Digger Phelps saw a lot of Jim Valvano’s games.
Not the ones Jimmy V coached at Johns Hopkins or Iona or NC State, though the longtime Notre Dame coach was on the opposing sidelines a couple of times, including a dramatic win over the Wolfpack in Reynolds Coliseum midway through the 1982-83 NCAA Championship season.
Instead, Phelps watched his roommate’s kid brother play in the same backcourt at Rutgers with All-American Bob Lloyd, back when Jimmy V went from walk-on to contributor to starter for the successful Scarlet Knights teams of the late 1960s.
Phelps and Nick Valvano, the oldest of the three Valvano brothers, were both playing at Rider College at the time. They were fraternity brothers who shared an apartment together, and whenever they could, they piled into Phelps’ car for the 45-minute trip from Trenton, N.J., to Rutgers’ main campus in New Brunswick. They would be greeted by parents Rocco and Angelina Valvano, with their youngest son Bob and a box full of meatball hero sandwiches in tow.
“Digger was the original Eddie Haskell,” Nick Valvano says, referring to the teen-aged parental suck-up from “Leave It to Beaver.” “Does anyone remember Eddie Haskell? Anyway, every time Digger saw my mother, he would go over and give her a big hug.
“She would always bring him homemade Italian food. She loved him. It made Jimmy fume.”
And Digger loved her.
“Being Irish, all I ever got was boiled cabbage,” he said. “I loved her Italian food.”
So on Feb. 12, 1983, when Phelps brought his Notre Dame team to Reynolds Coliseum for another game in what was an annual rivalry from 1978-83, he bumped into food-source Angelina Valvano in the hallway of the basement. He gave her a big hug — and one of the patron saint medals he gave to each member of his team during their regular pre-game mass, led by the team priest.
“Jimmy, look what Digger gave me,” she said.
“Mom, you rooting for me or Digger in this game?” Valvano replied.
Whichever it was, the Fighting Irish got a miracle that day. Holding on to a precarious 43-42 lead in a game, the Irish needed a defensive stop in the nationally televised game to hold on to the victory. Sophomore Terry Gannon — a native of Joliet, Ill., who always dreamed of playing for Notre Dame — was open in the corner for the 19-foot jump shot he was born to take, the stuff of “Rudy”-like movies.
The ball rimmed out, and NC State lost its eighth game of the season.
“Jimmy went to his grave believing his mom pulled for the Fighting Irish that day,” Phelps said, still laughing nearly four decades later. “He never let me — or her — forget it.”
Notre Dame’s most famous coach gives credit to the Valvano family for pushing him into coaching. Phelps coached a summer league team in the area after his eligibility was over and caught the coaching bug. He continued to live with Nick Valvano while serving as a Rider graduate assistant, a job he took to get out of enrolling in Syracuse’s funeral director program in order to take over the family embalming business.
While scouting a game against NYU, Phelps talked to a game official about how Rider could stay with the mighty Violets. The referee was Rocco Valvano, who earned extra cash calling college basketball games in and around New York.
Phelps went back to Rider and told his boss Robert Greenwood he had a plan to beat NYU. The head coach let his young graduate assistant implement that plan, and Rider ended up beating the Violets in their own gym, something that hadn’t happened since 1944 for a team that played most of their big-time games in Madison Square Garden.
“That’s when I figured out I might have a future in coaching,” Phelps said.
He went from a Hazelton, Pa., high school to Penn as a college assistant. He coached at Fordham for one season before getting a call from Notre Dame. In 21 seasons, Phelps compiled a 419-200 coaching record, before retiring in 1991 to become a television commentator.
One of those wins had an impact on another NC State national championship team: On Jan. 14, 1974, Notre Dame defeated UCLA, 71-70, ending the Bruins' NCAA-record 88-game winning streak. Two months later, Norm Sloan’s Wolfpack ended UCLA’s run of seven consecutive NCAA championships at the national semifinals in Greensboro.
Phelps says he learned one other important thing from the Valvano family. He was close to Jimmy V during his fight with a rare form of cancer, which Valvano ultimately lost in 1993. Since then, Phelps has gotten two physicals a year.
Because of many messages about early detection promoted by such organizations as the V Foundation for Cancer Research, he survived a prostate cancer scare in 2010 and a fight against bladder cancer in 2013.
Phelps still lives in South Bend, Ind., and, deep down, he still believes, like Jimmy V, that Angeline Valvano was rooting for the Irish on that day 37 years ago.
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
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