University of North Carolina Athletics
RAMblings - Streater's Stand - Rams Club
RAMblings 7.21.09 - Streater's Stand
by Lee Pace
He wasn’t the meanest or the most athletic. Lawrence Taylor fit that bill.
He wasn’t the biggest and strongest. Certainly Donnell Thompson and William Fuller brought more girth and sinew to the defense.
But certainly Steve Streater was the heart and soul of one of the best defenses in Carolina football history—that being the 1980 unit that allowed only 256 yards and 11 points a game for an 11-1 team that won the ACC championship (the Tar Heels’ last ACC title, by the way).
Streater, who collected All-ACC honors in 1980 as a safety and punter, died June 19 in an Asheboro hospital after complications from paralysis ended his three-decade battle with injuries sustained in a car accident in 1981. He was profiled in Sunday’s News & Observer, which prompted my digging in my archives to resurrect the story of the 1980 goal-line stand at Clemson and Streater’s firebrand motivational role.
Dick Crum’s third Carolina team breezed through its opening seven games and was ranked sixth in the country when it traveled to Oklahoma, where it was promptly hammered back to earth with a 41-7 defeat. But still the ACC title was in sight, and the Tar Heels traveled to Clemson for an early November meeting with a team that, at the time, was one of its arch rivals in the league.
With the defense stoning every Clemson possession and the one-two tailback tandem of Amos Lawrence and Kelvin Bryant each gaining more than 100 yards, the Heels took a 24-6 lead into the fourth quarter. But Clemson found a spark, scoring two TDs to cut the margin to 24-19. The Tigers were forced to punt with just over three minutes to play, but a short, low kick took a nasty bounce and hit Tar Heel Rocky White. The “fumble” was recovered by the Tigers at the Tar Heel 38 with 3:18 to play.
Clemson drove to the 1 yard-line with less than two minutes remaining. Twice the Tigers pounded the middle for no gain. Then they tried a play-action pass and Taylor, the ACC’s player of the year, was unblocked and nailed QB Homer Jordan for a nine-yard loss.
Streater then jumped into the face of each Tar Heel in the fourth-down huddle.
“These are our rings,” Streater screamed, looking every Tar Heel in the eye. “No one else is going to get them. Step up, strap it on. They are not going to get in the end zone. Do exactly what you are supposed to do and don’t try to do anyone else’s job.”
“There were only 11 people in that stadium who thought you guys would keep them out of the end zone,” the father of sophomore cornerback Greg Poole told his son later. “And those were the only ones who mattered.”
Jordan took the snap, rolled out to the left, away from Taylor, was hurried by a six-man Tar Heel rush and threw wide to receiver Jerry Gaillard in the left corner of the end zone. The Tar Heels ran the clock out and escaped with a rare win in Death Valley during that period of dominating Tiger football. Carolina dispatched Virginia and Duke the following weeks and collected its fifth ACC title since the league’s inception in 1953.
“Steve Streater got in our faces and said, ‘They are not going to score. We’re the ACC champs,’” Taylor said. “That got our confidence back and everyone got fired up. Sometimes you need something like that.”
The Heels finished 10-1 in the regular season, bounced Texas 16-7 in the Bluebonnet Bowl and were 6-0 in an ACC that had yet to expand to Georgia – much less Florida or Massachusetts. The team was built around a suffocating defense and a powerful rushing attack that featured the senior Lawrence and the freshman Bryant.
“We won with defense and played smash-mouth football on offense,” says Rod Elkins, the starting quarterback. “That was the right formula for that team. That was our identity. We had great linemen, great running backs. There was no need to do anything fancy.”
“Lord, what a team,” Streater said in 2005. “I loved the fellas. That’s what I called them, ‘The fellas.’ When we stepped on the field, everyone was on the same page. We’d knock your mouthpiece out. I called it ‘cow-pasture football,’ just a bunch of guys out having fun.”
Six Tar Heels were drafted from that team—Taylor, Thompson, Lawrence, Ron Wooten, Rick Donnelly and Harry Stanback—but Streater wasn’t selected. Still, his punting ability garnered him a free-agent deal with the Washington Redskins. Streater had just returned from Washington and his tryout on April 30, 1981, when he skidded on a wet road near RDU Airport, spun out of control, wrecked and suffered a spinal injury that left him paralyzed for life.
Streater took the same resolute attitude into the challenge of life in a wheelchair that he displayed on the football field. He became a father and worked to persuade the North Carolina Legislature to pass a seat-belt law. He was also the state’s first director of Students Against Drunk Driving and traveled the state in his wheelchair, talking to high school students about the dangers of driving while impaired or while not wearing seat belts.
“Steve touched many of us young and old in such a positive way that his life will never be forgotten by those who had the privilege to know him,” Congressman Walter Jones said on the floor of U.S. House of Representatives last month.