Chad Grier and the Naked Pirates

Pirate Time Machine No. 13

Though ECU was not the ticket to the NFL that Chad Grier once hoped it would be, it was where he found his future — in more ways than one... Bonesville's Ron Cherubini catches up with Grier in Pirate Time Machine No. 13...

Though the recollections are a little sketchy some 10 years after the fact, all parties involved in a now-famous naked excursion agree on one thing for sure… it was Chad Grier’s idea.

Maybe it was during the Peach Bowl season around the time of the Pitt game… perhaps it was the season before, during the week of the Northern Illinois game. Memories fail.

But what is certain, is that a group of ECU football players decided to carry on a tradition during the 1980s and take a hike from their dorm on the hill to the Student Store on central campus, wearing only their boots and their helmets.

Photo by Stephen Braddy
The Naked Five – (l to r) Greg Gardill, Ken Burnette,
Shane Hubble, Sean McConnell, Chad Grier

“We really needed to blow off some steam…to lighten things up a little,” recalled linebacker Ken Burnette. “So we decided we should go down to the Student Store wearing nothing but our shoes and our caps and get a picture.”

Grier denies that he was the kingpin of the prank, but he sounds a lot more like someone trying to pass the buck.

“I don’t believe it was me,” Grier said, holding back a laugh. “Surely, it couldn’t have been me. In that crowd, it would be hard to pick an innocent person. It was probably (Stephen) Braddy’s idea. Yeah, that is the way I remember it. In fact, the way I remember it, I tried to talk them out of going. But they had to do it. So, I thought I’d go and keep them from getting in trouble. I was very concerned that they might create a bad impression (about the team).”

The truth is, the Naked Five was borne of a long-going prank-feud between Grier and former punter Tim Wolters.

“The whole thing with Tim,” Grier said. “We had this ongoing one-upmans ship of pranks. We new we were never going to be great football players, so we made names for ourselves in other ways.”

The tradition started, apparently, in the suite next door to Burnette’s where Grier lived. There were pictures of former Pirates who made the trek to central campus.

The original naked journeymen were Matt Mclaughlin, Kyle Condrey, Shannon Boling, Brad Walsh, Wolters, and Joe Molineaux, but it was Wolters that drove the legend home to the guys in the suite next door.

“I guess it had been a tradition that sort of broke off after about three years, but the five of us were really bored and had to do something, so we decided to bring back the tradition,” defensive end Greg Gardill said.

“We were nervous only of getting in trouble with the coaches,” quarterback Sean McConnell recalled. “But, we were pretty pumped up to be starting back a tradition that we knew of. ”

The central figures were, of course, the naked five: Burnette, Gardill, McConnell, Shane Hubble, and Grier. But there might had been others involved. Pete Zophy bailed out to be with his girlfriend and another opted to be the Kodak moment maker.

“I should tell you, we should have had a sixth member, Stephen Braddy, but he wouldn’t do it, so he took the picture.”

“Stephen was a real nervous kind of guy,” Hubble said. “So he just took the photos.”

The plan was to strip down and make the journey down the hill, past Brewster and work their way over to the Student Store, where they would pose with their caps over their…goods. But the trip was almost thwarted at the outset.

“We thought we were so sly by going at 12 or 1 a.m., but as soon as we left the dorm out the back, people from other dorms were yelling out the windows, ‘streakers!,’” McConnell said. “We weren’t even 10 seconds from our dorm.”

But the crew was able to slip down the hill, where they encountered another potential problem.

“At the foot of the hill, there was police car,” Hubble, who is now himself a police officer, said. “We had to take cover.”

“We got to that little crick down at the foot of the hill when someone saw a cop, so we all jumped into the stream,” Gardill picked up. “I remember Shane started talking about that movie, ‘Stand By Me,’ and said something about the scene where the boys get all the leaches and then said something like, ‘this is what makes friends forever.’”

“It’s funny because Greg was the only guy to get poison ivy that night,” Burnette recalled.

“He’s a woodsman, too,” Hubble chimed in. “And he was the only guy to get poison ivy.”

As the pictures bear out, the group accomplished its mission, but not without a little more excitement.

“Of course, the alarms went off,” Hubble said. “And the lights…it was like someone knew we were going to do this. I really thought we were busted.”

Thanks to a waiting truck, the Naked Five was able to make a swift escape. But there was another destination.

“We went right to Tim Wolters’ apartment,” Hubble recalled. “He had (made the trek before) so we went to his off-campus place to show him that we did it.”

Grier, by all accounts, was the mastermind for the event. Legend has it that he and Wolters were the ultimate pranksters.

One time, according to some of the Naked Five, Grier took a picture of Wolters, who had a prominent gap in his front teeth, and made a poster out if it with Wolters phone number and text pleading, ‘I need a date.” Apparently, Grier took the posters and put them all over campus.

“Tim was always picking on the freshmen and so some of them took copies to Kinkos and made about 2000 of them and put them everywhere around campus. The next day, Tim went hobbling down to campus to tear down the posters. He was getting calls all day and night.”

The saying goes, ‘boys will be boys,’ and for this batch of ECU Pirates, it certainly holds true.

Post Streak Picture: (Clockwise from Left) Shane Hubble, Greg Gardill,
Chad Grier, Steven Braddy, Ken Burnette, Sean McConnell