Legacy strong in N.C.
Capel family helped build a foundation
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — The portraits, one of a father and the other of his son, are proudly affixed to a wall on the south end of Felton J. Capel Arena at Fayetteville State University.
The renderings of the two men — Felton Jeffrey Capel, the man after whom the venue is named, and Felton Jeffrey Capel II — keep a constant eye on the gym and all who wander through the building. Below each painting is a plaque with their names and their myriad accomplishments, any number of which are inextricably tied to the school that works to keep their respective legacies alive.
Their presence there speaks in a way even a work of art can’t: These people and what they did in life are worth remembering.
On Tuesday, about 80 miles to the north, Felton Jeffrey Capel III will take part in a homecoming of sorts when the Pitt men’s basketball coach takes his team
to Durham to face Duke. In the eyes of many, Capel is viewed through the prism of Duke, and understandably so. He played at the school for four seasons and graduated from there. He returned nearly 15 years later and was an assistant coach for seven seasons. His time there is memorialized by half-court buzzer-beaters, top-ranked recruiting classes and one of the most iconic rappers of all time wearing his blue-andwhite No. 5 jersey.
His connections to North Carolina, where he was born and raised, are immeasurably deeper.
Capel’s name resonates in the state not just for what he has done, but for the mark made by his ancestors and relatives. His grandfather, Felton Capel, was a businessman and politician who helped desegregate parts of the state and whose work was tied to Martin Luther King Jr. His father, Jeff Capel II, was a trailblazer in his own right, a man who worked his way up the basketball hierarchy and coached every level of the game in the state, from high school all the way to the NBA. His father-in-law, Dan Blue, is the minority leader of the North Carolina senate, and was the first and remains the only black speaker of the house in the state’s history.
Capel is a product of those who came before him, something he doesn’t need a trip to his home state and a basketball game at his alma mater to remember. But it’s in that same place where his name is valued in a profound way.
“I’m definitely mindful of it,” Capel said. “It’s something that we were taught as we were growing up, that your name means everything. There are people that fought to make that mean something. You honor them with how you live your life. You’re representing everyone that has helped make that name something.”
Blazing a path
Southern Pines, N.C., is an aptly named place, a town of fewer than 15,000 near the South Carolina border where slender pine trees tower over the houses, churches and shops dotting the streets.
It was there that Felton Capel arrived many years ago, a World War II veteran and recent college graduate looking to embark on his professional life a half-hour from his hometown.
Around the time he began his business career, he also found a home in politics. In 1959, at age 32, Capel became the first black person elected to the town council, on which he would serve for 12 years. During that time, he helped lead a $35,000 bond referendum to build the first swimming pool for black people in the area, helped with the hiring of the town’s first black police officer and helped establish the Southern Pines Housing Authority, among other feats.
He excelled through his warm personality, becoming known throughout the community as the type of person who had a genuine interest in the answer when he asked someone, “How ya doing, partner?”
“He was a friend to everybody,” said David Sinclair, a friend of Felton’s who is the managing editor of The Pilot, a Southern Pines-based newspaper. “I know that sounds cliche, but he really was.”
As a child, Jeff Capel III admired his grandfather and was equally fascinated by him. Man, everybody knows Pop, he would often think to himself. As they grew older, he and his younger brother Jason, now an assistant coach on Pitt’s staff, gradually understood why Felton Capel connected with people in such a powerful way.
For all of his achievements, life was a struggle at times for their grandfather, as it was for black people throughout the south in an era of codified segregation. Capel became intimately
involved in the fight for civil rights in his corner of North Carolina. He met with leaders of the movement as prominent as King and Julian Bond, even speaking once with Hubert Humphrey, the vice president at the time, about his ongoing efforts. He helped organize sit-ins and demonstrations.
He made a powerful and trusted friend in Voit Gilmore, a white man who was a state senator and former Southern Pines mayor. Together, the two would frequent segregated golf courses, restaurants, bowling alleys and movie theaters. In one instance, Gilmore reportedly called a golf course to tell them he wanted a tee time for himself and Capel, and that Capel would not be his caddie. They were allowed to play. Due to his standing in the community — to say nothing of Gilmore’s, both because of his title and the color of his skin — Capel was able to go to places he would otherwise not have been. He and Gilmore are widely credited with helping to desegregate large parts of their county.
“He was as highly respected as anybody that you’re going to find in this state,” Blue said.
On a 27-acre parcel of land outside of Southern Pines, he gave his grandchildren and an untold number of others a piece of his legacy they could enjoy. In 1962, Capel purchased the property and converted it into a recreational area at a time in which such amenities weren’t widely available to black people.
As children, Jeff III and Jason would go to their grandfather’s park seemingly every weekend to play, swim and eat. At the end of each day, their father would drive them around in a red truck and they would hop off to pick up trash. When the task was completed, their grandfather gave them some money. To the young boys, as Jason put it, it was their Disney World. It was only as they got older that they realized its significance.
“When you’re younger, you’re just worried about you,” Jeff III said. “As you get older, you start to see things differently, understand things differently, understand family differently. Certain things become more important to you. Sometimes, understanding your family’s history, understanding what they went through, understanding impact, understanding all these things. Sometimes, you can take it for granted.”
A son finding his way
In 2012, a three-quartermile stretch of what was South Knoll Road in Southern Pines was renamed after Felton Capel. Abutting that same road is the campus of Pinecrest High School, where the son of the street’s namesake saw his story begin in earnest.
Jeff Capel II played basketball at the school and graduated from it in 1970. Eight years later, he returned to his alma mater as a volunteer coach for the school’s junior varsity squad.
Entering what can be an insulated industry with no connections beyond his ties to the school, Capel had little choice but to embrace the toil of his situation. It didn’t take long for him to become the head coach and his teams excelled, going 111-61 over an eight-year span.
He longed for more, though, and eventually got it. In 1985, he took his Pinecrest team to Wake Forest’s team camp. While there, Capel’s team — and, more specifically, Capel himself — caught the eye of Demon Deacons coach Bob Staak.
“They played hard, they played the right way and he held them accountable,” Staak said. “He had a system of play and expected his teams to execute that system, and that’s what they did. That’s what impressed me about him.”
As fate would have it, a position opened up on Staak’s staff a year later, when Pittsburgh native and current IUP women’s basketball coach Tom McConnell left to take a job at Marquette. Staak thought back to the small-town high school coach he had seen months earlier.
The job only came with part-time pay, but for Capel, it was his big break. It jumpstarted a career that featured head-coaching gigs at Fayetteville State, North Carolina A&T, Old Dominion and the Fayetteville Patriots of the then-NBA Development League, advancing him well beyond the point many who begin their careers at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) reach. The final nine years of his career were spent in the NBA, where he was an assistant coach with the Charlotte Bobcats and Philadelphia 76ers.
It was at his alma mater, the first of those college head-coaching stops, where Capel set the template for what was to follow. Though he had a no-nonsense approach, a product of his time in the military, Capel connected with his Fayetteville State players, virtually from the moment he played pickup with them the day after he was introduced as coach. Having come from the ACC, he wanted to provide his players with the kind of amenities, like a team lounge, that HBCUs weren’t usually able to provide and that he never had.
Maybe the most shining example of his impact is found in Darrell Armstrong. The 6-foot Armstrong blossomed under Capel, who shaped him offensively through a drill called “Beat the Pro” in which a player has to make 20 shots from a spot before they missed 10.
More than anything, though, he was buoyed by his coach’s belief. One night in his dorm room, Armstrong happened upon a coaches show that Capel did on a local television channel. During the interview, Armstrong, for the first time in his life, heard someone say that he could play on the next level, a moment that still makes him tearful three decades later. Armstrong went on to enjoy a 14-year NBA career as a player and is currently in his 11th season as an assistant coach with the Dallas Mavericks.
“He always said I would run through a wall for him,” Armstrong said. “I definitely would try. I was blessed to have a good coach like that, a coach who knew how to motivate guys and talk to guys. When I look back, the relationship we had, it was amazing.”
‘Representing something’
At Jason Capel’s home, there’s a dark gray plaque with the family’s surname atop it. Below, 16 lines of poetry are engraved, rhyming verses that delve into the importance of a name and the work that comes with upholding it.
So make sure you guard it wisely after all is said and done, it finishes. You’ll be glad the name is spotless when you give it to your son.
In a physical sense, Felton Capel and Jeff Capel II are no longer in the lives of Jeff III and Jason. The former died in February 2018 at age 91, three months after his son died at age 64 after being diagnosed with ALS two years earlier. Their memory and the pressure that comes with upholding that legacy, however, is omnipresent.
“You knew you were representing something,” Jeff III said. “For me, I’m the oldest. I’m the oldest grandson, nephew, niece, whatever. I was the first. I took it very seriously. I took great pride in it. Everything I did, I wanted it to represent my grandfather, my dad and everyone else who has that name, but especially those two. Those were the two I wanted to make proud.”
That weight was felt that much more with the passage of time. When he first got to know his future wife, Kanika, who was a year behind him at Duke, the two bonded in some part over that shared experience, with her coming from one of the state’s most prominent political families.
The accomplishments of the Capel family, and their influence in shaping Jeff III, go beyond those two men. But even in the way he carries himself, particularly in the way he coaches and interacts with players, the influence of Felton and Jeff Capel II are unmistakable.
“You see those qualities, I think, manifested in Jeff,” Blue said. “That was such an integral part of him, his father and his grandfather. You don’t do these things by yourself. You’ve got to have partners. His mother and grandmother played important roles in it, too. But the dominating force, I think, in instilling a lot of these values came from Felton and Jeff Jr.”
There are hefty expectations that come with carrying that name, but more than that, there’s gratitude. Jeff III and Jason attended colleges — Duke and North Carolina, respectively — their grandfather, by law at the time, could not. Their time playing basketball at those schools, as well as Jeff II’s accomplishments, gave them connections of which their father could have only dreamed.
The two brothers exist now to enjoy the life of coaching in the ACC, hard-earned as it was to get there. But they’re constantly mindful of how they’re here and those who shouldered the heavy load to make that possible.
“Doors opened for us that weren’t open for them because of what they did, because of their success, because they set a standard so high that we had to live up to that or try our best to get as close as we possibly could,” Jason said in an October 2018 interview with the PostGazette. “We looked up to Michael Jordan, Penny Hardaway, Magic Johnson or Grant Hill or whoever, but those were just people we would strive to be as basketball players. We didn’t have to look to anybody on how to be a man because we had our grandfathers and we had Super Dad at home. That’s who you wanted to be like. That’s something that, as you get older, you start to understand and appreciate that. Most people don’t have that.”