PAPA’S VARSITY SWEATER

Papa and his sweater from 1956

Just look at that big smile :)

Since 2023, my sweet 89-year-old Papa has been fighting cancer. After successfully overcoming colon cancer in June 2023 following chemotherapy treatment, he recently faced a relapse and is now undergoing chemo once again for abdominal cancer. It’s been a long, hard road for Papa and my family, but he is one of the strongest male figures in my life and does not go down without a fight. 

In many ways, that strength is the same one I’ve always heard in his stories. As many grandfathers do, he loves telling stories from his lifetime. Listening to Papa has always felt comforting — his southern Asheville drawl paired with the passion in his voice pulls you completely into each memory. One of my favorite stories of his is about his time playing on the men’s soccer team at NC State.

Those stories made NC State feel familiar long before it ever became part of our family in a new way. Even growing up as a UNC Tar Heel fan, I shared the love Papa has for State. After my brother was accepted there, no one was prouder than Papa to welcome another member of the Wolfpack into the family. 

I’ve never admitted this to him, but growing up playing soccer myself always made me feel quietly more connected to him. That connection became tangible for the first time in fourth grade, when I was assigned to do a project on the oldest member of my family and to share a story from their life. Papa showed me his men’s varsity soccer sweater from his time playing at NC State, carefully pulling it out of a wooden heirloom chest as if he were unfolding a piece of his past. He even let me bring it to school to show my class — something that, at the time, felt like an enormous privilege.

I hadn’t seen the sweater again since that day until recently, when Papa decided he wanted to pass it down to my brother. In a recent email shared with my family, Papa talks about his time at NC State and how he came to be a part of the team. At a time when so many conversations in our family have revolved around his treatments, appointments, and uncertainty, reading his words felt different and lighter. For a moment, we weren’t thinking about his cancer. We were listening to Papa tell one of his stories again.

I don’t think I could ever do this story justice the way Papa tells it himself, so I want to share the email he sent in his own words: 

It occurred to me last night that you might someday begin to wonder how someone from Asheville, knowing only baseball, football, and some track, could come to letter in soccer. Not too long a story......

After my first year ('54) in Owen Residence Hall, I had decided (or it was decided) that I would spend my 2nd year in Tucker. I had 2 roommates: John Schecrist from Lexington, who told me all I know about BBQ, and Ray Morgan from Asheville.

Ray was one of the guys whom I ran into at dances, parties, etc., without really knowing each other. Ray, I think maybe went to the same church as we did, and I'm sure we knew a lot of the same girls from St Genevieve's. His Dad was a top executive at American Enka - at that time, one of the biggest outfits in Western NC. Ray had asked if he could room with me for part of his first year - he knew already that he would be moving into his frat house, and I knew we would have to be three in a room for at least part of the year.

I never wondered until now how he got to move into the house as a freshman - I think the rule was upperclassmen only, but his Dad had so much pull with the Dean of the Textile School (American Enka offered 30-40 paid internships to textile school students every summer, so he and the dean were close).

Anyway, it was a deal. We were on the bottom floor on the front in one of the "ells" that reach toward one another.

Living with Ray was interesting, to say the least. John and I both were public school products, and we worked hard from 3-4 on until 9-10 just trying to stay ahead of the assignments. Ray, a product of prep schools since the 6th grade, already knew most of this stuff! He'd wander back from the house around 6:30 and work on a couple of things and be ready for bed 8:30-9:00! We had one 2-bunk and 1 single-bunk unit. We finally figured out how a couple extra blankets draped around the 2-bunk unit would produce a dark cave underneath, so we moved him from the top bunk (freshman) to the lower one so he'd stop bitchin' while we stayed up trying to get our work done. Add to that, Ray was smart as a whip anyway, and he could out-figure us in any course we had if he wanted to. We finally got smart enough to ask him for a brief tutorial on one assignment per night in return for turning off the late-night DJ.

Ray had played soccer at Asheville School for Boys for 3-4 years and was anxious to get an "athletic credit" on his resume, so he went out, made the team, and then talked me into trying out. Listen, the coach (a grad assistant) was just trying to get 30 souls on the field so he could keep his tiny bit of extra income! I kicked a few balls and showed him I wasn't afraid to run into people, and I played fullback (little finesse, lots of blocking and tackling) regularly for two seasons.

Soccer was a Club Sport, I guess, back then. The field was beside Reynolds Coliseum, on the gym side. We had a back corner of the football locker room, which was in the basement of Reynolds. We supposedly had a couple of football managers assigned to us, but we mainly took care of our own stuff. After practice, we put our dirty stuff in a pile and whoever washed it piled it out of the dryers in the same spot - so we had to dig our own stuff out. Of course, when we knew the football staff was totally ignoring us, we figured out how to find what we wanted/needed and took great pleasure mixing our dirty stuff back in with clean football stuff! The only specific thing I remember about that was we still used leather shoes/boots then, and so had to brush the soles with neatsfoot oil last thing every night to keep the soles from drying out and cracking. No Nike at the time.

We didn't have a regular, year-ahead schedule. Instead, the coaches would meet periodically and figure out who had what and when - so some weeks we played twice, some once, and once in a while a double-header. We took a road trip up to play Pitt and several schools along the way. We got to eat in a major football program dining room (cereal bowls full of shucked lobster meat tossed with melted butter) and play on a soccer field like no other I have seen: hard-packed ground-up cinders from the steel mills just over the hill! Can you picture what that did to your knees/thighs when you went down? 

We actually had a pretty good team - in my two seasons, we won more than we lost. 

We had every kind of player: there were the prep school guys like Ray, and smaller schools in PA and NJ often had soccer rather than football, and we had maybe 50% foreign guys. I remember a Dutchman, a couple of Pakistanis, several Middle Easterners, and a bunch of South/Central Americans. Both the textile and the agriculture schools drew a bunch of overseas people, and they were delighted to see soccer!

The game we played then was nothing like the one you see now: we played 5 across the front, 3 halfbacks, 2 fullbacks, and the goalie - it was basic schoolyard brawling - kick it, block it, tackle. Nothing like what it is now - once in a great while, maybe a little finesse on the part of those who knew how, but it was mostly bang bang!

I played enough for 2 seasons to qualify for the varsity sweater. Since we had no "official standing,” Dr. Willis Casey, the Athletic Director, had us all over to his house. Mrs. Casey fixed a great picnic, and we all had a wonderful time. That would have been Spring of ‘57.

Right around the end of the season, I had a friend, Dobbin McNatt, stumble and fall right into the trajectory of a strong kick, and the ball caught him straight in the eye. It was a week or two before we really knew he would be able to see - he could, and did, and went on to a long and fruitful career. However, after that, I couldn't really get my leg behind a ball without first looking up - and that took away any defensive strength (if any, I had).

So, that pretty much sums up my soccer career; I had a good time with a good group and had a nice red sweater to boot. Not too bad for a mountain boy who had hardly ever even heard of the game before he started.

Enjoy the sweater and take care of it - think of me when you see it.

Love, Pop