North Carolina State University Athletics
PEELER: Gardner Leaves With Packed Memory Bank
9/17/2009 12:00:00 AM | Football
RALEIGH, N.C. – Eddie Gardner has had a full week to practice. Last week, before the kickoff of NC State's 65-7 win over Murray State, the head official gave Gardner the coin the crew used for the pregame flip.
In two days, when the Wolfpack hosts Gardner-Webb, head coach Tom O'Brien has asked Gardner to toss the coin before the 6 p.m. game, one of the long-time trainer and equipment manager's final acts after serving more than three and a half decades in the athletics department.
"I was thinking about asking Coach O'Brien which one he wanted, heads or tails, and then I could work on making it turn over the right number of times," Gardner said in jest. "I guess that's not possible.
"I'm just hoping I get to keep the coin after the game."
Gardner, a native of the Sampson County town of Roseboro, came to NC State in 1977 to study animal science. He grew up as an NC State fan on a large hog farm and had planned to take over the family business. But, before he even enrolled as a freshman, he visited with the head athletics trainer, Herman Bunch, to ask about working with the football team, as he had done for four years at Lakewood High School.
"I never had any ideas about playing football, but I wanted to be around it, so I volunteered to work with the football team in high school," Gardner recalled. "My dad never understood doing something you weren't getting paid for. He always kind of had an issue with that and would ask 'Son, it's great you are doing that, but how much are you getting paid?'"
Gardner has the perfect answer to that question now: His memory bank is overflowing with stories about Wolfpack athletics.
He can tell you about driving head coach Bo Rein's Mustang home from Clemson in 1979 after the Wolfpack beat the Tigers with a goal-line stand that all but sealed the Wolfpack's seventh ACC Championship. Rein had been on a recruiting prior to the game, and wanted to fly home and celebrate with his team.
He can tell you about flying on Wendell Murphy's private plane with then-athletics director and basketball coach Jim Valvano. He and Murphy were talking about hog farms and chicken farms they saw as they flew overhead, to Valvano's amazement. They taught him how to tell the difference, and that night at a Wolfpack Club meeting in Wallace, Valvano went on and on about his knowledge of eastern North Carolina farming.
And he can tell you about taking care of not only NC State's football team, but also about the times he guarded the Stanley Cup and Miss North Carolina.
But, at the age of 50, Gardner has attached his last facemask and handed out his last load of clean laundry. He's retiring so that he can serve as the accountant for his wife's on-line training company, ProTrain LLC, which serves about 130 junior colleges and universities across the country. Betty Gardner began the business five years ago after working for NC State, and Eddie Gardner handles all the invoices and bills for her company.
"It's not different than what I have been doing here, really," Gardner said. "It's keeping up with the budgets, deciding what needs to be ordered and what we need to do with it all."
Back in the spring, Gardner told O'Brien that this would be his final football season, and he planned to work through December. But his wife's business has kept him so busy that Gardner asked to move up his retirement. His final day will be at the end of September.
When he walks out the door, the Wolfpack will lose one of its walking football historians, a guy who can remember the elation of that '79 ACC football championship and his brushes with the great players who have come through the program since: Johnny Evans, Ted Brown, Danny Peebles, Philip Rivers, just to name a few.
The program will also lose one of its colorful characters, whose eastern North Carolina drawl took a while for O'Brien's staff to fully understand when they arrived from Boston three years ago.
On the other hand, practices might be a little safer. Gardner frequently drove a golf cart from the Dail Practice Facility back to the Murphy Center. Injured or tired players often clamored to ride with him. Every now and then, he would wildly cart the head coach off to make his weekly radio show in time.
Gardner began as a student trainer back as an NC State freshman. Among the players on that team were Ted Brown, Jim Ritcher, Bill Cowher, Kyle Westcoe, Simon Gupton and Woodrow Wilson. Many of those guys are still frequent visitors to the Murphy Center and they always come by to share a story or two.
He remembers that his first job was not taping ankles, but going in the pre-dawn hours to buy doughnuts for the team and staff before the first of three daily practices. Over the years, he did thousands of loads of laundry in the Weisiger-Brown Building and ordered every kind of football equipment imaginable.
He'll always be thankful to Dick Sheridan for making him the football program's equipment manager, and to Valvano for making him laugh. He'll always be grateful to Chuck Amato, who was an assistant coach under Rein when Gardner started, and the Wolfpack's head coach from 2000-2006. He'll always remember those first players he worked with, and he'll keep an eye on the guys who are still in the program to see how their careers turn out.
Gardner can tell those stories forever. In fact, as he sat reminiscing on Wednesday morning, he got a phone from his regular lunch crew as they headed over to Pam's Farmhouse. He told them he would meet them there in 10 minutes. Some 30 minutes later, he was still telling stories about his time with Wolfpack athletics.
He's cleaned out his office, and taking home the trinkets and baubles he's collected over 31 years of full-time service, through seven different coaching staffs, from Rein to O'Brien. There's less of it than you might think.
But he does life-sized cardboard cut-outs of former head coach Chuck Amato, who is now the assistant head coach to Bobby Bowden at Florida state, and O'Brien.
"I'm thinking about putting those out in the yard when we play Florida State this year," Gardner said.
That game will be played in Tallahassee, Fla., on Halloween, so trick-or-treaters will have something besides goblins to gawk at as they make their way through Gardner's neighborhood.
You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
