"Referee's Out-Of-Line Ejections Add To ACC Lore"(c/p)

REFEREE'S OUT-OF-LINE EJECTIONS ONLY ADD TO ACC LORE

By Caulton Tudor - Staff columnist - ctudor@newsobserver.com
By Caulton Tudor The News and Observer

First things first. ACC basketball official Karl Hess strayed way out of line Saturday in the RBC Center.

When he ejected former N.C. State stars Chris Corchiani and Tom Gugliotta (amid police supervision) late in the Wolfpack’s loss to Florida State, Hess didn’t merely act irrationally.

He might as well have pulled a carrot out of his back pocket and gone straight into a Bugs Bunny impersonation.

Any referee with rabbit ears is forever marked. But one with such a high profile as Hess is more than marked. He’s tagged, released and fitted with a tracking device inside his whistle.

The next time Hess is assigned a game in Raleigh (if there is a next time), he’ll be greeted with more caustic one-liners than you might hear at a Friars Club function.

On the RBC playing court Saturday, the action was predictably frantic.

Three players – Pack guard Lorenzo Brown and Seminoles Ian Miller and Bernard James – drew technical fouls. In the lane, State’s Richard Howell and FSU’s Okaro White were practically swapping elbows of standing-eight count potential.

Yet in the midst of the chaos, Hess was keeping his eyes on and ears open for taunts from a couple of ex-players located at least 10 feet away from the court.

You would think an official with Hess’ experience would have exercised better judgment and a heck of a lot more restraint. The game wasn’t very close – the Seminoles eventually won 76-62 – and the RBC audience hardly was in a belligerent mood.

But then again, thank goodness for the Karl Hesses of this world.

It was a dumb stunt, sure, but a few dumb stunts each season have served as the spice of life in ACC basketball for about 60 years.

There was Wake Forest coach Bones McKinney with his sideline seat belt, a self-devised restraint and insurance policy against drawing techs during an era when on-court brawls were as apt to occur as hook shots.

There was that bizarre night in 1991 when the Pack was at Duke and ref John Moreau suddenly ejected State coach Les Robinson’s son-in-law from the stands.

The Cameron Crazies were screaming for burned offerings as usual, Christian Laettner was in one of his Hannibal Lecter moods and yet the one guy who happened to get on Moreau’s nerves was Robinson’s harmless son-in-law.

Then there was UNC at FSU only a few weeks ago, when Roy Williams and several of his players left the scene of a competitive wipeout of chain-reaction dimensions without offering so much as an exchange of insurance information.

And there was Dean Smith flashing his famous choke signs to mortified officials and Gene Banks and his roses and Lefty Driesell and his assault and battery tantrums against helpless plastic chairs. And a hundred other wacky, unforgettable, moments.

We get incensed, overly wired and emotionally riled. But in the end, it’s just sports and in many cases, these are things that have made the ACC special.

So Karl, you screwed up royally. “You let the whole officiating team down!” But just sit still, Karl. Stay low and before you know it, someone else will rush in and grab the dunce’s hat.

And besides, what’s ACC basketball without a few screwballs?

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/02/19/1868738/tudor-referees-out-of-line-ejections.html#storylink=cpy

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Some old stories from a book about ACC Basketball

Feb 19, 2012, 9:24 PM

* DECEMBER 3, 2011

By FRED BARNES

Horace A. (Bones) McKinney was an ordained Baptist preacher and basketball coach at Wake Forest University from 1958 to 1965. He once received a technical foul for kicking his shoe on the court during a game. He criticized the referee in strong language. "I thought you were a preacher," one ref said, startled by McKinney's abuse. "Yea, and I thought you were a referee!" McKinney shot back. When his team played poorly, McKinney sometimes retreated to a seat in the stands. His habit of racing up and down the sidelines prompted students to install a seat belt on the bench. He stayed in it once, for about 10 minutes.

McKinney was only the most manic of the basketball coaches in the early years of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Virginia coach Bill Gibson grew so infuriated at what he felt were bad calls that he handed a referee his sports coat. "You've taken everything else away from me," he said, "you might as well take this as well." Mr. Gibson was tossed out of the game.

ACC fans, then as now, were routinely disrespectful of opposing players, and worse. At a home game in Chapel Hill, a North Carolina fan sneaked behind the bench and stuck chewing gum in the hair of South Carolina center Tom Owens. During an entire Virginia game, a local Charlottesville writer shouted insults at South Carolina coach Frank McGuire. The coach had to be physically restrained.

Novelist Pat Conroy was on The Citadel's basketball team when it visited Clemson. As he waited on the sidelines to make an inbound pass, two fans pinched his rear end and two others put out cigarettes on the back of his legs. He protested to a referee, who merely shrugged.

In 1957 coach Frank McGuire led North Carolina to a 32-0 record, an ACC title and the NCAA championship.
ACC Basketball

By J. Samuel Walker
North Carolina, 395 pages, $3

These incidents, culled from J. Samuel Walker's "ACC Basketball," are offered as evidence that a book with so dull a title—and covering the basketball activity of a newly formed conference between 1953 and 1972—is far from uninvolving. Mr. Walker, a retired history professor at the University of Maryland, has written a lively account of the ACC's rise as a basketball powerhouse. He says that, with the book, he has attempted "to capture the impressive progress made on both academic and athletic fronts without blinking when discussing more unsavory aspects of ACC basketball." He has succeeded.

On the athletic side, it's important to know the author is the brother of Wally Walker, a basketball star at the University of Virginia in the early 1970s, an NBA player for eight seasons and the president of the NBA Seattle Supersonics for a dozen years. Just as important, Mr. Walker has been attending games in College Park, Md., since Charles (Lefty) Driesell became Maryland's coach in 1969.

From the beginning of talks in 1952 about forming a new conference, there was tension between the "football faction"—favoring an elite, competitive league of schools with strong football programs and bowl ambitions—and the "academic faction," which believed a smaller conference drawn from the unwieldy 17-member Southern Conference would provide a way "to control but not cripple athletic programs." Gradually, Mr. Walker writes, "the two separate tracks converged."

But the tension endured. The ACC was the first major conference to require a student to score at least 800 on the SATs to qualify for an athletic scholarship. Coaches and athletic directors disliked the rule. It kept Pete Maravich from getting a basketball scholarship to North Carolina State, where his father was the coach. Both Maraviches departed for Louisiana State University. The 800-score requirement was struck down by a federal judge in 1972, who noted that it imposed a standard on athletes that (as Mr. Walker writes) "did not apply to other students."

At Virginia, there was significant faculty support for the 1951 "Gooch Report," which recommended that athletic scholarships be abolished. Thus it wasn't surprising that in 1962, when coaches asked that the 2.0 grade-point average for athletic eligibility be relaxed, they were turned down. At Duke, a faculty committee in 1969 said that the school's teams couldn't compete with ACC rivals unless academic standards were reduced and urged Duke to withdraw from the conference. President Terry Sanford nixed the idea.

Throughout "ACC Basketball," Mr. Walker uses his skill as a historian to good effect. His research is especially rewarding when he takes up the subjects of coaches, recruiting efforts and the racial integration.

Basketball coaches tend to have outsize personalities. Everett Case, the North Carolina State coach from 1946 to 1964 whose team dominated the ACC in its first decade, was a promoter and innovator. He created the popular Dixie Classic tournament, later canceled after a point-shaving scandal. He was the first in the ACC to use the fast break.

Mr. Driesell, at Maryland, often seemed out of control. He plunged into a fight between Maryland and South Carolina players and was punched twice in the face. But his success gave Maryland students "a sense of pride and community," Mr. Walker writes, and was the key to creating a "new personality at College Park."

Mr. Walker suggests that "the brilliance of its coaches" was a primary reason for the ACC's emergence as the nation's top basketball conference. So was their aggressive recruiting, which occasionally crossed the line. Clemson coach Tates Locke offered to buy Moses Malone's mother a house. Mr. Malone played professional basketball instead.

Frank McGuire promised the father of Pete Brennan, who became a star of North Carolina's 1957 national-championship team, that he would personally make sure that his son went to Mass every Sunday. Brennan's father thus dropped his insistence that his son go to Notre Dame. Mr. Walker writes: "As a student at North Carolina, Brennan recalled, he went to mass every Sunday and never once saw McGuire there."

The most ferocious recruiting battle involved Tom McMillen, a 6-foot-10 high-school star from Pennsylvania. He couldn't decide among Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia. He signed what North Carolina coach Dean Smith said was an agreement to play for him. It was really a napkin. Mr. McMillen wound up at Maryland.

"For competitive reasons, coaches tended to be progressives on favoring the integration of their teams," Mr. Walker notes. But it "did not happen quickly or easily." The four states of the ACC were segregated when the conference began, creating an awkward situation when teams with black players visited. Special accommodations were required. Oscar Robertson got a letter from the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan when the University of Cincinnati played in the Dixie Classic. "Don't Ever Come to the South," it said.

In 1965, Billy Jones of Maryland became the first black to play in the ACC. "He was the target of racial slurs when Maryland played on the road, especially at Virginia, Clemson, and South Carolina," Mr. Walker writes. But "once Billy Jones entered his first game, there was no turning back." The press barely took notice of Jones's historic role. When the heavily recruited Charles Scott signed to attend North Carolina in 1966, it was big news. He was an instant star. ACC schools began to realize that the failure to recruit black athletes was harming their competitiveness.

Mr. Walker doesn't oversell the result of the ACC's effort to improve academics and athletics simultaneously. The record is "generally favorable," he says. He quotes William Friday, president of the University of North Carolina system for 30 years, approvingly. "If you're going to do it, if you're going to be in big-time sports, the ACC does it about as well as you can expect anybody to do it."