To experience the era when the North Carolina State-Wake Forest rivalry was at its most contentious, you have to go back to Southern Conference days, when the ACC was still in the planning stage.

The Wolfpack constructed a dynasty in Everett Case’s early years, and the Demon Deacons were the first to chip away at it. Wake’s weapon of choice in that demolition? A quiet 6-foot-6 country boy named Dickie Hemric. In hindsight, the two teams would realize that the growing tension between the teams actually originated with Hemric’s recruitment in 1951.

Case invited Hemric, who came from tiny Jonesville, N.C., to Raleigh for a tryout against the Wolfpack varsity, but declined to offer him a scholarship. Hemric preferred the smaller environment of the campus in little Wake Forest, N.C. anyway and had already committed to play there, and soon after he arrived in 1952 he found a perfect mentor in the form of WFC assistant coach Horace “Bones” McKinney.

McKinney asked head coach Murray Greason if he could work with Hemric for 30 minutes every day, and with that one-on-one tutelage Hemric soon became a formidable force in the paint.

Long a whipping boy for NC State, Wake Forest first made Case pay for passing on Hemric on Dec. 9, 1952, when the Deacons edged NCSU 51-50 in Hemric’s second game on the team. The Wolfpack dominated their next meeting that season 99-80, but then the two squads met in their last Southern Conference final on March 7, 1953.

N.C. State was ranked 12th in the nation with six consecutive conference titles to its credit when Hemric and his team felled the Wolfpack, 71-70.

Wake won the next two games against NCSU as the 1953-’54 season opened the door on the ACC, most notably triumphing 86-79 in the consolation round of Case’s signature event, the Dixie Classic. It was the first Dixie Classic loss for the Wolfpack since Case founded the holiday tournament at Reynolds Coliseum four years earlier.

But in the first ACC Tournament championship game, on March 6, 1954 back at Reynolds, NC State eked out an 82-80 victory against the increasingly maddening Deacs.

Hemric only played for two seasons in the fledgling ACC, but his status as a conference legend is undisputed – his ACC rebounding record of 1,802 is considered untouchable, and his scoring title of 2,587 points stood for more than a half century before falling to Duke guard J.J. Redick in 2006.

When Hemric left for the NBA in 1955 Case was undoubtedly relieved, and when the two teams met again in the ACC final game in 1956 the Wolfpack responded to a Hemric-less Wake team with a 76-64 win. The two teams haven’t met in the league championship since.

In Hemric’s absence McKinney would stay around to stoke the fires of the rivalry, first as Greason’s assistant and, starting in 1957, as the Deacs’ head coach. Shortly after McKinney arrived at Wake in the early ‘50s to attend seminary and take a part-time job helping Greason, he introduced a zone defense that drove Case’s teams crazy, eventually prompting Wolfpack assistant Vic Bubas to ask if he could drive to Wake Forest to learn the fine points of the scheme to bring back to Reynolds.

McKinney is best remembered for his frenetic antics on the sideline during games, and he was at his most animated in December 1960, when the two teams met again in the consolation round of the Dixie Classic. (It was the final playing of the tournament, even though no one knew it at the time; revelations from a nationwide point-shaving scandal would implicate N.C. State and UNC players in early 1961 and lead UNC System President William Friday to cancel the Dixie Classic.)

As the Wolfpack defeated Wake 99-91 that day, McKinney took out his frustration on one of the Reynolds Coliseum sideline chairs. About a week later Case arrived at a scheduled appearance at the Winston-Salem Tip-Off Club with the pieces of ill-fated chair in his arms and a twinkle in his eye.

"During our Dixie Classic game, Mr. McKinney willfully and maliciously demolished this chair, which I produce as evidence," Case said. "However, since Bones is a former State player, the University is willing to settle for the damages as suggested by our athletics director.”

Case then produced a letter from NCSU AD Roy Clogston to Wake Forest president Harold Tribble and an invoice for the cost of the chair – $14.33. Rather than pay up, however, McKinney took the remains of the chair to the WFC maintenance department and asked them to put it back together and paint the bottom half gold and black and the top half red and white.

For the next five years until Case’s retirement, the chair became a trophy of sorts, traveling back and forth between Raleigh and Winston-Salem in the possession of whoever had triumphed in the most recent game. The chair is reportedly still stored somewhere in the bowels of Joel Coliseum.

Emotions between the two teams have never since reached that fevered level when Hemric dominated the boards and the campuses were only 20 miles apart. But the Wolfpack and the Demon Deacons made history in 1989 in a marathon that still stands as the longest ACC game in history.

In a late-season matchup in the old Greensboro Coliseum, the two squads sparred through regulation and four overtime periods until N.C. State finally prevailed 110-103.

State guard Rodney Monroe scored 26 points to push his team to victory in the epic contest, which lasted nearly three hours.