Ed Hardin: Carl Tacy goes home quietly and without fanfare

Tacy coached at Wake Forest from 1972 to 1985, a golden age for ACC basketball coaches. And he was as good as any of them.

He died this morning at 87, some 35 years after he inexplicably walked away from coaching when he was only 53.

Tacy’s teams reflected their coach, dogged and unafraid, with the ability to go into Carmichael Auditorium and beat Dean Smith, playing head-to-head against Lefty Driesell at Maryland, Jim Valvano at N.C. State, Terry Holland at Virginia or young Mike Krzyzewski at Duke.

And his teams could also go into periods of darkness.

Mary Garber, the legendary sportswriter with the Winston-Salem Journal, was once asked by another writer for a funny story about Tacy for a profile he was writing.

“There are no funny stories about Carl,” she said.

That was mostly true.

Tacy could be open and engaging with the press or taciturn with fans and even his own staff and players. But to those who knew him best, he was a kind and dignified man of few words.

Rev. Mike Queen, who was Tacy’s pastor at First Baptist Church in Winston, probably knew him as well as anyone. And he saw both sides of the man and the coach.

“Some of his players loved him, and some didn’t,” Queen said. “That’s the way it is with most coaches. But he was who he was, a man with no pretense, a straight-up guy who was respected by his peers.”

Tacy coached some of the greatest players in Wake Forest history and coached the Deacons to some of their greatest wins. And while he was comfortable in the gym if not the bench, he was uncomfortable recruiting.

Ultimately, that’s probably what convinced him to retire so abruptly.

Tacy won 222 games for the Deacs, taking them to the NCAA Tournament four times and the NIT twice. But after a loss to South Florida in the first round of the 1985 NIT, he’d had enough.

His players had revolted, his staff was no longer there to support him, and the fun was gone from the Wake Forest basketball program. As quietly as he’d arrived from West Virginia in 1972, Tacy walked away without talking to the media.

“He was genuine,” former Deacons coach Dave Odom said. “He wasn’t a guy who needed attention. Give him a ball and a team and a gym. Reynolds Gym on campus was enough for him to carve out a program, That’s all he needed. He was a special man.

"Everybody though he was 'Gentleman Carl,' but he had the mind of a tiger and the heart of a lion.”

Tacy was a hard man to understand, and only those closest to him saw him when he was comfortable. Queen was one of those people.

“He’d gone up to West Virginia one year to recruit a kid, and he pulled up in a real rural setting,” Queen said, recounting one of the few recruiting stories Tacy told. “The family didn’t have much, and when he pulled up one Saturday morning he saw the family car was out there. It had seen its better days. But then he noticed Lefty Driesell was washing the car. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘this is going to be tougher than I thought it was going to be.’”

Tacy could be tough on those inside his program. He could be gruff and uncommunicative. But he won basketball games. He won as a high school coach, he won at tiny Ferrum College, and he won in his only season as the head coach at Marshall.

After one year as an assistant in Huntington, the head coach went to the Marshall athletics director and told him he needed to be the assistant and Tacy needed to be the head coach. In Tacy’s only season as the Marshall coach, the Herd went 23-4 and made the NCAA Tournament.

A year later, he arrived at Wake Forest.

It wasn’t an easy job. The ACC was as strong as it’s ever been, and winning at little Wake Forest was a daunting task.

But as he did everywhere he coached, Tacy won. He’s in the sports halls of fame at Davis & Elkins College where he played, at Ferrum and at Wake Forest.

Tacy will be buried in his hometown of Huttonsville, W.Va., in a simple service where his parents and family members are buried. There will be a memorial service in the future.

One of Tacy’s last requests was for Queen to do the service.

“I told him I would be honored,” Queen said.

Odom said his old coach would understand the situation and would embrace it.

“In a way, it’s fitting,” he said. “He was never a guy who needed back slaps or words of encouragement or anything. Going back home to be buried with his parents in the state he loved more than any other would be just fine with him.”

Gentleman Carl went home this morning, quietly, privately and dignified to his final day.