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This Date in History | Flat Rock Playhouse

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donbosco

donbosco

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Sweet D Left This Mortal Coil

Here’s remembering..,

The 1976-77 Carolina Men’s Tar Heel Basketball Team carried us along in their wake through a March Mad with Miracles. As a freshman in Chapel Hill I - gloriously - have never recovered. In those days the Atlantic Coast Conference was a compact league of 7 bitter rivals — UNC, Wake, State, dook, Clemson, Virginia, and Maryland. We played one another twice - home and away - and rival arenas were pits packed with palpably intense loathing and deafening vitriol.

An interesting footnote to the texture of seasons in those times were the schedules interspersed with non-conference matches not just early but throughout. Small leagues made that sort of play possible. In ‘76-77 after the ACC season started Carolina had games with Georgia Tech, Furman, Tulane, South Florida, and Louisville. Oh, and in North Carolina we STARTED off with The Big Four Tournament - the very first games of the season - in Greensboro - a blood and guts kickoff between Carolina, wake, state, and dook. This meant 3 guaranteed games between the four in-state powers every year (a fourth might come in the ACC Tournament). Those were some heavenly days. In ‘76-77 after a solid thumping of the wolpfack in the opener, UNC lost the Big Four Championship in overtime to Wake Forest (96-97). Grudges were renewed all around.

Carolina won 11 straight after that loss until being tripped up in a revenge game to State in mid-January at mean, nasty, barnlike Reynolds Coliseum, 73-75. That one hurt but payback would come - in that very spot for Clyde Austin and state college in 1979 by the quick hands of then bench bound freshman Dudley Bradley - but that half court pickpocket was still in the future in 1977. That State game led to The Tar Heels dropping another tilt to Wake and an embarrassing loss to Clemson in Littlejohn (talk about a PIT) before Coach Smith righted the ship and led his charges to 15 wins in a row and a Final Four Championship game versus Marquette in Atlanta.

The final 6 wins, all in March, of that 15 victory streak were particularly remarkable and for a freshman from #DeepChatham made memories still bold over 45 years later. The ACC Tournament saw UNC with a bye by virtue of a 9-3 first place finish and a second round meeting with State - the fourth of the season. Carolina actually dispatched the Wolfpack easily and followed that up with a championship win over a Marc Ivaroni-led Virginia. It was March 5.

The NCAA opened with a Carolina/Purdue match-up in Raleighwood in the previously mentioned old barn - and it was a burner. Playing without injured star Walter Davis UNC prevailed 69-66. Center Tommy LaGarde was also out - and would not return that season. At the buzzer we went pretty wild back in Chapel Hill. It had been close.

Next game up was in College Park - another crackerbox and home to the Maryland Terrapins - yet another hated conference rival. The foes were the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame led by mouthy Coach Digger Phelps. The Irish were a muscle team but with Walter Davis playing hurt Carolina rallied from behind and won 79-77. This was my first ‘taking over Franklin Street’ night. A little place called Kirkpatrick’s was my evening venue in those days and we were there until far past Last Call that night.

There was no time to rest though because March 19 meant a Blue Blood struggle against Kentucky - since Coach Smith’s upset victory over racist Rupp in 1962 the waters had been roiled - as they remain - between the Tar Heels and the Wildcats. UK had an early version of the Twin Towers in Robey and Phillips and Givens was a star. There was controversy and rough play - Davis led the scoring with 21 and Carolina’s freshmen tandem, O’Koren and Yonakor (Class of 1980 like me) came through. Zaliagaris was a particularly stalwart soul and with Phil Ford limited to 15 minutes of court time due to a hyper-extended elbow, #15, John Kuester stepped in and ran the Four Corners Offense to perfection. Kentucky fell 79-72. In Chapel Hill we once again hit the streets.

For the next two weeks the student body took to taping together their middle and index fingers on their right hand in solidarity with their injured hero Sweet D. (H/T Arnold Watkins for the recollection)

This ship was beginning to look unsinkable. Charmed perhaps. And now - with stars Ford and Davis at three-quarter speed and center Tommy LaGarde’s last court time far in the past Coach Smith was proving wiley beyond our wildest dreams at the helm. So this improbable squad was on to the Final Four which featured Nevada-Las Vegas, shirt-tailed Marquette, and from down highway 49, Cornbread’s UNC Charlotte.

Back in Chapel Hill Yonakor and O’Koren had earned a lot of campus cred with both their hustle and around town antics. The team had captured all our hearts and minds in The Southern Part of Heaven heading into the Saturday night game against UNLV. Of course Ford was our captain and Walter Davis an equally beloved hero - both were injured but soldiering on. And Kuester - in the Semis and versus UNLV he proved the glue that held it all together.

Heading into the Monday night final against Marquette it was the walking wounded (Carolina) meeting the Cinderella (Marquette) - the calm calculator (Smith) versus the wild man of Milwaukee (Al McGuire). My Psychology 10 professor had the cluelessness to schedule a test for Tuesday morning (I have no idea how many showed - I know that I did not). We lost and all was sadness in town and on campus. McGuire’s announcement to retire after the game was too much ‘win it for the gipper’ for Carolina. That and Ford’s elbow and Sweet D’s broken finger. It hurt a lot.

Davis, Kuester, and LaGarde graduated and played pro (even Kuester). Walter Davis, of the tying 35-footer his freshman year in the legendary 8 points in 17 seconds game, went on to be a 6-time NBA All Star with his jersey retired in Phoenix. He won a Gold Medal in the 1976 Olympics where his coach was Dean Smith. He was a huge part of the team that made my freshman year at Carolina so incredible. As the springtime slowly sprung that year in Chapel Hill Sweet D and Company took us on a ride that set the tone. Many others would do likewise - still do - most recently the 2021-22 squad whose essence was reminiscent in its miraculousness.

If you know me then you know that I put great stock in how one ‘plays the game.’ One’s sense of fairness and values shine through in competition and teamwork. Now Walter Davis is gone - Tom Zaliagaris and Rich Yonakor from that team preceded him and of course Coach Smith left us in 2015. Of course we’re also reminded by such titans of mortal flaws and the impermanence of it all. It’s a wake up call when folks - your contemporaries - pass on - even more so when once upon a time they lifted your spirit with heroic deeds and gave you moments, now memories, that altered the path of your life.

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One of my all time-time favorites. I made a lot of buzzer beaters in my driveway as Walter Davis.
 
Didn't see you mention NBA Rookie of the Year (as was Phil the next year). Had the pleasure of partying with these guys a couple times. Great players; better people.
 
Sweet D might have been the smoothest Carolina player ever.

Charles Scott, Al Wood, Michael Jordan, and Wayne Ellington are up there; but, Sweet D was gazelle-like.
 
I had my picture taken with Davis and Ford at the Gardner Webb basketball camp in the summer of 1977 (or was it 76, can't remember which). Just found the framed pic when I was cleaning out my parent house!! 2 of my absolute favorite players of all time.
 
Doesn’t always a have to be political, just a daily calendar of anniversary events …

Starting today with the fall of the Berlin Wall 35 years ago





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Also

“On this day in 1938, in an event that would foreshadow the Holocaust, German Nazis launch a campaign of terror against Jewish people and their homes and businesses in Germany and Austria. The violence, which continued through November 10 and was later dubbed “Kristallnacht,” or “Night of Broken Glass,” after the countless smashed windows of Jewish-owned establishments, left approximately 100 Jews dead, 7,500 Jewish businesses damaged and hundreds of synagogues, homes, schools and graveyards vandalized. An estimated 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, many of whom were then sent to concentration camps for several months; they were released when they promised to leave Germany. Kristallnacht represented a dramatic escalation of the campaign started by Adolf Hitler in 1933 when he became chancellor to purge Germany of its Jewish population.”

HISTORY

The HISTORY Channel - Geschichte erleben! The HISTORY Channel ist der deutschsprachige Pay-TV-Sender für spannende Dokumentationen und macht die Faszination von Menschen und Ereignissen täglich greifbar!
www.history.com www.history.com
 


On November 10, 2024, U.S. Marines around the globe will celebrate 249 years of success on the battlefield and a legacy defined by honor, courage and commitment. This year, the Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Eric M. Smith and the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Sgt. Maj. Carlos A. Ruiz reiterate to the force that Marines are warfighters first and foremost, in any clime and place. Drawing on the strength and service of those who wore the Eagle, Globe and Anchor in years past, Marines today are standing ready to fight and win.

www.dvidshub.net

DVIDS - Commandant of the Marine Corps 249th Birthday Message

www.dvidshub.net www.dvidshub.net
 
On this day in 1871, the--now cliched--phrase, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume," was allegedly first uttered.
 
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Way back in the 1990s I managed to ‘get on’ teaching history at a small religious college in North Carolina. At first I only taught Latin American History - my ‘specialty’ - but when my great friend, mentor, and advocate, Alex Stoesen, discovered that my second field was the History of the American South, he cajoled me into taking up his North Carolina History classes. I wasn’t perfectly prepared though I had taken plenty of pertinent courses over the years at both UNC and at Appalachian State (where I earned an MA in the ‘80s). Of course, growing up in the state I had the standard 7th grade course that focused on a sanitized and status quo-acceptable North Carolina narrative.

I also had family members that were very engaged with our history. My Aunts Burdine and Leisel were teachers and bibliophiles. Over the years of my youth they showered me with books about local and regional history. My parents never denied me a book either and bookstores were my joy - especially when forced to accompany my mother, a world-class shopper, and her sisters when they made their forays out of #DeepChatham into Raleigh and Greensboro for shoes and who knows what-all else. I always managed to wangle a good haul of reading material out of those trips. Explains a good deal about my life frankly.

I also lived through some significant times and my Deddy’s obsession with the news meant that I was reading newspapers and magazines and plugged into TV and radio from a very early age. My parents were affected by state, local, and even world events and they talked about civil rights, the Vietnam War, Watergate, presidential and congressional politics and policy, the Governor and the NC General Assembly - all those things and more - each night at supper and always while riding in the car. I was an eye, AND ear, witness to history being made.

I read a lot of books that were fairly wrong-headed but I didn’t know it at the time. There were countless “Lost Cause” glorifications of the Confederacy for example. I also read about Charles Aycock, dubbed by apologists as the “Education Governor” and got a mild sense that North Carolina was run by “Progressive Plutocrats” who benevolently operated their textile mills and tobacco factories not so much for profit but more for the public good. ‘Pro Bono Publico’ they insisted. But what I only learned later was that what was the most misleading about those books I read as a child was what went left out.

My 7th grade textbook was titled, ‘North Carolina: History-Geography-Government’ and it was written by Dr. Hugh T. Lefler from Cooleemee, NC and the Department of History at UNC. ‘NC:HGG’ was my book in 1971, had been published in 1959, and reprised much of the material from ‘North Carolina: The History of A Southern State’ from 1954. Lefler’s co-author in both was Dr. A.R. Newsome, also a native Tar Heel (Marshville) and UNC History Professor.

It mainly left out African Americans save to mention that they had been enslaved and according to Lefler, had been a ‘problem’ ever since emancipation. In his version, in the late 19th century conservative Democrats, whose leaders were the White Supremacist sons and descendants in most cases of slave holders and secessionists, had risen up against “Bad Government” and “Negro Rule” to eventually return the state fully to white control. He did mention briefly that “an organization called the ‘Red Shirts’ which used some of the methods of the old Ku Klux Klan” aided in “keep[ing] the Negro from voting” as part of that conservative, regressive return to power.

To continue in that same vein, about the murderous acts of White Supremacists in 1898 Lefler wrote: “After the election there was a race riot in Wilmington. Several Negroes were killed; many were driven from the city; a few white people were wounded; and the Democrats seized control of the city government.”



And that was it.



The only SUCCESSFUL coup d’étàt in the history of the United States, perpetrated by White Supremacists who went on to reestablish the rule of an elite class over the state by murdering hundreds of African American citizens and displacing even more - and those few lines in ‘North Carolina: History-Geography-Government’ were the sum total of what at least two generations, perhaps more, of North Carolinians learned in school.


Today, we cover this in Humanities classes that all juniors where I now teach are required to take. I am happy to teach that course. I also cover this in my North Carolina History courses. I ask my students if they have heard about the events of Wilmington 1898. Almost none have. Don’t tell me that we don’t need to retool our curriculums to face hard questions about race. Today’s historical remembrance is a harsh and horrible one - modern conservatives would strike it from the record. They HAVE stricken it from classrooms and texts for generations. Half-Ass History won’t do in a Constitutional Democratic Republic. But such a thing facilitates authoritarian racist governance. We are casting our lots in these days with one or the other. It is that simple.


#OTD (November 10) in 1898 the Democratic Party’s (South/Conservative) campaign to regain control of North Carolina culminated in a massacre of African American citizens (the number is disputed) & the overthrow of Wilmington City Gov’t, (USA’s only successful coup d’étàt). White Supremacy and segregationist discriminatory Jim Crow legislation ruled the state for decades. Advances in equality and civil rights, albeit small, were all but erased. It took the Civil Rights Movement in the second half of the 20th century before many rights were available again to People of Color in NC & the South. https://www.ncdcr.gov/blog/2012/11/10/wilmington-race-riots
 
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IMG_5566.jpegGrowing up we watched the news on WRAL because it came out of the capital city of Raleigh, a reasonable distinction before the days of 24-7 news coverage. The logic was that the Raleigh station ñ would have the latest regarding the state of the State. That was Channel 5 - a number that in my youth was negatively associated with the clear villainy of Jesse Helms - a connection thankfully tempered in recent years by heroes that wore that number like Marcus Paige and Armando Bacot!

As a child I remember very clearly noting that the left-side of Helm's mouth configured into a sneer each time he pronounced the letter 'R.' Long before I even tried to understand what his horrid message was I disliked the man. Once I gathered the gist of his communication that dislike ballooned. In retrospect I can see that a lot of things began to inch off the rails as this cretin’s influence rose.

That he and his dirty tricks were acceptable was the tip-off that so much worse might be in the cards. Today in Congress the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and Lauren Boebert represent the “Worst Ángels of our Nature” and manage to effortlessly out-Helms ‘Dear Jesse’ daily. Of course I believe that senator Helms’ life’s work is a huge negative on the planet and humanity and that his hands are deeply stained with the blood of 100s of thousands of Central Americans but as bad as he was I can’t get past the sense that the modern trumpist GOP is beyond even his famous malevolence. Still, were he around today I have no doubt that, not to be outdone, he’d adjust properly.

Helms attacked my Alma Mater with vigor and frankly he was a measure that we were on the right track. From our #DeepChatham den in the 1960s and ‘70s to hear the nightly foreshadowing on Channel 5 of today’s all too familiar trumpist juvenile name-calling in Helmsian phrases like “UNC: The University of Negroes and Communists” or “Not Chapel Hill - but Commie Hill” simply endeared the Southern Part of Heaven to me. After all, it was Coach Smith’s teamwork, passing, and winning style of play, communal to its core, that had gotten me on The Front Porch and with every Point to The Passer for an easy basket I knew more and more where the Better Ángels were based.

That the larger UNC System can still serve as a target for Senator No’s modern disciples and admirers is a comfort but that the same set now hold most of the reins of power is deeply disturbing. The consistent attacks on the 17 campuses and the humanities in particular has been Gerrymandered into an upper hand over a decade old now and much damage has been done. Imagine that crooked sneer on the face of Helms as he looks up from his eternal resting place and mutters Re-Education. In the trenches and classrooms the battle continues.



“#OTD in 1976 the final segment of ‘Viewpoint’ aired on WRAL-Raleigh. TV Journalist and Pundit Jesse Helms (Monroe NC) used the 5 minute nightly show (broadcast with the evening news) to transmit his Conservative Ideas and build his Senate career which, beginning in 1973, endured 30 years.” Jesse Helms and “Viewpoint”
 
donbosco said:
IMG_5566.jpegGrowing up we watched the news on WRAL because it came out of the capital city of Raleigh, a reasonable distinction before the days of 24-7 news coverage. The logic was that the Raleigh station ñ would have the latest regarding the state of the State. That was Channel 5 - a number that in my youth was negatively associated with the clear villainy of Jesse Helms - a connection thankfully tempered in recent years by heroes that wore that number like Marcus Paige and Armando Bacot!

As a child I remember very clearly noting that the left-side of Helm's mouth configured into a sneer each time he pronounced the letter 'R.' Long before I even tried to understand what his horrid message was I disliked the man. Once I gathered the gist of his communication that dislike ballooned. In retrospect I can see that a lot of things began to inch off the rails as this cretin’s influence rose.

That he and his dirty tricks were acceptable was the tip-off that so much worse might be in the cards. Today in Congress the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and Lauren Boebert represent the “Worst Ángels of our Nature” and manage to effortlessly out-Helms ‘Dear Jesse’ daily. Of course I believe that senator Helms’ life’s work is a huge negative on the planet and humanity and that his hands are deeply stained with the blood of 100s of thousands of Central Americans but as bad as he was I can’t get past the sense that the modern trumpist GOP is beyond even his famous malevolence. Still, were he around today I have no doubt that, not to be outdone, he’d adjust properly.

Helms attacked my Alma Mater with vigor and frankly he was a measure that we were on the right track. From our #DeepChatham den in the 1960s and ‘70s to hear the nightly foreshadowing on Channel 5 of today’s all too familiar trumpist juvenile name-calling in Helmsian phrases like “UNC: The University of Negroes and Communists” or “Not Chapel Hill - but Commie Hill” simply endeared the Southern Part of Heaven to me. After all, it was Coach Smith’s teamwork, passing, and winning style of play, communal to its core, that had gotten me on The Front Porch and with every Point to The Passer for an easy basket I knew more and more where the Better Ángels were based.

That the larger UNC System can still serve as a target for Senator No’s modern disciples and admirers is a comfort but that the same set now hold most of the reins of power is deeply disturbing. The consistent attacks on the 17 campuses and the humanities in particular has been Gerrymandered into an upper hand over a decade old now and much damage has been done. Imagine that crooked sneer on the face of Helms as he looks up from his eternal resting place and mutters Re-Education. In the trenches and classrooms the battle continues.



“#OTD in 1976 the final segment of ‘Viewpoint’ aired on WRAL-Raleigh. TV Journalist and Pundit Jesse Helms (Monroe NC) used the 5 minute nightly show (broadcast with the evening news) to transmit his Conservative Ideas and build his Senate career which, beginning in 1973, endured 30 years.” Jesse Helms and “Viewpoint”
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My parents would explain to us how wrong he was about most everything. They hated him. Luckily the old apples didn't fall far from the tree. I dislike everything about Capital Broadcasting though it's hard to avoid them.
 
grimes70 said:
My parents would explain to us how wrong he was about most everything. They hated him. Luckily the old apples didn't fall far from the tree. I dislike everything about Capital Broadcasting though it's hard to avoid them.
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Broke my Deddy's heart when my brother became a follower.
 
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