In the early 1960s, Mount Holly was a rural postcard of 4,000 residents. The Seaboard Air Line Railroad cruised over Main Street on its way to Charlotte, teenagers gathered at Charlie’s Drugs’ soda shop and breadwinners woke to the call of the Mount Holly Cotton Mill, or American & Efird. Young boys gathered for pick-up football or baseball on neighborhood streets and lawns, toting store-bought gear and mail-order uniforms from the Sears Catalog. “This was before any kind of organized sports, so I would be playing with kids my age or maybe three, four or five years older,” says Gary Neely, who grew up off of North Main. “We had the catalog, and my brother and I told Mom what we wanted and we got matching outfits. You could either order blue jerseys or red, so most of the guys in our neighborhood ordered blue.”

When Neely was about 10, Mount Holly established its first Little League team. By fifth grade, the town had Pop Warner peewee football. “I wore the uniform I’d gotten for Christmas several years earlier, my own shoulder pads and helmet, and we came dressed to play,” he says. “Only now, we were playing with coaches. “In Little League we were told that if we won and kept winning, we could go all the way to the Little League World Series. The leagues were sponsored by the mills. But when our season ended, that was it.” The baseball field, he says, was a mile or so away, so he’d ride his bike to play. Neely’s Pop Warner football team, affiliated with the Young Business Men’s Club of Gastonia, made road trips. Destinations such as Disneyland in California, places in Florida, Pennsylvania. “Unfortunately for me, we went to Owensboro, Kentucky,” he says. “Not something to write home about. But we had won the conference, and the state and made that trip, and at the banquet we found out we were the world champions. I only knew of teams playing in America, but that’s the title they gave us. “It was something. I developed a love for sports at an early age.” Neely, 74, made athletics a permanent fixture in his life, playing for Mount Holly Middle School, Mount Holly High School and Lenoir-Rhyne University.

He graduated from Mount Holly High in 1970 owning 10 varsity letters – four in baseball, three in football and three in basketball. This year, his individual accomplishments have placed him in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame, adding to previous group inductions with his freshman baseball team, 1967 football team and his high school basketball teams that went 21-4 and 18-9 his sophomore and junior seasons. “That was going to be my claim to fame – being a good teammate,” he says. “It’s good to go in as a member of a team, but this one means a little more than the others.” Some memories from decades ago refuse to fade, such as discovering he was the first basketball player at Mount Holly High to score 1,000 points. “We didn’t really keep individual records. It depended on the scorekeeper,” he says, recalling that every game’s stats were handwritten with a pencil. “My first year, the scorekeeper was a senior and she tabulated all the results and points for all the players and posted it for the benefit of them and the coach, but I don’t know if we ever saw her again after my sophomore year.

Nobody knew I’d scored 1,000 points until I discovered it myself. “Some girls teams were being recognized, and Coach (Joe) Spears let me pick up his scorebooks out of his attic so we could display them at the banquet, and while I had them, I did some tallying of my own. I got my total at 994. So close.” The scorebooks didn’t have a lot of pages, and Neely found that at the end of one book, the scorekeeper erased previous games to continue the season. “We’d used all the pages, so I went to the Gazette and found our game against Dallas, and that I’d scored 12 points.” Career total: 1,008. Basketball, for him, began in eighth grade when the middle school started a team and played a few county tournaments. “We were noted for football and baseball, but not in a good way in basketball. We’d go like 2-14. We were good losers,” he says. He moved from junior varsity to varsity his sophomore year, a 6-foot-3 guard (“the second-shortest player on the team”) to help MHHS start 10-0 and win the conference championship for only the second time in school history.

Then, in 1969, a 10-game win streak put the team at 17-7 and secured a ride to the eight-team state tournament. “We had the worst record of the eight teams there, so we played an undefeated team that was ranked No. 1 and we beat them by about 15 or 20 points, and that put us in the final four,” he says “We lost the semifinal game and the consolation game, but we won at the right time of the year.” Football was kind to him; he played defensive back but didn’t start: “I was the first sub they’d send in. If someone got beaned, I’d go. But I never saw a pass come my way, never got in on the tackle.” The year MHHS went 12-0-1, the tie was 0-0 versus Charlotte Catholic, “the best football team in Charlotte,” he says. “To tie them was an accomplishment.

Our post-season games were in 2A, and we won all three games, and that was the max you could play so there wasn’t really a state championship for the whole state. We were the Western NC champions for 2A.” Neely combined playing left field in high school baseball with American Legion games, but it was basketball that drew the scout from Lenoir-Rhyne University who offered Neely a place in Hickory. He went. “But two things happened,” he says. First, he was awarded a $5,000 academic scholarship, good at any state-supported school, not L-R. Second, the L-R coach mentioned upping Neely’s partial deal to a full ride, “But he got fired that summer, and his replacement invited me to walk on,” he says. Neely transferred to Appalachian State University, on the academic scholarship plan, played intramurals and graduated in 1974 with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. “At L-R, I learned in the locker room talking to the scholarship players that the scholarship cost them their freedom. They were told what time to get up, what to eat, how to spend their time, and so forth,” he says. “I was just doing it for the love of the game.

In Boone, once you get through the rainy season and cold season, it’s pretty up there. It gets extremely cold, though. I had a friend who I never saw him wear a jacket…because he was afraid someone would try to take it.” Neely briefly worked for Kmart Corporation, then in 1979, after he started a long career with Duke Energy, an uncle plotted Neely’s next move. He showed Neely a picture of a woman in Gaston Memorial Hospital’s company newspaper. “She had just graduated from X-ray school, so her picture was in there. My uncle says, ‘This is just the right girl for you,’ so I called her,” Neely says. They went to a movie in Charlotte. A year later, he and Teresa married. They have three children and 13 grandchildren. Neely is active in his church and has served on the Community Development Committee, Sports Hall of Fame committee and Mount Holly and Stanley historical societies. “I think everyone should be involved in some capacity of service. So it’s been a privilege to do that, even during my working life,” he says. “Since I’ve retired, I’ve always had a chance to contribute to helping others in some way. I’ve been very blessed. I thank the Lord, I thank my wife Teresa, and my family. That pretty much sums it up.”