<a href='http://newsobserver.com/barnett/story/2494385p-2318277c.html' target='_blank'>Link</a>



Valvano's message lives on

By NED BARNETT, Staff Writer

RALEIGH--This spring the 1983 Cardiac Pack came back to life. On the 20th anniversary of N.C. State's wild run to the national championship, Dereck Whittenburg's prayer of a shot and Lorenzo Charles' saving catch and dunk flashed into the lulls during the NCAA Tournament.
Today marks a different anniversary, not the birth of that basketball legend, but the death of the coach behind it.
Ten years ago today, battered by a fast-moving and ferocious cancer, Jim Valvano died at Duke University Hospital. He was 47.
I never met him. I arrived here a year after he was forced to step down as N.C. State's coach and athletics director in 1990. He left amid allegations that some of his players didn't go to class and some violated NCAA rules by misusing their complimentary tickets and selling the sneakers given them by shoe companies.
Even those who missed Jimmy V in life can't spend time around college basketball without encountering his memory. To those who knew him -- and to many who only watched from afar -- he was as an electric and irreverent figure who made them laugh, cheer, mourn and then remember it all again and again.
Last Friday, a gray and drizzly day, I went looking for his grave in Raleigh's historic Oakwood Cemetery. I found his polished black headstone on a ridge that commands a view across the generations. Down below, close enough to shout, lies N.C. State All-America Ronnie Shavlik. He died young, too, at 49, but he lived just long enough to personally see the Cardiac Pack win the national championship over Houston as time expired in Albuquerque, N.M. Shavlik died two months later.
Twenty years after Valvano's team won it all, 10 years after he died, how is history remembering him? Was his career an inspiration or a warning? Will he be recalled as a coach who set a standard or broke the rules?
For answers, I called three people who played roles in shaping Valvano's image: the man who wrote the book that triggered the investigations into N.C. State basketball, The News & Observer editor who doggedly pursued the story and Jim's brother, Bob, an ESPN radio host who wrote "The Gifts of Jimmy V."
In 1989, Peter Golenbock shook N.C. State with his book, "Personal Fouls: The Broken Promises and Shattered Dreams of Big Money Basketball at Jim Valvano's North Carolina State."
The book relied on unnamed sources and contained errors of fact, but its claims hit hard: Valvano's program funnelled money and cars to players, pressured teachers to change players' grades and brought in recruits who had no chance of graduating.
Investigations by the UNC Board of Governors and the NCAA found academic abuses and players' misuse of free tickets and sneakers. The NCAA placed the Wolfpack on a two-year probation that barred it from the NCAA Tournament.
Golenbock's most serious allegations against Valvano's program were not confirmed and those that were seem in retrospect not so grievous. But Golenbock has no regrets about the tone of Personal Fouls.
The author, who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., and continues to write sports books, said, "I wouldn't change a word."
Yet Golenbock now says Valvano -- despite appearing in his title -- wasn't the book's villain. The school's administrators were.
"Part of what I wanted to say is somebody needs to keep an eye on what's going on in the athletics department," he said. "We now have a former college president as head of the NCAA, and I like to think that Personal Fouls had something to do with that."
The book certainly had something to do with media coverage. The News & Observer responded with stories and editorials critical of Valvano's handling of the program as both coach and athletics director. Valvano's supporters saw the coverage as a crusade disproportionate to the problems it attacked. Bitterness about it remains today.
Claude Sitton, the editor of The News & Observer who pushed for the aggressive coverage, is now 77, retired from the The N&O since 1990 and living in his native Georgia outside Atlanta. With Valvano gone, he sees no point in discussing it further. He offered just one comment: "Coach Valvano did exactly what North Carolina State University brought him to North Carolina to do -- win ballgames."
Winning doesn't sound like a bad thing, but I infer from Sitton's comment that he thought winning had become the only thing. Nothing, not NCAA rules, not the players' education, not the standards of the institution seemed to get in the way.
A see-no-evil obsession with winning is a bad thing, but the years have not made clear how much was wrong at N.C. State, nor how much occurred because of Valvano's intent or simpy his neglect.
What is becoming clear is that Valvano was a genuine rarity as a tactician and a motivator. No team has quite done what his did in 1983. None may ever again.
With that run for the championship and his speeches before his death, Valvano became synonymous with striving against long odds. "Don't give up. Don't ever give up," he said famously.
But in the quiet of the cemetery, the message that endures isn't about relentless striving. Instead, it seems to be the sentence that followed the "Don't give up" line in his acceptance speech upon receiving the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage. He said, "I will thank God for the day and the moment I have."
That was the thing he learned last and wanted to express most. The man whose teams made history out of a few seconds, the man who crammed a full life into half of one, wanted people to value every day.
Of all the words spoken by that talkative man, only 10 are carved on his tombstone: "Take time each day to laugh, to think, to cry."
Bob Valvano said Jimmy V's final message was to savor the present.
"Jim said to never get discouraged," his brother said. "Some people interpret it as, 'There's always tomorrow.' He would have been the first to say, 'No, there is not always tomorrow.' "
But there is today, the day Jimmy V is 10 years dead, but still urging the living to be fully alive.

==============================================
Just FYI: those of you with ESPN Classic might want to tune in this evening:

8 P.M.: Up Close Classics: Jim Valvano (will be re-aired at 11:30 p.m.)

8:30 P.M.: Jimmy V Tribute Special - will include a look back at the 1983 NCAA Championship, the speech he gave at The ESPY Awards in 1993 and commentary from ESPN's Dick Vitale.

9 P.M.: 1983 NCAA Championship: N.C. State vs. Houston

While I appreciate the article, I find it very offensive to give either Sitton or Golenbock any more attention for what they did to him. I just can't believe any responsible journalist would actually think, of the three men to speak to about V, that two would be people who deliberately sought and profited from his ouster at NC State.

I am incapable of uttering my disgust about the article. Apparently for the N&O all they will remember of the V era is their despicable role in ending it. Lord knows the NCAA didn't fault anything by the coaching staff, and Lord knows Golenbock's book of lies was eventually exposed (if you looked in the right places -- say page C6 rather than A1 of the N&O for things like 'No game fixing at NCSU' or 'No proof found of grade tampering' etc).

The story's selection of individuals to interview is appalling, absolutely appalling.

I hear ya Beo....the sad thing is this is the ONLY article I could find about the 10 year anniversary of the loss of Coach V in every local media source :frown: my main point is I did not want this day to go unnoticed...

Man, the whole thing still makes me cry. That article is awful. On the anniversary of a man's death.....

On a brighter note ~ I watched last night and I absolutely LOVED that first interview they show with ?Roy Firestone? (is that who it was?).

Gosh, that was great. I had never seen that particular interview. Jimmy V looked so young, with that red workout suit with the big white collar! I was giggling. He really is the best story teller. He was telling the story about what was going through his head when he ran out on the court after the win. You know the clip we have all seen ~ he looks crazy excited. I loved watching that last night.

I miss Jimmy V.

I miss Jimmy V.

Does anybody know where Jimmy V is buried?

Beavis218 Wrote:Does anybody know where Jimmy V is buried?

From the article above:

Raleigh's historic Oakwood Cemetery

I 'spose that's what I get for not reading the whole thing. Thanks, NCTM.


:stupid:

After the ACC tournament, a buddy (Clemson fan) stated to me that the Pack was going to go all the way. I told him he was straight out of his mind. Today that game lives on as the greatest finish I have ever seen in a basketball game. I've made my wife watch that ending a few different times. She just doesn't get how dramatic it really was.

Don't know if anybody else noted it, but Phi Slama Jama got nary a dunk in the entire game, while NCSU had two. Bailey took a pass down low in the first half, turned around and slammed it on Olajuwon's head. :D

Who could forget the bewilderd look on Drexler's face, or Jimmy V. running around the court, trying to find somebody to hug?! :D

I miss beowolf.