Wake Loses A Staunch Supporter
Over the past week I’ve had the great pleasure of watching Wake basketball practices with the two men who have directed Deacons athletics for the past 46 years. On Friday Gene Hooks, the AD from 1964 until 1992, joined me at Joel Coliseum to watch Coach Jeff Bzdelik put his team through its paces. And on Monday, I was hanging out at the Miller Center when Ron Wellman, the AD since 1992, made his rounds through Budd Gym.
Wellman has a tough job as the director of athletics at what is by far and away the smallest school the ACC. But as hard as Wellman has it, Hooks had it harder.
I mentioned that to Wellman Monday, and he, without hesitation, agreed.
There were times during Hooks’ stewardship that Wake Forest was clinging to its ACC affiliation. Before Groves Stadium was built in 1968, the Deacons played football across town at Bowman Gray Stadium, a place few opponents found to their liking. That became all-too-apparent whenever Hooks attended conference meetings. He told me once that when it came to scheduling, the other schools would set their slates before they would offer Wake whatever was left.
And then, of course, there was the barn known as Memorial Stadium that served as the home basketball arena long after it had outlived its usefulness. The place had become so rank and rundown by 1982 that first Carl Tacy and then Bob Staak actually took their teams over to Greensboro to play conference games. Try recruiting at a school that plays its ``home games’’ 25 miles from campus.
Support was always an issue, forcing Hooks to bite many a bullet. Consequently he was never the most popular man on campus among students or coaches.
But it was the foundation that Hooks built, Wellman said Monday, that allowed him to take the program to the next level and survive until the modern age of multi-million TV contracts.
Wellman would also be the first to note that nobody gets anything done in college athletics without ample financial support. So often the most indispensable people in any program are the ones you rarely read or hear anything about, the ones who shell out the kind of money it takes to built and upgrade facilities and pay the kinds of salaries that all successful coaches in a major sport are going to command. Wake sports are funded like never before, with Deacon Tower being the shining proof.
Wake Forest lost one of its finest fans and supporters yesterday when Jim Judson, Jr. and his wife Elizabeth crashed a single-engine Beachcraft Bonanza in Mississippi. They were flying back home to Atlanta after watching a daughter play tennis for Southern Mississippi. A reader, Michael Lambert of Roswell, Ga., wrote to alert me with the sad news.
Judson was an alumnus of Wake Forest who made his money building and selling a software company, Witness Systems Inc. He was a member of the Wake Forest Board of Trustees and a staunch supporter of his school.
He and Elizabeth will be missed.