South Carolina's forgotten ACC football title of 1965

Alan Piercy is the author of A Gamecock Odyssey: University of South Carolina Sports in the Independent Era (1971-1991). The following was originally published on Alan’s South By Southeast newsletter.

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How conference sanctions and a forfeited title marked the first step toward Carolina’s ACC exit

When South Carolina met Clemson in the final game of the 1965 season, it was before a home crowd of 44,500, the greatest assemblage of spectators in the 60-year history of the rivalry. For the first time in the storied Palmetto State series, Carolina and Clemson were playing with a conference title on the line. 

The Gamecocks had been picked between sixth and last in all of the pre-season ACC forecasts, but out-performed expectations in league play, carrying a 3-2 conference record into the contest. Clemson, meanwhile, had played a full conference slate and carried a 4-2 ACC record into the final game.

Clear skies and temperatures in the mid-60s set a grand backdrop for the troubled family reunion, as a great many partisans sporting garnet, and a few thousand others clad in orange, settled in among the old bowl of time-worn wooden bleachers at Carolina Stadium.

Clemson held the all-time series lead with 36 victories to Carolina’s 23. The meeting marked the fifth between Carolina’s head coach Marvin Bass, and Clemson’s Frank Howard, with each coach claiming two wins. Oddsmakers had installed the Gamecocks as a three-point favorite, though odds held little sway in this emotion-filled rivalry series.

The Tigers dominated play through most of the first half, and led 10-0 before a momentum-shifting 50-yard strike from USC quarterback Mike Fair to his favorite target, receiver J.R. Wilburn. The big play set up a short rushing touchdown from tailback Jule Smith to pull the Gamecocks within three after the Jimmy Poole extra point. 

A 31-yard field goal by Poole knotted it at 10-10 near the five-minute mark of the third quarter. When the Gamecock defense held on Clemson’s ensuing possession, Fair directed his offense 55 yards on nine plays, setting up a seven-yard scamper from halfback Bobby Harris for the go-ahead score, propelling the Gamecocks to a 17-10 lead. 

A Bobby Bryant interception at the USC seven-yard-line stopped Clemson momentum mid-way through the final period, but the resilient Tigers capitalized on their final opportunity, manufacturing a stellar 73-yard drive in the waning minutes. Facing a fourth down inside the Gamecock one-yard-line, Clemson quarterback Thomas Ray dropped back and fired a touchdown strike to flanker Phil Rogers for the late score, trimming the Tiger deficit to one, 17-16. 

With time running out, Clemson lined up for a point-after attempt, apparently content with a tie, though Bass’s Gamecocks and 44,500 fans suspected a fake. The stadium throbbed with nervous energy as fans ringed the sidelines, hands on knees like coiled springs. 

The ball snapped to holder and second-string quarterback Jimmy Addison who executed the anticipated fake, rolling to his left, spotting fullback Bo Ruffner in the corner of the end zone. Addison fired a rope to Ruffner, but Gamecock linebacker Bob Gunnels stuck out a long arm in the nick of time, swatting the ball harmlessly to the turf as time expired. 

Gunnel’s timely play preserved the Gamecock win, and more substantially, provided Carolina a share of its first-ever conference championship. Pandemonium ensued, as fans rushed the field and jubilant players carried Bass and assistants on an impromptu victory ride.

Speaking with reporters after the game, senior fullback Phil Bronson summed up the feelings of many: 

“I can’t think of a better way to end a college career than winning a part of a championship, especially since we at South Carolina have never won a championship before. I’m just glad I could help do something for Coach Bass before I finished.” 

The normally stoic Bass, speaking with The State’s Joe Whitlock after the game let down his guard, revealing his thoughts on the state of the program, and uncharacteristically venting frustrations over external negativity impacting the team. 

“I think we got a head start today when we won a share of the ACC championship. I don’t think I’ve ever worked at a better place than the University of South Carolina, and I’ve never worked with better people,” Bass noted, before his reflections took a darker turn:

“I’ve had to eat a lot of crow here and I’ve had to swallow my pride because the people who don’t count thrive on spreading rumors that aren’t true. I’d like to cuss out some people,” he said, “but I’ve always kept my mouth shut. There have been some things I’ve wanted to say, but I let them pass because I’m proud of this University and it doesn’t deserve the treatment some people seem to want to give it.”

Bass continued, “South Carolina can be good in every sport. That’s what it deserves. But show me a school that hasn’t won anything since 1894 that has had the support we’ve had here. The school has never had a chance. There has been a plot to disrupt the athletic setup. It’s impossible to imagine the number of rumors that have made their way back to me that have obviously been designed to tear down the team. 

“Someday this place is going to blossom and get what it deserves and when it does it’s really going to be something to see.” 

A plot to disrupt the athletic setup? This seemed ominous, and oddly off-key in light of what Bass called his greatest win as a head coach. The events of the next several months would take Carolina from the heights of that championship moment through a bizarre chain of events that seem almost hard to fathom nearly 60 years later. 

A strange and dramatic offseason

Just over two weeks later, Frank McGuire’s basketball Gamecocks claimed the first of many milestone victories in a thrilling 73-71 win over third-ranked Duke at Carolina Fieldhouse.

Senior Sports Editor Herman Helms of The State opined:

McGuire’s Monday miracle, coming so close on the heels of the Gamecocks’ first football championship in 71 years points to an inescapable fact. USC, long an athletic punching bag, can fight back now. 

People were hysterical (after USC’s Duke win) because in this victory there was a promise that someday – not this season of course – but someday not too far away, this sort of thing will become commonplace.

Helms was prescient about McGuire’s program. After all, playing on the freshman team that December was the nation’s second-ranked recruit in 6-foot-8 center Mike Grosso from Raritan, New Jersey. The big man would average nearly 23 points and 26 rebounds on the season. Fans salivated over the prospect of Grosso joining the varsity squad a year later, where McGuire’s first recruiting class of Jack Thompson, Frank Standard, Skip Harlicka, Skip Kickey, and holdover Gary Gregor were already making waves in the vaunted ACC. 

Additional football success seemed a foregone conclusion as well, with championship hardware already secured and Bass seemingly hitting his stride going into year six at the helm. 

In late January, 1966, defensive coordinator Bud Carson left the Gamecock program to join Bobby Dodd’s Georgia Tech staff. Dick Bestwick, another defensive coach, had resigned days earlier for an assistant job at Pittsburgh.

On February 21, Bass hired former Connecticut assistant Lou Holtz to work with the defensive secondary, noting that Holtz would replace Bud Carson on the staff. “He is an energetic young coach with a bright future,” Bass noted of Holtz. “He should do fine with us.” 

A month later, with still no hint of the seismic things to come, Bass and staff kicked off spring practice. Jim Hunter of the Columbia Record, waxed poetic in a March 22 article: 

The muscular young lad walked slowly across the ruffled turf in a twilight of bangs and bruises. His heart flowed out in the sweet smell of early spring, the nostalgic scent of sweat and grass that is football pulled out of the locker room again. He is a raw, rising sophomore, Earl Hunter, and the spring was to be an awesome awakening for a young guy who loves a game of physical action.

An injury to his collar bone ended his early spring training Monday afternoon, and the grass and dirt turned momentarily sour in the twilight of afternoon. 

“Its a time you find out who the football players are,” Marvin Bass said of spring football drills.

Bass unexpectedly resigns

Just a week later, and still in the midst of spring practice, Bass would unexpectedly resign his position at USC to pursue a lucrative head coaching offer with the Montreal Beavers of the nascent Continental Football League.

“I hate to leave Columbia and the State of South Carolina because I feel that I have many friends there,” Bass said in March of 1966 after announcing his resignation as Gamecock coach, “but this was too good an offer for me to turn down. It is the best offer I’ve ever had in coaching,” Bass noted of his new role as general manager and head coach of the Continental Football League’s new Montreal franchise. 

Bass accumulated a 17-29-4 record as Gamecock head coach between 1961 and 1965. He never enjoyed a winning season at Carolina – his best record, the 5-5 finish in 1965. Despite some high points, including a share of the ‘65 ACC title and winning three of five against Clemson, the board of trustees would not extend Bass’s contract beyond a year-to-year agreement. 

Speaking with Alex Riley of The State in a 2009 article about the 1965 team, Bass cited that short-term contract arrangement as a reason for leaving in 1966. “I knew I couldn’t recruit very successfully just having one year on my contract, and they wouldn’t have fired me here, I’m convinced of that,” Bass said. “But I told them when I left that meeting with them (following the ‘65 season), if I don’t get an extension on my contract, the first job that comes along, I’m taking it.” 

Indeed, Bass was tremendously popular within the University community, and probably wouldn’t have been fired, despite his losing record. “Anyone who knows Marvin Bass has affection for him,”The State’sHerman Helms wrote of Bass. “He is an individual of the best quality. Anyone who knows him has to feel a sense of loss now that he’s leaving the University of South Carolina.”

The search to fill football, athletics director openings

Before departing for Montreal, Bass recommended Frank McGuire for the athletics director job, noting that McGuire would be the “logical man for the job.” 

Perhaps inspired by Bass’s endorsement, a group of citizens wrote an open letter to University President Thomas Jones recommending Coach McGuire for the open AD position. 

“No coach in years has brought our school or state more national recognition than Coach McGuire. As Athletic Director, Coach McGuire would be in an even better position to give our University and state the kind of public relations we sorely need.”

“We also feel that no one is better qualified to assist in obtaining a top-flight football coach than Coach McGuire. With all of the problems now facing the Athletic Department, the University of South Carolina cannot afford to lose a man of such leadership and talent.”

The letter was signed by a who’s-who of local and university-affiliated luminaries, the likes of John Terry, president of the Columbia Touchdown Club, Charles Myers, president of the Columbia Tip-off Club, the entire membership of the University’s Lettermen’s Club, radio “Voice of the Gamecocks,” Bob Fulton, alumnus and benefactor Dr. Charles Crews, Gamecock historian Don Barton, booster Jeff Hunt (who had been integral in connecting McGuire with USC officials in 1964), football great Johnny Gramling, and basketball legend Grady Wallace. 

As is typical of coaching and administrative vacancies, rumors about Bass’s replacement swirled in local media. “Mysterious Murray Trip Unproductive?” one headline of a Herman Helms column read in The State on April 1. Former Duke coach Bill Murray had been spotted by two writers from the Columbia paper leaving the residence of USC President Tom Jones on campus. 

(one imagines the intrepid reporters in trench coats and fedoras, comically peeking out from a crouch behind blooming azaleas, or perhaps sitting on benches at the Horseshoe, conspicuously obscured behind spread newspapers)

Murray, had resigned a year earlier after a highly-successful 15-year stint in Durham, and was then the executive secretary of the American Football Coach’s Association. Both men denied the visit was to discuss the open coaching position, with Jones describing it as advisory in nature. 

Dietzel enters the picture

By April 2, reports confirmed USC officials would meet with Army head coach Paul Dietzel. From Fremont, Ohio, near the shores of Lake Erie, Dietzel played college ball for a season at Duke, then served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, before returning to college at Miami of Ohio. Upon graduation, he was drafted in the late rounds by the Chicago Bears, but like Bass, never played professional football. Instead, he entered coaching, where he honed his craft between 1948 and 1954 with assistant coaching stops at Cincinnati and Kentucky, bookended by two stints at Army. 

Dietzel earned his first head coaching opportunity at Louisiana State, where he served from 1955 through 1961, famously winning the national championship in 1958. A four-year stop in the familiar territory of West Point followed. 

By 1966, when South Carolina came calling, Dietzel, though not ready to surrender his coaches’ whistle quite yet, was eager for an opportunity to move into administration. 

During a reported four-hour meeting at the International Hotel in New York’s Kennedy Airport on Sunday, April 3, USC President Jones and Dr. James A. Morris, faculty athletic chairman and acting athletic director, met with Dietzel and his chief assistant coach, George Terry.

The most significant part about the meeting, according to The State’s Executive News Editor, Charles H. Wickenburg, did not lie in the intricacies of the negotiations or in the final decision itself. The real story lay in the two men who did the talking on behalf of the University. 

In the past, it had been members of the University Board of Trustees Athletic Committee, which handled such high-level negotiations. Just two years prior, when USC courted McGuire, the coach was perplexed when an interview was scheduled, not to Columbia, but “down the country,” in Barnwell, where he met with Athletic Committee Chairman Sol Blatt Jr. and his father, Speaker Emeritus of the South Carolina House, Sol Blatt Sr. 

The deep involvement of one of the state’s most powerful political families had complicated USC’s athletic administration for years. 

“There is no doubt the roles assumed were well-intended and genuinely sought to be helpful,” Wickenburg wrote. However, “In the wake of the resignation of Football Coach and Athletic Director Marvin Bass and the search for a successor, the University Board of Trustees last week had a full discussion of the control of the athletic program.”

Wickenburg quoted Board Chairman Rutledge I. Osborne, whose comments, while somewhat vague, indicated a power shift from the board’s athletic committee to the university president. Osborne noted, “…the feeling was unanimous. We are headed in the right direction.” 

Indeed, the responsibility for negotiating on behalf of the University would now rest with President Jones, while the board’s athletic committee would act in an advisory capacity only. “There is no way in the world of placing responsibility without placing authority,” Osborne added.

Another unnamed trustee confirmed, “We are going in the right direction,” adding perhaps with some naiveté, “The old system will not work its way back again.”

The “old system” would not die quite so easily. The Blatts continued to wield outsized influence in athletic affairs well into the 1970s, putting their collective thumb on the scale in power squabbles between McGuire and Dietzel’s future replacement, Jim Carlen. 

But that is a story for another time.

On April 6, 1966, Dietzel signed a 10-year contract with the University of South Carolina to become its athletic director and head football coach. Financials were not disclosed other than Dietzel’s comment that his move was not about money. “I was not underpaid at West Point,” he wryly noted. 

Introduced to gathered press as “the man who is going to lead the Gamecocks to a new era of athletics,” Dietzel gave off a confident, relaxed vibe as he took the podium at USC’s Roundhouse Athletics offices. 

“I hope I’m able to fulfill the faith the University of South Carolina has shown in me,” the 41-year-old Dietzel said. Dietzel praised his “old, warm friend,” Frank McGuire, noting, “If I, as Director of Athletics, had to go across the nation searching for a basketball coach, I know I could never come up with a better man.” 

And then, as if placing the Blatts and their “old system” on notice, Dietzel noted,

“My entire dedication is to this university and President Thomas F. Jones. I’ve worked in a state capitol with a state university before, and I’ve learned that politicians are wonderful people. Those who aren’t don’t remain politicians very long. But I don’t intend to tell them how to run their business.” 

The implication was clear. Dietzel would answer to Jones, and Jones alone. 

The new coach outlined a “three-part plan” that he and Jones had established as a guide to this new era of Gamecock athletics. First, everything would be done by the rules. Second, Dietzel and Jones both wanted a winner. Third, the athletic department would operate in the black. 

The first point addressed a brewing controversy that became a focal point of Dietzel’s first months at USC. 

Winning hearts and minds

Not quite four months into his dual role of athletics director and head football coach at the University of South Carolina, Paul Dietzel was a road-weary man. It was a Friday, July 29, 1966, and the 41-year-old Dietzel met with Joe Whitlock of The State for an interview at USC’s Roundhouse athletic offices for an article that would appear two days later. 

The coach sat sock-footed in his office, feet propped into a chair. He turned off his wrist alarm, reminding him to eat, and, in perhaps the most anti-Don Draper lunch ever, pulled a cheese sandwich from a brown paper bag and poured himself a shot of milk.

“Honestly, I’ll be glad when we get down to practicing football,” Dietzel confided to Whitlock as he stared into the mid-distance, thinking about the herculean task he had undertaken at South Carolina. “It’s all this outside business that consumes so much time.” 

The new coach estimated he had driven 10,000 miles, crisscrossing the state during his first few months at USC. Wherever he went – chamber of commerce breakfasts, booster-club luncheons, or simply meeting people on street corners from Beaufort to Spartanburg and Myrtle Beach to North Augusta, Dietzel was selling an idea. 

“We have a lot of dreams and they aren’t idle dreams. They are definite plans and I know we can do them. Almost everything we want to do, all the plans we have point to one fact,” Dietzel said. “We need support. Without support, nothing we are planning will transpire… I keep getting the feeling I’ve seen this show before.” 

Indeed, he had not just seen the show but had been the primary actor in a similar plea for support a decade earlier at LSU. When the 31-year-old Dietzel took on his first head coaching opportunity in Baton Rogue, he encountered roadblocks to success that mirrored those he now faced in Columbia.

“They had never sold over 2,000 season tickets,” Dietzel said of LSU’s season ticket sales before his arrival in 1955. “In 1958, we stopped season ticket sales at 35,000, and LSU has never sold less than that since.” 

Contrasting LSU with South Carolina, Dietzel singled out Carolina Stadium as a liability. “…it’s 26,000 plus seats smaller. Yet the student body here is 2,000 people larger, and the metropolitan area is more than twice the size Baton Rouge was when I was there.” 

Dietzel had spent his first hundred days sizing up challenges, devising plans, shaking hands, and evangelizing through the hot summer months like a hillbilly preacher on a tent revival circuit. 

But winning hearts and minds wasn’t the only business Dietzel dealt with during those early months. 

ACC sanctions vacate wins, removes ‘65 conference title

The same Friday of Dietzel’s interview with The State, the ACC announced the results of its months-long investigation into Marvin Bass’s program and the Gamecocks’ 1965 football team. 

Conference commissioner Jim Weaver announced that USC had violated ACC regulations by providing illegal aid to at least one freshman football player and two varsity players. As a result, Weaver ordered that all games in which the varsity members participated be forfeited to the opposing teams. South Carolina’s 4-2 conference record – good enough for a share of the ACC title with Duke – would now become 0-6. 

The penalty stripped the Gamecocks of its lone ACC football championship. To add insult to injury, the ‘65 conference crown passed to rival Clemson, along with NC State, whose records both improved to 5-2. Duke, through no fault of its own, lost its share of the ACC crown, falling to third place with their 4-2 record. 

Both NC State’s Earl Edwards and Clemson’s Frank Howard expressed regret and discomfort over their newly awarded shares of the ACC title. “All I know is the score of our game will always read the same, 17-16, South Carolina’s favor,” Howard said.

Weaver did not announce the names of the players involved but noted that they would be banned from future participation in the ACC.

Dietzel, who had conducted his own internal investigation, confirmed the report and also declined to announce the names of the athletes involved. “I don’t think any good purpose can be served by disclosing the boys’ names,” Dietzel said.

Reached for comment in Montreal, former coach Marvin Bass said he didn’t believe Dietzel’s investigation turned up anything he had not already told the commissioner himself before departing South Carolina. 

“If Coach Dietzel wanted to go in with a 1-9 record (instead of 5-5) so he couldn’t possibly do anything but improve this season, I wish him luck. I hope he can live in good faith and look people in the eye. If I were going to conduct an investigation, I would at least have had the courtesy to contact the guy who was there before me,” Bass said. 

Bass later apologized for his remarks and took full responsibility for the situation. 

For his part in the matter, Dietzel told reporters, “I didn’t come here to become an investigator. I was told to look into the matter and report my findings to the commissioner’s office and to the university, and I did what I was told. I reported my findings, and Weaver told me that the information I had was the same information he had. So here, I don’t think I did very much to aid the investigation,” before adding, “I hate to see this happen to a bunch of kids who went out there and played their guts out to win a championship.” 

One university official who spoke with The State’s Herman Helms on the condition of anonymity noted the aid provided to the three players “was meal money and text books. The amount was very small, no more than $75 or $100 per player.” 

Of the two varsity players, one was a reserve, the other a starter in a few games. One of them had graduated, the other left school when he could not meet academic requirements. The freshman player was still attending USC but was no longer a member of the football program. None of the athletes were scholastically eligible to receive aid from the university, the report revealed. 

The largely insignificant contribution of the players and the small dollar amount of aid did not erase the transgressions, Helms opined, noting the University did not “deserve sympathy for wrongdoing.” Like many others, though, Helms did take exception to the second part of Weaver’s four-part declaration of penalties. 

It is because of this flagrant disregard for constituted authority, Weaver’s ruling began, that any athlete at the University of South Carolina whose eligibility is questioned be withheld from participation unless and until it is established to the complete satisfaction of the conference that there has been no violation in each individual case.

The ruling was tantamount to “guilty before innocent” and cast a wide net of suspicion across not just football but all of South Carolina’s athletic programs.

Soon to be caught up in that net was Frank McGuire’s prized freshman, Mike Grosso. 

The ACC scholarship rule then in place stipulated that no athlete could receive financial assistance unless he achieved a score of 800 on his college board (SAT) examination. Non-scholarship athletes could participate with a minimum score of 750, however, and it was through this loophole that Grosso landed at South Carolina, courtesy of some help from family. 

Grosso’s uncles, who owned a bar back home in New Jersey, agreed to cover the freshman’s tuition until he could qualify for a scholarship. Grosso had never scored 750, the minimum for competition, during his attempts at the SAT as a high school senior. He subsequently retook the SAT exam on the campus of the University of South Carolina in July 1966, scoring a 706 – still short of qualifying for participation. 

On a second attempt in September 1965, also on the USC campus, Grosso scored 789, qualifying him for participation in the ACC. He was dominant on South Carolina’s 1965-66 freshman team, averaging 22.7 points and 26 rebounds per game. One account noted Grosso pulled down 41 rebounds in a game versus Duke. 

The Grosso situation did not sit well with Duke’s athletics director Eddie Cameron, who harbored a simmering personal feud with McGuire going back to the latter’s UNC days. To compound matters, Duke’s basketball coach Vic Bubas had tried unsuccessfully to lure Grosso to Durham. Bubas and McGuire also feuded in the aftermath of a wild brawl between UNC’s Larry Brown and Duke’s Art Heyman in 1961, during McGuire’s final season at North Carolina.

Cameron threatened to boycott Duke’s games with South Carolina when Grosso moved up to varsity the next year while goading the ACC to launch a sprawling investigation into Grosso’s recruitment and eligibility. 

At Cameron’s further prompting, the conference closed the SAT loophole, updating the standard for participation, not just a scholarship, to 800. Though that change did not apply to Grosso retroactively, the ACC used continued questions around his recruitment and eligibility to snare the young man in Commissioner Weaver’s “wide net” ruling regarding any South Carolina athlete “…whose eligibility is questioned.”

By the fall of 1966, the ongoing ACC investigation cast a shadow of doubt over the much-anticipated start of Grosso’s varsity career, then just weeks away. 

“The Off-Court Uproar in Dixie”

On Friday, Oct. 28, 1966, USC President Thomas Jones, assistant athletics director George Terry, and McGuire attended a meeting of the ACC executive committee at the Triangle Motel, located at Raleigh-Durham Airport (Dietzel was traveling with his team for a matchup at Maryland). 

After meeting for nearly four hours, executive committee head Ralph Fadum advised the USC contingent that the committee saw no cause to overturn Commissioner Weaver’s earlier decision to disqualify Grosso. Neither Weaver nor Fadum would divulge why Grosso was ruled ineligible. 

Mark Mulvoy of Sports Illustrated, in a November 7, 1966 article titled “The Off-Court Uproar in Dixie,” noted that McGuire had to be physically restrained by Jones following the ruling, and a dramatic photo that ran with the piece showed McGuire confronting Weaver (sunglasses on, briefcase in hand, trying his best to get the hell out of there).

In public remarks over the coming days, McGuire called ACC officials “skunks,” and “rats,” noting, “they have forced me into the gutter with them.” The remarks drew sharp criticism from coaches, athletics directors, and presidents within the conference. 

Some South Carolina boosters and alumni called for a withdrawal from the conference. They saw the ruling as clear evidence of political dominance by the “Big Four” North Carolina schools within the ACC. The conference leaders involved in the Grosso drama, ACC commissioner Weaver of Wake Forest, ACC basketball committee chairman Cameron of Duke, and executive committee head Fadum of NC State, made that point inarguable. 

For his part, McGuire saw the Grosso decision as a personal vendetta against him by enemies accumulated over a decade of bitter ACC battles as head coach of both UNC and South Carolina. 

“They are not after Grosso, they are after me,” McGuire told Mulvoy of Sports Illustrated.

As Mulvoy closed his article, he noted USC’s coming appeal, and ominously, that the NCAA was also investigating the Grosso affair. His ending was prescient. “Whatever the outcome, it has engendered enough bitterness in the ACC to last for years.”

The ACC’s ruling, though not divulged to McGuire and Jones during that contentious executive committee meeting, hinged on an obscure, albeit useful technicality. The Educational Testing Service (ETS) of Princeton, New Jersey, was the governing body that prepared and admitted the board exam. ETS guidelines dictated that it would accept and recognize only one institutionally administered college board exam for each student. Grosso’s first attempt at the SAT in Columbia resulted in a 706 score. It was that score, not Grosso’s second score of 789, that was sent to the ACC offices and represented the only official score, according to ETS rules.

McGuire’s disparagement of ACC officials in the days after the executive committee meeting did little to bolster whatever slim hopes USC harbored for an appeal. Those hopes received a final blow in January 1967, when the NCAA announced the results of its own investigation into USC’s football and basketball programs. 

The NCAA determined that Grosso’s expenses had been paid by “a corporation upon which the student athlete was neither naturally nor legally dependent.” The “corporation” in question referenced the bar owned by Grosso’s uncles and the tuition assistance provided by them. The NCAA dealt harsh penalties to both programs, banning post-season tournaments or bowl games for two years. In the embryonic days of television broadcasts, USC was also banned from appearing in televised games during the same period. 

Grosso, who McGuire once boasted would bring championships to South Carolina, never played a varsity game for the Gamecocks. He transferred to Louisville, where he received a scholarship and played behind the great Wes Unseld during his first season before starting his final two. He averaged 18.6 points and 13.9 rebounds during his senior season of 1970, and went onto a brief, injury-plagued career in the ABA. 

Speaking with David Cloninger of Charleston’s Post and Courier in October 2022, Grosso said it took counseling and a lot of time to get past what happened in those ACC boardrooms during the summer and fall of 1966. 

“I had a void, it took me 20 years to get over it. I was just wandering, lost, without a real vision as to what was ahead.”He says meeting his wife, Barbara, helped all that.“She provided that vision. All that anger and ugliness melted away. She was my Coach McGuire. She made me whole again.”

USC basketball legend Jack Thompson calls Grosso, “…the best damned basketball player I was ever blessed to step onto the hardwood with. We all knew we were with greatness ‘beyond category’ at that moment. Through years of trials and tribulations, and just life itself, the thought remains so vivid, as if it were just yesterday.” 

An exit set in motion

The University of South Carolina was never supposed to challenge for ACC supremacy. Certainly that was not the design of the “Big Four” schools who constituted the governing nucleus of conference hierarchy. 

An editorial from The State just days before USC announced its conference exit in March 1971 summed up the situation from South Carolina’s perspective: 

The Atlantic Coast Conference was formed by the four North Carolina members for the benefit of the North Carolina members. They needed USC, Clemson, Maryland and Virginia (a late joiner) to fill out a decent conference. But the outsiders were supposed to be step-children, to be seen and not heard

It was becoming clear by the mid-60s that the University of South Carolina would no longer accept a supporting role in the conference it helped found in 1953. From the hiring of basketball coach Frank McGuire in 1964, to its first share of an ACC football title in November 1965, to an upset of third-ranked Duke in basketball a few days later, to the hiring of athletics director and head football coach Paul Dietzel in 1966, the South Carolina Gamecocks were ascendant. With championship coaches and elevated recruiting came renewed fan interest, increased funding, and an undeniable kinetic momentum. 

By 1965, plans were advancing for a new basketball arena, which upon its completion in 1968 would be the finest facility of its kind in the ACC, and in the entire Southeast. Following closely behind, an upgraded football stadium, and a vastly improved baseball facility, along with state-of-the-art athletics dorms, training and dining facilities.

A step-child no more, South Carolina claimed an outright ACC football championship in 1969, an undefeated regular-season basketball championship in 1970, and an ACC tournament title in 1971. 

By early 1971, just as the Gamecocks reached their zenith of competitiveness in the ACC, Carolina’s conference exit seemed all but guaranteed. The ground was salted, the earth scorched, and collegiality among sister institutions lay broken beyond repair for years to come. By that time, the driving force behind the Gamecocks’ approaching ACC exit was Dietzel. 

USC’s athletics director and head football coach (a vastly troubling conflict of interest in hindsight) had grown weary of watching South Carolina high school stars go on to stellar careers at Big 8 and Big 10 schools because they could not qualify for a scholarship under ACC regulations. 

On March 29, 1971, USC’s board of trustees announced that the university would withdraw the university’s ACC membership effective August 15 of that year – a timetable later accelerated to June 30.¹

Many have argued that South Carolina made a historic blunder when it stepped away from the Atlantic Coast Conference with no apparent plan for conference affiliation elsewhere in June 1971. Many more argue it was for the best. 

Carolina’s struggles during the “wilderness” years of the 1970s and 80s, most poignantly the decline of its once powerful men’s basketball program, supports the former argument. USC’s current lofty perch of lucrative stability above the churning chaos of conference realignment lends credence to the latter. Debate over the wisdom or foolhardiness of South Carolina’s ACC exit will continue among fans and pundits for years to come. 

One thing seems clear though. The Gamecocks’ share of the 1965 ACC football title, combined with the ascendancy of its basketball program under McGuire – a brash New Yorker many in the staid ACC hierarchy loved to hate – roiled the status quo. It lit a fire among “Big Four” officials who looked to tamp down any budding conference insurgency outside of the Old North State. 

Other insurgencies followed, with noted successes by Clemson, Virginia and Maryland in the ’70s and ’80s. But from 1965 through 1971, the Fighting Gamecocks of South Carolina led the first rebellion, and the most fearsome. 

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