A triumph as glorious as it was fleeting is 1974 Wolfpack’s enduring appeal

It’s hard to imagine a school immortalizing its best-ever basketball player — the conference’s and perhaps the game’s greatest-ever player — by literally putting him on a pedestal, but the 44-inch plinth that lifts the David Thompson statue N.C. State unveiled last fall into the air is as stunning to witness as it is unique.

In that sense, the statue not only honors Thompson but presents an ideal summation of why the legend and lore of those 1974 national champions has proven so enduring even 50 years later. There wasn’t ever a team quite like that before. And, its mission accomplished, it scattered to the winds. That transience became part of its legacy. In some ways, it is what still distinguishes it.

It’s a fair question to ask why N.C. State’s 1974 team has carved out a space in the collective basketball conscience that exceeds most others. And there are answers to that question, even if that wasn’t the Triangle’s first title — Lennie Rosenbluth and North Carolina had done that 17 years earlier — and even if the Wolfpack only had to wait nine years for another.

That team was very much a creation of its time and place and era, a collection of moving parts that locked into sync for a moment, and then dispersed. In some ways, it’s that transitory nature, how that team’s moment was as fleeting as it was glorious, that so deeply cements it in our memories – and our imaginations

Photos: A look back at NC State’s 1974 National Championship basketball team

Even some of that team’s received legend was born of the manipulations of Wolfpack publicist Frank Weedon: Thompson wearing 44 instead of the 33 he wore in high school at Shelby Crest, to reference his leap; Tommy Burleson listed at 7-foot-4 instead of his actual 7-2 to claim the title of college basketball’s tallest player.

At the other extreme, there was also a sense, one not lost at N.C. State all these years later, that the universe was arrayed against it. Thompson was the last great star to play before freshmen were eligible, a rule changed in the middle of his wasted freshman season. And the player who might have been the greatest dunker in college basketball history played at a time when the dunk was banned, for reasons still hard to understand. (Instead, Thompson and Towe improvised the drop-it-in-the-bucket alley-oop.)

Thompson’s sophomore year was wiped out by the violations alleged in his recruitment, with the undefeated Wolfpack ineligible for the postseason. The NCAA tournament was a velvet-rope affair in those days, with only one invitee from each conference, and a year later that meant getting past equally powerful Maryland just for a chance.

That led to what may have been the greatest game ever played, the 103-100 overtime battle in the ACC title game in Greensboro, and once that hurdle was surmounted, and Thompson survived his head-first fall during the NCAA tournament, who awaited but UCLA? Dynasty of dynasties, winner of the previous seven NCAA titles. The actual championship, against Marquette, was almost anticlimactic after that.

To overcome all that required a team that was truly special, one that could truly rise to its moment. And how quickly that moment passed. It’s not hard to argue that 1974 was the basketball peak for everyone involved. The attempt at a repeat, a year later, saw Thompson score a then-ACC record 57 points but ended with a fourth-place ACC finish and an ACC tournament loss to North Carolina.

And after that? Thompson’s promising pro career fizzled in an inferno of injuries and drug abuse, one that epitomized the pro-basketball culture of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. (A winked-at not-so-secret immortalized in the opening lyrics of the 1980 Steely Dan song “Glamour Profession,” about a Los Angeles coke dealer: “6:05, outside the stadium/Special delivery for Hoops McCann.”)

Burleson’s NBA career was limited to seven seasons by injuries; Towe played a few pro seasons before moving into coaching. Tim Stoddard went on to a long pro career, but in baseball, not basketball. And the irascible Norm Sloan, who managed to meld all the moving parts together, went back to Florida six years later. His legacy has since been all but overlooked by the basketball establishment, if not at N.C. State, where like Thompson he has a statue outside Reynolds Coliseum.

But in that one golden season, when the best player and the best team in the country took on and tackled every obstacle in their way, N.C. State rose above it all. The Wolfpack flew higher than ever before, soaring into legend, and that’s what we remember it by.

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