A Davidson-NC State meeting in 1947 carried historic significance

It might be weird for NC State’s men’s basketball team to travel all the way to Texas to face Davidson, one of its fiercest early basketball rivals, in Thursday’s first round of the National Invitation Tournament (NIT), but such is the last year in all our lives.

It’s certainly no weirder than the Wolfpack Women facing North Carolina A&T, a regular rival based in Greensboro, at the NCAA Women’s Championship site in San Antonio.

What’s even stranger is how few times of note that the Wolfpack and Wildcats have played in recent years. The last meeting was during two-time NBA MVP Steph Curry’s time at Davidson, when NC State head coach Sidney Lowe and his team split games with the Cats in back-to-back seasons.

In the old days before conferences, State and Davidson were part of North Carolina’s Big Five, along with UNC-Chapel Hill, Wake Forest and Trinity (now Duke). That rivalry mostly dissolved in 1953 when four of the schools left the Southern Conference for the Atlantic Coast Conference, leaving Davidson by its lonesome in the country’s first formal conference.

State has only played against the Wildcats 19 times since then, winning 17 of them.

There is one game in the rivalry, however, that sticks out more than most others. The contest was played on Feb. 22, 1947, at NC State’s Thompson Gymnasium, the decrepit and small venue on campus that barely sat 2,500 spectators.

That season, head coach Everett Case’s first at NC State, basketball became the most popular pastime for the World War II veterans who had enrolled on the GI Bill and their wives. So popular, in fact, there were no general admission tickets sold to the public and no tickets available to faculty.

Midway through the season — in which NC State did not lose a home game — distribution was changed to an alphabetical split, with last names A-M getting tickets one game and N-Z the next. Those tickets were hot, with basketball beginning to take root like flue-cured tobacco in the North Carolina soil.

The NC State Student Government came up with an idea to sell all student tickets to the general population, faculty and staff to help raise funds for the incomplete Memorial Tower on the northeastern entrance of the campus.

“These plans are being made because the Memorial Tower has been incomplete for so long and because much more interest has been shown in completing the Tower recently than has been expressed in many years,” noted the NC State Student Government.

The Belltower was originally built to honor NC State alumni who died in World War I. A full Depression and another World War later, the Belltower was finally constructed, but without chimes in the belfry it was incomplete.

Some $14,000 had been raised to purchase them, but it was not enough. By selling their tickets to the general public, the students hoped to raise another $3,000 or so to contribute to the Belltower.

Students voted to approve the sale, invalidating their passes for the game. In all, they sold 2,543 tickets and raised just over $3,100 for the Belltower chimes.

The State-Davidson game was the first time Raleigh and surrounding communities really got to see in person the kind of fast-paced, pressing basketball Case had brought with him from his home state of Indiana and from his four-year stay in the Navy.

That night, they saw Leo Katkaveck score a game-high 16 points, with 14 each from freshman Dick Dickey and sophomore Pete Negley. Case’s squad beat the Wildcats, 65-56, and the Raleigh community was completely and irrevocably hooked.

Three nights later, so many spectators showed up to see NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill play at Thompson Gym that they overran the ticket takers and ushers. More than 4,000 fans, students, dates, staff and faculty rushed the doors, and Raleigh fire marshal J.C. Butts canceled the game and sent everyone home, though students lingered in protest.

Case’s team was the top seed in the Southern Conference because of its 21-4 record and 11-2 Southern Conference mark. They swept through the tournament, played at Duke Indoor Stadium in Durham, with wins over Maryland, George Washington and North Carolina, a 50-48 victory in which Case had his championship team cut down the nets.

It was the first time that Indiana high school tradition had been done following a college game.

Afterward and ironically, NC State would play in its first ever NIT appearance, losing to Kentucky in the semifinals before topping West Virginia in the third-place game.

The Davidson win was one of State’s final victories in Thompson Gym, where Case never lost a game. Early the next year, the gym was officially condemned by Raleigh building inspectors, forcing Case and his team to play its home games at the downtown Raleigh Memorial Auditorium until Reynolds Coliseum was opened on Dec. 2, 1949.

About those chimes, though: The first of three electronic carillons was installed in the Belltower just before its dedication on Nov. 11, 1949. Those chimes played off and on for more than five decades, most notably on Veterans and Memorial days and most poignantly on the evening of Nov. 23, 1963, following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

This May, however, real bells will chime in the Belltower, following a three-year renovation project thanks to a gift from Bill and Frances Henry of Gastonia.

Tim Peeler is a regular contributor who can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.