Howling success: Bobby Purcell has managed to bring out the beast in N.C. State boosters. Not bad for a Carolina grad.

• Author: Gray, Tim
• Position: FEATURE

Most people like to brag about the college from which they graduated. Not Bobby Purcell. He brags about the one he left.

Purcell heads the Wolfpack Club, the money machine that is the fundraising arm of N.C. State University athletics, but earned his bachelor's at UNC Chapel Hill. Ask him how a Tar Hell could end up as the money man for one of Carolina's archrivals, and he hustles to point out that he started at State and would have stayed if it had offered him the chance to study physical education or business.

"It was an academic decision. I transferred to Carolina but was a State fan the whole time, even in my fraternity house. My transferring was a hard thing for a lot of people who knew me to understand, including me." Transferred? To Carolina? Didn't he know that ABC doesn't just begin the alphabet but abbreviates a key tenet of the State creed? If the game doesn't involve the Pack, you root for anybody but Carolina. If State fans could send someone to purgatory, Purcell surely would've had to go before returning to Raleigh.

His sin likely has been forgiven. Since becoming boss of the Wolfpack Club in 1997, Purcell has showered State with cash. The club, officially the N.C. State Student Aid Association, has become the top athletic booster among North Carolina's major universities. It raised $25.8 million in the fiscal year that ended June 2004, the most recent data available, compared with $15.9 million for Carolina's Rams Club and $18.2 million for Duke University's Iron Dukes.

Purcell's fundraising hasn't just paid for scores of athletes to attend State--public money isn't used for sports scholarships at State and Carolina. It has bankrolled new facilities for football, basketball, baseball, even tennis. And money matters more than ever in the Atlantic Coast Conference. By expanding to 12 schools, the league has intensified competition in all sports but especially football, the costliest, where it added two national powers: the University of Miami and Virginia Tech.

Purcell, who tools around the parking lot in a golf cart before State football games working the crowd like a pol, is skilled at coaxing money out of alums, but he has been lucky, too. He leads Pack fundraising at a time when State's academic strength--applied technology--has produced fortunes unimaginable a generation ago.

Two of North Carolina's four billionaires--Wendell Murphy and Jim Good-night--are State alumni, as are such recently minted millionaires as two of the founders of Cree, a Durham semiconductor maker. All four are club members, Purcell points out. Murphy gave $26 million for the field house that opened two years ago--the Wendell H. Murphy Football Center.

"Bobby caters to the needs of his whole constituency, not just the big givers," says Murphy...