Class of 2016
Barry Grice
Barry Grice was tennis before tennis was cool. Decades before John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert thrilled television audiences, Grice was swatting forehands with a wooden Wilson Jack Kramer on the courts at Wingate School, 50 miles east of Mount Holly, when the university was still two-years. Guy named Norman Chambers – who won the national junior college doubles title at Wingate and swept the Carolinas Conference singles and doubles titles three consecutive years at Appalachian State – got Grice hooked on the game, back in 1961-62. Grice hadn’t played much prior to college because, well, there wasn’t any place to do it. “He kinda helped me, starting out. He was looking for someone to chase balls, I guess,” Grice says, half-joking. “Mount Holly didn’t have any tennis courts when I graduated high school in 1960. It wasn’t very big; nobody really played.” So, Grice learned from Chambers, then enrolled in Charlotte College – now UNC-Charlotte – to quietly complete his degree in business administration. Which would have gone smoothly, except for two unrelated life events. He got married. And, he got summoned to the Chancellor’s office. “I was in class one day, and this lady came and pulled me out of class and said Bonnie Cone wants to see you. And I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness,’” he says. Mrs. Cone, who died in 2003, was a leader and president of Charlotte College since its birth in 1949 and a popular, persuasive community advocate on numerous fronts. She was a teacher, had a Master’s in math from Duke University and had been a statistical analyst in Washington for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. “She’s going to kick me out of school,” Grice thought. She didn’t. Instead, she let Grice in on her plans to move Charlotte College into the University of North Carolina system, but all the pieces weren’t in place. “She said she wanted to start a tennis program, and she heard I played a little bit of tennis,” he says. “And next thing I knew, she gave me a list of teams we were going to play, and the times and where we were going to play. The only thing missing was a team.” So, in 1964, Grice started the first team. “We posted some bulletins on the board about setting up a team. And I guess we did OK. We would play at Freedom Park on the clay courts – practiced and played there – and we played Pembroke, St. Andrew’s, Belmont Abbey, Presbyterian, six or seven schools. I was the coach and the captain.” Charlotte College became UNC-Charlotte in 1965. Grice, who by then was combining married life with tennis tournaments, finished college in night school and got his degree in 1969. He played in the Southern branch of the United States Tennis Association’s tournaments, and was ranked in the state and Southern region. Mount Holly remained his home base. His wife, Gail, daughter of one of the Jones brothers who owned the supermarket that later became the City Café on Main Street in Mount Holly, taught home economics, and the Grices raised a son and a daughter. So, it was only natural that he help with installation of the tennis complex at East Gaston High School. “They asked me what kind of courts, what kind of surface, the durability of the facility. I just guided with my experience,” he says. “They did a real good job on it, I’ll tell you that. “They put in a special Har-Tru surface and a lighting system that’s really good, with a timer on it. Usually a team will play six singles and three doubles, but they put in eight courts.” Grice, 74, doesn’t play much tennis anymore. Traded his racket for a golf club, after an injury to his back. He owns the course at Marlboro Country Club in Bennettsville, S.C., which he bought in 2006. “I finally said, hey, I got to start doing something (after the injury), so I just started swinging a golf club and got into that. I like to play, but I love tennis. And Mount Holly and my family and friends. “I was real excited about this Hall of Fame, but I felt there’s a lot more people who are more deserving. “But I felt honored to be inducted.”
Derek Spears
Long after the newspaper clippings disappeared, and statistics became faded markings in a scorebook, the concept Derek Spears remembers most about his sports career is camaraderie with the people who accompanied it. It was inevitable that he would play. His father, Joe, coached the Mount Holly High basketball team to its first- ever league regular season title in 1968 and guided the 1966-67 and 1967-68 girls teams to a combined 35-7 record. His little sister, Suzanne, went to college on a volleyball ride. Joe Spears is a 2010 inductee in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame. Derek is 53 now, married with two kids and a job. His sports moments, the ones that were the most important thing in the whole wide world, are on a shelf, tucked aside. “But my mom, she saved all kinds of things. We found them in boxes, stuff I’d forgotten about,” Derek Spears said. “She saved everything.” Moms will do that. When asked about his own Hall of Fame induction, Derek Spears didn’t boast about accomplishments in football or baseball or track. He mentioned his teammates, his coaches and his friends. “James Ford, he was in track. He showed me a lot. He was a good track guy, and he was a good guy to help me,” says Spears, who ran the 4x100 relay and 100-yard and 200-yard dash, and might have won a state relay title in 10 th grade if not for a fall in the rain on a slippery track. “We had some of the best times in the state.” His sophomore year in 1978, his first at East Gaston High School, Spears quarterbacked the Warriors to their first-ever Southwestern 3A Conference title and first post-season victory, but it isn’t the wins or applause that he recalls: It’s the welcoming committee. “I knew I could play in 10 th grade – it was just a matter of playing,” he says. “We were practicing in the gym before the season started, and I can remember running a play where the quarterback runs a fake-out, and I was running in the gym, and this guy was sitting there, Ricky or James McDowell, one of the brothers. And he had these little pads, like you have on defense, and when I was carrying the fake-out, he came out and just nailed me with those pads. “It was, ‘Welcome to high school.’” The following spring, Spears played second base on the Warriors team that was state Class 3A runners-up. “I love baseball. My favorite memories, team-wise, would be in junior high, and I have quite a few memories of American Legion teams,” he says. “There are a lot of good stories…” He’d rather mention the good coaches than the good stories. “We had coach (Wayne) Bolick, coach (Buddy) Green… Junior high, that’s the age when a kid starts believing what somebody’s telling them. You start believing,” Spears says. “They would talk about playing in the college ranks, or the pros. That’s when it really started hitting me, this could be fun. And a lot of people from my team, they did play college or pro baseball, and I think some ran track in college. I guess that’s the goal, what a lot of us wanted to do.” For Spears, in high school, recruiting letters arrived from across the South. “The best part was going to the mailbox to see what you got. That was fun,” he says. “Some of the smaller schools, they wanted me to run track too, and play football. I decided real quick I didn’t want to do that.” Mail came from Louisiana State University, North Carolina State, Winthrop, Coastal Carolina, South Carolina, Clemson … He narrowed it to baseball, and Clemson, N.C. State and LSU. Clemson won. “I kinda liked Coach Bill Wilhelm. He was a legend down there.” Spears says. “And I can remember him coming to talk with my mom (Marie) and dad, and he was asking me, ‘You know, we have an all-conference second baseman coming back next year. You think you can beat him out?’ “I didn’t beat him out. He went on to play for the Mets for a long time…” Spears played at Clemson as a utility infielder and outfielder as a freshman, then was red-shirted his sophomore year (“The all-conference guy was still there.”), then played some as a junior behind Bill Spiers, who went on to a career with the Houston Astros. “So practically everyone I played with there, there were about seven major leaguers on those teams,” he says. Spears went on to the business world. He lives in Charlotte with his wife, Missy, and their sons Jake, 7, and Vance, 11. Vance plays tennis and squash. Jake favors baseball and basketball. Life is busy, the phone rings a lot, and Spears looks back at his baseball career and laughs and says it would be awful hard, now, to hit a good slider. “I could run real fast and play defense, but I sometimes had a lack of ability to hit the ball…,” he says. “This Hall of Fame, I’m not sure I deserve it, but it’s a great honor. There’s a ton of people other than me who should be in there, but I appreciate it.”
Stephanie Frazier
When the call came about Mount Holly’s Sports Hall of Fame, Stephanie Frazier, the businesswoman, was having lunch on Manhattan’s East Side en route to Las Vegas, because in adult life, as in sports, her days are non-stop with no time to lose. Frazier, 46, is a client executive who provides the transmission path – the signal that connects two nodes of a network in data communication – for distribution of video for television broadcasting to CNN, Turner Broadcasting, HBO and Warner Bros. She has a Bachelor of Science in Communications from the University of Tennessee. In high school, and as a kid growing up in Mount Holly, Stephanie Frazier the athlete played year-round and excelled, because even as a child, she was non-stop competitive. “There was no down time. It was fun,” she says. “That’s what happens when you don’t have the internet to be on all day.” It began at age 6, when she joined the Mount Holly swim team, and she swam every summer until she was about 15. But accumulating laps in a pool wasn’t enough. “I started playing Saturday mornings in city leagues when I was about 10, and I did that all through high school. I did it all, basically,” she says. “I did the Optimist League, when I was about 7 and 8 and 9, then in junior high I played softball and basketball and ran track. “It was fun. I mean, honestly, it was fun! I was the classic little tomboy.” A uniform for every season. “I’m obviously hugely competitive. I enjoyed being part of a team. And it was a social activity as well,” she says. By the time she enrolled in East Gaston High School, there weren’t too many sports she couldn’t play. So her senior year, she added another accomplishment: “I was senior class president. That was fun.” She played volleyball in the fall, then basketball, then softball in the spring. One thing after the next. But one night, she made everything stop. It was during a basketball game, at home versus West Charlotte her senior year. A 5-foot-9 shooting guard, it wasn’t uncommon for her to score 30 points a game. On this night, she scored her 1,000 th point. “They stopped the game. Coach (Stan Napier) came out and gave me the game ball, and everyone clapped. My parents came down. It was in the second quarter,” she says. “Then I don’t think I hit another shot the whole game. It was all discombobulated.” Frazier finished her high school career with between 1,300 and 1,400 points – she isn’t sure – and was recruited by the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, UNC-Asheville and the University of Central Florida. But her dream team – to play for Pat Summitt at Tennessee – remained that…. a dream. Frazier had visited the UT campus, for a softball game, and knew from that moment it was where she would go to school. She thought about approaching Summitt. “But I knew I wasn’t good enough to play for the Lady Vols, so I started not caring about my stats. I’d moved past it. I was ready to have fun and have a normal college life,” she says. And it may have been normal, except for a close encounter at a football game – the moment that reigns as Frazier’s favorite sports memory. “It was 1997, when Peyton Manning was the quarterback at Tennessee and we were in the Citrus Bowl and he had just thrown a touchdown pass. I had gone to get a Coke, and when I came back, he throws the touchdown and I stopped right where I was to celebrate. And I turned around, and Archie Manning and (Peyton’s) mother were right there, and we all high-fived and celebrated,” she says. “That was cool.” So is being inducted into Mount Holly’s Hall of Fame. “It’s certainly an honor,” says Frazier, who lives in Greensboro. “I loved growing up in Mount Holly,” she says. “Truth be told, I probably wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
Jerry Brooks
When Jerry Brooks was a kid, he was intrigued by wrestling. Watched it on television. Cheered for the stars of the WWE – Dusty Rhodes, Ric Flair. So, when he heard his junior high had a wrestling team – what could be better than trying out for that? “I learned very quickly it was nothing like what was on TV. It was a big shock there. And my friends were thinking the same as well,” he says. “We found out it was different. But we hung in there, and that’s what made it fun.” Brooks, a 1991 East Gaston High School graduate, had enough fun to win two state championships, be recruited by several colleges and excel at the NCAA level. His success has landed him in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame. Like the WWE stars, Brooks’ wrestling career had an entourage – not the boisterous, flamboyant kind, but a network of support in his family, friends and coaches that guided a child from Stanley along the path to where he is now – a successful business owner in metro Raleigh, with a wife and two children. “Coach (Doug) Smith (at East Gaston) was the one who always kept his finger on me, when I was going to school, who asked who I hung out with, made sure I kept my head on straight and made sure I didn’t mess up the opportunity I had in front of me,” Brooks says. “He stayed focused on me. In that day and age, where there weren’t too many guys getting scholarships for wrestling, he made sure I had the opportunity. He would tell me, ‘Be careful these next four or five years, because what you do now is going to determine the type of lifestyle you’re going to live.’” Brooks grew up watching his father and uncles play sports, and he took to football and baseball, along with wrestling. At Stanley Middle School, then at East Gaston, it meant year-round competition – one season following another, year after year. He started on the wrestling team in eighth grade, tipping in at 121 pounds, and remembers receiving a Most Valuable Player award. “I won whatever matches I got to wrestle,” he says. By ninth grade, he was 145 pounds and learning that success is a group effort. The 1991 team won the state 4A title with a 40-15 victory over Cary and went 20-0 in dual meets. “First of all, one thing about that season, I’ll be honest with you, is that I was very fortunate to have some great coaches and we had real good chemistry on that team,” Brooks says. “We had a strong team up and down the line-up, and there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team.’ It’s an individual sport, but it’s a team sport, and we cheered each other on and moved some guys up and down the line-up to give us the way to win the match. “There was no bickering, no fighting. We practiced every day after school, in the cafeteria. We’d move the chairs and unroll the mats and move in there and start wrestling. We didn’t have a wrestling room at East Gaston; we’d move the chairs, then move them back.” He won two state championships as an individual, but credits the team. “We were all inseparable. We worked hard, because we knew we were being hunted – everyone was out to get us. And that’s what motivated us. We didn’t take any shortcuts. Every time we went somewhere, we were humble,” he says. “We let our work show on the mats.” Favorite memory? “Seeing my cousin, Mario McCorkle, win a state championship,” he says. “My junior season in high school, going through there and winning the team state championship, and seeing my cousin do good in the tournament. And winning state championships as a team. Those were the most memorable times of my career.” A few small colleges took notice of Brooks for football, but mostly it was wrestling. Schools from Vermont to Pembroke had him on their wish lists. “But the one that stood out the most, that was Division I and had the academics, was Campbell. I got a partial scholarship, the most that was ever offered a freshman, then after my first year, it became full,” he says. He sat out his freshman year to concentrate on academics, then competed the following seasons. He holds the Campbell school record for most pins in a season, with 17 in 1994-95, and is second all-time in wins for a season, with 39, also in 1994-95. He is 14 th in school history in career wins, with 64, from 1993 to 1996. He graduated from the Research Triangle area university with a degree in Business Administration and Education. He met his wife, Theresa, in 1993 at Campbell, and they married in 2000. The family lives near Raleigh, and Theresa, who also has a master’s in special education from Belmont Abbey, is a teacher with Wake County Public Schools. Their son Jalen, 15, wrestles – he was fourth his state meet, in the private school sector as a 9 th grader. Their daughter, Jada, turned 12 in July. Jerry Brooks owns five franchises of Dickey’s Barbecue Pit. He’s been in the restaurant business since 2011. Brooks credits the support of his late father, Jerry “Pete” Brooks, and his mother, Mary Ann Arnold, as well as his coaches, with giving him the foundation to create the life he leads. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the coaches and my teammates, throughout my athletic career,” he says, of the Hall of Fame induction. “Being from around Mount Holly and going to East Gaston, that small-town community, it’s something I wish I had for my children. But it got me to where I am today. It’s precious to me. Home is home. I like it.”
1991 East Gaston Wrestling
Community Spirit Award Aaron Goforth
Somewhere in a box, Aaron Goforth’s NASCAR memories are stored on VHS tapes, antique reminders of trips from Riverside, Calif., to Daytona, to North Wilksboro and a blur of map specks that were not Mount Holly. He was a tire specialist for important people – Cale Yarborough, Buddy Baker, Bobby and Davey Allison – but the other important people, his wife and kids, were home in Gaston County while his job whizzed by at 190 miles per hour. “I’d miss so much of Little Aaron’s baseball games, and in the summers on those weekends, I was gone,” he says, of his oldest son’s youth leagues. “And I didn’t want that with (younger son) Billy. And the NASCAR work was getting physically harder, so I gave that up and was here for Billy.” Instead of deciding what race car tires to switch, he decided what baseball fields needed fixing. Instead of making new tires in sets, he made new roofs for dugouts. And instead of telling race teams about circumference and air pressure, he told Little League players how to swing, how to run and how to have good sportsmanship. For all he’s done for sports in Mount Holly, Goforth is the recipient of the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame 2016 Community Spirit Award. “I still feel like there’re a lot more folks more deserving than I am. All I did was work on the fields and batting cages and the dugouts,” he says. “It was for the kids. Not only my kids but for all the boys and girls that came after them. I enjoyed it. I look around now and see some of the kids I coached who have grown up to be very successful, and I’m very proud of them.” Goforth served in the Army from 1968 to 1970, at Fort Bragg and Fort Jackson, S.C. He received his orders for Vietnam, but was kept stateside. In addition to NASCAR, he worked as a mechanic for Duke Power at several of its locations – South Boulevard, Little Rock Road, Wilkinson Boulevard and the Toddville garage. He had a shop at his home, where he worked on cars and trucks. Goforth met Debbie, his wife of 40 years, in Sunday School at Thrift Baptist Church in Paw Creek, just over the river in Mecklenburg County, where his family had a farm. They’ve been soulmates since. “The people who did a lot of work were the ones like Debbie. When we had a ballplayer who needed a glove or needed shoes and couldn’t pay, or needed their hat or their socks, she would come up with the money to do that,” he says. “I don’t know how she did it, but she always came up with it. And one time, we were building the batting cage down at Mount Holly Middle School and we needed a tool, and she came up with the money for it. I couldn’t have done any of it without her.” Goforth began coaching T-ball in 1990, then in the East Gaston Babe Ruth Association in 1991-92. He was the Gaston County Parks and Recreation volunteer of the year in 1993. “That was the year we went to all the fields in Gaston County and put roofs on all the dugouts. In the summertime, it was pretty hot on the kids, so we did that,” he says. “I saw things that needed doing, and wanted to help, so we did it.” As a member of the Mount Holly Optimist Club, he took on several projects – raising money to build the gym at Tuckaseegee Park, put lights on Costner Field across from Mount Holly Middle School, put in irrigation for sprinklers. “My cousins all played football and baseball there in the 1950s and ‘60s, and the only lights they had on the field were where they had cords across the field with bulbs,” he says, “till a storm blew it down. So we decided it would be better to have lights on the field.” Today, the Goforths can be found with folding chairs in their minivan, travelling to see their grandsons’ soccer games. You learn, from years of coaching and working on ballfields, how to be a fan, too. “It used to break my heart, when after practice there would be little kids waiting … practice would be over, and it would get dark, and some parents who’d dropped their kids off, we’d wait an hour, hour and a half for them to show up,” he says. “Those were the kids who needed the discipline of sports.” So, he and Debbie watch from the sidelines. And when the games are over, they go home. Or to McDonald’s with the boys – because grandparents are like that, and the discipline of sports has its rewards.
