T-Time For V
NC State upset North Carolina in March of 2024, ending a five-game historic run to win an Atlantic Coast Conference basketball tournament championship. I had to be the only fan--- cheering wildly at my TV, polishing off beers---who was thinking baseball!
It had been 37 years,1987, when the Wolfpack won their last ACC tournament. Just days after that tournament I arrived in Vero Beach Florida, at the spring training camp of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
On assignment from NC State’s alumni magazine, I would follow Tracy Woodson, an ex- N.C. State power hitting third baseman, to tell the story of a prospect making his first major league team (God willing) and joining the Dodgers when they returned to L.A.
What does this have to do with an NC State ACC basketball championship? Hey, I’m getting there.
Since ACC Champs T-shirts were rolling off the presses by the thousands in Raleigh, I grabbed one at the Raleigh-Durham airport and took it to Tracy.
Well, no good deed goes unpunished.
Woodson, who had slipped it on under his uniform came out of the locker room shaking his head.
“Well, now we’ve pissed off Tommy,” he said.
What?
It seems that Tommy Lasorda, the Dodgers’ manager, and, the man who held the key to Woodson’s future, was a friend of Jim Valvano, the NC State coach whose Wolfpack had just won the ACC Championship
“Tommy wants to know why Coach V didn’t send him a T-shirt,” Woodson said.
I quickly agreed to take care of this as soon as I returned to the NC State campus.
Which I did----sort of!
When I landed back in Raleigh, I called Valvano’s office where my friend Beverly Sparks, V’s secretary, listened patiently as I told her I would just buy another championship T-shirt and send it from V to the Dodgers’ PR office in LA.
Beverly, kindly said, “Bob, don’t worry about this. I’ll get the T-shirt and mail if from here, with a note from Jim to Tommy.”
This was a plan that could not fail. Beverly selected a Championship T shirt from a rack in V’s office and had it in the mail with a “personal” note to Lasorda the next day.
Within a week I had a call from none other than Coach James T Valvano who was wondering what I was doing sending his special, one-of-a-kind Championship T-shirt to Tommy Lasorda?
It seems V, a habitual collector of “merch” and sundry freebies, had squirreled that special T-shirt away in his office so no one could get to it.
This blog has a reasonably happy ending. Beverly took the heat for glomming the T shirt, Tracy Woodson made the Dodgers’ team and Tommy Lasorda (I suspect) was prancing around the LA locker room in a very special ACC Championship Tournament T-shirt.
And, I learned a very important lesson.
A month or so later I was in the N.C. State baseball office chatting it up with a very wise man, coach Sam Esposito.
I told him the story of V’s missing T shirt and how Sam’s ex-player Tracy Woodson and I got caught in V’s crosshairs.
Sam leaned back in his chair, laughed and said, “My boy the thing you have to know is that V is a hoarder and he can’t stand to have anybody screw with his shit. Nobody screws with V’s shit!”
