TheReff
Rod Griffin
- Joined
- May 15, 2011
- Messages
- 6,431
- Reaction score
- 563
Gene Hooks was an idiot.
Hooks was an awesome AD. He did all he could at Wake with absolutely no money. James Ralph Scales gave him nothing for the athletic department and back then there was nothing coming from any TV contracts and such like there is today. We literally were on a shoestring budget. My college roommate was our leading hitter & ACC leading hitter on the 1977 ACC champ baseball team and when they won the title they were wondering where the money was going to come from to actually go to the Regionals. If they had beaten South Carolina down in Columbia to win the title, who knows how they would have paid to go to Omaha back in those days?
Also, thank goodness for Thomas Hearn as our new school President who came in after Scales retired in 1983, because on our 3rd attempt, Hearn helped lead the charge to get us a new basketball arena. We put in $5 mill of the $25 mill it took to build it. Got concessions from the city and WSSU and got the great building built. Otherwise we might still be in the Quonset Hut in front of 8000 people sitting on top of an ice rink. Hearn wanted an overall well-rounded school and all Scales cared about was the fine arts. Hearn & Gene Hooks teams up to get us started on spending some money in athletics! Plus Gene hired as his first couple of asst AD's great folks like Jon Lecrone who moved on to be an Assoc Comm of the ACC & has been Commish of the Horizons League for years and also one Ben Sutton, who came in right out of Wake Law School and started helping Dr Hooks negotiate TV contracts when that stuff was just getting started.