North Carolina State University Athletics
Oldest Living Basketball Lettermen Tell All
2/19/2009 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Editor's note: This story originally appeared in the March 13, 2005, issue of The Wolfpacker. It is reprinted with permission of Coman Publishing Company.
BY TIM PEELER
Sam Womble will never post anything about NC State basketball on an Internet message board. He will never read the stuff other people write, whether it’s supportive or destructive.
He might be one of the few believable people when he says he doesn’t know how to get on the Internet.
That’s because Womble, Wolfpack basketball’s oldest living letterman, still remembers when radio, moving pictures and television were all newfangled technologies.
“I don’t fool with it,” Womble said. “I don’t even ask any questions because I am so dumb about it. I don’t want to show my ignorance. All this Internet stuff is too deep for me.”
Womble, 92, is the oldest living but not the only link to the days when the Dr. Ray Sermon was the Wolfpack’s basketball coach.
Neil Dalrymple, on the other hand, toggles daily between the Wolfpacker website and www.gopack.com on his WebTV.
“Hey, maybe, you can tell me this,” Dalrymple said to a recent caller. “When’s Amato going to hire some more assistants?”
Maybe that’s because the Internet is for young folks: Dalrymple, N.C. State’s oldest living basketball captain, won’t turn 90 until April.
The young kids are always more proficient with the latest innovations.
Womble and Dalrymple remain a remarkable living link to the unheralded pre-Everett Case era of N.C. State basketball, back when the school had won exactly one conference title (in 1929) in its first 36 years of intercollegiate basketball. (There have been 16 conference titles and two national championships since.)
Womble was born Aug 17, 1912, just four months after the Titanic sank. Dalrymple was born July 22, 1915, only a few months before Babe Ruth and North Carolina native Ernie Shore helped the pre-cursed Boston Red Sox win the first of its three World Series in four years.
They’ve been around for near-unfathomable changes in the world around them. Both were born before Alexander Graham Bell died. Both remember the early hoopla of radio and moving pictures and the novelty of television. So when something like the Internet came along, they were relatively unfazed.
The two former Wolfpack basketball players have a long, long history, dating back to Jonesboro High School in Lee County. They met not long after Womble’s family he was the son of the Lee County sheriff -- moved to Jonesboro just after the stock market crash of 1929.
They played basketball together for former Elon player Clarence “Tobe” Crutchfield, who built a mini-dynasty at the now-defunct high school. Womble was a 6-foot-4 center and Dalrymple was a 5-foot-11 point guard. During a three-year span, Jonesboro went 69-6, including an appearance in the state Class B championship game in 1932 and an undefeated state title run in 1933, the only state championship in school history. They were good enough that season to beat Campbell College’s team in an exhibition game.
Three players from that Jonesboro team were offered scholarships to play basketball at State College: Womble, Dalrymple and Len Matthews. (Womble’s younger brother John was offered a scholarship a year later, but he didn’t go to college.) They all played on Bob Warren’s 1933-34 freshman team, winning the Big Four championship against North Carolina, Duke and Wake Forest. Meanwhile, the varsity made headlines by ending South Carolina’s then-NCAA record of 31 consecutive victories in the first round of the Southern Conference Tournament. But Matthews left school after that first year.
As sophomores, Womble and Dalrymple moved up to Dr. Ray Sermon’s varsity team in 1934-35, when both won varsity letters while helping the Red Terrors go 10-9 overall and 6-5 in the Southern Conference. It was a trying year, mainly because of injury and illness. Rufus “Chub” Womble (no relation to Sam) suffered a broken wrist early in the season, then the State College campus was stricken by a flu epidemic, which hobbled the team on a three-game swing through South Carolina.
Still, it was an exciting time in Southern Conference basketball. The league’s innovative 16-team tournament had moved to Raleigh’s Memorial Auditorium in 1933, after being played in Atlanta for 11 straight years since its inception in 1922. It was Raleigh’s first taste of big-time post-season basketball, and the Auditorium frequently had sell-out crowds. However, the Auditorium only held 2,500 spectators for basketball.
Sermon, State College’s head basketball coach and athletics director for 10 years, was a controversial figure. He had a long-time feud with the school’s top sports booster, Dave Clark, who went to the athletics council and the board of trustees to get Sermon removed from his positions. Primarily, Clark didn’t like Sermon’s attitude toward the football program and coach Hunk Anderson, a Knute Rockne protg Clark helped hire for football. Clark, who wanted Anderson to be the basketball coach as well, spent three years trying to get Sermon relieved of his duties, accusing him of using school funds for a variety of personal gains. It didn’t work, and Clark, a prominent businessman in Charlotte withdrew for a while his support of State College athletics.
Sermon finally stepped aside in 1940, handing the reins over to Warren, his long-time freshman coach and a member of State College’s only pre-war Southern Conference Championship team in 1929. But Warren stepped down just two years later when he received his commission in the Navy. Warren was replaced by a one-time teammate of Womble and Dalrymple, Leroy Jay, who coached the Red Terrors for four seasons.
Jay was replaced in 1946 by a guy named Everett Case, who immediately started a string of six consecutive Southern Conference championships.
Sam Womble played only one season of varsity basketball at N.C. State, but like Dalrymple, he lived in the basement of old Thompson Gym, where there were two rooms that were used for living quarters by basketball players. One room was for sleeping, the other for studying, and the half-dozen players who lived there had permission to use the showers and facilities in the basketball lockerroom.
Womble called back home to Sanford after two years of college to manage the town’s first self-service grocery store. He made $47.50 per week for managing the store, good money during the Depression. It was a job he held for three years until he went into business for himself. On Jan.5, 1940, he married his high school sweetheart, Mildred. They celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary last month, by being named the Sanford Lions Club’s King and Queen Sweethearts.
Darlymple, however, stayed in school, helping the Terrors go 15-4 overall and 10-3 in the Southern Conference as a junior, thanks in part to the addition a fiery young center named Connie Mack Berry, who twice led the Southern Conference in scoring before going on to play professional football, basketball and baseball.
Dalrymple, as the only senior on the 1937 team, was elected captain for a season that was unlike anything that was played in prior years. That’s because the rules of college basketball were changed before that year to eliminate the jump ball after every made basket.
“If you had a center tall enough to control the tip-off, why you had the game won, because that is where all the games were won,” said Womble, who switched from center to forward for his sophomore year. “Back then, the hook shot was the most famous shot. And when you would go to the free throw line, you would hold the ball between your legs and lob it up real soft to the basket.”
Neither really recognizes the game they played in today’s March Madness atmosphere. Of course, they didn’t recognize the game played in “Hoosiers,” which, for them, was set in the futuristic world of 1954.
“Law, basketball now, I just can’t conceive of how it is played,” Womble said. “You can take and hold and push and shove, and unless you weigh 250 pounds, then they can just push you out of the way.
“It’s just entirely too rough. It doesn’t even seem like basketball to me. If you had played like that back when I played, you wouldn’t have lasted the first quarter.”
Dalrymple, who didn’t start playing basketball until he was in the 10th grade and only played in the winter months, believes the same thing in an era when first pick up a ball in elementary school and continue to play the game year-round.
“Today’s basketball is so different from the game I played,” Dalrymple said. “Somebody asked me a while back if we ever dunked. I told them, Good Gracious, if the net ever got caught up in the rim, we had to throw a ball up there to dislodge it. Players are so gifted today.
“There is no comparison in the type of basketball we played.”
Womble did play basketball again after he left NC State. He closed up his own grocery store in 1942, when he was drafted into the Army for World War II duty. When he got to Fort Bragg, he ran into another former NC State basketball star named Horace “Bones” McKinney, who had just finished his sophomore season with the Red Terrors.
“Bones pulled me aside and said, “Do you want to play basketball?’ ” Womble said. “Well, of course I did.”
Womble spent the war years teaching illiterate farm boys to read and write at Fort Bragg. He would conduct reading classes in the morning, lead some basic drills in the afternoon and play basketball in the evenings.
After the war, Womble lit out for Broadway Broadway, NC. He and two partners owned Stevens Milling Company, which manufactured livestock feed in the tiny Lee County town with a population of 1,004. After 42 years in that business, he retired in 1991. He still lives in Lee County, where he has lived all 92 of his years. He has three children, four grand children and six great-grandchildren.
Womble still tools around North Carolina in his 2001 Lincoln LS. He used to play golf with a regular foursome three or four times a week, either at Quail Ridge Golf Club in Sanford or Carolina Trace or Carolina Lakes. But that ended not long after his triple-bypass heart surgery last year, though not because of his health.
“One of them died, one of them has Alzheimer’s, and the other one had a bypass, too,” Womble said. “Our foursome just went to pot.”
Dalrymple got a degree in Textiles in 1937, and spent his career working for various textile manufactures in North Carolina. He retired in 1983 from Burlington Industries, and has lived at a Myrtle Beach campground ever since with his wife Kathleen. They will celebrate their 64th wedding anniversary on April 12.
He has no choice but to keep up with NC State. He sent one of his two sons and three of his four granddaughters to Raleigh for their educations. He was on hand last year when his youngest granddaughter, Kariane, graduated in the RBC Center. He came back for both the Red & White game and the Duke game this season.
It’s more difficult for both Womble and Dalrymple to get around these days. Womble has poor circulation in his legs. Dalrymple uses a cane and a wheelchair, mainly because of arthritis and worn out cartilage in his knees.
But they both relish their days as athletes, back when State College teams were the Red Terrors, and getting around wasn’t nearly as hard.
Tim Peeler writes about NC State athletics on www.gopack.com. You may contact him at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
