Charlotte, N.C. — With all the bad things that have happened to N.C. State head coach Jim Valvano – losing two of his players to illness and injury, suffering a hernia that will eventually need surgical repair, losing five of six games during one stretch in January– something wonderful happened Friday night in the first round of the 25th-annual North-South Doubleheader.

His N.C. State basketball team played awful and still won.

“We played well at Louisville and lost and we played well against Memphis State and still lost,” Valvano said after his team’s hard-fought 51-48 victory over Furman at the Charlotte Coliseum. “So it’s nice to get a win when you don’t play well.”

The Wolfpack, clearly weary of switching back and forth between two sets of game rules, was unable to get into an offensive flow against Furman’s pressure man-to-man defense.

“We struggled to do everything,” Valvano said. For the coach, who has been suffering through his painful injury for two and a half weeks, that included walking up and down the sidelines.

With his team in foul trouble most of the night, Valvano had to rely on a three-guard rotation that included freshman Ernie Myers and sophomore Terry Gannon. Myers, who entered the game as the team’s leading scorer, struggled with his shooting touch, making just two of his 11 field goal attempts for nine points.