The Wolfpacker: An Independent Magazine Covering NC State Sports
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MARCH/APRIL 2023 ■ 49 What makes it difficult to compare is that the two teams had the same stars in Tommy Burleson, David Thompson, Monte Towe and Tim Stoddard, but the lineups were not the same. The earlier team had more depth but was less experienced. Thompson, the great unknown, was just getting started with Burleson, Towe and Stoddard. Bur- leson, coming off a summer with the 1972 Olympic team, had been the ACC's sec- ond leading scorer and top rebounder as a sophomore, but he accepted a different role to make way for Thompson's scoring and athletic ability. Before the season, Thompson was known to be a gifted player, but few in the national media knew what to think of Sloan and his team, especially Sports Illustrated writer Curry Kirkpatrick, who said the Pack deserved the "Ken-L Ra- tion" trophy because its early-season op- ponents were "absolute dogs." Sloan's Pack scored more than 100 points in four early blowout wins over Appalachian State ( 1 3 0 -5 3 ) , At l a n t i c Christian (110-40), G e o rg i a So u t h e r n (144-100) and South Florida (125-88). In response, the coa c h b e ga n g iv- ing out a can of the dogfood to his top player every game. Thompson won it for 26 of the 27 games and was given a Ken-L Ration Award plaque after the season. The Pack gained regional respect by beating North Carolina and Wake Forest at the Big Four Tournament in Greens- boro, but the uncertainty about just how good Sloan's team was ended on Jan. 12, 1973. In a nationally televised game be- fore the Super Bowl, the third-ranked Pack beat second-ranked Maryland 87-85 in College Park, Md. Thompson scored 37 points and tipped in a Burleson miss with 3 seconds to play for the win- ning margin. Thompson perfected scoring on the alley-oop passes from Towe and Stod- dard, an accidental offense created one day when the high-flying forward caught an errant pass and laid it in the basket without landing and without touching it while in the cylinder of the basket. (Dunking was not allowed in college bas- ketball at that time.) The Maryland game gave the young sophomore confidence, and the rest of the schedule against some of the best ACC teams ever assembled gave him experi- ence. The 1972-73 Pack, however, was not playing for a national championship. Just prior to the start of the season, the NCAA gave NC State a one-year postseason ban as punishment for infractions committed after Thompson had signed his letter of intent to play for the Pack. Sloan and his team considered both the crime and the punishment to be exaggerated and sus- pected a tattletale from a rival school for their plight. There was no changing the NCAA's mind, though. Sloan did what he could to stick it to the governing organization by announcing in December that his team would participate in the season-ending ACC Tournament. "As a group, I remember us getting to- gether and deciding that we wanted to try to win every game," Towe said. "That's all we could do. It was a personal challenge to go undefeated." The Pack finished the regular season with a 25-0 record and an average winning margin of more than 22 points. It earned a first-round bye in the seven-team ACC Tournament, and rolled over Virginia in the second round, 63-51, setting up a title game matchup against Maryland, with a lineup full of future NBA stars in Len Elmore, Tom McMillen and John Lucas. Terrapins coach Lefty Driesell and his squad earned the league's automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament by winning their semifinal game against Wake Forest. Still, the 10th-ranked Terps were moti- vated to end the third-ranked Wolfpack's perfect season and avenge their previous two losses. That didn't happen, even though Thompson was plagued with foul trou- ble and was held scoreless in the first 24 minutes of the game. The consensus All-American scored just 10 points, the second-lowest total of his college career, while junior Burleson was named the tournament's Most Valuable Player. The next year, the Wolfpack was like Triple Crown champion Secretariat, "moving like a tremendous machine." The NCAA title was the school's first, even though it did suffer an early-season loss to seven-time national champion UCLA. Thompson and the Pack avenged that defeat in Greensboro in the NCAA semifinals, then beat Marquette in the title game. There were, however, two players for whom the Pack's success of the early '70s inspired decidedly mixed feelings: senior starters Rick Holdt (8.3 points, 3.7 rebounds per game) and Joe Cafferky (7.9 points and 2.1 rebounds a contest). Throughout the 1972-73 season, they knew their careers would end after the ACC Tournament. "The sad part about that season was the people that got hurt, the se- niors on the team," said Holdt, now 72 and retired in the No r t h C a ro l i n a mountains. "I was one of those seniors, but so was Joe, and it is something that has always been painful for us. "It's something you just don't forget." While most of his teammates were cel- ebrating the 1974 championship, Holdt watched the games from his home in New Jersey, where he was coaching high school basketball. He and Cafferky, who has lived in Sweden for the past half century, cut down the nets after the 1973 ACC title, but they never got to play in the NCAA Tournament. "Coach Sloan tried to turn it into a pos- itive, setting the goal to go undefeated," Holdt said. "And it was an honor to get to do that. Still, it was hard watching Mary- land go to the NCAA Tournament know- ing we had beaten them three times that season. "That's just the way the ball drops." ■ Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu. " The sad part about that season was the people that got hurt, the seniors on the team. Yes, I was one of those seniors, but so was Joe [Cafferky], and it is something that has always been painful for us. " Rick Holdt