More than 70 years ago, in August 1948, a World War II Army veteran and North Carolina A&T graduate walked into Riddick Stadium to apply for a job as an assistant to head athletics trainer Al Proctor.
It was a place Chester Grant knew well, because as a teenager in the late 1930s he drove a team of mules to clear the land where the stadium’s west grandstands were built.
The Raleigh native was a truly ground-breaking pioneer who quietly went about his job tending to the medical needs of generations of Wolfpack athletes, a memory worth sharing every year during Black History Month.
Grant had no intention of staying long at the college just a few blocks from his home on Everett Avenue. Yet he couldn’t bear to leave.
“I was going to stay through one basketball season and then get out,” Grant once said. “When I started I was only making $25 a week, but they kept giving me a raise, so I stayed on. It’s a decision I have never regretted.
“I enjoy my work and especially the coaches and the boys that I am associated with.”
He taped Alex Webster and Dick Dickey, early superstars when he first came to NC State. He iced down Ted Brown and “Hawkeye” Whitney, Wolfpack heroes near the time he retired.
He had his favorites through the years. NFL quarterback Roman Gabriel always brightened his day. He always reserved time for Freddie Combs when the former two-sport star stopped by the trainer’s room. And he would have been proud to see former senior associate athletics director David Horning rise through the ranks of the NC State athletics administration.
But he never let a player’s talent level affect the way he treated him.
“Chester was just one of the kindest, warmest guys I’ve ever met,” said former football player Jim Hipps, who endowed a scholarship for student trainers in Grant’s name a few years ago. “I never heard him say anything bad about anyone. Chester treated everyone the same.
“It didn’t matter if you were the star of the team or someone who never saw the field.”
For more than three decades, Chester Arthur Grant was the only full-time African-American employee of the athletics department, serving under four head trainers, seven football coaches and four basketball coaches.
And he was loved by everyone, especially those players and coaches he would let enter the back door of Reynolds Coliseum during the Dixie Classic and ACC basketball tournament.
He was not only a training-table philosopher, he was also a part-time barber, especially for baseball players who let their hair run afoul of head coach Sam Esposito’s strict grooming rules.
“I knew him a long time,” said the late Frank Weedon in a 1982 Technician obituary. “He never had any children, but he had a slew here with the athletes.
“He was a father and grandfather image with the athletes. He treated them in other ways other than just medical. He never had an unkind word for anybody. He loved State. He would listen more than give you treatment.
“He was a good, good person. He knew his business. He knew athletic training. I don’t know of anybody who didn’t have the utmost respect for Chester. It was more than just taping them; he was giving them philosophical and medical treatment.”
To show its appreciation for his dedicated service, when Grant reached retirement age, the athletics department presented him with a car and other gifts prior to the 1970 Homecoming football game against Virginia.
“We are most grateful to Chester Grant, because he has been such an important part of our program,” athletics director Willis Casey at the time.
Grant showed his appreciation by continuing to work for another 10 years, until failing health forced him to retire in November 1981.
He died of cancer on Sept. 11, 1982, at the age of 76. The pall bearers at his funeral included Weedon, his three living former bosses, two members of the equipment staff and sports information director Ed Seaman.
Honorary pall bearers included baseball coach Sam Esposito, former interim football coach Al Michaels, team orthopedist Jim Manly and assistant football coach Bill Smaltz.
The NC State Athletics Council honored Grant by naming the training room in the basement of Reynolds Coliseum in his memory, a decision nominated and approved by the university’s History and Commemoration Committee. He was posthumously inducted into the National Athletics Trainers Association Hall of Fame in 1986, the third African-American elected.
“He was a great individual and he loved helping the kids,” Seaman said at the time of Grant’s death. “He was really a legend around here.”
And still is.
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
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