A ‘piece of Wolfpack history’ went missing at Final Four. Frantic fan wants it back.
For all the big NC State games, Angela Crumpler takes along a treasure from her Wolfpack collection — a good-luck token for the former cheerleader and lifelong fan.
Among her favorites: a “Pack Power” sign autographed by the entire 1974 men’s NCAA championship team, gathered one basketball player at a time the year she screamed her lungs out from the sidelines with her hair flopping wildly.
Just last week, she took it to Phoenix to watch the Wolfpack men’s team play its first Final Four game in 41 years.
But when she came back to her seat from the bathroom during Saturday’s game, the sign was gone. Probably stolen, she thinks.
As if losing the game could get any worse.
‘In the middle of Wolfpack people’
“It’s heart-breaking,” Crumpler said Thursday. “David Thompson’s signature was front and center. If you were there, you have to understand the significance of that sign. Maybe I was stupid carrying it, but I was in the middle of Wolfpack people.”
Now Crumpler, who is nearing 70, is frantically searching for her lost artifact, asking anyone who finds either her sign or a guilty conscience to mail it anonymously to the Wolfpack Club in Raleigh — no questions asked.
Inside the cavernous Phoenix arena, she was sitting in section 111, row LL, alongside her 82-year-old husband and her niece and nephew. She described the seats as being situated on what would normally be the football field, arranged on risers with chairs chained together.
‘A piece of Wolfpack history’
She asked them to watch the sign when she left before halftime. Nobody around her seat saw the sign go missing. Crumpler didn’t see any gaps big enough for a sign 2 feet across to fall through, and she remains stunned that it would vanish among people who got tickets through the Wolfpack Club.
“People had been taking their picture with it,” she said. “I was at the Wolfpack tailgate showing it to people. It’s a piece of history. It’s a piece of Wolfpack history!”
Crumpler’s sign carries deep meaning because she witnessed the Pack’s ‘74 championship up-close, cheering through the whole season and gradually accumulating autographs.
She appears in a 1974 Sports Illustrated issue, beaming alongside UCLA Coach John Wooden, whose head is lowered in defeat, eyes closed.
“I have really long hair,” she said. “They took a lot of pictures of me because my hair did crazy things.”
A felony crime
She has more memorabilia she’s promised to the NC Museum of History, including from the 1974 and 1983 championships. So when the sign disappeared, she felt immediately felt dizzy. Her blood pressure shot to 170 over 100. She spent the rest of the game in the arena’s medical room on oxygen, an IV and a heart monitor.
“In the clearer light of day,” she wrote in a Facebook post, “I think I narrowly dodged having a stroke.”
She reported it to troopers inside the arena, who told her its value would make the crime a felony.
But she isn’t worried about that so much as recovering something precious — not only a piece of Raleigh’s history but something collected while it was happening, touched by everyone involved.
If you cheered at a buzzer-beater, high-fived a stranger at a last-second win or stood in a crowd of thousands all wearing the same jersey, you’ll send this relic back.
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