In May, we originally started a countdown to NC State football's season and ACC opener against Louisville, a game that was originally scheduled for Thursday, Sept. 3.

In mid-June, the game was moved up a day to Wednesday, Sept. 2 in order to not conflict with the Kentucky Derby which was postponed from the traditional first Saturday in May to Saturday, Sept. 5 over Labor Day weekend.

In late July, the ACC scrapped its original football schedule to create a new 11-game model due to challenges presented from the coronavirus pandemic. A week later, NC State learned the dates of its new schedule which will begin Saturday, Sept. 12 in a road game against Virginia Tech.

Today, Aug. 25 marks 18 days from the Wolfpack's season opener, for now.

Each day, The Wolfpacker will do a countdown to the season with a reflection on the significance of that number to NC State.

The story below was originally printed in The Wolfpacker January 2020 "Where Are They Now" magazine.

Click here to order a copy of any of our past magazines.

By Tim Peeler

Roman Gabriel can’t get to the gym five days a week the way he used to. Doctors have made him cut his regular workouts down to just three hours, three times a week. But there is no doubt he’s still as proud of his membership card as any award he’s ever received.

It keeps him alive and lively.

When the former All-America football player and movie star does go, he’s the most popular person in the weight room. Pioneers always are, even if it’s after the fact.

The first full-time NFL quarterback from NC State — some like to call it QBU these days — enjoys spending an hour or so talking to his friends and acquaintances before he ever lifts a weight or gets on the stationary bike that has a plaque with his name on it.

His workouts are serious: three miles of cardio and 90 minutes of light weightlifting with three sets of 15 reps focusing on six different muscle groups.

Back when he was playing, he would do an hour or so of kung fu training, but that is long in the past.

Sometimes, he likes to talk to strangers who don’t know who he is and tell them about the legacy of success NC State’s quarterbacks have had in professional football, even if they don’t know it all started with him. They surely know about Philip Rivers, Russell Wilson, Mike Glennon, Jacoby Brissett and Ryan Finley.

“I like to tell them about what NC State has done in the NFL,” Gabriel said.

The gym is a necessity, not a luxury for Gabriel. After 16 surgeries (a half dozen of which were on one knees), a couple of strokes and a heart operation, Gabriel credits his frequent workouts through the years for saving his live several times now, allowing him to celebrate his 79th birthday back on Aug. 4.

Surrounded by friends, including former NC State football coach Chuck Amato and teammate Claude “Hoot” Gibson, Gabriel celebrated one more trip around the sun this past summer at his home in Little River, S.C., not too far from his hometown of Wilmington.

The affair was relatively subdued.

As he said in an interview a few years back, “My doctor told me if you live a boring life, you will live longer. My life is very boring right now, but I’m satisfied.”

Roman Ildonzo Gabriel Jr., a product of New Hanover High School, is one of North Carolina’s greatest sports treasures, someone who was hardly boring the first three-quarters of his life.

The son of a Filipino immigrant father who worked as a railroad cook and an Irish mother who stayed rooted at the family’s home in Wilmington, the tall and muscular specimen was a three-sport star in high school, who went on to become a legend in Raleigh, the toast of Hollywood and the pride of Philadelphia.

He spent time at NC State playing three sports as well, though he had to cut back some after his freshman year to be able to maintain his grades well enough to become a 1961 Academic All-American. So, after one season of freshman basketball for basketball coach Everett Case, Gabriel dropped the sport to concentrate on being football coach Earle Edwards’ starting quarterback and baseball coach Vic Sorrell’s starting first baseman. (Few people even remember that Gabriel led Wolfpack baseball in home runs and RBI as a junior.)

At the time, Edwards liked throwing multiple offenses — the split-T, the single-wing, the belly option — at opposing defenses, not the football to his split ends.

“We didn’t try to throw it too much,” Gabriel recalled. “That’s not what college football was about back then. Anything in the air created chaos, and Earle didn’t like chaos.”

Before Gabriel, only one NC State quarterback had ever thrown two touchdown passes in a game (Eddie Green vs. Villanova in 1955). Gabriel did it three times in his debut season of 1959. His numbers in the season-finale free-for-all against Maryland were outrageously unapproachable. He completed 23 of his 38 passes for 279 passing yards, all NC State and ACC records at the time.

Gabriel established himself as the gunslinging quarterback of the future while at NC State, but the Wolfpack was rarely successful. Only once in his three years as a starter did the team have a winning record, the 6-3-1 mark it posted in 1960. However, the 6-5, 230-pound Gabriel, the biggest player on the Wolfpack team, was a two-time ACC Player of the Year and a two-time All-American.

He ushered in the most successful decade in NC State football history. While Gabriel’s squad never played in a bowl game or finished higher than second in the league standings, the Wolfpack won four ACC titles in the seven years after he graduated.

The two professional leagues took notice of his ground-breaking combination of size and mobility. The AFL’s Oakland Raiders took Gabriel with the No. 1 pick of the 1962 American Football League draft. A few weeks later, the Los Angeles Rams took him with the No. 2 pick of the National Football League draft, one spot behind future roommate Merlin Olsen.

Like Rivers, Gabriel had to wait his turn to be a successful NFL quarterback, out-lasting other talented players to earn the Rams’ starting job. At first, he looked to be the successor to Zeke Bratkowski. But the next year, the Rams used its No. 1 overall pick to take dual-sport star Terry Baker, who was Oregon State’s starting point guard at the 1963 Final Four and the Beavers’ Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback. He lasted two years in the NFL, before the Rams tried one more highly decorated college quarterback, Tulsa’s Billy Guy Anderson, who set NCAA and Southwestern Conference passing records.

“They were all good quarterbacks,” Gabriel said.

Ultimately, however, he was better, at least in the eyes of new Rams coach George Allen, who showed a preference for veteran players over newcomers when he took over the team in 1966. Allen gave Gabriel a chance to win the job and put him under the tutelage of offensive genius Ted Marchibroda.

The result? In Gabriel’s first year as a starter, the Rams had their first winning season since 1959. For seven seasons, from 1966-72, Gabriel led the Rams to 63 wins and two NFC division championships.

He probably should have been the league’s Most Valuable Player in 1967 when the Rams went 11-1-2 and won the NFL Coastal Division title, and then he did win the award in 1969.

He grew into one of the biggest celebrities in a town of superstars, dating Hollywood starlets and picking up roles in movies and television shows. He had significant roles in two major motion pictures, “Skidoo” and “The Undefeated,” which co-starred John Wayne and Rock Hudson. He had roles on several television shows, from “Gilligan’s Island” to “Wonder Woman.”

He was named All-Pro three times with the Rams and once after he was traded to the Philadelphia Eagles for receiver Harold Jackson and a pair of first-round picks.

In 1973, his second year with the Eagles, he was named the NFL’s Comeback Player of the Year, throwing to wide receivers Harold Carmichael and Don Zimmerman, and tight end Charle Young.

Injuries bothered him the rest of his career, but he stayed with Philadelphia until he retired following the 1977 season, a total of 16 years in one of professional sports’ most difficult jobs.

His numbers, before passing became the first option on every offensive play, still stand up against the best quarterbacks in NFL history, with 29,444 passing yards, a 52.6 passing completion rate and 201 touchdown passes.

Along the way, he broke Johnny Unitas’ NFL record with 89 consecutive starts, which is now owned by Brett Favre with 297. Both Rivers (210) and Wilson (126) have also bypassed Gabriel’s one-time mark.

During a 40-year retirement, Gabriel has focused on a variety of projects, primarily involved with sports. By his own accounting, he has raised nearly $7 million for various charities, primarily through golf tournaments.

He and his Eagle teammates, through their Eagles Fly for Leukemia, raised the money to build the first Ronald McDonald House in the country. For more than 35 years, he has participated in an event with his New Hanover High School teammates to raise mortgage money for the widow of a teammate who died of multiple sclerosis.

If you ask him to this day, he will tell you his greatest legacy is the work he has done on behalf of others.

He has been a college and professional coach, and was involved in minor league baseball and football ventures in Charlotte and Raleigh. He has also spent time in the broadcast booth as a radio and television analyst.

He has no regrets about a life well-lived.

“I have definitely been blessed by God’s amazing grace,” Gabriel said.

When the Lonnie Poole Golf Course opened 10 years ago, three of Gabriel’s college teammates raised $150,000 to name the No. 18 hole — the number he wore during his Wolfpack career — in his honor, a contribution that put a smile on the face of course designer and Wake Forest golf All-American Arnold Palmer, who became friends with Gabriel when the two were in college.

“It’s great to know that that will always be the Roman Gabriel hole,” the late Palmer said during construction of the golf course. “We’ve been buddies for a long time. We just went to different schools together.”

Gabriel has been recognized in every way possible. He is a 1989 inductee into the College Football Hall of Fame, and has been selected to the inaugural classes of the NC State Athletic Hall of Fame, the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, the Wilmington Hall of Fame and the Players Retreat Hall of Fame.

There is only one thing that has eluded him.

For the last couple of years, NC State graduate Vinny Sheehan has been promoting Gabriel for the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. It’s similar to the unsuccessful effort the school mounted in 2008 to get Gabriel elected as one of two senior players with a push from then-football coach Tom O’Brien, retired senior associate athletics director David Horning, then-athletics director Lee Fowler and then-Chancellor James Oblinger.

This time, however, it’s different since the NFL announced earlier this year that it would induct a one-time superclass of 20 deserving players into the Class of 2020 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first NFL season. The hall has previously been capped at eight inductees per year.

Ten of those can be senior players who haven’t played in the NFL in more than 25 years, five can be modern-era players, three will be special contributors and two can be coaches.

The 10-member superclass will be selected by a 25-member Centennial Class Blue-Ribbon Committee, made up of 13 Hall of Fame electors and 12 current and former NFL executives and head coaches, including New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick.

“It’s an honor and a privilege to be fighting in the trenches with a fellow NC State alum who was one of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play in the NFL,” Sheehan said. “Whether a long-time fan, friend, teammate, competitor, Hall of Famer, coach, respected media member, decorated military hero, politician, business executive or community leader, we all ask the same question: Why hasn’t Roman Gabriel been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame?

“This seems like the perfect time to recognize one of football’s greatest quarterbacks.”

Many of Gabriel’s contemporaries — which are numerous since he played for 16 NFL seasons — are already among the 326 players enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame: George Blanda, Terry Bradshaw, Len Dawson, Dan Fouts, Bob Griese, Sonny Jurgensen, Bobby Layne, Joe Namath, Ken Stabler, Bart Starr, Roger Staubach, Fran Tarkenton, Y.A. Tittle and Unitas.

His fate will be determined by the blue-ribbon panel, and Gabriel wants to be NC State’s first player in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, so that it might perhaps pave the way for others and all Wolfpack fans can enjoy the honor.

“I have a lot of honors, a lot of memberships in Halls of Fame,” he said. “I just think this would mean something to all fans of NC State, the Rams and the Eagles.”

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

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