Brownout
Armanti Edwards isn’t the only Appalachian State quarterback to be disappointed about not playing at East Carolina.
Steve Brown was a sophomore quarterback for ASU’s “Retaliate in ‘78” team, the last ASU team to play in Greenville.
Coach Jim Brakefield’s Mountaineers did retaliate to a large extent, going from 2-9 the season before to 5-2 at one point during the 1978 season.
Brown was a big part of that turnaround. But he got hurt – taking a defender’s helmet to the knee on the next-to-last play of a game against East Tennessee State.
Next on the schedule was East Carolina. If there was any game Brown didn’t want to miss, it was that one.
He grew up in Goldsboro, and hoped to play for East Carolina after high school but was offered only an invitation to walk on. He wound up at Appalachian, and ranks third on the all-time list for passing yards with 6,533.
“The only darn game I missed was the one at Greenville,” Brown said. “And I was dying to play there. That’s where all my buddies were. My uncle had taken me to so many East Carolina games I feel like I grew up in Ficklen Stadium. I probably saw 20 games there.
“All my buddies were at the game and, shoot, I couldn’t even play. That was the one big downer for me that season.”
Brown said that another player wore his jersey number in a Friday night walk-through, just so East Carolina thought he was going to play.
“I had to hide on the sideline,” Brown said. “I didn’t even get to go out there and walk around.”
Brown will be at Saturday’s game. So will Tom Sofield, who played in the Mountaineers’ last victory over the Pirates, in 1975, and Rick Beasley, who played the last time the teams met in 1979.
“We hated to see it when we stopped playing,” Sofield said. “As far as we were concerned, they were probably our biggest rival.”
Beasley said: “That was a game we always looked forward to playing. It’s a great in-state rivalry, one that we would love to play more often.”
That’s something that could happen.
When the game was agreed upon last October, Terry Holland, ECU’s athletics director, said: “Even though this is a single-game contract with Appalachian State for the 2009 season only, it is my hope that this game will be a springboard for a great in-state rivalry in the future.”
Charlie Cobb, ASU’s athletics director, said: “It’s great for the fans. It’s a game people want to see, tickets are in demand… My expectations are that we will play again down the road. Eventually, we would like to look for a way for East Carolina to come west for a game, maybe play in Boone or play in Charlotte or play in Winston-Salem.”