Lexington hero and Duke Legend Dwight Bumgarner dies, services Jan. 20

{In the above photo, the 1960 Duke University football team, including Bumgarner, celebrates their hard earned but unexpected win of the Cotton Bowl. Bumgarner sustained a career ending injury in the final minutes of that game, and ended his NFL career before it began. This story has been updated with the date and time of the funeral.}

Dwight Bumgarner is a name that has been known and spoken, often with reverence, around Lexington and the entire state for years. And now that name and the man behind it moves from living legend into history. Bumgarner died Tuesday morning after an illness.

Bumgarner could have played any number of sports - baseball, basketball, football - but in the end it was football at Lexington Senior High School that captured his heart and his talent.

When he graduated, having grown up in what he always called “Pug Town” in Lexington, he received a scholarship to Duke University, and was going to play football. But Bumgarner often told the story of how his freshman year was a challenge, and he was struggling and almost gave up. Until his Duke coach Bill Murray came to Lexington to find him and bring him back. He got focused, the grades came up dramatically and the performance on the field just got better and better.

In 1960, Duke’s team did not start out with high expectations among those in the know on college football. But by the end of the season, they were playing for the Cotton Bowl championship, and they won it.

In the final few minutes, however, Bumgarner suffered what would be a career-ending injury to his knee. An injury that today would have been treatable, but then was not.

He had been drafted by the Bills and the Redskins, and his son Tim said he believes there was an offer from a team in Canada as well.

He also had a wife, Jean, and a week after the bowl game, a new son, Tim, for whose birth a neighbor had to drive Dwight and Jean to the hospital with Dwight’s fully-encased leg sticking out of the back window.

A recent photo of Dwight Bumgarner standing beside the Cotton Bowl Trophy he and his teammates won in 1960. {Contributed Photo}

“I asked him about it, if he had regrets about not getting to play in the NFL,” said Tim talking about his father Wednesday afternoon. “Well, first I asked him what the money was like. And he told me the contract was for $14,000, which was a lot of money in 1960, but he would still have had to get another job to support his family. And he told me it was not a done deal, that he was not sure he would have gone on to play professionally.”

As it was, he took a job with Carnation and built an entirely different, and immensely successful career, away from football (though he did coach both his boys along the way).

A second son, Bill, joined the family not long after Tim, and both boys played football in high school and college, just like their father. Bill played for UNC Chapel Hill, and Tim played for Duke. As fate would have it, Tim both roomed with and played on the team with the son of Dwight’s college roommate, teammate and best friend, Claude “Tee'“ Moorman, Jr. Tim’s roommate was affectionately known as “Tee 3.”

“When we got to college, at one point Tee and I went to the library and asked to see dad’s game tapes,” said Tim. “They sent us up to a room where we could set up the reels and we were both watching the tapes looking for our dads. When we stopped the tapes, we looked at each other and said “holy sh-t, they were great!”

But Dwight was modest, always, about his accomplishments. When Tim was about 12, he was in the attic and came across a set of lockers.

“I immediately thought there would be some good stuff in those lockers,” he said. “But I started pulling out certificates for All ACC and All American awards, and trophies including the Jacobs Blocking Trophy, and I went downstairs and said to Dad, “Hey, you were really good!” And Dad’s answer was, “Eh, I was okay.” Tim noted that the Jacobs trophy was probably his father’s biggest accomplishment given what it stood for. Years later, Tim’s son Robert, wearing a uniform with his grandfather’s number 84 after a game at Presbyterian College, stood with his grandfather beside the trophy, on display a the college with Dwight’s name on the list of recipients.

Robert Bumgarner, left, and his grandfather, Dwight Bumgarner, stand on either side of the Jacobs Blocking Trophy with Dwight’s name among the listed recipients. {Contributed Photo}

There was much more to Dwight than an athlete. He was a caregiver and devoted family man, to his parents and siblings as well as his wife and children (and eventually grandchildren and great grandchildren), loyal to a fault, according to his family and numerous friends from Lexington, from Duke and from his long career.

“If you were my dad’s friend, he would do anything to help you, go the distance,” said Tim. “If you didn’t know him, you would see the tough exterior, but underneath he was a big hearted guy who was old fashioned and who believed in loyalty. By the same token if you were not his friend, you also knew that.”

Dwight had several health issues in recent years but faced them as they came with a calm determination. At one point he was having to get injections in his eye for macular degeneration, which could be uncomfortable the rest of the day, but he would say “tomorrow’s gonna be great.”

This past Saturday, Tim said he and his dad had about five hours together, just the two of them, and he found an old article on the 50th anniversary of the Cotton Bowl game and read it to his dad, who had not read it.

“He’d had some difficulty with his focus, but he was very lucid that afternoon, and really seemed to enjoy listening to the story. It was a gift of time.” Tim when home and the next day, his birthday, he realized later in the afternoon that he had a missed call from his father.

“At first I thought he must have accidentally called, but then I thought he might have tried to call to wish me happy birthday, so I called him back.”

He paused a moment before saying, “He sang happy birthday to me, the whole song. And then said he was sorry he hadn’t gotten me a gift. I told him mom had actually given me a subscription to a local magazine from the two of them.”

He laughed at his father’s response, indicative of Dwight’s unique brand of humor.

“Well good grief, couldn’t we have done better than that?” his father asked. “Dad had the best sense of humor.”

Tim said he has one particular memory that was a turning point for him, thanks to his dad. Tim’s wife, Barbara, is his childhood sweetheart, but at one point in high school, she broke it off.

“It was a Saturday and I was lying in bed, basically pouting, thinking I didn’t want to do anything anymore, and it was morning then it was afternoon, and Dad stuck his head in the door and asked what I was doing. I said something mopey, and he told me to get up, get my feet on the ground and come out of my room and stop pouting. I grumbled my way to the den and was on the couch watching television. Now, my dad could make these monster sandwiches, layers of meat and cheese and Duke’s mayonnaise and he’d mash it down and add tomato slices, but these things were huge. He came around the corner with one of those sandwiches and a beer. I wasn’t quite legal drinking age yet, but I immediately felt I’d been let in some club, that I’d gone from being a kid to being a young man. He didn’t say anything, just brought me the sandwich and the beer, and I knew he understood.”

Services will be held at 1 p.m on Saturday, Jan. 20 at Wesley Memorial Methodist Church, 1225 Chestnut Street, High Point, followed by a visitation with the family.