Stormin' Norman Was A Colorful Icon of Wolfpack Hoops

BY TIM PEELER

RALEIGH, N.C. – Rarely has a nickname ever fit more perfectly than Stormin' Norman Sloan, and rarely has one ever been more despised by its owner.

"You only call me that because it rhymes,'' Sloan told the worms who used that nickname, which he loathed like a mustard stain on one of his plaid jackets.

Apparently, he had never seen himself standing rigid on the sidelines, his hands trembling with intense anticipation of the competition ahead, as his wife Joan sang the national anthem. He never saw himself stomping on the sidelines, berating his players for not doing things his way or an official for not calling things his way.

Later in life, he finally admitted what everyone already knew.

"I deserved it,'' he said of the nickname.

Sloan could be a snapping turtle, unwilling to let something go until he heard the distant rumble of thunder. Once, while in his second stint as the head coach at Florida, Sloan was a little upset at the way Georgia fans were hurling debris at him and his players. He went after the campus policeman who was in charge of protecting the Gators as they left the court.

For the next hour and a half, the guy who was supposed to protect Sloan, stormed around Stegeman Coliseum trying to put the coach in handcuffs and haul him downtown. He might have succeeded, too, had two of Sloan's biggest players not blocked the doorway to the visiting locker room.

Sloan, an Indianapolis native who was one of Everett Case's six original "Hoosier Hotshots,'' loved his ties to the Old Gray Fox. But, typical of Sloan, he stormed away from Case's program with a year of eligibility remaining, primarily because he got little playing time behind a star guard named Vic Bubas.

"Coach, there's only two people in the world who think Bubas is better than me: you and him,'' Sloan told Case.

"But, Norm, we're winning,'' Case shot back.

"Yeah, but with me, we would be winning by more,'' Sloan said.

So he spent his senior year not on the hardwoods with Case, but playing quarterback for football coach Beattie Feathers instead.

But Sloan absorbed plenty about basketball, so much so that when he met up with Bubas again one night in the Charlotte Coliseum, the two Case protégés faced off in a bout of stubbornness in which Sloan won in an unconventional and controversial manner. It was the 1968 ACC Tournament, and Sloan was in his second year as the head coach of his alma mater and Bubas was in his ninth year as head coach of the Blue Devils. Duke was ranked sixth in the nation and had beaten the Wolfpack handily in two regular-season meetings, thanks primarily to the inside play of Mike Lewis.

When the two teams met in the semifinals of the ACC Tournament, Sloan turned his offense inside out in hopes of forcing Bubas to bring Lewis from under the basket. So Bill Kretzer and Vann Williford started the game at the top of the offense instead of under the basket. But Bubas didn't budge.

The result was one of the weirdest games in ACC Tournament history, as Kretzer spent most of the game either holding the ball or dribbling it near midcourt, while the entire arena was practically bored to tears. But the Wolfpack won, and Sloan got the best of Bubas without stomping off to the football field.

"It was pure coaching genius, even though we never planned on holding the ball,'' Williford says. "It was just how things happened. In the end, Norm completely out-coached him, because he knew how stubborn Bubas was.''

Two years later, the Wolfpack slowed things down against Frank McGuire and South Carolina in the championship game, and Williford helped lead State to its first of three ACC championships under Sloan.

Those were the days when Sloan was just building his program, when he didn't have as much talent as Duke or North Carolina. That changed dramatically when Sloan landed Tommy Burleson from Newland, North Carolina, in 1970 and David Thompson of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in 1971. They were the foundation for one of the greatest teams in college basketball, the squad that in 1974 ended UCLA's reign over the game.

With Burleson in the middle, Thompson all over the court and tiny point guard Monte Towe running the show, the Wolfpack won 57 of 58 games over a two-year span and brought home the school's first basketball national championship.

"I always thought Norm was an underrated coach,'' said Lefty Driesell, the former Maryland coach who was Sloan's adversary on the court, but his partner in getting under the skin of North Carolina coach Dean Smith. "He never had McDonald's All-Americas, but he knew how to coach and get the most out of his players. They always competed hard.''

But Sloan also rode his charges extremely hard. More than a handful couldn't take it and left the program over the years. Those that stayed, however, were defiantly loyal to their old coach.

"Norm could be brutal,'' Williford says. "But he was only brutal for the day. If you screwed up in practice or you screwed up in a game, you were going to hear about it in great detail. Probably a lot of other people were going to hear about it too. But the next day, it was done, unless of course you did the same stupid thing again. There were some players who didn't either understand that or couldn't handle it, and it ate at them.''

Sloan never lost his fiery, my-way approach, which did not serve him well in the two times he ended up being investigated by the NCAA. He landed on probation both times, for one year at N.C. State for the recruitment of David Thompson and for two years at Florida for buying player Vernon Maxwell a $240 plane ticket to a Boston Celtics basketball camp.

The latter scandal, which included a Drug Enforcement Agency investigation into the basketball program during his second stint at Florida, brought about Sloan's forced retirement on Oct. 31, 1989. Or, as he called it, the Halloween Day Massacre.

Sloan was firm with his players, no question. Every year before the start of practice, he called the team together to state his simple rules: Go to class, trim your hair, tuck in your shirts, have your ankles taped before practice every day and be on time.

"If you don't want to do that, then don't worry about it,'' Sloan would say. "You don't have to do any of those things. But you have to pay your own way to college and you can't play basketball for me.''

Burleson remembers his first meeting as a signed player for the Wolfpack. Sloan had courted the 7-foot-4 center for nearly three years, lavishing all kind of attention on the center who would end up as the centerpiece for a national championship.

"Now, guys, you are on campus and you have accepted a scholarship,'' Sloan told the freshmen. "The steak dinners and shrimp cocktails have come to an end. I am going to be demanding in practice. There will be a lot expected of you in academics. You are going to have to earn your scholarship now. You are going to be role models for this program. You are not going to go to parties and go to bars and damage the reputation of the N.C. State basketball program.''

There was no doubt in the players' minds that Sloan meant it.

"You never had to guess where he stood about anything,'' Williford says. "If you wanted to hear what he thought, all you had to do was ask.''

Yet, Sloan had no problems with breaking NCAA rules if he thought a player needed help. In his book, "Confessions of a Coach,'' Sloan admitted that he broke multiple rules, both as a player and coach at N.C. State and at Florida. Generally, he gave players in need money for trips home or to help their families. He helped Phil Spence's mother buy the heart medication she needed. He loaned Tommy Burleson, who came from a poor farmer's family in the mountains of North Carolina, the $20 Burleson needed for his dorm deposit. But Sloan adamantly insisted -- both to the NCAA Infractions Committee that he faced on two occasions and to the public -- that he didn't cheat to get a player.

"I adopted a simple precept that basically never changed,'' Sloan wrote. "In relation to the NCAA's ever-expanding rules, I've primarily been concerned with illegal aid, offered or given, as an inducement to get an athlete to attend my school. If I went out and tried to buy him, that was cheating.

"But to me, once a kid gets there, he's family, particularly if it's a kid without a family that can take care of his basic human needs. When you go in a home to recruit now, one of the first things the father or the mother -- or both -- will say is, "I just want to make sure you will take care of my son. I want to make sure that when he has problems, there is someone he can go talk to.' That's something a coach tells the parents he will do and something I feel he should do.''

Sloan mellowed like a fine wine - okay, he calmed down like a seltzer in stomach acid -- after he retired to North Carolina in 1990. One afternoon in 1999, he sat for hours at a Raleigh seafood restaurant to talk about his colorful career, bringing along his grandson to hear the retelling of the Wolfpack's "Golden Years.''

Here are a few highlights from that broad-ranging interview.

• "When we came here, people in this part of the country were basketball illiterates. They didn't know anything about it and they didn't care anything about it. Reynolds Coliseum helped create the most rabid area of fans for basketball that there is anywhere in the country,'' Sloan said of his arrival as one of Case's "Hoosier Hotshots.''
• "We took a bad lick. It was uncalled for, it was inexcusable, it was laughable compared to what goes on today,'' Sloan said of the one-year probation that kept the undefeated 1973 team out of the NCAA Tournament.
• "My responsibility on that team, to be honest with you, was not to screw it up,'' Sloan said of the 1974 team that won the national championship.

Sloan recruited the foundation for another national championship squad: Dereck Whittenburg, Sidney Lowe and Thurl Bailey. But by the time those three were cutting down the nets in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in April, 1983, Sloan had returned to Florida for a second go round as the Gators' head coach.

He left N.C. State in a huff with athletics director Willis Casey, with whom he had a stormy relationship that could be traced back to the day that long-time N.C. State athletics director Roy Clogston died in 1969. Both Casey, the swimming coach at State, and Sloan pursued the job. Sloan got the first offer, and accepted until he found out that he would have to give up his job as basketball coach. He backed out two days later, after consulting with his wife.

Casey became the athletics director, but Sloan always refused to call him "Boss.''

A decade later, after three ACC titles and the school's first national championship, Sloan discovered that he and his staff were among the lowest paid coaches in the league. He had already been contacted by Florida, where Sloan had coached from 1960-66, about the vacancy left by John Lotz, when Casey and N.C. State president Joab Thomas were talking about a contract extension and a raise.

But with Casey out of town, Sloan went to Dr. Thomas, told him about the Florida offer and requested a raise for himself and his staff. When Casey found out about it, he thought Sloan was bluffing. He wasn't.

"He really wanted to stay here, but they didn't match the salaries until the last minute, after he had already accepted the job at Florida and he couldn't back down,'' Joan Sloan says. "We had a family and State was not willing to up the salaries for anybody.''

Sloan later said he regretted leaving N.C. State, and many of his players felt the same way.

"Personally, I wish he could have stayed and created a legacy like Dean Smith did at North Carolina and Mike Krzyzewski has done at Duke,'' Burleson says. "But that was something between Coach Sloan and Willis Casey. I don't know why they didn't see eye-to-eye more.''

When Sloan died of pulmonary fibrosis on Dec. 9, 2004, the Atlantic Coast Conference lost one of its most fiery and emotional characters, a guy whose character was just as colorful as those red, black and yellow plaid jackets he used to wear on the sidelines. Sloan compiled a 627-395 record during his coaching career and was named his league's coach of the year at Presbyterian, the Citadel, Florida, N.C. State and Florida again. He built one of the ACC's greatest teams with Thompson, Towe and Burleson and won the league's second national championship.

Yet, the mournful lament for those who gathered to say good-bye at Edenton Street United Methodist Church was that Sloan never got the credit he deserved for being one of the top coaches in college basketball history. He's in the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame and in the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. But, with two probations on his record, he may never make it into the National Basketball Hall of Fame.

"I just want people to realize what a great coach he was,'' Burleson says. "He was a little bit fiery, of course. You didn't always agree with him, but you never won an argument with him either. But he was the perfect coach for our team.''

At his funeral, when Stormin' Norman finally calmed down, his friends and former players enjoyed retelling the best stories about one of the ACC's most intense characters. For some, however, there is more to Sloan's legacy than just that plaid-clad persona.

"He should be remembered as a great, great coach,'' says Towe. "Because that's what he was.''

You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.