A Pirate Forsaken:
The End of a Dream
Despite the Pain, Ed Emory
Forever Bleeds Pirate Purple
By
Ron Cherubini
©2002, 2004 Bonesville.net
Photo: ECU SID |
For Ed Emory, the years since his abrupt dismissal
as East Carolina University’s head football coach have been painful,
less because of the foggy details surrounding the firing, but more
because of the perceptions that the events created about him as a person
and a Pirate.
It has always bothered Emory that some of the very
people he holds in highest regard – ECU people – may perceive him in a
way that is simply not the reality that is Ed Emory.
Many stories have been told about Emory’s dismissal
in 1984. That he cheated and was let go for it. That the lawsuit Emory
filed was intended to strike back at ECU.
For the most part, Emory has remained quiet about
it, until now.
The former star offensive lineman and the coach who
produced one of the greatest seasons (1983) in the Pirate football
program’s history wants to set a few things straight about the event
that still pains him today.
“The reason I got fired – and nobody knows this but
you until today – is that I let my love for East Carolina and my emotion
for East Carolina control what I did. I really want people to know that
my lawsuit wasn’t against ECU or the all the people (affiliated) with
ECU. It was about two men. I would take back that lawsuit because it was
really about Dr. Ken Karr (athletic director at the time), Dr. Tom
Howell (interim Chancellor at the time) and what they did.”
In order to appreciate how things happened at the
end, it makes sense to start with the beginning of the Emory tenure.
For Ed Emory, every moment of his coaching life was
aimed at landing the East Carolina head football coaching position. So
in 1979, when he was hired, Emory had found nirvana.
“I applied for the job after (Sonny) Randle left,”
Emory said. “I applied again after (Mike) McGee left. Me and Jim Donnan
applied both times. We both were there again after Pat Dye left. They
probably regret it now, but they hired me that third time.”
At 41 years of age, Emory felt like he had just won
the national championship.
“I was so happy,” Emory said. “I really
thought I would die there. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,
for 34 years, I worked for and wanted that job.”
What Emory didn’t expect was to walk into a program
that was in complete disarray. The athletic department was deep in the
red and the team was completely frayed.
“I can’t really tell you what state the program was
in when I got there,” Emory said. “I would like to tell you how
bad it was, but it would be X-rated. They didn’t have but 30 players and
hadn’t done any recruiting in two years. Of the 30-35 kids, most were
ineligible. The department was about $1.6 million in the red and I
couldn’t even hire staff.
“Many times I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself
into.’ Pat (Dye) was a hell of a football coach, but he left a lot
of problems here and that is why I never really had a relationship with
him.”
And there was more.
“It was bad… real bad,” he said. “There was not a
penny in the budget (for) recruiting. What money was left had been spent
to buy UNC and Wake game tickets for the players and their families. The
field house was in shambles. There was more water inside on a rainy day
than outside — deplorable conditions.”
Even with the conditions, Emory was able to
assemble a remarkable collection of coaching assistants.
“I had a great young staff,” he said. “Bob Sanders
(now the linebackers coach for the Miami Dolphins), (Jim) Holland, Tommy
Bowden… they worked so hard. We spent 99 percent of our time out on the
road. I provided the cars and we used our own money to recruit. We’d
stay in people’s houses. It was a tough year. Poor Earline Leggett got
tired of seeing me come in there begging for money.
“Doug Parker, Bill Clark, and Lou Hallow (Pirates
Club members) ought to have a statue honoring them for all they did for
the program. We started the weight program, the academic counseling
program, set up the study hall by the cafeteria… hell, when we started,
we had a 25-pound plate and a bar.”
The program was in shambles and the players were in
for a real awakening.
“This is a true story. When I first got there, I
noticed the kids (players) wore anything they wanted to. They looked
like a bunch of bums,” Emory recalled. “I went over to the cafeteria and
stood by the door so that each of them had to walk by me. I wanted to
learn their names and faces. Guys were coming by me with Duke, Wake
Forest, Georgia Tech, high school t-shirts on – anything but East
Carolina. Then this boy comes by with a Carolina t-shirt and I reached
over and tore it off of him. I said, ‘The next time I see any of you in
here with a shirt that says anything other than ECU, you will not eat
here.’
“I told them, ‘You have one loyalty only and that
is ECU. We do not sleep with or eat with our enemy.’ I never saw another
school’s shirt again. I wanted them to have pride in what they were.”
So it was, the state of the ECU football program.
But Emory brought enough passion to offset those deficits in the program
and it showed. On their shoestring budget, using a lot of their own
money, Emory and his staff were able to recruit and sign one of the most
talented single classes in school history in the 1980 class.
There was little that Emory’s 24-29 overall record
had to do with the firing at the end of the 1984 season. It was about
people, according to Emory. In particular, about an athletic director,
his assistant, and a coach and a relationship that never was.
“Dr. Karr was the worst choice at the time for East
Carolina,” Emory said. “He had just been fired by San Diego State
University, but he had a PhD. You know, he never once asked us if we
needed help. He never once was there for the program.
“He was lining up the teams we’d have to play like
we were prostitutes. I just would have liked that if we were going to be
prostitutes, we should at least be expensive ones.”
Emory pointed to lack of institutional support
costing him a bevy of great coaches who, for their pay, simply couldn’t
afford to stay at ECU. Despite appeals for more money for coaches’
salaries, Emory was stuck with what he had and he persevered.
“I went to every Pirates Club function, every
sports club dinner — I was possessed by ECU,” Emory said. “And my (then)
wife Nancy Buie Emory poured her heart and soul into that program.”
From the start, Emory’s relationship with Karr was
non-existent. The two men were polar opposites when it came to East
Carolina, at least as Emory recalls.
“We never had a relationship,” Emory said. “I had
always wanted him to come over with his wife Priscilla… to get to know
each other. But he never would. He stayed away. He never gave a coach a
pat on the back or appeared to care much.”
So, what led to the firing?
The media would tell the story in 1984 — about
vague allegations of widespread admissions improprieties within the
program, that ineligible players were playing.
Not the case, according to Emory.
“Whatever the NCAA says, I never bought no
players,” he said. “I never paid anyone. I did buy a player a
Thanksgiving Day dinner once when he had nowhere to go and I would give
a kid a pillow if he needed one. That’s not cheating, that’s being
human.”
So what was it? What happened?
“I made two terrible mistakes,” Emory said. “First,
I should never have signed that contract in 1983. I was making $35,000 a
year and spending $135,000 of my own money. I should never have signed a
contract in December. I got a lawyer and that really pissed them off.
Every coach had an agent handling their contracts, but it really made
them angry… it was unheard of at ECU. Dick Blake was coming down here
every day trying to get me to sign that contract because they wanted to
have it done before the end of the year for the Board (of Trustees).
Finally, I signed the contract and that was very immature on my part
letting them talk me into signing.
“Then, not pursuing the Miami job in 1984, was a
bad idea. I had spent four days down there and when my wife and I flew
back, there were 100 or so people (waiting) for us at the Kinston
airport and they heralded me off to Bill Clark’s office with all of the
powers there and Ken Carr.”
The counter-offer from ECU, according to Emory, for
him to remain in Greenville, included paying for Emory’s house by
December; an annuity; a Pirates Club job for his wife — and hope that he
would get administrative support.
“I called Miami and told them I was not
interested,” Emory said. “I turned down a lot of security that day,
because I love East Carolina and I thought we could keep building
something there.”
But the relationship between Karr and Emory
continued to degrade. The final straw — and the reason, according to
Emory, that the coach was dismissed — was an incident that occurred
during the 1984 season.
“I guess the most important thing I learned was
that if you are going to get into a pissing match with someone, you have
to be prepared to go all the way,” Emory said. “I came up short as a
coach. The thing I learned since I left there is if you are going to get
into a pissing contest, you better be willing to die for it or don’t get
into it.”
Struggling with a 1-5 season — marked by a host of
close losses — the ’84 Pirates headed to Tulsa with hope of turning
around the season. But the team arrived in Tulsa and a series of events
took place that would result, according to Emory, in his eventual
termination despite having signed a lucrative extension less than 12
months earlier.
“When we went to Oklahoma for the Tulsa game,
things started out fine,” Emory recalled. “We had a first-class flight
and we were staying in the Marriot, which is a nice place. We get there
on a Friday and go to the locker room in Tulsa’s old stadium and we
don’t have a manager there. The dressing rooms were a mess with towels
all over the floor. We had no equipment, not even a damn football. There
were no benches on the visitors’ side, our telephone systems weren’t
working, and we had no one there to help us.
“That Friday afternoon, we warmed up by playing
cowpatch football with no ball. Where was the manager? Out eating dinner
with Bob Helmut. We had a miserable practice that night.”
Frustrated and fuming about what he perceived as a
bush league situation, Emory went back to the Marriott in search of his
athletic director to find out what could be done.
“I get back to the hotel and I go up to Dr. Karr’s
room,” Emory said. “I knocked on the door and Dr. Karr answers and he is
already three-sheets to the wind and he asks me to come in and have a
drink with him. I said, ‘I don’t want a drink. I want to know what’s up.
I have a team to take care of.’ I asked him to call (Tulsa) Coach (John)
Cooper and have him take care of the locker room, the benches, the
phones.”
The game against Tulsa was set for an 8 p.m. start,
so Emory took his players to a couple of attractions during the day to
get their minds off football. First the team went to tour Oral Roberts
University because, as Emory put it, “Oral Roberts was saving everyone
at the time, so we figured maybe it wouldn’t hurt to get a little of
that.” And then, he said, the team went to the Tulsa Zoo, followed by a
team meal. When the team arrived at the stadium for pre-game, aside from
the presence of their footballs and equipment, nothing else had been
remedied.
“We got beat (31-20),” Emory said. “So we’re back
in the locker room and I’m telling the players that they didn’t deserve
to lose that game — that I should have personally come down here and
taken care of all of the mess. Well, Dr. Karr and (athletic department
staff member) Bob Helmut come in the locker room as I was finishing up
my speech. I should have just said, ‘Dr. Karr, is there anything you
would like to say to the team?’ But I didn’t.”
What followed, Emory admits, was bad.
“I let my mouth overload my butt,” he said. “I
jumped him right there. I told him, ‘You don’t like me, you don’t like
East Carolina University. You think we are a bunch of rednecks and you
told me so yourself. You don’t care about the kids. You have cost us
players, you have cost us coaches, and you have cost us games and you
have to take some responsibility.’
“He just stood there and took it. That was the last
time I saw Dr. Karr before he fired me.”
The firing not only took Emory by surprise, but it
also sent ripples through the ultimate authorities, the Board of
Trustees, many of whom apparently didn’t know he was going to be fired.
Emory fielded calls from big whigs, including Jack Minges and others, he
said, wanting to know what was happening. What was happening was simple,
according to Emory:
“I got rooked,” he said. “They knew they had to
fire me before Dec. 22, because they had to pay off my home by then.
Karr knew he couldn’t control my love fore ECU. But at the same time, it
was his department to run.
“They were pressuring me to sign a release saying
that if I didn’t sign right then, I would get nothing. They owed me
$136,000 and they offered me $50,000. At the time, during an election
year, the Board was circulating a petition to get Emory reinstated.
Everyone was on the bandwagon, so I sued. That was a mistake.”
The suit, not because he thought it was wrong, is
something that Emory really regrets to this day.
“I really would take back that suit,” he said. “I
thank God for those five years, for graduate school, for my years as a
player. I never wanted to leave East Carolina. I had 10 years there that
I cherished. I just wish I had made a better choice in Tulsa.
“I’ve never had an ECU person say anything negative
to me about it. I want everyone to know that I’ve never had anything
ever against ECU — it was two men.”
Subsequently, Emory felt the sting of being
blackballed as collegiate job after collegiate job was denied him,
forcing him to settle for a position on Pepper Rodgers’ staff in the
United States Football League with the Memphis Showboats.
“I got toasted for three or four jobs and I found
out it was coming from East Carolina and that really hurt,” Emory said.
“It was individuals, and it’s sad that sometimes individuals speak for
the entire school — but sometimes they do.”
The pain still lingers to this day. Not because he
is bitter, but because Emory left a big piece of himself at ECU when he
left.
“The pain was deep,” he said. “I always said, ‘Life
ain’t been fair to Ed Emory, but God, I have been blessed. ECU got rid
of the wrong guy, and I will believe it until I ain’t living anymore.
They let a guy (prevail) who didn’t love ECU, who didn’t want to be at
ECU, and who didn’t have the best interest for ECU in his heart or in
his soul.”
The passion for ECU is clearly evident to this day.
Still, in his final assessment of those events, Emory can’t help but
return to the real reason he has wanted to be a coach since he was seven
years old – the players.
“I brought in good kids and they became good
people,” Emory said. “These kids made good lives for themselves and I
like that I have been a part of that.
“I loved the kids I had there. It was a whirlwind
five years that went by like it was six months. Even with the pain, I
would do it all over again… I bleed Purple”
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