East Gaston’s humble basketball, baseball superstar.

 The Gaston Gazette article foreshadowed a milestone for East Gaston basketball standout Freddie Petty. Would the 6-foot-1 senior reach 1,000 career points? He’d already scored 30 in the Warriors’ season-opener, then 28, then 19.

As Mount Holly fans watched Petty’s progress, college scouts were focused on county rival Ashbrook High, and All-America forward James Worthy. Petty didn’t mind. He wasn’t playing for spotlights and cameras.

“I don’t figure my job is to score 1,000 points,” he told a reporter after EG beat Southwestern 3A opponent Kings Mountain to go 3-0. “I want to make a good example of myself for the juniors and sophomores on our team, which is a young one. I never know after a game how many points I’ve scored, how many rebounds I’ve collected or how many shots I’ve blocked or how many assists I’ve been credited with. I don’t really want to know. I want to show leadership, be a team player and just go out there every game and play the best game I can possibly play.”

Petty, who had 683 points his first two years, scored 489 his senior year, putting the three-year starter above the 1,000-point mark at 1,172. He was East Gaston’s 1978-79 Male Athlete of the Year for his success in basketball and baseball. He was named basketball MVP, won the Leading Rebounder trophy and led the baseball team to its conference championship.

His accomplishments are being recognized with his induction into the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame.

“Freddie was the type who could be in the room and you’d never know it,” says Russ Randolph, whose friendship with Petty dates to their playing Little League baseball as 12-year-olds. “He was just really quiet. During that time, James Worthy was big-time and Sleepy Floyd was over at Hunter Huss. But Freddie… He was a gifted athlete, I’m tellin’ you.”

Randolph was an announcer at Warriors games, a school reporter with the Student Council and a stringer for the Gazette, “So I saw him play just about every game,” he says, “and I was amazed.”

Petty and Randolph played against each other in Little League.

“He could pitch. It was like I was afraid to get up and bat against him,” Randolph says, “because he could throw a curve ball and fast ball like no one in town. He was that advanced. He’d throw that curve, and I didn’t know to duck or try to hit it. Then we got to junior high, and we won the whole county championship in ninth grade and Freddie was the reason for that. I remember his pitching like it was yesterday. That’s how good he was.”

He also remembers the hole in the ground.

East Gaston baseball finished the 1979 regular season 18-5, best in school history, as Petty went 10-4 with 99 strikeouts and a 1.60 ERA.

In the first round of the ’79 playoffs, at Crockett Park in Charlotte, he threw a six-hitter to beat Mooresville 7-0.

The Warriors beat South Stokes 6-2 to advance to the 3A state championship. “It was OK,” Petty, who struck out six of the first 11 batters, told a reporter after the game, “until the fourth inning.”

The rubber on the pitcher’s mound was sinking. “When he’d go forward with that hole there, it kind of messes up your stride and your motion,” Randolph says, “but he overcame that and still won the game. He had such a strong arm. I was a catcher in my younger years, and I remember catching him and he’d burn your hand up.”

As always, Petty remained humble.

“He was real mild-mannered and almost shy,” Randolph says. “He didn’t talk a lot. We were always joking, like good friends, but really he was a man of few words.”

There was an exception.

When Petty was a sophomore, he noticed a girl at school named Blanche Grice, a senior.

One night, several friends were out for a drive and Petty and Blanche were in the same car.

“And every time we’d go around a curve, he’d lean over and try to kiss me on the cheek,” she says. “Then in school he’d always come by my locker, like a nuisance, every day, and I’d call him ‘little boy.’ Because he was only a sophomore and I’d say, ‘Go on, little boy.’

“But it worked out OK.”

The two went to the movies, to see the horror show Carrie.

“We became an item,” she says.

An item that lasted 37 years.

“He was always so smooth and so humble and that’s what I loved about him. He let the way he played the game speak for him,” Blanche Grice-Petty says. “I watched him come down the basketball court from mid-court, and he would fly long before Michael Jordan every thought about flying. He would say that, that he could fly before Michael Jordan could.”

East Gaston baseball coach Jerry Adams arranged for Petty to have a workout with the Atlanta Braves the summer after graduation, she says. “He was going to get to pitch as a walk-on, but he went down there and there was a pickup game being played in a park and he was playing in it, and he slid into home plate and broke three fingers on his pitching hand. Instead of being a walk-on, he was sent home. Then Freightliner came to town in Mount Holly, and he went to work for Freightliner.”

The two married in 1979, the year Freightliner’s plant opened, following Freddie’s return from Atlanta.

Petty played some semi-pro, she says, with two local teams. The couple has three children. They were married 35 years.

Freddie Petty died Sunday, December 21, 2014 after a battle with thyroid cancer.

He was a Carolina Panthers fan, his wife says, and on that Sunday the Panthers were on TV playing the Cleveland Browns, with the winner advancing to the NFC South title game. Petty was surrounded by his children and grandchildren, and his pastor, and as Cam Newton found Jonathan Stewart open in the end zone for the winning touchdown pass of the 17-13 game, the family cheered. “There was all this love in the room,” she says. “Then our pastor says to the children that when they were cheering for the Panthers, they also were cheering for their dad and granddad, because he was transitioning into heaven.”

When she got the call this year about the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame, she says, “I would have loved to have seen his face when they told him he was recognized. Because he was not only my husband, he was my best friend.”