NC State Bench Goes from Warm To Hot
In the summer of 1954, one of America’s slickest basketball coaches hosted a recruit that would have made his team a contender for a national championship. Everett Case, known as the Old Gray Fox, had come south in the 1940s to NC State University and brought along something that would change the region and in fact the nation and big time college basketball.
Recruiting former U.S. Navy players from his home state of Indiana, Case introduced NC State and again the nation to a team that scribes quickly dubbed The Hoosier Hot Shots. The team ran rampant though the league and their showcase, another CASE creation, was the grandest Christmas Holiday Basketball Tournament on the East Coast---The Dixie Classic.
How smart was Case? Well, he created the tournament, then hosted it in NC State’s Reynolds Coliseum, the largest venue in the Southeast at the time. Here local Big Four (NC State, The University of North Carolina, Duke and Wake Forest) teams with incredibly high profiles took on hand-picked outside teams from across the nation in a tournament that never failed to pack the new building.
What Case created was more than a money making machine. It was an incredible recruiting tool as prospective high school players (both football and basketball) were invited to NC State to celebrate the Christmas holidays while watching the basketball bonanza. During one tournament in ’58, five of the top ten teams in the nation participated. The drawing cards included the University of Cincinnati’s Oscar Robertson and Michigan State’s Jumpin’ Johnny Green as drawing cards. Carolina paraded out Lee Schafer, NC State Lou Pucillo, and Duke Dick Groat.
But there was another great player, hardly one who would be considered a bench warmer, who made an incredible splash in the Classic much to the chagrin of the Old Gray Fox.
The story begins in the summer of 1954. Everett Case was an incredible recruiter, and the recruit that he had and had to have was none other than West Virginia’s Hot Rod Hundley. Hundley would go on to become the number one pick by the NBA where he was a tremendous showman who set league scoring records.
But as Coach Everett Case, the Old Gray Fox, sat on the bench licking his chops at NC State, he did so knowing that he was about to sign a player who had averaged 30 points per game at West Virginia’s Charleston High School, broke the state’s four-year high school scoring record in just three years, and had been a shoo-in high school All-America.
During that summer of ’54 Hot Rod lived in Raleigh in the basement of two brothers who were big NC State boosters and had a summer job as a lifeguard at Raleigh’s Pullen Pool---a pool where he never wet his toes.
Why? Because he was busy shooting hoops in NC State’s Reynolds Coliseum. Hot Rod slept till noon, drifted over to Reynolds, shot hoops and played in pickup games---this went on day in and day out. When the summer ended, he left Everett Case with the promise that he’d go home for a week, just to pick up his clothes, then come right back to Raleigh to be admitted to NC State.
Problem!
When he returned to West Virginia, half the state showed up on the lawn of the Hundley home---everybody from Fred Schaus, the West Virginia coach, to the governor of the state. And so that was it. Alas, Hot Rod Hundley stayed and enrolled at West Virginia University where he would become a college All-America. Hundley would never return to Everett Case and NC State.
Never return until the first round of the 1955 Dixie Classic Christmas tournament. There in Reynolds Coliseum, Hot Rod’s old playground (with Case sitting on the BENCH seething), Hot Rod dropped a neat 47 points on Wake Forest. When the game ended, Hot Rod strolled over to the bench and when he came to his old “friend” Case, he stopped, put his arm around the beleaguered Case’s shoulder, and said, “Sorry, Coach, home court advantage!”
