Flawed NCSU great Clyde “The Glide” Austin, dead at 67, needs help coming home
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- Clyde Austin, a former NC State star and Globetrotter, died at 67 in Las Vegas.
- Austin’s legacy includes both athletic acclaim and a 17.5-year prison sentence.
- Family launched fundraiser to return Austin’s body to Raleigh for burial.
In his day, Clyde “The Glide” Austin lit up Reynolds Coliseum with his flashy style of play, passing behind his back or between his legs — a point guard fast as a cheetah with a half-court shot in his arsenal.
When he joined NC State University in 1976, The N&O called him a “sleek ball-handling whiz,” while Coach Norm Sloan raved he’d found “one of the best playmakers I’ve ever seen.” In his freshman year, he racked up 27 points in a game against Wake Forest.
Austin would go on to a 10-year career with the Harlem Globetrotters, taking his trickster’s game on world tour. But his name never rang out in Raleigh the way he would have liked — not even at his death this month at 67.
For one, long after his Wolfpack career, fans remembered the final seconds of a 1979 game against UNC, when the Tar Heels’ Dudley Bradley stripped the ball from Austin and won the game on a dunk.
For another, while serving as a pastor in 2004, Austin got sentenced to 17.5 years in federal prison for his role in a pyramid scheme that bilked investors out of $16 million. Greed, he told the judge, “took over all that was intended.”
But now that he has passed, his daughter in Clayton has asked for help bringing Clyde “The Glide” back to Raleigh from Las Vegas, where he died Aug. 16. His family, in every sense, is here.
A GoFundMe campaign for Austin hopes to raise $20,000 for his “homegoing,” which would involve transporting his body from Nevada. So far, donations total just over $4,000.
“My dad loved it here,” said Patrice Austin-Moser. “He was Wolfpack every day from the time he started at that school. I couldn’t even wear blue growing up.”
‘The right guy to shoot’
Austin grew up in Richmond, Virginia, where he battled a tough childhood on the streets. He told The Associated Press in 1979 that he sold pills on the street at 14, hiding them under his hat, stopping only when his basketball coach urged him toward better things.
The 6-2 guard broke scoring records in high school, and recruiters flocked to him. He chose NC State at his mother’s insistence.
“My mother said to take the quiet one and that was Coach Sloan,” he told The N&O in 1976. “I left it up to her and I haven’t been wrong with her yet.”
Playing all four years, Austin collected an honorable mention All-American honor and dominated headlines on late-‘70s sports pages. He showed off a flashy personality to match his showy play on court.
“Just a ball of energy,” said his daughter. “He comes in the room and his smile just lights up the room.”
Wolfpack fans of a vintage will remember his near-halfcourt buzzer-beater to knock off Georgetown in the 1978 NIT semifinal, a game played in Madison Square Garden.
“We certainly picked the right guy to shoot,” Sloan told the AP later.
“I started to cry when the ball went in,” Austin confessed.
But the UNC slip-up in 1979 would serve as his Wolfpack obituary.
Even before he left Raleigh, sportswriters called it his signature play. The AP called it a “thoroughly embarrassing moment” for which Austin would be “best remembered.”
The Philadelphia 76ers chose Austin in the second round but cut him before he could play his first game. Within a year, he turned Globetrotter.
“I can be myself now,” he told The N&O.
‘A sad and tawdry story’
Outside of basketball, Austin started a string of Raleigh nonprofits — Future Kids Foundation, Heaven’s Light Christian Center and Clyde Austin Ministries — along with a long list of businesses and limited partnerships. He also co-owned and coached the spring pro league Raleigh Cougars while becoming an ordained minister in Cary.
The trouble started in 1998, when the state attorney general sued his company, Bankers International Trust, for running a pyramid scheme against investors. The state froze $500,000 in assets, The N&O reported at the time.
Austin pledged to pay back $2.5 million to investors, but then moved to Nevada and filed for bankruptcy. In 2004, a federal judge in Virginia sentenced him to 17.5 years after victims’ attorneys described Austin using the pulpit and his fame to fuel his deceptions about profits to come from overseas trading, real estate, herb sales and weight loss aids. Many lost life savings.
“When I took on these projects,” he said in court at the time, “I believed they would be successful.”
Bob Lipper, a columnist for the Times-Dispatch in Austin’s hometown of Richmond, delivered the harshest judgment.
“It’s a sad and tawdry story,” Lipper wrote, “one made sadder still by the possibilities and assumptions it shattered. We all wanted to believe in Clyde Austin. We all wanted to believe the poor kid from Richmond’s mean streets had made it on his own, through hard work and diligence. ... Looks like he had us all fooled.”
A light
Austin got an early release from prison. Court records online are unclear on exactly when, but the former Wolfpack star was on probation by 2010 when officials sought to transfer him from Virginia to Nevada.
There, he worked as a security guard for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which sometimes hosted summer league play and allowed Austin to hobnob with young players. But more trouble followed: a 2022 conviction for wire fraud after trying to receive unemployment benefits from Massachusetts.
His daughter said Austin had been working in food delivery and was in relatively good health, but a blood clot left behind from a recent knee surgery traveled to his lungs, triggering a heart attack.
She wants to bring him back to Raleigh, where his grandchildren can attend a funeral service, and where he can rest in a place where his future felt brightest, where he got the most applause.
“It’s just so hard,” said Austin-Moser, describing the mourning process for her family when her father rests in a faraway state. “I really can’t believe he’s gone. He had a light about him. You could feel it. It just exploded.”
To contribute to the GoFundMe for Clyde “The Glide” Austin, go to https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-clyde-the-glide-austins-homegoing.
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This story was originally published September 1, 2025 at 5:00 AM.