Posted on Wed, Mar. 12, 2008

IN MY OPINION / SCOTT FOWLER

Integrating the ACC, one player at a time

1968 ACC TOURNAMENT IN CHARLOTTE | Scott was first black scholarship athlete at North Carolina

SCOTT FOWLER

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA

Charlie Scott’s career at North Carolina included the turbulent year of 1968. He was a two-time All-American and an All-ACC selection three times, and finished with a 22.1 career scoring average.

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When the ACC tournament first came to Charlotte 40 years ago, America was in a different place.

The year will be long remembered as a time of strife and change. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. President Lyndon B. Johnson, in the midst of an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, announced he wouldn't seek re-election. That paved the way for Richard Nixon's election. "Hair" opened on Broadway. The Beatles released "The White Album."

All that was a few weeks or months away from happening as eight teams convened March 7-9 at the old Charlotte Coliseum for the winner-gets -
the-only-NCAA-bid tournament. But the ACC was changing, too. Four of those eight squads had at least one African-American player pictured in their official team photos for the 1968 ACC tournament program.

"It was a very turbulent year," said Charles Scott, North Carolina's lone black player at the time. "Civil rights were at the forefront of everything. I had met Martin Luther King Jr. when I was a kid in Harlem. I was very aware of what he was doing and very supportive of it. I was participating in my own way -- nonviolently -- by integrating the UNC basketball team."

Scott said he was treated well in Charlotte at that 1968 ACC tournament.

"Partly, I'm sure, that was because there were a lot of UNC fans in Charlotte," he said from his home in suburban Atlanta. "But also, in 1968, Larry Miller was the All-American senior and the focus of our team. If fans wanted to get under someone's skin, they tried it more with Larry. I was a sophomore and more of the subtext -- rightfully so.

"It got a little worse for me the next two years, especially at road games, when I was more of our offensive focus."

(Charles Scott handled that adversity so well that current UNC coach Roy Williams would later name his son Scott in honor of the former player).

A glance back through the 1968 ACC program (cost: $1) reveals several treasures. Billy Packer, then a Wake Forest assistant, wrote a column for the program. In the accompanying picture, Packer actually has hair and looks startled, as if someone just goosed him off-camera.

The coaches that year? The men who made the semifinals had names you'll remember -- Dean Smith, Vic Bubas, Norm Sloan and Frank McGuire. The coaches who got beaten in the first round might not roll off the tip of your tongue: Clemson was headed by Bobby Roberts, Virginia by Bill Gibson, Maryland by Frank Fellows and Wake Forest by Jack McCloskey.

The most talked-about game of the 1968 tournament remains the "stall-ball" Sloan ordered up for the Wolfpack's semifinal against Duke. N.C. State won the game 12-10, which led to this headline in the next day's Charlotte Observer: "State Stall Stifles Duke, 12-10 (Honest)."

The other semifinal was the game of the 1968 tournament. Smith faced former mentor McGuire, now at South Carolina. "Coach Smith was always so, so nice to coach McGuire," Scott remembered. "But coach McGuire just wanted to kill us, you could tell."

With the game tied at 74, Miller missed a shot at the buzzer that could have won it. In overtime, the Tar Heels squeezed out an 82-79 victory. McGuire blamed the officials for the loss in postgame interviews.

The ACC final was a rout. N.C. State decided to run with the Tar Heels.

"And we ran them right off the court," Scott said.

The Tar Heels won 87-50 in what remains the largest margin ever for an ACC tournament championship game. UNC made it all the way to the NCAA final that season before getting crushed by Lew Alcindor and UCLA in the title game.

The ACC tournament? It would return to Charlotte in 1969 and Scott would score 40 points in the final, beating Duke almost by himself. But that's another story.

Then & Now

Charlotte hosted the ACC tournament for the first time in 1968. A comparison: