“Don’t give up, don’t ever give up.” The iconic quote written on the inside of Reynolds Coliseum should be in every fan’s mind as we watch our men’s basketball team trudge through another difficult season. Currently sitting on a 2-5 ACC record, we’re a long way from our last national championship in 1983, and we’re a long way from coach Jim Valvano. That historic underdog championship run is made all the more somber and memorable by Jimmy V’s untimely death 10 years later, at the age of 47.
His legacy is commemorated in many ways around NC State’s campus and Raleigh, from the iconic bronze statue of an excited Coach V holding up the championship net outside Reynolds to the Jimmy V Foundation for Cancer Research to Jimmy V’s Osteria, an upscale restaurant in downtown Raleigh and home of the Whittenburger (named after guard Dereck Whittenburg, a senior on the famous ‘83 team and leading scorer in the tournament with 120 points).
While I love a good Whittenburger, my favorite way of remembering one of the greatest coaches — hell, the greatest coach — ever to play the game of basketball is ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary, “Survive and Advance.” This documentary, for which Whittenburg won an Emmy as executive producer, is best enjoyed on DVD. Although it is available on Netflix, the DVD version includes Jimmy V’s unforgettable 1993 Arthur Ashe Courage Award acceptance speech, given a mere eight weeks before his tragic death to bone cancer.
“Survive and Advance” is named for a phrase Coach V would say about progressing through the single-elimination March Madness tournament; the team would enter each game with uncertainty, survive and advance to the next round. They survived the likes of 7-foot-4 Ralph Sampson and an unstoppable team of Virginia Cavaliers and advanced all the way to upset Hakeem Olajuwon and his slam-dunk Cougars team (a.k.a. “Phi Slama Jama”).
The Wolfpack managed, against all odds, to cut the nets down in The Pit with a buzzer-beater victory on April 4, a day that will live in NC State’s collective memory until we win another NCAA championship — Dennis Smith Jr. and Abdul-Malik Abu may be dominating the court this season, but the bar was set pretty high by the trio of Dereck Whittenburg, Thurl Bailey and Sydney Lowe.
My favorite matchup in “Survive and Advance” is the ‘83 ACC Championship Semifinals overtime win against our archrival. A Dean Smith-coached team of Tar Heels headed by the Jumpman, No. 23 Michael Jordan, was thrashed 91-84 by Jimmy V’s Wolfpack — I had to rewatch a few times after the devastating 107-56 loss earlier this month. Michael Jordan may be the most iconic basketball player of all time, but whenever he’s in Raleigh, MJ needs to remember the L that State team captains Thurl, Syd and Whit handed him on March 12, 1983 (also worth mentioning, Whittenburg had a better 3-point percentage than Jordan in the first year of the stripe in the NCAA).
Parts of the famous “Don’t give up, don’t ever give up” Arthur Ashe acceptance speech and coach V’s 1987 “Cutting down the nets” speech punctuate these intense battles on the court, showing Valvano as an animated, emotional man reflecting on his dream achieved. While interviews with college basketball superstars like Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski can tell us what a great man Jim Valvano was, nothing in “Survive and Advance” can outshine the man himself. Who could forget Valvano sarcastically telling the teleprompter, “That screen is flashing up there 30 seconds like I care about that screen right now, huh? I got tumors all over my body. I’m worried about some guy in the back, going 30 seconds?’” before going on to speak for another four minutes.
Jimmy V is the most inspirational man I can possibly imagine. He beat all odds to carry our school to one of the greatest upsets in the history of the NCAA; Valvano even tells us that his own mother’s March Madness bracket had Houston beating State. Even when he was laughed out of the room, he told his team from the very beginning that it would win a national championship. He never gave up, he was a uniquely emotional man and he was always smiling, even to the end. He ultimately lost his life to cancer, but it cannot be said that Jimmy V didn’t beat cancer. In his own words: “Cancer can take away all my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever.”
“Survive and Advance” is a journey that can be revisited time and time again. It makes us proud to attend NC State, and it gives us hope that we can cut down the nets again someday. It tells us that we can achieve anything we set our hearts to, just like coach Valvano. Jimmy V’s words will echo for as long as young men and women look at Reynolds and remember to “don’t give up, don’t ever give up.”
