North Carolina State University Athletics
PEELER: Pack Looking For a Good Time in Hotlanta
3/11/2009 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
BY TIM PEELER
RALEIGH Nothing will ever top the ACC Tournament’s first trip to Atlanta, a wild confluence of events that propelled NC State into the NCAA Tournament and towards the 1983 National Championship.
But the three trips to the Georgia capital since haven’t worked out as well for the Wolfpack, which was eliminated in the second round of the 1985 tournament and in the first round of both the 1989 and 2001 tournaments.
Wolfpack head coach Sidney Lowe, however, loves Atlanta, and not just because as a senior point guard in 1983 he helped Wake Forest, North Carolina and Virginia to win the championship and was the recipient of the Everett Case Award as the tournament’s most valuable player.
He loves it now because it has become the Wolfpack’s most fertile recruiting ground, the place where he found and signed J.J. Hickson in his first season as head coach and a pair of signees for next year, Lorenzo Brown and Richard Howell.
Heading into Thursday’s 7 p.m. opening-round game against Maryland, Lowe is looking for his Atlanta mojo to work yet again.
“I hope history repeats itself,” Lowe said Tuesday before the team departed.
For the 1983 tournament, Lowe remembers being loose, following the Wolfpack’s 130-89 victory over Wake Forest in the regular-season finale. And even though the team was not assured of an NCAA bid, there didn’t seem to be much pressure on Jim Valvano and his team as they headed to Atlanta to play in The Omni, the now demolished downtown arena that looked for the world like a rusty waffle iron.
“We didn’t have any pressure on us at all,” Lowe said of that magical season. “We were confident that we were a good basketball team. When you have confidence, there can’t be any pressure.
“So we didn’t feel any.”
This year’s Wolfpack (16-13 overall, 6-10 ACC) is seeded 10th in the tournament.
“I am not sure where this team is with its confidence, but if we go into the tournament with confidence, we won’t have any pressure,” Lowe said. “We just have to go play.”
Here are recaps of the Wolfpack's previous tournaments in Atlanta.
1983
To set the record straight, the Wolfpack didn’t have to win the ACC Tournament to earn Jim Valvano’s team a berth into the NCAA Tournament. By beating Wake Forest on a free throw by sophomore Lorenzo Charles with three seconds remaining, the Wolfpack solidified its claim on the league’s fourth bid into the newly expanded, 52-team tournament.
By beating North Carolina in overtime thanks to nine straight points by senior guard Dereck Whittenburg, who had scored just four points in regulation, and a career-high 26 points by Atlanta-loving Lowe the Wolfpack was a shoo-in for the NCAA field.
At least that’s what that year’s NCAA Tournament Selection Committee chairman, Hall of Fame coach Dave Gavitt, has said many times over the years.
But those two victories landed the Wolfpack in the championship game against regular-season champion Virginia, led by All-America center Ralph Sampson. By then, Valvano figured, it was good to take advantage of momentum.
“Guys, I’ll tell you what,” Valvano told his confident team moments before they took the court against the top-ranked Cavaliers, “if we win this game, we are definitely in.”
Sampson scored 18 points and grabbed nine rebounds in the first half alone, but the Cavs managed just a 40-37 lead at halftime, thanks to a trio of experimental 3-pointers by sophomore guard Terry Gannon.
Sampson was fronted in the second half by Thurl Bailey and checked from behind by a combination of Charles, Cozell McQueen and Alvin Battle. That held his scoring and rebounding in check. The game turned on two critical plays a technical foul on Cavalier assistant coach Jim Larranaga with five minutes to play and Gannon slapping the ball out of Sampson’s hands with less than a minute to play.
Whittenburg, who had been injured earlier in the season against Virginia, sank a pair of free throws to seal the victory and the Wolfpack’s record ninth ACC Tournament championship.
That title sent the Wolfpack into the NCAA Tournament with great confidence, and six games and five second-half comebacks later, Valvano’s Cardiac Pack beat Houston on a last-second dunk by Charles to win the school’s second NCAA title.
Every now and then, in Raleigh, you can still see a classic bumper sticker in some scrapbooks, office cubicles and a few beat-up old cars.
“Wake Forest, North Carolina and Virginia: Breakfast of Champions.”
1985
The Wolfpack anchored by seniors Lorenzo Charles, Cozell McQueen, Spud Webb and Terry Gannon finished in a three-way tie for first place in the regular-season standings, with North Carolina and Georgia Tech, thanks to a late-season surge in which it won seven of its last eight regular-season games.
But the post-season coin-toss was not kind to the Wolfpack, which beat fourth-ranked Southern Methodist, 11th-ranked North Carolina and sixth-ranked Duke during its February surge. The home-standing Yellow Jackets won the top seed in a pre-tournament drawing, while the Tar Heels were seeded second and the Wolfpack third.
Charles had matured into a monster on the court and earned All-ACC and All-America honors. He single-handedly beat the Blue Devils at Cameron Indoor Stadium, scoring 18 points in a 10-minute span and finishing with 25 points. It was perhaps the greatest game of his career.
The Wolfpack eased by Clemson in the opening round of the tournament, again played at the Omni. But in the semifinals, North Carolina double-teamed Charles the whole game, limited him to just five points and held on for a 57-51 victory.
Valvano’s team wasn’t sorely affected by the loss: it won a pair of game in Albuquerque, N.M., the same building where it had beaten Georgia and Houston two years before in the Final Four. In the Sweet Sixteen in Denver, the Pack easily upended Alabama to advance to the Elite Eight for the second time in three years.
But Chris Mullins scored 25 points and led St. John’s to a 69-60 victory over the Pack and a berth in the Final Four.
1989
This season 20 years ago has to rate as the wildest season in NC State basketball history, and much of the craziness happened en route to Atlanta.
Expectations weren’t especially high for Valvano and his team, but it had put together a strong early-season run against so-so competition and won eight of its first 10 games.
Then, in early January on the same day the Wolfpack debuted Nike’s uniform of the future, the Unitard, in a nationally televised contest against Temple The (Raleigh) News & Observer reported that a forthcoming book called Personal Fouls by author Peter Golenbach would reveal multiple NCAA infractions and improprieties in Valvano’s program.
The season-long storm brought the team led by Chucky Brown, Brian Howard and Avie Lester and the Fire and Ice backcourt combination of Chris Corchiani and Rodney Monroe closer together. Corchiani gutted out the second half of the season, playing on a lower-leg stress fracture that affected his play.
There were two games that played a huge role in the Wolfpack winning its first out-right regular-season championship of Valvano’s tenure. The first was the Wolfpack’s scheduled road trip to Atlanta to face Georgia Tech in early February. The team was slated to leave the night before for a nationally televised noon game.
But a winter storm snowed the team in Raleigh for the night, and the 9:10 a.m. flight that was supposed to get the team into Atlanta in just the nick of time for tipoff was canceled in the middle of the night.
The next morning, Valvano and his staff found 14 seats on a commercial flight that arrived in Atlanta at 11:50. The nine players who made the trip south were on the plane dressed in their uniforms, taped and ready to play when the plane landed. After trailing behind a funeral procession, the team made it to Georgia Tech’s Alexander Memorial Coliseum by 12:15 and the game was only slightly delayed.
The Wolfpack showed no ill signs of the ordeal, shooting 56 percent from the field in the first half and taking a 71-69 victory in the waning seconds on a pair of free throws by Monroe.
A few weeks later, an intentionally missed free throw played a huge role in the Wolfpack beating Wake Forest in four overtimes, still the longest ACC regular-season game in the league’s history.
The Wolfpack went to Atlanta as the regular-season champions, even though the league didn’t officially recognize that as a championship until the next season.
But it was a short trip. The Wolfpack was inexplicably flat and fell to Maryland, 71-49, in the opening round, the first time in the 36-year history of the league that the tournament’s top seed fell to the No. 8 team.
“We went through an entire game without doing the first thing right,” Valvano said.
Seemingly shocked by the win, Maryland coach Bob Wade collapsed in the lockerroom and had to leave the Omni on a stretcher.
Valvano’s team put things back together for the NCAA Tournament, beating South Carolina and Iowa on the opening weekend and advancing to the Sweet Sixteen at the Meadowlands. But the season and Valvano’s NCAA career came to an end with a 69-61 loss to Georgetown, a game defined by an official calling Corchiani for traveling instead of giving Georgetown center Alonzo Mourning his fifth foul with less than two minutes to play.
2001
Little went right in Herb Sendek’s fifth season as NC State’s head coach. The 2000-01 team was plagued by injuries to Damien Wilkins, Archie Miller and Ron Kelley, and there were some off-court-problems that proved to be big distractions.
So the poor-shooting Wolfpack limped into Atlanta’s 40,000-seat Georgia Dome the league’s first ever trip into a dome for the post-season event with a 13-15 record. It was no match for second-seeded Duke, which ended the Wolfpack’s season with a 76-61 whipping in the opening round.
However, the next season behind the play of senior guards Anthony Grundy and Archie Miller and a five-player freshman class that included future ACC Player of the Year Julius Hodge and little-known Bulgarian native Ilian Evtimov the Wolfpack advanced to the ACC Tournament Championship game and began a run of five consecutive NCAA appearances.
You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
