Terry Holland waited a long time in the west end zone of Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium, the celebration raging around him on the field, in the stands, as he stood alone. Players and coaches and staffers filtered past him, but Holland was waiting for one man.
Finally, Ruffin McNeill made his way off the field and walked up to Holland. The two men had both come home to East Carolina, Holland out of retirement as athletic director, McNeill getting his first head-coaching job at his alma mater. The Pirates had just beaten Tulsa on a last-second touchdown pass in McNeill’s debut, and Holland stood patiently and waited until McNeill practically leapt into Holland’s arms. That hug contained multitudes.
“That game, the first game, the first last-second win,” McNeill said Monday. “Coming back home, a Clinton Dark Horse and a Lumberton Pirate. I do remember that embrace and coach waiting for me. I do.”
But that was Holland, who died Sunday at 80: loyal, stoic, classy — and despite being most famous for coaching Virginia during the ACC’s greatest era, he was a North Carolinian to the core.
“Clinton, North Carolina,” former Davidson coach Bob McKillop said. “He would never let you forget that.”
Holland played at Davidson, got his first head-coaching job there and later served as AD. And after he retired as athletic director in Charlottesville, he couldn’t resist the call to come home and save East Carolina after John Thompson laid wreckage to the football program.
Holland played on some incredible teams for Lefty Driesell at Davidson, never left campus and was only 27 when he was promoted to replace the departed Driesell as head coach. In 1974, Virginia hired Holland to take over a program that was more or less irrelevant in a league full of basketball powerhouses. The Cavaliers quickly became one.
While a national title eluded Holland, even with Ralph Sampson on his team, the glory days of the ACC wouldn’t have been the same without Virginia’s gentleman on the sideline. In his 16 years, the Cavaliers won one ACC title, advanced past the first round of the NCAA tournament six times and made two Final Fours, but that says more about how competitive the ACC was at that time than anything else.
“Certainly, Terry was one of the outstanding coaches in the country and his Virginia teams of the 1970s and 1980s helped place the ACC ahead of all other conferences,” former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said in a statement. “For me, as a young coach entering the league, Terry was the perfect example of what a head coach should be, especially in how he represented his institution both on and off the basketball court.”
Holland had four future ACC head coaches on his staff — Miami’s Jim Larranaga, Wake Forest’s Dave Odom, Virginia Tech’s Seth Greenberg (briefly) and his successor at Virginia, Jeff Jones.
“Everything I’ve been able to do is because of the example he set for me,” Larranaga said.
Holland stepped down in 1990 at age 48, walking away in his prime, not unlike Dean Smith, to become the athletic director at his alma mater. Before he even officially started, he quietly picked his new basketball coach, a Long Island high school coach who had spent a season as a Davidson assistant: McKillop, who would hold the job for the next 33 years.
McKillop on Monday said he wouldn’t have made it through his first three years without Holland, and called him “a treasure of Davidson College.”
“The love affair between him and Davidson was extraordinary,” McKillop said. “He always did things with honor, integrity, class, dignity. You could just as easily see him walking the halls of Congress as you could walking the sidelines.”
Holland would eventually return to Virginia as athletic director, retiring in 2001 and being inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame in 2002. That retirement was short-lived as his home state beckoned again.
East Carolina was in disarray and needed Holland’s steady hand. He hired first Skip Holtz and then McNeill to lead the football program back to where ECU has traditionally expected to be. He had less success with men’s basketball, at one point hiring one of his former players, Ricky Stokes, but by the time he retired (again), the athletic department was back on solid footing.
“He gave me the opportunity to be the first African-American head football coach at East Carolina and one of the first at a public institution in the state of North Carolina,” McNeill said. “Coach Holland was behind that and gave me an opportunity. I was just fortunate that he did, and he was there with me to help lead it on.”
