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John Mengelt was a recruiting miss that ultimately paid great dividends for NC State men’s basketball head coach Norman Sloan.
Mengelt was an undersized forward from Elwood, Ind., who was recommended by Sloan’s former NC State roommate and four-time All-Southern Conference selection Dick Dickey, a Hoosier State native who often passed on the names of players to his longtime friend that he thought could help his alma mater.
Not surprisingly, Sloan was stubborn about not recruiting Mengelt.
“I’ll never have someone that undersized on my team,” Sloan told Dickey.
Mengelt, a two-sport standout at Wendell Willkie High, barely even remembers being recruited by Sloan and his assistants.
“I got about 200 Division I college football offers and about seven or eight college basketball offers,” said the 69-year-old Mengelt. “My mom and dad didn’t want me to play both in college, so I decided to play basketball.
“I do remember getting a letter or two from NC State, but that’s about as far as it went.”
Mengelt opted to play basketball at Auburn from 1968-1971, where he became an All-SEC and All-American player who was taken with the 21st pick of the 1971 NBA Draft by the Cincinnati Royals. He set, and still owns, the Auburn single-season scoring record of 28.3 points a game during his senior year.
Of particular note, Mengelt had a pair of world-class games against Sloan’s Wolfpack, totaling 71 points in the home-and-home contests.
In fact, Mengelt’s 45-point game on Dec. 5, 1970, in a 98-51 Tiger victory at Auburn is still the most points ever scored by an opposing player against the Wolfpack. And that was a good NC State team, having knocked off unbeaten South Carolina in the conference tournament title game the year before to win Sloan’s first ACC title.
It was a rare home-and-home series against the Tigers, the Wolfpack’s opponent this Wednesday night at PNC Arena. The two early members of the Southern Conference played twice in the 1920s, twice in the 1930s and three times during Sloan’s NC State career. The last meeting between the teams was a 79-74 Wolfpack win Dec. 27, 1975, in Reynolds Coliseum.
Sloan never forgot, nor forgave himself, for Mengelt’s performance, mainly because Dickey wouldn’t let him.
Eventually, the coach told his old roommate that the next time he came up with any legitimate recruiting tip, he would take the player sight unseen.
Dickey held him to that promise just a year later. The Marion, Ind., bird dog was sent by Sloan to scout Northfield High guard Steve Ahlfeld against Converse High, not far from Dickey’s home.
After the game, Dickey told Sloan to forget Ahlfeld, that he had found the Wolfpack’s point guard of the future playing for Converse.
Sure, the player was undersized, standing just 5-foot-7 in lifted loafers.
Sure, Sloan had never had anyone like him in his time as head coach at Presbyterian, The Citadel or Florida.
Sure, Dickey knew Sloan would balk at the mere suggestion.
A promise was a promise, and Sloan reluctantly offered diminutive point guard Monte Towe a scholarship, even though he was easily the seventh best player in Sloan’s seven-player 1971 recruiting class.
“He’s going to get killed in the ACC,” Sloan said grumpily.
Towe had abilities, however, that didn’t show up on the size chart. Freshman coach Sam Esposito noticed that the team Towe played for in scrimmage games always won, whether he was playing with David Thompson or Tim Stoddard or not.
“The midget can play,” Esposito told his boss.
Towe proved his toughness as a sophomore, playing much of the season with a broken wrist and a broken nose, while getting the ball regularly to 7-foot-4 center Tommy Burleson and Thompson.
Towe and Stoddard, both baseball players, perfected the long pass to Thompson, a play everyone now calls the “alley-oop.” The Pack won all 25 games it played in 1972-73.
The next year, when Burleson was a senior and Thompson, Towe and Stoddard were juniors, they formed one of the best teams in NCAA basketball history, losing just once all season and unseating seven-time national champion UCLA in the semifinals of the NCAA Tournament. Then the Wolfpack took down Marquette in the title game, all in front of a hometown crowd in Greensboro.
After the national championship contest, Marquette coach Al McGuire gave all due praise to Thompson and Burleson, but acknowledged that Towe’s floor leadership was the reason the Wolfpack won the game.
During Towe’s career, the Wolfpack was 45-6 against ACC opponents, including regular-season league games, the Big Four Tournament, North-South Doubleheaders and the ACC Tournament.
Like Mengelt, who now lives in Lake Forest, Ill., Towe was good enough to play professional basketball, spending two years with Thompson on the ABA’s Denver Nuggets.
“He paved the way for me because of his success at Auburn,” Towe said of Mengelt.
But he may never have gotten that chance had Sloan not stubbornly refused to have an undersized forward early in his NC State career.
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
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