1990 NC State Basketball Controversy
Brooks Raiford discusses the 1989-1990 basketball controversy at NC State that resulted in the firing of Jim Valvano. He recalls his response as a Student Senator, which he remembers was unpopular with many students.
Interview on 2012-04-27 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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In a nutshell,
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Coach Valvano had become both basketball coach and the director of athletics along the way.
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Also during that time, I guess it wasn't all that common in those days although it seems to be very common these days,
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was that he had been given a perpetual contract.
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As I recall it he was always at the beginning of a five-year contract,
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so it would automatically renew every year for five years.
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So with that by way of context,
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there were some accusations made about the coach and about the program,
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who knows how much of that was true in the detail.
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It ranged from sort of what most people considered fairly trivial,
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players selling shoes that they got free from sponsors,
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to giving away or selling tickets that they received free because they were student athletes,
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those sorts of things,
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to some more serious accusations about
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pressing professors to delay or change grades to keep players eligible.
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All that sort of stuff was in the mix.
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My concern never really was the detail about the truth of every bit of that,
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although those were all important questions.
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What we got to was a point where there was an untenable situation, in my view,
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which was we had a coach who had been investigated, a program that had been investigated.
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That created a dynamic on campus where
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the coach operated very independently from the chancellor and the administration
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So the student body president at that time and I
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contacted the coach and asked for an opportunity to visit with him, and we did.
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We went to his house and we sat in his living room and had a very frank conversation
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about what was going on, his recruiting practices, some of the allegations that were out there.
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Clearly he had a case to make and we listened.
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We also, I think, asked some challenging questions
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that we had about practices and behaviors and so forth
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and suitability to lead at this point,
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There was an investigation by the University of North Carolina system.
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The Poole Commission Report is the famous report that came out of that.
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That report was heavily redacted because it had a lot of names in it and so forth,
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but although that report found generally I think a lack of direct rule violation
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there was an awful lot of questionable judgment, in my view, that had gone on,
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so in the end I felt like the university cannot move on as long as he was coach.
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Now you've got to remember I came to campus with a "Jimmy Valvano for President" bumper sticker on my car,
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so I was a fan. I mean this is a guy who I liked and was a huge State fan and loved the big win in '83,
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and you'll remember I started in '86 so this was very fresh in everyone's mind.
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I also knew that ninety-nine percent of students thought he walked on water
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and that to say otherwise would be a really unpopular point of view.
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But I ultimately came to the view that it was time for him to go
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and for us to move on, so I gave a speech to the student senate to that effect,
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I got a lot of flack about it, got a lot of support too
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from people and faculty and staff as well who were supportive, which I appreciated.
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Who knows if I'd do everything the same way over again, it's impossible to say,
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hindsight's twenty-twenty, but I'm comfortable with all of that
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and I do feel like we had gotten to a point where for the university to really get past this blemish,
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whoever you might feel is responsible for the blemish, we needed to change personnel.
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Out of all this the chancellor resigned.
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It had gotten to a point where there were times I was communicating between the chancellor and the coach
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and they were not,
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so that by itself spoke volumes, I think, about where things had gotten on campus.
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We had people cutting up their diplomas and mailing them back.
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It was during all this that our student body president at the time stepped down and I became student body president
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automatically for the last month or so of that school year
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and so therefore was a trustee for a period of that time.
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During that time when we went through the transition we rewrote the contract that would be offered to the next coach,
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we had to go through a chancellor search,
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and I was on the chancellor search committee that
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offered Chancellor [Larry] Monteith the position on an interim basis and ultimately hired him as the permanent chancellor.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.