Neill McGeachy

He was a preacher's kid. His father — Rev. Neill Roderick McGeachy Sr. — was a Presbyterian minister; his mother was Francis Hamilton McGeachy. Neill Roderick McGeachy Jr. was born in Charlotte on April 20, 1942, and the family eventually settled in Statesville, a small textile and furniture town fifty miles north up Interstate 77 in Iredell County. He grew up tall, athletic, and unmistakably his father's son — courteous, religious, quick with a line of poetry, raised on the rhythms of Southern Presbyterian English. He played basketball and tennis at Statesville High School from 1956 to 1960 and was named an all-state selection in both.

He stayed home for college, picking Lenoir-Rhyne — the small Lutheran liberal-arts school in Hickory, an hour west of Statesville. It was not the natural choice for a top high-school athlete; Lenoir-Rhyne played NAIA basketball against schools no one outside the Carolina foothills had heard of. He chose it anyway. Across four years from 1961 to 1965 he became a three-sport varsity letterman: football, basketball, and track. A teammate from his freshman year years later remembered sitting next to him in the dining hall and watching the 19-year-old McGeachy switch a rubber ball back and forth between his hands, squeezing it for finger strength while he waited for his food. He took the work seriously even when no one was watching. He graduated in 1965.

What happened next is the strangest line on his résumé. He went pro in two different leagues, in two different sports. He played professional basketball for the Carolina Cougars, the regional ABA franchise that had been the Houston Mavericks before relocating to North Carolina in 1969. And he played professional football for the Atlanta Falcons of the NFL. Neither stint produced a Hall of Fame career or a Wikipedia stat line. Both happened. Both were real. He was the rare American athlete of his generation to have drawn a pro paycheck on a court and a field.

Coaching, though, was the family business — or close to it. His father preached on Sundays; McGeachy stood at the chalkboard the rest of the week. He went back to Statesville High School as the basketball and tennis coach, then moved into the college ranks as an assistant at Davidson under Terry Holland — the brilliant young coach who would soon leave for Virginia and build a national power. From Davidson, McGeachy moved to Durham. In 1971 Bucky Waters hired the 29-year-old to coach the Duke freshman team. In 1972 Waters promoted him to varsity assistant. He had no head-coaching experience above the high school level. He thought he was an assistant. Then the bottom fell out.

The setting for the disaster was the fall of 1973, two weeks before the season opened.

Bucky Waters had inherited the Duke head coaching job from Vic Bubas in 1969 and spent four years getting beaten down by it. The Vietnam-era student body wasn't interested in his coat-and-tie discipline. The Vic Bubas recruiting pipeline had dried up. The ACC he was coaching in was an arms race of generational talent — David Thompson at NC State, Tom McMillen and Len Elmore at Maryland, Bobby Jones at North Carolina, the field of titans that would be the league's golden age. Duke was on NCAA probation in 1973 for two minor violations during the recruitment of David Thompson — Waters hadn't committed them; a Shelby businessman associated with the football program had — but his program wore the punishment anyway. The team finished 12-14 in 1972-73. Students called for him to be fired. He went to Duke's new athletic director Carl James in early September and asked for a contract extension to demonstrate the school's confidence in him. James declined to commit. Waters resigned that afternoon. Practice opened in two weeks.

Carl James panicked. His first call was to Adolph Rupp — the legendary, 72-year-old, recently retired Kentucky coach who had been forced into retirement against his will and was looking for one more season. Rupp initially said yes. Then Rupp's estate manager died unexpectedly, and Rupp called James back to say he couldn't take the job after all. With days to go before practice and no other names in the rolodex, James turned to the most recently hired Duke assistant: Neill McGeachy. He was 31 years old. He had been a Duke assistant coach for a total of one season.

At the press conference introducing his new head coach, James did something cruelly revealing. He emphasized that McGeachy was "the new head coach... not the interim coach" — and then announced that Duke would conduct a nationwide search for the best coach available at the end of the season. McGeachy stood at the podium and listened to his own ten-month notice. He had been given the job in fall, and he had been told in the same sentence that the job would be open again the following spring.

He went to work anyway. The roster he inherited was thin and aging. Junior Bob Fleischer was a 6-foot-8 bruiser; senior Chris Redding was a 6-8 scorer who would become Cameron Indoor Stadium's renaming-night hero in his junior year; Kevin Billerman was the slow but cerebral point guard; Willie Hodge was a 6-9 forward and one of two Black players on a roster that was now playing in an integrated ACC; freshman Edgar Burch (1973-74 was the first season of freshman varsity eligibility in the modern NCAA — the first freshman to play for Duke since the Korean War) was a wing guard from Detroit who would flunk out after one year. There was no future NBA talent on the roster. There was no current All-American on the roster. There was, against the murderer's row of the 1974 ACC, no realistic path to victory in conference play.

Duke went 10-16. They were 2-10 in the ACC and finished seventh in the eight-team league. They got embarrassed by NC State, by Maryland, by UNC. McGeachy ran practices the way he had been taught to — organized, no-nonsense, courteous, calm. He never publicly complained about the situation. The players liked him. One of his Duke players, writing a public condolence at the time of his death, would call him "my coach at Duke, my mentor, and an inspiration to those who were fortunate to have played for him. He was able to bring out the best in us, both personally and athletically."

But the season had a defining moment, and it was a catastrophe.

March 2, 1974. Carmichael Auditorium, Chapel Hill. Duke and North Carolina, the final regular-season game. The Tar Heels were ranked nationally; Duke was finishing out the season at 9-15. With 17 seconds left in regulation, Duke led North Carolina 86-78 — by eight points. The game was, by any rational measure, over. There was no shot clock; there was no three-point line. The Blue Devils were in possession of the lead and the inbound, in an era when teams trailing by 8 points with 17 seconds left simply did not come back.

Carolina fouled Bobby Jones. Two free throws. 86-80, 14 seconds left.

UNC pressed Duke's inbound. John Kuester scored. 86-82, 13 seconds left.

UNC fouled. Duke missed. Duke turned the ball over on the next inbound. Walter Davis got the loose ball, fed Jones. Jones scored. 86-84, 6 seconds left.

Duke's Pete Kramer — one of Duke's better free throw shooters — was fouled on the inbound and went to the line for a one-and-one. He missed the front end. UNC rebounded. The ball came to Walter Davis 30 feet from the basket. He pulled up and banked in a shot at the buzzer. 86-86. Overtime.

UNC won 96-92.

Eight points in seventeen seconds. No three-point line. Walter Davis bank shot from thirty feet to tie a game Duke had led by eight with less time on the clock than it takes to read this sentence. It remains, more than fifty years later, the most painful regulation collapse in the Duke-UNC rivalry's history. Generations of Duke fans who weren't yet born when it happened can still recite the sequence. The game was the last game Neill McGeachy ever coached as a head coach at any level.

True to his word, Carl James fired him in late March 1974. Duke hired Bill Foster from Utah to begin the six-year rebuild that would end at the 1978 NCAA Championship Game with Mike Gminski, Jim Spanarkel, Gene Banks, and Kenny Dennard on the floor. McGeachy was 31 years old. He had been a Duke head coach for one season. He would never coach at the Division I level again.

He went where good coaches go after a bad year: down the road to a familiar friend. Wake Forest hired him as an assistant under Carl Tacy. He spent a few seasons there, then in 1977 — at 35 — he made the decision that defined the rest of his life. He left coaching.

He founded Sugar Creek Enterprises, a sports promotions and marketing company with offices in Winston-Salem and Charlotte. He ran it for twenty years. He was good at it: by the time he sold the company in 1997, Sugar Creek had built a substantial regional client base in the Carolinas. The work suited him — the gladhanding, the storytelling, the deep network of contacts he'd accumulated in two pro leagues and three college programs. He had the temperament for it. "He was a colorful man, a gifted promoter, a unique orator, and a gentleman," his obituary would later put it. People who had known him only as the Duke head coach with the 10-16 season were surprised to discover he was actually one of the most charming people in the Carolina sports community.

In 1997 he took the marketing job for the United States Tennis Association's Southern Section in Atlanta. Five years there. Then, in the winter of 2002, the call came that everyone gets if they're lucky: a chance to go home.

Lenoir-Rhyne University — the small Lutheran college where he had been a three-sport varsity letterman four decades earlier — was looking for an athletic director. The football program was bleeding attendance. The athletic department had no marketing arm. The board wanted someone with a name and a network. They wanted McGeachy. He took the job at age 60 and held it for the next fourteen years. He brought the same energy he had brought to Sugar Creek: more pre-game promotions, more corporate sponsorships, more fan involvement, more theatricality. (At his very first home football game back at Lenoir-Rhyne in 2002, a skydiver descended onto the field with the game ball.)

Football attendance more than doubled in his first year — from 13,958 to 28,625. Lenoir-Rhyne led all NCAA Division II programs in the country in attendance-percentage increase that fall. Over fourteen years, McGeachy added eight new sports to Lenoir-Rhyne's athletic program (men's and women's tennis, men's and women's track and field, men's and women's swimming, men's and women's lacrosse), increased student-athlete enrollment by 46 percent, and turned the Bears into a South Atlantic Conference power. Lenoir-Rhyne won 38 SAC regular-season championships and 14 conference tournament titles during his tenure. The football team won four consecutive SAC titles from 2011 to 2014. And in the autumn of 2013, the Lenoir-Rhyne Bears reached the NCAA Division II National Championship Game. They lost, but they got there. McGeachy was 71 years old.

He kept going. In September 2015, at age 73, he suffered a stroke. He told his university president, Wayne Powell, that he wanted to retire. The official announcement came in early spring 2016. At Lenoir-Rhyne's May 2016 commencement, the school awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters — a Doctorate from his alma mater, more than fifty years after his original Lenoir-Rhyne diploma. All university flags would fly at half-staff when he died.

Neill McGeachy died early on the morning of February 9, 2018, in Clemmons, North Carolina, at age 75. His memorial service was held four days later at St. Andrews Lutheran Church in Hickory — within walking distance of the Lenoir-Rhyne campus he had spent the last act of his life rebuilding. The Lenoir-Rhyne flag flew at half-staff. The Bears Club, the athletic fundraising arm he had run for fourteen years, brought a contingent. The Statesville high school basketball coaching fraternity sent representatives. So did the United States Tennis Association Southern Section. So did Lenoir-Rhyne's president, Fred Whitt, who in a public statement called him "a Lenoir-Rhyne icon and a beloved leader." Duke sent a notice through the athletic department. The Bucky Waters / Vic Bubas circle of pre-K Duke basketball figures was by 2018 nearly extinguished — Bubas had died ten months earlier; Waters would live another six years — but the survivors among them made sure their old protégé was honored.

He left behind his wife of many years, his son Neill Roderick McGeachy III (married to Joan Williams), his daughter Ashley Letitia McGeachy Fox, and four grandchildren — Emma Hamilton McGeachy, Jackson Roderick McGeachy, Ella T. Fox, and Austin Waller Fox. He left behind three sisters. He left behind, his obituary noted, "a Civil War historian, poetry reader, life-long tennis player and fan of the late Leonard Cohen." People who hadn't known him personally often discovered, after his death, that the man whose Duke season had been the program's darkest single year was also a polymath who could quote Cohen lyrics from memory and discuss the order of battle at Chickamauga over dinner.

The year after his death, the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame inducted him into its 2019 class — a posthumous recognition of a 50-year life in North Carolina athletics that began at Statesville High School in 1956 and ended at Lenoir-Rhyne in 2016. The 10-16 season at Duke was a footnote on the citation, sandwiched between the three-sport pro career and the Lenoir-Rhyne rebuild. He had been inducted into the Lenoir-Rhyne Sports Hall of Fame in 1987, the North Carolina Tennis Hall of Fame in 1999, and the inaugural class of the Iredell County Sports Hall of Fame in 2016.

The 1973-74 Duke basketball season was painful in the way only certain seasons are — painful because of the suddenness of the catastrophe, painful because of the public humiliation built into the hire, painful because there was a moment late in a March game at Chapel Hill when Duke fans believed for seventeen seconds that maybe, in a season that had everything go wrong, this one thing was going to go right, and then it didn't. McGeachy carried that season in his pocket for the next forty-four years. He never publicly complained about it. He never tried to relitigate his case. He never blamed Carl James for the impossible position the job had been when he was handed it. "Neill seemed like a decent guy thrown into an untenable situation," an old Duke fan posted on a basketball board years later. "It should come as no surprise that he did just fine."

He did better than fine. He went home to Lenoir-Rhyne, took the program from seventh place to the national championship game, and built fourteen years of small-college athletic infrastructure that would outlive him. One of his Duke players, writing in the comment section of his obituary, captured the version of him that the 10-16 record couldn't: "My coach at Duke, my mentor, and an inspiration to those who were fortunate to have played for him. He was able to bring out the best in us, both personally and athletically. His passing is a personal loss to me, and I'm sure many others."

He was a head coach at Duke for one season — the season every Duke fan would prefer to forget. He was a credit to North Carolina sports for fifty years. The latter, in the end, is what they wrote on the citation.