With NC State trailing Maryland by a point in the final two minutes of the 1974 ACC championship game, Phil Spence took a pass alone under the basket and laid it in, the kind of shot teammate Monte Towe still calls "one of the biggest baskets that was ever made in N.C. State basketball history." The winner claimed the ACC's only bid to that year's NCAA tournament, since the conference still sent just one team to the field, and Sports Illustrated has called the game the best in conference history. Spence, a Raleigh native who spent a quarter-century coaching basketball around North Carolina's Triangle after his playing days, died on September 21, 2026, at age 72, the News & Observer reported. He was a sophomore reserve on the NC State team that beat Maryland 103-100 in overtime that night, then beat Marquette 76-64 for the program's first national championship weeks later, ending UCLA's run of seven straight titles.

Spence grew up in Raleigh and starred at Broughton High School, where he helped the Capitals win a state title in 1971 and was named Wake County Player of the Year and a Converse All-American as a senior, according to the News & Observer and On3. He spent a year at Vincennes University in Indiana, where he earned NJCAA All-American honors, before transferring home to NC State as a sophomore in 1973. On a roster built around David Thompson, Spence was part of a small group of Black players on the team, and he was the one who coined their nickname, "The Jive Five," a bond that lasted the rest of their lives, the News & Observer reported.

As a first option off coach Norman Sloan's bench that championship season, Spence averaged 6.0 points and 6.3 rebounds a game, playing behind a starting five that included Thompson and 7-foot-4 center Tom Burleson. Towe, the point guard who fed him the decisive pass against Maryland, remembered the play in detail: "They were really covering Burleson and Thompson, which they should have been. Phil was standing down there underneath the basket, and I made a pass to him, and he laid it in." Spence moved into the starting lineup as a junior, when he led the team in rebounding, and again as a senior, when he averaged 14.6 points and 9.1 rebounds. He finished his NC State career with 986 points and 742 rebounds, a rebounding average that still ranks among the top 10 in program history, per the News & Observer.

The Milwaukee Bucks picked Spence in the sixth round of the 1976 NBA draft, but he did not make the team's final roster. He turned to coaching instead, starting at his alma mater, Broughton, in 1977, then building programs at Cary High School from 1979 to 1989 and East Wake High School from 1989 to 1999, winning four Tri-6 Conference championships and Wake County and Tri-6 Conference Coach of the Year honors along the way, according to On3. In 2000, North Carolina Central University hired him as head men's basketball coach. He led the Eagles for four seasons, was named the CIAA's Coach of the Year in 2003 after guiding the team to a 16-13 record and the CIAA Western Division championship, and finished with a 49-64 overall record before the school chose not to renew his contract in 2004.

In 2001, Spence suffered a stroke. He changed his diet and lifestyle afterward and spoke publicly about stroke prevention at the CIAA tournament the next year. "I think everything happens for a reason," he said at the time, according to WRAL. In 2016, NC State inducted its entire 1974 championship team, Spence included, into the university's Athletic Hall of Fame, the first team enshrined in the hall's history.

Word of Spence's death brought tributes from the program he had helped put on the national map decades earlier. "We are saddened by the passing of former Wolfpack basketball player Phil Spence," NC State Men's Basketball wrote. "Our thoughts and prayers are with Phil's family, friends and all who knew and loved him," as WRAL reported. Towe put Spence's place on that team into words for the News & Observer: "I've always thought that the national championship meant maybe more to Phil than anybody on the team because he was a local kid. He always talked about that, being a kid growing up in Raleigh and then winning the national championship. It meant so much to him. He loved N.C. State, and we're gonna miss him." Spence is survived by his wife, Paula, and their daughters, Porche and Pauletta.

Spence's name remains in the NC State record book for rebounding, and his plaque hangs in the Wolfpack's Hall of Fame beside the teammates he once nicknamed the Jive Five. Players he coached at Broughton, Cary, East Wake and North Carolina Central carried what he taught them into their own adult lives, and the basket he made under the rim in Greensboro in March 1974 still gets replayed whenever that ACC final is counted among the sport's classic games.