Vic Bubas, the former NC State basketball player and assistant coach who ushered in the age of the “executive coach” while leading Duke to four ACC titles and three Final Fours during the 1960s, died on Monday at his home in Midlothian, Virginia. He was 91.
Though the native of Gary, Indiana, was not a member of Red Terror coach Everett Case’s famed inaugural recruiting class known as the “Hoosier Hotshots” in 1946, he arrived in Case’s second season, along with the school’s change to the “Wolfpack” nickname for all sports.
He had a stellar playing career as a guard for four consecutive Southern Conference championship teams.
Perhaps his biggest career highlight as a player came on Dec. 2, 1949, when he scored the first basket at Reynolds Coliseum. As a student, he watched the coliseum’s brick-by-brick construction for three years, and he wanted to leave a lasting mark.
He would always remind those who remembered that basket that he also had the arena’s first two missed shots and first two offensive rebounds before scoring the landmark points.
When he came out of the game, Case pulled him aside and said, “Damn, boy, you really wanted that first basket.”
Bubas answered: “Damn right I did. It’s something that no one can ever take away from me.”
It might be the only selfish thing Bubas did his entire life.
Twice, he was named to the All-Southern Conference squad. As a junior, he was in the starting backcourt on Case’s 1950 Final Four team. But a sprained ankle suffered against Holy Cross in the team’s NCAA opener at Madison Square Garden limited Bubas in a semifinal loss to City College of New York.
He was better the next night when the Wolfpack defeated Baylor to finish No. 3 in the nation, the highest placement in the final polls under Case and the program’s best finish until the 1973-74 team won the NCAA championship.
The son of a Yugoslavian immigrant, Bubas grew up in Gary, working in his family’s hardware store. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1944 and was sent to Germany to join the military police just after the war ended. However, he spent most of his time playing for an Army basketball team.
Case first noticed the fellow Indiana native back in their home state before Bubas left the service. The talented guard considered going to Southern California, but decided to attend NC State because he thought Case eventually could help him get into coaching.
“I came to Raleigh and visited with Coach Case,” Bubas once told former Raleigh News & Observer sports editor Dick Herbert.
“In my conversations with him, I told him that, more than anything else, I wanted to be a basketball coach. I told him that I would sacrifice a chance to join my father’s prosperous hardware store if I could coach.
“He told me to enter State, achieve good grades, act as a gentleman at all times and fight hard on the basketball court. He said if I did that, he would fight just as hard to help me land a coaching job.”
It was Case, in fact, who first hired Bubas to be the coach of NC State’s freshman team soon after Hemphill graduated in 1951. After four years, Case elevated Bubas to his top assistant position and put him in charge of recruiting.
“Vic was always a keener student of the game than most,” Case once said of his coaching prodigy. “He studied basketball with the idea in mind that someday he would coach it. You could always trust his judgment.
“Vic is a fine strategist and has a knack for getting close to his players. He is a relentless worker and has a great desire for winning.”
Among many all-stars and future professional players, Bubas lured two future ACC Players of the Year to Raleigh, Ronnie Shavlik of Denver, Colorado, and Lou Pucillo of Philadelphia, ushering in an era of national recruiting to the newly formed Atlantic Coast Conference.
“Vic taught us all how to recruit,” the late Dean Smith once said of his cross-Triangle rival. “We had been starting on prospects in the fall of their senior years, like almost everybody. But Vic was working on them in their junior years. For a while all of us were trying to catch up with him.”
After four years next to Case on the Wolfpack bench, Bubas informed his boss he would leave the team after the 1958-59 season. He was looking for a head coaching job, but was ready to enter graduate school at Florida if he didn’t get an offer.
He was sorely disappointed when he missed out on the New Mexico job, but not long after that Duke head coach Hal Bradley resigned his position to become the head coach at Texas. Duke athletics director Eddie Cameron chose Bubas over some 150 other applicants for the job, much to the consternation of Duke fans, who thought they deserved better than an assistant coach who had just quit his lucrative job.
Like Case at NC State, Bubas never signed anything but a one-year contract with Duke. In time, just like those disgruntled after three years of Mike Krzyzewski, they changed their minds. Bubas recruited three more ACC Players of the Year (Art Heyman, Jeff Mullins and Steve Vacendak), and led the Blue Devils to four ACC titles and three Final Four appearances.
In 10 years, his teams compiled a 213–67 overall and a 106-32 ACC record.
Then, just like that, Bubas decided to retire from coaching at the tender age of 42. He went to work with Duke’s university administration until 1976, when he began a 14-year stint as the founding commissioner of the Sun Belt Conference. He retired to Hilton Head, South Carolina, in 1990, then moved to Richmond, Virginia, with Tootie, his wife of nearly 70 years, to be near most of their grandchildren.
“He lived an incredible life, doing the things he wanted to do on his terms,” said former NC State player Bucky Waters, who was Bubas’s first assistant coach and his successor as head coach at Duke. “And he left the world that way too, surrounded by his family, in his sleep.
“This is a major loss for the college basketball community.”
Bubas was inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame in 1976, the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 2003 and the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in 2007.
A memorial for Bubas is scheduled for 11 a.m. Tuesday at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia.
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
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