North Carolina State University Athletics
PEELER: '74 Champions Recall NC State's Greatest Team
12/22/2008 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Editor's note: Relive the game-by-game exploits of the 1974 team at this special 35th anniversary section of GoPack.com: Remembering '74.
BY TIM PEELER
RALEIGH, N.C. The word they will never forget how to spell is “Converse.”
That was the only thing visible to them when David Thompson's shoes flew by on one of his many magical flights, in games and in practices.
The image of those red-and-white Converse sneakers are still seared in their memories, 35 years after they played their last game together and brought home NC State’s first NCAA Championship by beating Marquette 76-64 in the 1974 title game.
Nearly a dozen members of the 1973-74 team gathered Sunday night at Raleigh’s Downtown Sheraton for their first reunion in years, invited by current Wolfpack head coach Sidney Lowe for a two-day celebration that will peak tonight when they are honored at halftime of the NC State-Marquette basketball game at the RBC Center.
They recounted all of their stories some even printable from a time when they were young, skinny and close-knit, all of them wearing red, white and blue bell-bottomed warm-up suits and tight fitting short-shorts. Ah, the 70s.
They recounted David’s elegant flights and his one horrific fall, when he tripped over teammate Phil Spence’s shoulder as he flew in for a blocked shot against Pittsburgh in the second round of the ’74 NCAA Tournament.
They talked about their battles with UCLA and Bill Walton, the kings of college basketball whose reign they toppled, ending the Bruins’ run of seven consecutive NCAA titles with an 80-77 double-overtime victory in the National Semifinals at the Greensboro Coliseum. And they watched highlights of the semifinals against UCLA and the championship game against Marquette.
They remembered the late Norman Sloan, the head coach who brought them all together here in Raleigh. Sloan family wife Joan, daughter Leslie and her husband Biff Nichols and son Mike was in the crowd of about 75 invited guests, along with Lowe, Wolfpack Club Executive Director Bobby Purcell, athletics director Lee Fowler and associate athletics director David Horning.
They talked of broken noses and just how tough team trainer Herman Bunch made them. Tommy Burleson had his nose broken and two teeth knocked out when UCLA’s Ralph Drollinger elbowed him in the face near the end of the first half of the first meeting between the two teams, at the St. Louis Arena in a made-for-television special between two teams were undefeated in 1973. Burleson played the rest of the game in a fog, and the Bruins won 84-66.
Moe Rivers caught an elbow to the nose in the greatest game in ACC history, the 103-100 overtime win over Maryland in the 1974 ACC Tournament in Greensboro.
“I was on the court screaming I can’t breathe out of my nose! I can’t breathe out of my nose!’” Rivers recalled. “So Herman comes off the bench, packs it with some cotton and says Hey, Moe: Breathe out of your mouth.’
“And I thought, Wow, Herman that is brilliant!’”
And Rivers played the rest of the game.
Towe, who is now an assistant on Lowe’s current Wolfpack staff, suffered a broken nose and cracked wrist in the middle of the undefeated 1972-73 season, but never missed a game.
Towe said: “Herman always told us: Go out and practice. It’ll make you feel better.’ And it usually did.”
Sunday night, they felt better just being together, with team managers, Bunch, Dr. Don Reibel and assistant coach Art Musselman.
Thompson and Burleson are still familiar figures and frequent guests at Wolfpack basketball games.
Thompson, low-key and soft-spoken as always, still lives in Charlotte, where he is the vice president of a sports ministry program that operates basketball leagues for area youth. He proudly claims Davidson’s Stephen Curry as one of the program’s alums, even though he wishes Curry hadn’t put up 44 points against NC State earlier this season. But Curry picked the right number to honor Thompson...
Burleson is back in the mountains, not far from his real hometown of Squirrel Creek, N.C. The famous “Newland Needle” is the director of planning and inspections for Avery County and owner of a Christmas tree farm that he operates with his sons.
Some of the guys who attended took extreme measures to get here. Tim Stoddard, the forward/pitcher who spent 12 years in the major leagues following his NC State basketball career, made a late decision to come down, after his invitation was redirected several different places.
Stoddard, now an the pitching coach at Northwestern University, made his reservation Friday afternoon and was here by Sunday morning, either extremely eager to see his old mates or simply to get out of the 10 inches of snow and minus-33 wind-chill factor in Chicago for a visit to balmy North Carolina.
Truth be told, Stoddard made the decision to come when he heard that Sam Esposito, NC State’s former head baseball coach and Sloan’s long-time assistant basketball coach wanted to see him at tonight’s game.
Stoddard had the unique thrill of playing for two of the most fiery coaches of the 1970s, Sloan and Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver. Who yelled at him more?
“It was probably about the same,” said Stoddard, who pitched in two World Series with the Orioles. “But what Norm yelled at me made a lot more sense than what Earl yelled.”
Rivers came down from the Bronx, where he works for the City of New York Human Resources Department. He’s been out of touch for a while, so his thick Brooklyn accent and his broad smile were a welcomed addition to the reunion.
Greg Hawkins came down from his home state, West Virginia, for the reunion. And Jerry Hunt, Thompson’s high school teammate, came from Charlotte, where he has spent more than two decades teaching, as he puts it, “emotionally and behaviorally blessed children.”
Mike Buurma, a freshman on the ’74 team, traveled from Willard, Ohio, with his three sons-in-law for a chance to be with his old teammates. He now owns three produce farms, a total of about 5,000 acres in Michigan, Ohio and Georgia.
Others didn’t have to travel far at all.
Spence, now retired after three decades as a high school and college basketball coach in the area, still lives in Raleigh, his hometown. He stays busy with an occasional stint as a substitute teacher for Wake County Schools.
Craig Kuszmaul recently retired after 33 years of teaching carpentry and now does residential construction in Smithfield, N.C., just outside of Raleigh.
Mark Moeller, who has been in Raleigh since graduation, just took a job with downtown architectural first J Davis & Associates as director of business development.
Among those who were unable to attend was assistant coach Eddie Biedenbach, now the head coach at UNC-Asheville. He and his team were playing at Ohio State Sunday night. The other players on the roster were Steve Nuce, Bill Lake, Steve Smith, Dwight Johnson, Bruce Dayhuff and Ken Gehring.
At the end of the night, Lowe closed the reunion by giving a position-by-position breakdown of the 1983 NCAA Championship team and the 1974 team. On Saturday, the coach said if the two teams played against each other the ’83 team would likely win on a last-second shot at the buzzer, maybe in the same manner as the Wolfpack beat Houston.
Sunday night, however, he had second thoughts, as he stood talking to the players.
“I don’t know, you guys had David Thompson, the greatest player in the history of college basketball,” Lowe said. “I don’t know if anybody could have stopped you.”
You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
