Francis Combs is ending a streak for all the right reasons

There are many Wolfpack families who given every ounce of energy in their support of the university and its athletics programs. Few, however, have been given as much as the Combses.

Twins Freddie and Francis came to Raleigh from Hertford, N.C., in 1965 on dual football-baseball scholarships, and quickly became, as they like to joke, the “illegitimate sons of Frank Weedon,” the long-time sports information director and senior associate athletics director who took them under his wing shortly after they arrived from Perquimans High School.

Together, the twins helped lead the Wolfpack to the school’s first appearance in the College World Series, and Freddie was an All-American defensive back on the first team in school history to win a postseason bowl game. They repaid Weedon many times over by taking care of him in his final years as a widower, when dementia robbed him of the many memories they shared together.

Francis’ two sons, Chris and Ryan, grew up embedded in Wolfpack athletics. Chris and his dad both chuckle at the memory of a 1980s basketball game against North Carolina in Reynolds Coliseum when Chris was serving as a ball boy. Though he was supposed to be neutral, at a critical point in the game with a Tar Heel player on the line, he stood under the basket, waving his arms and towel trying to distract the shooter.

“We’ve always been red, through and through,” Chris Combs said.

Eventually, both Chris and Ryan played baseball for the Wolfpack, becoming favorites of head coach Elliott Avent. Chris was a hard-hitting, hard-throwing first baseman capable of drawing rain with his high-arching home runs.

Francis, as he had with the New York Yankees and his high school friend Jim “Catfish” Hunter, pitched many hours of batting practice, umpired many intra-squad games and even coached a summer league team that was mostly comprised of Wolfpack baseball players. If he ever missed one of his son’s games in Little League, at Broughton High School or at NC State, they don’t remember it.

However, Francis never got to continue his football career after showing up to be the Wolfpack’s freshman team quarterback in 1965. That’s because the NCAA suspended him for a semester for traveling with Hunter on a summer road trip during the pitcher’s rookie season with the Kansas City Athletics.

Not allowed to travel with the football team, Francis Combs hitchhiked his way from Raleigh to East Lansing, Mich., for the 1966 season opener against Michigan State. It took him 30 hours, more than a dozen different rides and a prolonged walk through the state of West Virginia, but he made it to the stadium just as the Wolfpack team was leaving its Friday afternoon walk-through.

The team gave him a standing ovation, head coach Earle Edwards promised him a ride home on the team plane and Weedon gave him a job as a spotter for the Wolfpack Radio Network with announcers Bill Jackson and Wally Ausley.

Combs has kept that job for 51 seasons, attending 598 consecutive Wolfpack games, home, away and neutral. He’s been with 11 head coaches, three play-by-play announcers and a 319-270-9 record that includes every highlight and heartbreak of the last half century.

The win over Georgia in the 1967 Liberty Bowl? He was there in the booth. The Lou Holtz years, when the Wolfpack lost only one home football game and went to four consecutive bowls? He saw them all. He became quite familiar with calling out No. 23 when Ted Brown was piling up rushing and all-purpose yards during his record-breaking career. The horrible loss to Penn State in 1979 on a dying duck field goal that bounced off the upright and through the posts? He watched it through binoculars.

The miracle catch by Danny Peebles with no time left on the clock in 1986? Saw it. The win over Florida State in 1998? Yep. The outstanding careers of Philip Rivers, Jerricho Cotchery and Russell Wilson? Of course.

Getting there wasn’t always easy. There were long drives to Florida State and other locations when there wasn’t room on the team plane. There were difficult trips home and discussions with security guards.

“Francis is very good at talking his way into a stadium,” said play-by-play announcer Gary Hahn.

Hahn remembers the time that Combs was left behind at Clemson, when the team rushed to get to the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport for the flight home while Combs was still in the postgame media scrum with the Tiger head coach. The team bus left him behind, but Combs convinced a South Carolina Highway Patrol officer to get him to the airport.

“And there he was, as we were going through security, waiting for us at the gate,” Hahn recalled.

But if you ask Combs what his favorite memory of all those football games were, he’ll tell you that it was a game that had little impact on salvaging a 3-9 season after which head coach Chuck Amato was let go.

That’s because he was sitting beside his friend, former Wolfpack quarterback and All-America punter Johnny Evans, on Sept. 24, 2006, when quarterback Daniel Evans hit receiver John Dunlap with a game-winning touchdown throw with eight seconds left against No. 20 Boston College — and he knew exactly what the emotions were like.

“To be able to sit there with Johnny, knowing what it is like to see your son do something special in a situation like that,” Combs remembered. “There is nothing that compares to it.”

That’s probably why the decision to end his remarkable streak of consecutive games wasn’t so difficult. Chris Combs, who is now an associate director with the Wolfpack Club, asked his dad to go with his young family to the Virgin Islands to see the NC State men’s basketball team play in the Paradise Jam. For years, Francis has also worked as a spotter and postgame interviewer for Wolfpack basketball games as well.

“But you’ll have to miss a football game,” Chris told his father.

Choosing family over football was a no-brainer for Combs, because his family has been through so much in the last year. In the spring, after months of tests, false-positives and trips to Duke University in Durham, to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, to a specialist in Phoenix, to Columbia University in New York, Chris was officially diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

It’s the same disease that claimed the life of lifelong family friend Hunter in 1999.

“There have been good days and bad,” Chris said since his diagnosis. “It’s really just something you take day by day.”

His story was told with care and compassion by Joe Giglio of the Raleigh News & Observer.

The Combs family, and the Wolfpack athletics community, have thrown as much support to Chris as they can. Avent, football coach Dave Doeren and head basketball coach Mark Gottfried gave their time to help with a fundraiser for Project ALS in September. It raised more than $1 million for the nonprofit organization.

Gottfried and his staff are participating in the no-shave November to bring awareness to the plight of Combs and ALS patients everywhere. There are about 16,000 people living with ALS in the United States and about 350,000 worldwide.

Combs has put together a team for the North Carolina Chapter of the ALS Association’s Walk to Defeat ALS on April 22, 2017, with the goal of raising $150,000 for ALS research. It would be the single largest fundraiser in the history of the local organization, which is named in memory of Hunter.

So in the grand scheme, taking a family vacation with his son, his daughter-in-law and his three grandchildren means much more than continuing a streak of football games, even for someone who has devoted 51 years to the athletics radio crew.

“I knew this streak would end sometime,” said Francis Combs, who earlier this fall won the Ronnie Shavlik Award of Merit, the highest honor a former student-athlete can receive from the Wolfpack Club. “Going to so many consecutive games wasn’t something I ever really intended to do, so I’m not really losing anything.

“There is a good reason for it, and that makes it worth it. For my family, I’ll do anything.”

Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.