When Robin Simonton was hired as the Executive Director of Historic Oakwood Cemetery in November of 2011, she was unprepared for what would come four months later. Simonton knew about the rich history of NC State men’s basketball but was also familiar with its struggle to keep up with UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke for the last 30 years.
But what she didn’t know was how desperate NC State fans were to have a team like the 1983 championship squad. In March of 2012 when droves of fans clad in red entered under the stone archway entrance of Oakwood and down the winding road to her office asking where Jim Valvano was, she didn’t understand why requests to see the legendary coach tripled.
Asking where Valvano is buried was a common request. However, she was curious as to why there were so many requests to see him.
So when Simonton asked one of the visitors dressed in red sweatbands and Wolfpack apparel what was going on, they said:
“We have to go beg him to reverse the curse.”
A curse? Simonton had no idea what curse they were talking about.
“Every year, people would come in March and make this pilgrimage to him,” Simonton said. “I never really thought about what was behind it. For me, it was just this neat way for them to pay homage to their coach. But it was very clear that they were hungry for a really, really good team, and that’s what they were hoping Valvano could do for them.”
What curse were NC State fans hoping Valvano would lift?
The ‘curse’ originated from Valvano’s ousting as the head coach of NC State men’s basketball, even after leading the Wolfpack to a national championship in 1983 and an ACC title in 1987.
Allegations of corruption and academic negligence surrounding Valvano’s team — a book titled “Personal Fouls” by Peter Golenbock painted Valvano as a villain who represented what was wrong with college basketball. It claimed Valvano was someone who betrayed his recruits while the administration condoned academic failures.
All this prompted Bruce Poulton, NC State’s then-chancellor, to resign. Valvano was stripped of his athletic director duties in 1989. A year later, he was also out as the head coach.
Once the NCAA and Bureau of Investigations finished looking into the claims, there was no evidence that linked Valvano to any of the allegations but it was already too late. The University still felt the pressure to part ways with him.
“NC State unfortunately didn’t have his back,” said Greg Haas, a lifelong NC State fan who remembers watching the 1983 championship team when he was six. “Fans that are my age and even older, they’ll tell you that he got a raw deal.”
That’s when the idea of a curse settled in. The way NC State handled Valvano’s last few years seemingly placed a curse on the program.
From there, everything seemed to spiral.
At the time of Valvano’s departure, NC State and UNC had the same amount of national championships while Duke was yet to win one. But over the next 30 years, NC State entered a basketball abyss while its Tobacco Road rivals collected championships like infinity stones.
To replace Valvano, NC State hired Les Robinson, who led the Wolfpack to the NCAA Tournament in his first season. However, a year later the school imposed a scholarship limit because of the NCAA violations that took place under Valvano. Robinson could not recover — he failed to make the tournament for the next five years before he was replaced by Herb Sendek.
By the time the Pack hired Sendek in 1996, UNC won a national championship to surpass NC State while Duke claimed two to draw even. Sendek made the NCAA Tournament his last five seasons but couldn’t keep up with the Tar Heels and Blue Devils who both added another championship by the time Sendek was let go.
Sidney Lowe was hired after and failed to make the tournament in his five seasons, while Duke and UNC also won a title each during that stretch. In 2011, it seemed like NC State hired the right guy in Mark Gottfried — he made two Sweet 16 rounds but at the end of his tenure, the program’s culture was falling apart.
Soon after Gottfried was let go, the NCAA launched an investigation into the NC State program regarding a pay-for-play scheme involving Dennis Smith Jr. It took the investigation four years to conclude and during that time, current head coach Kevin Keatts admitted it was difficult to build a culture and establish trust with recruits while the investigation was happening.
It seemed like NC State could never catch a break. When things started to look like they were turning around, an investigation or a wrong hire doomed the Wolfpack. It was as if NC State was chasing the ghost of Valvano — maybe even, a curse.
“There’s no doubt that it stunted it,” Haas said. “It set [NC State] back 30 years,”
When Ernie Myers, a member of NC State’s 1983 national championship team, moved back to Raleigh in 2006, he noticed a different aura surrounding Wolfpack basketball.
“I moved back down here 18 years ago, and the mentality of people was different,” Myers said. “When I left, we were champions.”
It seemed like there was nothing NC State could do to lift the apparent curse the basketball gods put on the program for the way Valvano’s situation was handled. And it sure didn’t seem like Keatts was going to break the curse anytime soon. He was the head coach for one of the worst seasons in Wolfpack history when it went 11-21 and 4-16 in the ACC.
It should be noted that his team was ravaged by injuries. It was also the year the Dennis Smith investigation came to a crescendo — NC State lost one basketball scholarship for the 2021-2022 year, had official recruiting visits reduced, reduced recruiting communication for the year and received a one-year probation.
Keatts put that year behind him, though, and led the Wolfpack to the NCAA Tournament for the second time in his tenure in 2023. There was belief NC State could return to its glory days now that Keatts could focus solely on coaching.
But the next season, after a promising 5-1 start to conference play, NC State only won four more ACC games and ended the regular season losing 10 of its last 14.
The Wolfpack entered the ACC Tournament as a 10-seed. It had to win five games in five days to claim the conference title — something that had never been done in the ACC. It was the only way for the Pack to make it to the NCAA Tournament and most likely, for Keatts to keep his job.
Of course, the rest is history.
Doing his best Valvano impression, Keatts got his team to believe it could be the first ACC school to win five games in five days. While it took a little bit of magic from now-graduate guard Michael O’Connell against Virginia, the Wolfpack claimed its first conference title since 1987.
“You’ve got to give coach Keatts credit,” Myers said. “To keep those guys mentally, their heads in the game and to believe that they can do something that had never been done before. That’s what Coach V was. He was a dreamer, a believer. He made you believe that you could do something that nobody ever thought you could do.”
But Keatts and his squad of believers didn’t stop with an ACC Championship, they made it to the NCAA Final Four for the first time since 1983. When NC State made its long-awaited return to basketball’s grandest stage last March, those who visited Valvano’s grave were no longer there begging the legend to reverse the curse.
It was finally broken.
“This time people were so much more excited,” Simonton said. “They had a whole different level of hope than they had had in the past.”
Now that NC State had won the conference championship and made it to the Final Four in the same season, fans could finally move on from the curse they thought was on the team and the Wolfpack could finally stop chasing that ghost.
“I think we’ve had some teams that have been close, and it may not have been a lot of them, but they’ve been close, and we just never got over the hump,” Keatts said. “This team will always be remembered as a team who broke through, whether it’s a curse or not, but we were able to break through it.”
