. And Valvano let him.

Valvano liked having a large entourage just in case he needed his
own personal laugh track. He wanted his players to be engaged with
the fans and the media. Reporters did interviews in the lobby or in
hotel rooms. Fans hung out with the players and the coaches.
Famously, Valvano didn’t believe in bed checks or curfews, either for
his players or himself.

Valvano was right: his team didn’t match up well with Pepperdine.
The Wolfpack missed its first 12 shots out of the gate, and won the
game only because Pepperdine’s best free-throw shooter, Dane Suttle,
missed two front ends of one-and-one opportunities at the free-throw
line in the first overtime. The Wolfpack, down five points with 24 seconds
to play, tied the game on an offensive rebound by Cozell
McQueen, and won it on Dereck Whittenburg’s eight free throws in the
second overtime.

McQueen’s rebound is the most remembered play of that game,
but it might not have been the most important thing that happened
that night, at least for the most superstitious members of the
Wolfpack cheering party. Pam Valvano, who had arrived with the
cheerleaders and pep band the day of the Pepperdine game, was a
nervous spectator. During the ACC Tournament, she had walked out of
The Omni with two minutes to play so she wouldn’t have to watch the
tension-filled final moments, just like her husband’s mother Angelina
Valvano used to do in the early days of her middle son’s career.

Pam Valvano always held in her hands a golden, wolf-shaped brooch, a
good luck charm given to her by an N.C. State fan. A handful of other
fans would keep Pam Valvano company in the musty hallways of whatever
arena the Wolfpack was playing in, with each giving the brooch a
good-luck rub. But sometime during the celebration of the Pepperdine
game, the brooch fell underneath the stands of Gill Coliseum. “She was
frantic,” said Scott Joseph, the student who had been portraying the
Mr. Wuf mascot for the past three years. “She couldn’t find it anywhere.”

Without his mascot head on, Joseph was small enough to
crawl under the stands, where he found the brooch charm among the
paper cups and popcorn boxes, a stroke of good fortune for the band
of nail-biters who had become ritualistic in the clothes they wore and
their pregame routines.

Valvano called his wife’s followers a cult, but he participated as
much as anyone. He refused to let anyone other than team manager
Gary Bryant hand him a piece of gum before or during a game. He
wore three suits throughout the postseason in the same rotation: a
beige three-piece, followed by a gray plaid, followed by blue pinstripes.

And for nine straight games, he had to worry about his pants falling
down on national television: just prior to the Wake Forest game in the
ACC Tournament, Valvano’s belt broke, and Pam would not let him
wear one for the rest of the season. Most importantly, the coach made
sure to hug Dereck Whittenburg after every postseason game, a head
start on good luck for the team’s next outing.

Just about everyone had a ritual, from the fans to the team to the
students back in Raleigh. Pity the poor girl in Sullivan Dormitory who
made the mistake of taking a shower with four minutes to play in one
of the early ACC Tournament games. Over the next three weeks, she
was the cleanest partier on Hillsborough Street, since everyone in the
dorm made sure she showered at the same point of every game that
followed. Sarah Jackson of Raleigh wore the same blouse she wore
during N.C. State’s run to the 1974 NCAA championship, nine years of
fashion changes be damned. Another lady wore the same underwear
that she had worn during every game of the 1974 tournament. Larry
Hall of Fuquay-Varina, who went years without missing a Wolfpack
home or road game, would not take his seat for a postseason game
until he found a face-up penny somewhere on the ground.

“Before every game, there is so much rubbing and praying and
clothing assignments, the pregame [routine] has become much
tougher than the game itself,” Valvano said. …

For the Wolfpack players, the day between games was an opportunity
to attend a short practice and rest from their double-overtime
duty the night before. But team doctor Don Reibel took a handful of
managers and non-practicing personnel to the Oregon coast to go
deep-sea fishing. They brought their catch back to the Riverview,
where the head cook fried it all up fish-camp style to feed the whole
Wolfpack contingent late Friday evening.

Before leaving the Riverview the next day for the Nevada-Las
Vegas game, Valvano reminded the hotel’s owner to gas up the double-
decker and be ready for a party later that evening. Not long after
Thurl Bailey’s game-winning shot went down, the bus was stocked with
a case of champagne and two kegs of beer. It was revved up and waiting
to go when the Wolfpack contingent returned from Gill Coliseum.

Before leaving the parking lot, the cheerleaders presented Joseph
with a cake to celebrate his 21st birthday. Dereck Whittenburg grabbed
the cake before they got on the bus. “Come here, Wuf,” Whittenburg
said. Then he shoved Joseph’s face in the cake. “That kind of set the
tone for the rest of the evening,” Joseph said. “It was quite a party.”

The next morning, while everyone recovered from the traveling
road show, the coaching staff met to figure out the team’s travel
plans. Since the Wolfpack originally was not due to return to North
Carolina until late Sunday night and the team had to be in Ogden,
Utah, no later than Tuesday afternoon for its Thursday night game
against Utah, Valvano made the executive decision to keep everyone
on the West Coast. Rehbock and assistant athletic director Kevin
O’Connell, who was back in Raleigh, arranged a Monday morning flight
from Eugene, Oregon, to Salt Lake City, via Las Vegas, and told everyone
they needed to prepare to wash some clothes.

For the cheerleaders and pep-band members and a handful of
other students on the trip, staying on the West Coast was completely
unexpected. Most of them had only packed for three days away from
campus, and no one had enough books to catch up their studies. But
they had plenty of time, since they would not be joining the team on
the flight to Utah. They had to take a bus. The upside was that they
stayed over night in Reno, Nevada, at Carl’s Supper Club, a combination
ranch house, restaurant, and casino.

“We had discovered earlier that you could turn in beer cans and
other recyclables for money in Oregon, so we found all the empty beer
cans we could and turned them in,” Joseph said. “Once we got to
Reno, we were glad we did that. We pretty much all took our per diem
money and all the recycling money, got off the bus, and went to the
nearest casino until about five o’clock in the morning.”

On Monday morning, the team loaded up its rickety activity bus for
the hour-long trip to the Eugene airport. Gannon and Mike Warren
made a few convenience-store purchases for a week-long stay in
Mormon country: they bought two cases of beer to sneak through the
airport. “We were young and stupid,” Gannon said. “We didn’t know
what to expect out there. We wanted to be prepared.”

At the airport, the Wolfpack contingent bumped into CBS
announcers Dick Stockton and Steve Grote. [State senior guard Sidney] Lowe, who had seen the
tape of the Pepperdine game in which Stockton declared his career
over, could not resist repeating the same lines he had told Grote prior
to the UNLV game: “Hey, Dick,” Lowe told Stockton, “never count us
out.”

[N.C. State won the West Regional, beating Utah in the semifinals and Virginia in the final. After that, State finally returned to Raleigh to an overwhelming welcome.]

After nearly three weeks on the road, N.C. State coach Jim
Valvano figured that his team needed some time at home before going
to Albuquerque. He was wrong. The atmosphere in Raleigh was so
electric that no one could actually get anything done.

The team participated in yet another pep rally on the Brickyard
early Monday afternoon and threw the doors open to practice at
Reynolds Coliseum. More than 5,000 people showed up, turning the
basic shootaround into a 45-minute exhibition of dunking and scrimmaging
that wasn’t exactly beneficial to putting together a championship
game plan.

“Coach, what are all these people doing here?” team captain
Dereck Whittenburg asked. “Where were they when we were 9-7?”

“Dereck, just enjoy it,” Valvano said.

Most Recent Comments

I'm not going to compare Coach V and Dean. But I will say that Coach V was the one of the best game coaches I have ever seen, an unparalleled tactition and game planner. He had his faults, but he could coach, no doubt about it.

dean smith and the tarheels won two national championships. not too good for number of years in coaching. had more blue chip players than anyother team,good recruiter not very good coach.

V probably was a better floor coach than Smith. Smith seemed to underachieve at tournament time. However, V had only three players he coached at State EVER graduate, and admitted a player, Washburn, who scored 470 on the SAT (you get 400 to sign your name). That is inexcusable...period.

Ask almost anyone in America and people have way more respect for Dean Smith....GO HEELS

Jimmy V could coach in the NBA,Dean was best known for holding Michael Jordan under 30 and being an underachiever with all that great talent.Good coaches win with less.Some through sheer talent finally win a national championship with players like MJ and James Worthy of championship mentality that can carry the team instead of the coach.Roy Williams,Coach V,Coach K have the championship mentality not sweating under the collar looking like they need a smoke.

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"When March Went Mad:" Third Excerpt

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