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Pirate
Time
Machine
No. 27
(2002)

With Ron Cherubini
©2001-2004 Bonesville.net


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”

Send an e-mail message to Ron Cherubini.

Click here to dig into Ron Cherubini's Bonesville archives.

Related Ed Emory stories:
   Catching up with a Pirate Hall of Famer
   Life ain't been fair... but it's been a good one
   A Pirate forsaken: The end of a dream
   '83 team: A picture of the future of Pirate football
PIRATE TIME MACHINE NO. 27
(From the 2002 Bonesville Magazine)
Ed Emory: 'Life ain't been fair to Ed Emory,' but it's been a good one Through it All, Lifetime Coach Ed Emory Wouldn't Change a Thing

SIDEBAR SPECIAL #1:
A Pirate Forsaken: The End of a Dream Despite the Pain, Emory Forever Bleeds Pirate Purple

SIDEBAR SPECIAL #2
That '83 Team: A picture of the future of Pirate Football Arguably, Emory Assembled the Greatest ECU Team Ever to Hit the Field

View the Pirate Time Machine Archives...

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02/23/2007 02:13:06 PM

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