Pack of memories
Nobody could have expected Jim Valvano's 10-loss N.C. State team to win the NCAA tournament 25 years ago today — or could have envisioned how it would mean so much to so many for so long.
<DL class=byline>By DAVID TEEL | | 247-4636 <DD>April 4, 2008 </DD></DL>Article tools
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<!--In Albuquerque, coach Jim Valvano holds the spoils of North Carolina State's improbable, memorable 1983 NCAA championship.
-->Dane Suttle can't remember ever missing two clutch free throws. Except on that Friday night 25 years ago in Corvallis, Ore.
A fateful night. A night that changed college basketball.
A night that began a journey. A journey that turned a modest team and its brassy coach into national celebrities.
A journey that resonates still with bravery and victory and tragedy.
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And none of it ever happens if Dane Suttle, his school's career scoring leader and a damn fine foul shooter, doesn't miss the front end of two bonus free throws in the waning moments of what became his final college performance.
That is, if you believe it was actually Suttle at the line attempting to end North Carolina State's 1983 NCAA tournament and extend Pepperdine's.
"Maybe God shot those free throws," Suttle says. "I don't know. It's weird to explain. I believe in fate. It was meant to be."
Jim Valvano sure thought so.
"We're a team of destiny," the N.C. State coach told his players.
"I don't know what the hell would have made him say that," his brother Bob says now.
But the more Valvano said it, the more his team believed it. The more Valvano said it, the more reporters wrote it.
And 25 years ago tonight, in Albuquerque, N.M., the Wolfpack made Jimmy V a prophet, capturing the national championship with an unfathomable 54-52 upset of a University of Houston squad led by two future NBA all-stars.
"We put the madness in March," says Ernie Myers, then a freshman guard.
Indeed, all of the NCAA tournament lore that's transpired since — Villanova and George Mason and Davidson; office pools and bracket busters and "One Shining Moment" — is rooted in the Cardiac Pack.
And like all epic sports tales, this one transcends victory and defeat.
By the 10th-anniversary celebration of the Wolfpack's title, Valvano's administrative negligence had ended his coaching career, and cancer had ravaged his body. Still, before a capacity crowd at N.C. State's Reynolds Coliseum on Feb. 21, 1993, he shuffled to midcourt, took the microphone and spoke, his preacher's cadence strengthening with each sentence.
"They taught me what love means," Valvano said of his players. "When you have a goal, when you have a dream and when you have a belief, and you throw in that concept of never stop believing and loving each other, you can accomplish miracles. ...
"The 1983 team was special, not because it put the banner up there, but because it taught me and the world so much."
How that team won it all remains the stuff of legends.
At 17-10 entering the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament, the Wolfpack had little hope of making the NCAA tournament. Guard Dereck Whittenburg had missed much of the year with a broken foot, and State had lost two of three to close the regular season.
But Lorenzo Charles made two last-second free throws to upend Wake Forest in the ACC quarterfinals. State followed with an overtime conquest of Michael Jordan and defending national champ North Carolina, and a three-point victory over Ralph Sampson and Virginia in the ACC title game.
A team with quality guards (Whittenburg and Sidney Lowe), a sturdy frontcourt (Charles, Thurl Bailey and Cozell McQueen) and productive bench (Myers and Terry Gannon) was headed to the NCAA tournament.
"IT WAS MAGICAL"
Five days and three time zones later, the Wolfpack was done.
State trailed Pepperdine by four points with 29 seconds remaining in overtime of a West Regional first-round game. Suttle, an 84-percent free-throw shooter and the West Coast Conference player of the year, had a one-and-one.
"I wasn't nervous," he says. "I wanted to go to the line."
Then coaching at Kutztown State of Pennsylvania, Bob Valvano was watching alone on a black-and-white television in a Cumberland, Md., hotel. The hour long past midnight, everyone else had gone to bed, convinced the game was over.
Suttle missed, short, and Bailey dunked to bring State within two. Again, the Wolfpack fouled Suttle.
He was determined not to miss short. He missed long.
McQueen tied the game with a follow of a Whittenburg foul shot, his only points of the game, and State won in double overtime, 69-67.
Team of Destiny? Maybe Valvano was onto something.
"Whenever we needed an opponent to turn the ball over, it kind of happened," Charles says. "Whenever we needed someone to miss a free throw, it kind of happened. Whenever we needed to hit a big shot, it kind of happened. It was magical."
It happened again in the second round against Nevada-Las Vegas. After squandering a 12-point, second-half lead, the Rebels led 70-69 with 32 seconds remaining and Eldridge Hudson at the line for a one-and-one.
Hudson missed, and the Wolfpack held for a final shot, which Whittenburg missed. But Bailey's follow with three seconds left won the game and advanced State to the West semifinals in Ogden, Utah.
It wasn't the last buzzer-beater Whittenburg missed. Or the last time a teammate had his back.
Valvano, a hyper New Yorker who jarred many in North Carolina, was in overdrive now. One game at a time? Please. V was talking Final Four and national championship as only he could, in rapid-fire paragraphs that amused and bemused.
He'd been this way since childhood, when the nuns at St. Leo Elementary paraded him to each classroom, where he'd perform his spot-on impression of Jimmy Durante.
"He always said, 'Look for the laugh and at the very least you'll get a smile,' " Bob says.
"If I could bottle some of the things he said," Myers recalls. "There was a game before the game, and that was motivation, and V knew how to play the game so well. You'd run through a brick wall for him. If you heard that stuff and didn't want to jump out of your skin and beat the hell out of someone, then something was wrong with you."
State beat the hell out of Utah in the West semifinals, 75-56. All that separated the Wolfpack from the Final Four was top-seeded Virginia.
The teams had met three times, the Cavaliers winning twice. The Wolfpack's seniors — Lowe, Whittenburg and Bailey — were 2-7 against Sampson.
The game was tied at 61 before Virginia's Othell Wilson made one of two free throws. Charles' two foul shots with 23 seconds remaining gave State a 63-62 lead and the Cavaliers a final possession.
Tim Mullen's long jumper, his only shot of the game, missed, as did Wilson's follow. Sampson, a three-time national player of the year, never touched the ball.
As the Wolfpack celebrated, Sampson dunked the ball violently. His college career was over.
N.C. State's season was not. The Wolfpack headed straight to Albuquerque, where Valvano gladly commanded the game's center stage.
"Like everything else he did, he did (the Final Four) with every ounce of his being," says Bob, a 1979 Virginia Wesleyan graduate.
"YOU BELONG!"
Valvano held court daily with reporters in the lobby of State's hotel; he feigned outrage when some wandered off and spoke to musician Huey Lewis; he turned news conferences at the arena into comedic monologues and reveled in the media's portrayal of State's semifinal against Georgia as the junior-varsity game.
Turned out the portrayal was right. The Wolfpack defeated the Bulldogs in a drab affair, followed by a high-wire act between Houston and Louisville. Led by Akeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, the Cougars, a.k.a. Phi Slama Jama, soared into a championship game in which they were overwhelming favorites.
"I wouldn't be surprised if their fans could dunk," Bailey said after watching Houston.
"If we win the tip, we might not shoot until Tuesday," Valvano said.
Nonsense. As Valvano huddled in a coffee shop with brother Bob and assistant coach Tom Abatemarco the night before the game, Valvano told them he had supreme confidence in his team, especially Whittenburg and Lowe, teammates since their high school days at powerful DeMatha Catholic in suburban Washington, D.C.
"I don't know if we'll win," Bob recalls his brother saying. "But we won't get blown out. Our guards are too good."
Valvano's players were equally assured.
"We were not a great team," Charles says. "They were a great team, but we had played great teams all year. Virginia and Ralph Sampson, North Carolina and Michael Jordan coached by Dean Smith. We didn't feel that we were out of our element or that the stage was too big."
Valvano made sure of it. Detailing strategy before tipoff, he hurled his chalk against the locker-room wall and offered the Wolfpack a simple message:
"You belong!"
He recited their signature victories and relived their compelling journey. The opponent didn't matter, he said. The moment was at hand.
"You belong!"
"We were ready," Myers says. "We didn't back down."
Indeed, N.C. State controlled the first half, even while quickening the pace against the more talented Cougars. Sitting in the stands, Bob Valvano thought his brother "had lost his mind."
He was sure of it when Houston opened the second half with a 17-2 run. State trailed 42-35.
But Drexler was in foul trouble, Olajuwon was sucking wind, and the Wolfpack was employing its free-throw voodoo. With 1:05 remaining and the score tied at 52, Houston's Alvin Franklin missed the front end of a one-and-one.
Unencumbered by a shot clock, State held for a final opportunity, and with 44 seconds left, Valvano called timeout. But his play, designed for Bailey in the low post, broke down.
With the clock about to expire, Whittenburg let fly from 30 feet. The shot was far short, the most famous airball in basketball history.
"I just went and got it," Charles says.
"I just saw Lorenzo come out of nowhere, grab the ball and dunk it in," Myers says. "It was like slow-motion. And it was pandemonium after that."
Bailey collapsed to the floor in tears, Lowe and Whittenburg danced in one another's arms, and McQueen and Myers climbed atop the basket. But the iconic images show Valvano racing around the court searching for someone — anyone! — to hug.
And that's fitting, for despite all of his championship dreaming, Valvano never had envisioned its impact. On him, his school, or, most important, just plain folk.
THE EPILOGUE
Bob Valvano says countless people thanked his brother and his team for inspiring them. People battling drug addiction or domestic strife or financial crisis.
No one could have known that Jim Valvano's most inspirational time was yet to come. Or that it would be born of ultimate adversity.
In December 1989, the NCAA sanctioned N.C. State for rules violations within the basketball program. Four months later, the school bought out Valvano's contract.
Apologetic and defiant, Valvano turned to television. To no one's surprise, he was a natural.
On June 19, 1992, ESPN announced that Valvano had bone cancer. By all accounts, the prognosis was grim.
Valvano confronted cancer's challenge as he had all others: with uncommon energy, vision and humor.
His speech at the championship team's 10-year reunion touched many, but it paled to the 10-minute stem-winder he delivered March 4, 1993. The event was ESPN's inaugural Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly awards show, the ESPYs, and Valvano received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.
Posted a year ago on YouTube, the speech has drawn more than 300,000 hits, almost 1,000 per day. College students study it, friends marvel at it, and Bob Valvano compares it to Lou Gehrig's "luckiest man on the face of the Earth" oration at Yankee Stadium.
Less than two months from death, there's Valvano, in tuxedo, urging people to laugh, cry and think every day. There he is vowing to "never give up" and proclaiming, "Cancer can take away all my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul."
Jim Valvano would have turned 62 last month. His brother Bob is a radio broadcaster with ESPN and the University of Louisville; Lorenzo Charles works for a limousine service, and Ernie Myers sells advertising, both in Raleigh.
Dereck Whittenburg and Sidney Lowe are college head coaches at Fordham and N.C. State, respectively; Terry Gannon is a television broadcaster for ABC, and Thurl Bailey is a businessman, broadcaster and musician in Utah, where he played 10 NBA seasons.
Most attended the silver anniversary celebration of their championship in February, an event that spotlighted the V Foundation, a cancer research charity that has raised more than $70 million since its inception 15 years ago.
"V always told us (the championship) would mean more 25 years later than it does right now," Myers says. "He was right."
And what of Dane Suttle?
Drafted by the Kansas City Kings, he played two seasons in the NBA. He made 86 percent of his foul shots.
Today he's a personal trainer in Los Angeles and next season his son, Dane Jr., will play for Pepperdine. The elder Suttle figures that his son's enrollment will rekindle questions about those missed foul shots against the Team of Destiny.
And he's OK with that.
"When those guys went on and won it all, that helped me heal quicker," Suttle says. "If they had lost in the next round, it would have worn on me longer. ...
"My negative turned into a positive. Jim Valvano touched so many lives."
But what if Suttle had made those free throws, and Pepperdine had defeated N.C. State? Would Jim Valvano the coach have become Jimmy V the celebrity? Would he have made the careless mistakes that derailed his career? Become the force of nature that created so much good even in death?
The questions are as enticing as the answers are elusive.
Bob Valvano professes no grand insight, but offers this: "We're surrounded by steroids and scandal and all that's wrong with sports. Every once in a while you see sports at its most glorious. That was one of those times, and it's always worth revisiting."
Nobody could have expected Jim Valvano's 10-loss N.C. State team to win the NCAA tournament 25 years ago today — or could have envisioned how it would mean so much to so many for so long.
<DL class=byline>By DAVID TEEL | | 247-4636 <DD>April 4, 2008 </DD></DL>Article tools
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<NOSCRIPT></NOSCRIPT><!--In Albuquerque, coach Jim Valvano holds the spoils of North Carolina State's improbable, memorable 1983 NCAA championship.
-->Dane Suttle can't remember ever missing two clutch free throws. Except on that Friday night 25 years ago in Corvallis, Ore.
A fateful night. A night that changed college basketball.
A night that began a journey. A journey that turned a modest team and its brassy coach into national celebrities.
A journey that resonates still with bravery and victory and tragedy.
Related links
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And none of it ever happens if Dane Suttle, his school's career scoring leader and a damn fine foul shooter, doesn't miss the front end of two bonus free throws in the waning moments of what became his final college performance.
That is, if you believe it was actually Suttle at the line attempting to end North Carolina State's 1983 NCAA tournament and extend Pepperdine's.
"Maybe God shot those free throws," Suttle says. "I don't know. It's weird to explain. I believe in fate. It was meant to be."
Jim Valvano sure thought so.
"We're a team of destiny," the N.C. State coach told his players.
"I don't know what the hell would have made him say that," his brother Bob says now.
But the more Valvano said it, the more his team believed it. The more Valvano said it, the more reporters wrote it.
And 25 years ago tonight, in Albuquerque, N.M., the Wolfpack made Jimmy V a prophet, capturing the national championship with an unfathomable 54-52 upset of a University of Houston squad led by two future NBA all-stars.
"We put the madness in March," says Ernie Myers, then a freshman guard.
Indeed, all of the NCAA tournament lore that's transpired since — Villanova and George Mason and Davidson; office pools and bracket busters and "One Shining Moment" — is rooted in the Cardiac Pack.
And like all epic sports tales, this one transcends victory and defeat.
By the 10th-anniversary celebration of the Wolfpack's title, Valvano's administrative negligence had ended his coaching career, and cancer had ravaged his body. Still, before a capacity crowd at N.C. State's Reynolds Coliseum on Feb. 21, 1993, he shuffled to midcourt, took the microphone and spoke, his preacher's cadence strengthening with each sentence.
"They taught me what love means," Valvano said of his players. "When you have a goal, when you have a dream and when you have a belief, and you throw in that concept of never stop believing and loving each other, you can accomplish miracles. ...
"The 1983 team was special, not because it put the banner up there, but because it taught me and the world so much."
How that team won it all remains the stuff of legends.
At 17-10 entering the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament, the Wolfpack had little hope of making the NCAA tournament. Guard Dereck Whittenburg had missed much of the year with a broken foot, and State had lost two of three to close the regular season.
But Lorenzo Charles made two last-second free throws to upend Wake Forest in the ACC quarterfinals. State followed with an overtime conquest of Michael Jordan and defending national champ North Carolina, and a three-point victory over Ralph Sampson and Virginia in the ACC title game.
A team with quality guards (Whittenburg and Sidney Lowe), a sturdy frontcourt (Charles, Thurl Bailey and Cozell McQueen) and productive bench (Myers and Terry Gannon) was headed to the NCAA tournament.
"IT WAS MAGICAL"
Five days and three time zones later, the Wolfpack was done.
State trailed Pepperdine by four points with 29 seconds remaining in overtime of a West Regional first-round game. Suttle, an 84-percent free-throw shooter and the West Coast Conference player of the year, had a one-and-one.
"I wasn't nervous," he says. "I wanted to go to the line."
Then coaching at Kutztown State of Pennsylvania, Bob Valvano was watching alone on a black-and-white television in a Cumberland, Md., hotel. The hour long past midnight, everyone else had gone to bed, convinced the game was over.
Suttle missed, short, and Bailey dunked to bring State within two. Again, the Wolfpack fouled Suttle.
He was determined not to miss short. He missed long.
McQueen tied the game with a follow of a Whittenburg foul shot, his only points of the game, and State won in double overtime, 69-67.
Team of Destiny? Maybe Valvano was onto something.
"Whenever we needed an opponent to turn the ball over, it kind of happened," Charles says. "Whenever we needed someone to miss a free throw, it kind of happened. Whenever we needed to hit a big shot, it kind of happened. It was magical."
It happened again in the second round against Nevada-Las Vegas. After squandering a 12-point, second-half lead, the Rebels led 70-69 with 32 seconds remaining and Eldridge Hudson at the line for a one-and-one.
Hudson missed, and the Wolfpack held for a final shot, which Whittenburg missed. But Bailey's follow with three seconds left won the game and advanced State to the West semifinals in Ogden, Utah.
It wasn't the last buzzer-beater Whittenburg missed. Or the last time a teammate had his back.
Valvano, a hyper New Yorker who jarred many in North Carolina, was in overdrive now. One game at a time? Please. V was talking Final Four and national championship as only he could, in rapid-fire paragraphs that amused and bemused.
He'd been this way since childhood, when the nuns at St. Leo Elementary paraded him to each classroom, where he'd perform his spot-on impression of Jimmy Durante.
"He always said, 'Look for the laugh and at the very least you'll get a smile,' " Bob says.
"If I could bottle some of the things he said," Myers recalls. "There was a game before the game, and that was motivation, and V knew how to play the game so well. You'd run through a brick wall for him. If you heard that stuff and didn't want to jump out of your skin and beat the hell out of someone, then something was wrong with you."
State beat the hell out of Utah in the West semifinals, 75-56. All that separated the Wolfpack from the Final Four was top-seeded Virginia.
The teams had met three times, the Cavaliers winning twice. The Wolfpack's seniors — Lowe, Whittenburg and Bailey — were 2-7 against Sampson.
The game was tied at 61 before Virginia's Othell Wilson made one of two free throws. Charles' two foul shots with 23 seconds remaining gave State a 63-62 lead and the Cavaliers a final possession.
Tim Mullen's long jumper, his only shot of the game, missed, as did Wilson's follow. Sampson, a three-time national player of the year, never touched the ball.
As the Wolfpack celebrated, Sampson dunked the ball violently. His college career was over.
N.C. State's season was not. The Wolfpack headed straight to Albuquerque, where Valvano gladly commanded the game's center stage.
"Like everything else he did, he did (the Final Four) with every ounce of his being," says Bob, a 1979 Virginia Wesleyan graduate.
"YOU BELONG!"
Valvano held court daily with reporters in the lobby of State's hotel; he feigned outrage when some wandered off and spoke to musician Huey Lewis; he turned news conferences at the arena into comedic monologues and reveled in the media's portrayal of State's semifinal against Georgia as the junior-varsity game.
Turned out the portrayal was right. The Wolfpack defeated the Bulldogs in a drab affair, followed by a high-wire act between Houston and Louisville. Led by Akeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, the Cougars, a.k.a. Phi Slama Jama, soared into a championship game in which they were overwhelming favorites.
"I wouldn't be surprised if their fans could dunk," Bailey said after watching Houston.
"If we win the tip, we might not shoot until Tuesday," Valvano said.
Nonsense. As Valvano huddled in a coffee shop with brother Bob and assistant coach Tom Abatemarco the night before the game, Valvano told them he had supreme confidence in his team, especially Whittenburg and Lowe, teammates since their high school days at powerful DeMatha Catholic in suburban Washington, D.C.
"I don't know if we'll win," Bob recalls his brother saying. "But we won't get blown out. Our guards are too good."
Valvano's players were equally assured.
"We were not a great team," Charles says. "They were a great team, but we had played great teams all year. Virginia and Ralph Sampson, North Carolina and Michael Jordan coached by Dean Smith. We didn't feel that we were out of our element or that the stage was too big."
Valvano made sure of it. Detailing strategy before tipoff, he hurled his chalk against the locker-room wall and offered the Wolfpack a simple message:
"You belong!"
He recited their signature victories and relived their compelling journey. The opponent didn't matter, he said. The moment was at hand.
"You belong!"
"We were ready," Myers says. "We didn't back down."
Indeed, N.C. State controlled the first half, even while quickening the pace against the more talented Cougars. Sitting in the stands, Bob Valvano thought his brother "had lost his mind."
He was sure of it when Houston opened the second half with a 17-2 run. State trailed 42-35.
But Drexler was in foul trouble, Olajuwon was sucking wind, and the Wolfpack was employing its free-throw voodoo. With 1:05 remaining and the score tied at 52, Houston's Alvin Franklin missed the front end of a one-and-one.
Unencumbered by a shot clock, State held for a final opportunity, and with 44 seconds left, Valvano called timeout. But his play, designed for Bailey in the low post, broke down.
With the clock about to expire, Whittenburg let fly from 30 feet. The shot was far short, the most famous airball in basketball history.
"I just went and got it," Charles says.
"I just saw Lorenzo come out of nowhere, grab the ball and dunk it in," Myers says. "It was like slow-motion. And it was pandemonium after that."
Bailey collapsed to the floor in tears, Lowe and Whittenburg danced in one another's arms, and McQueen and Myers climbed atop the basket. But the iconic images show Valvano racing around the court searching for someone — anyone! — to hug.
And that's fitting, for despite all of his championship dreaming, Valvano never had envisioned its impact. On him, his school, or, most important, just plain folk.
THE EPILOGUE
Bob Valvano says countless people thanked his brother and his team for inspiring them. People battling drug addiction or domestic strife or financial crisis.
No one could have known that Jim Valvano's most inspirational time was yet to come. Or that it would be born of ultimate adversity.
In December 1989, the NCAA sanctioned N.C. State for rules violations within the basketball program. Four months later, the school bought out Valvano's contract.
Apologetic and defiant, Valvano turned to television. To no one's surprise, he was a natural.
On June 19, 1992, ESPN announced that Valvano had bone cancer. By all accounts, the prognosis was grim.
Valvano confronted cancer's challenge as he had all others: with uncommon energy, vision and humor.
His speech at the championship team's 10-year reunion touched many, but it paled to the 10-minute stem-winder he delivered March 4, 1993. The event was ESPN's inaugural Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly awards show, the ESPYs, and Valvano received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.
Posted a year ago on YouTube, the speech has drawn more than 300,000 hits, almost 1,000 per day. College students study it, friends marvel at it, and Bob Valvano compares it to Lou Gehrig's "luckiest man on the face of the Earth" oration at Yankee Stadium.
Less than two months from death, there's Valvano, in tuxedo, urging people to laugh, cry and think every day. There he is vowing to "never give up" and proclaiming, "Cancer can take away all my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul."
Jim Valvano would have turned 62 last month. His brother Bob is a radio broadcaster with ESPN and the University of Louisville; Lorenzo Charles works for a limousine service, and Ernie Myers sells advertising, both in Raleigh.
Dereck Whittenburg and Sidney Lowe are college head coaches at Fordham and N.C. State, respectively; Terry Gannon is a television broadcaster for ABC, and Thurl Bailey is a businessman, broadcaster and musician in Utah, where he played 10 NBA seasons.
Most attended the silver anniversary celebration of their championship in February, an event that spotlighted the V Foundation, a cancer research charity that has raised more than $70 million since its inception 15 years ago.
"V always told us (the championship) would mean more 25 years later than it does right now," Myers says. "He was right."
And what of Dane Suttle?
Drafted by the Kansas City Kings, he played two seasons in the NBA. He made 86 percent of his foul shots.
Today he's a personal trainer in Los Angeles and next season his son, Dane Jr., will play for Pepperdine. The elder Suttle figures that his son's enrollment will rekindle questions about those missed foul shots against the Team of Destiny.
And he's OK with that.
"When those guys went on and won it all, that helped me heal quicker," Suttle says. "If they had lost in the next round, it would have worn on me longer. ...
"My negative turned into a positive. Jim Valvano touched so many lives."
But what if Suttle had made those free throws, and Pepperdine had defeated N.C. State? Would Jim Valvano the coach have become Jimmy V the celebrity? Would he have made the careless mistakes that derailed his career? Become the force of nature that created so much good even in death?
The questions are as enticing as the answers are elusive.
Bob Valvano professes no grand insight, but offers this: "We're surrounded by steroids and scandal and all that's wrong with sports. Every once in a while you see sports at its most glorious. That was one of those times, and it's always worth revisiting."
