Tim Peeler: Reflecting on former NC State coach Lou Holtz's football life

Lou Holtz once said he should have never left his head coaching position at NC State.

His Wolfpack teams from 1972-75 were successful, his family of four was comfortable at their MacGregor Downs Country Club home in Cary and the ambitious coach was eager to play in an expanded and updated Carter Stadium, as promised by Wolfpack athletics director Willis Casey.

“I really didn’t want to leave NC State,” Holtz said in 2005 while in Raleigh on a book tour. “Does it bother me to this day? Yes.

“The lesson is, don’t go do anything unless you are totally committed to seeing it through. When I [left NC State], I had no plan, no sense of urgency, no commitment to seeing it through.”

Holtz, ever the one-line quipster and sideline philosopher, was relentlessly eager as a young coach. In 1966, as an unemployed 26-year-old coach, he compiled a list of 107 life goals that included winning a national championship in college football, meeting the pope and appearing on the “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, just to name a few. (He added one more after showing Beth, his wife of nearly 60 years, the list: Get a job.)

Holtz died Wednesday his home in Orlando, having completed about 105 of his written goals. He was 89.

The fact is, Holtz was too ambitious to wait for success in Raleigh. He was wildly popular at NC State, after winning all but two of his 22 home games in four seasons and taking his team to four consecutive bowl games, back when postseason play was an exciting accomplishment, not just an expectation.

However, the renovations Casey promised didn’t actually begin until 25 years and six coaches later, when one of Holtz’s graduate assistants, Chuck Amato, was hired to lead the Wolfpack. 

By then Holtz was well into establishing his College Football Hall of Fame legacy, going a perfect 12-0 at Notre Dame to win the 1988 national title he longed for. He continued to tick off other items on his list, like having dinner at the White House, visiting all seven continents and flying in a plane that landed on an aircraft carrier.

He never did run with the bulls in Pamplona, but the sometimes controversial coach never let go of pursuing his dreams.

His time in Raleigh was indeed special. The wiry 5-foot-10, 135-pound coach took a program that was picked to be in the national bottom 10 rankings of 1972 and made them into Atlantic Coast Conference champions in just two years and into the UPI Top 10 in three.

“When we were here, we didn’t even have a weightroom,” said the ever slight, ever wiry Holtz. “When we had a great win, the players weren’t strong enough to carry me off the field.”

His success was the work of a magician, both figuratively and literally. Holtz took lessons from a Cary magician to improve his tricks and help overcome a childhood stuttering problem.

And he made his fame by turning programs like NC State, Arkansas, Minnesota, Notre Dame and even South Carolina into college football success stories, entertaining fans and national media alike with his banquet-style anecdotes and well-rehearsed humor.

When he appeared in Raleigh to promote his third best-selling book, Holtz said: “I’ve now written more books than I have read. Not many people can say that. I did not want to write an autobiography. It’s like telling people your problems: 90 percent of them don’t care and the other 10 percent are glad you have them.

“You are better off keeping it to yourself.”

He did it anyway. In all, he wrote or contributed to 10 books and spent the last quarter-century of his life talking about college football on ESPN.

Holtz and his personality weren’t for all people. He made as many enemies in the game as he made friends, usually because his comic personality didn’t always jibe with his ruthless pursuit of his ambitions.

“Coach Holtz is one of those people, you either like him or you don’t,” Amato once said. “And I love him.”

Holtz left NC State for the New York Jets shortly after a bizarre incident on Oct. 6, 1975, midway through what turned out to be his final season with the Wolfpack. Math professor Robert Ramsay was taking his daily jog around the Paul H. Derr track and Holtz accused him of being a spy for Maryland, the team NC State faced later that week.

The professor said the only way he wouldn’t complete his daily four laps around the track was if Holtz had him arrested. So the coach did.

The whole incident blew up nationally, even after interim chancellor Jackson A. Rigney stepped in and pardoned the professor. The Wake County district attorney’s office wasn’t so understanding, and the controversy kept going for another month as Ramsay faced charges of “resisting , delaying and obstructing a public officer while the officer was attempting to discharge his duty.”

Those charges were eventually dismissed by Wake County district attorney and NC State graduate Burley Mitchell, Ramsay was censured by the NC State faculty senate and the professor was forced to write a letter of apology to the officer involved.

After the season, Holtz resigned to take the head coaching position with the NFL’s New York Jets, in what turned out to be a disastrous one-year entry on the coach’s resume, followed by stints at four other Division 1 programs.

In all, the College Football Hall of Famer was 249-132-7 in his 33 years as a head coach.

He returned to NC State on a hurricane-soaked night on Sept. 6, 1999, as the head coach of the Gamecocks, losing to Mike O’Cain’s final Wolfpack team, 10-0. It was the first loss in an 0-11 season for Holtz and his team and just the second time he ever lost on the Carter-Finley Stadium field.

In October 2023, Holtz returned to Raleigh to reunite with his former players at the University Club on Hillsborough Street, a poignant farewell for those who helped establish a foundation of success under the coach.

“I just want to say how special you were to me,” Holtz told the collected group of players. “You can go into a lot of professions, make a lot of money and do many things. But when you are a coach, you have a chance to do something significant.

“And what you hope is that you help other people be successful in all that they do. That lasts a lifetime.”

Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at [email protected].