At halftime of the 1985 Elite Eight game, Villanova headed to the locker room trailing North Carolina, 22-17. Villanova head coach Rollie Massimino walked into the locker room, grabbed a chair, flipped it around backward and sat down.
He proceeded to tell Chuck Everson (‘86) and the rest of the 1985 Villanova team he would rather be doing anything else based on how they were playing.
“If I knew you guys were going to play like this, I’d rather be home eating a bowl of linguine and clam sauce with a lot of cheese on it,” Everson said when recalling Massimino’s locker room speech. “We’re all looking at him like, ‘What the hell are you talking about? You’re talking about food. We’re getting our asses kicked.’”
Massimino told the team to “just go play and have fun,” and Villanova scored 39 points in the second half to defeat North Carolina, 56-44, on its way to winning the 1985 national championship.
Everson is now 41 years removed from Villanova’s first basketball national championship. Currently, he has been working for 7-Eleven Fuels for the last seven years. He has been working with companies in the oil industry for the last 37 years after leaving his career in professional basketball.
Everson was drafted by the Utah Jazz in the sixth round of the 1986 NBA Draft, but did not make the team after the summer workouts. He took his playing career overseas instead.
“I wound up going overseas to England,” Everson said. I played there. I played in the Continental Basketball Association (CBA) in Casper, Wyoming, and the United States Basketball League (USBL) and then finally got a real job like everybody else.”
Everson landed his first job in the gas and oil industry in a way only Chuck Everson could. He left his job at Frito-Lay in 1989 and crashed at Villanova teammate Connally Brown’s apartment in Philadelphia. Everson was close to getting married to his then-girlfriend.
He went to a local headhunter in search of a new job and ran into Roy Lane. The six-foot-five Lance worked for Mobil Oil.
“I get back to Scranton on a Sunday,” Everson said. “I got a call from Mobil offering me the job, which I was very excited about because I wasn’t working and we were going to get married in less than a year.”
The next call Everson received was from Lance, who asked if Everson could be on Long Island by Wednesday. It was Sunday. Everson told Lance he would be there. However, Everson’s first task was not related to anything oil at all.
“[Lance] goes, ‘Well, now that you’re part of our marketing team, we have a basketball game against the engineers for a keg of beer and a six-foot hero.”
Everson showed up to Mobil that Wednesday, and the opposing team was wearing black dress socks and had watches on. He joined the layup line before the game, and he was dunking with ease.
“Roy brings me out to half-court because the head engineer was like, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ He goes, ‘Oh, we just hired Chuck 15 minutes ago.’”
Everson recalls going on to score 70 points, and it kicked off his career in the oil company business.
His work in the oil industry has remained close to the same over his almost 40-year career. At 7-Eleven, he manages over 40 stores, specifically working on the marketing side of each store.
“The coolest part about it is, for me, that you basically are working in the United Nations,” Everson said. “ I’ve got Indian, Pakistani, Turkish, Greek, Italian guys, and every kind of every kind of culture you can think of. And everybody is excited to share their culture with you. So over the years, I’ve been to funerals, weddings, birthday parties, Sweet 16s, anything you can think of. The biggest part about it is the relationship, developing all the relationships, which I’ve gotten pretty good at.”
Outside of his work at 7-Eleven, Everson started The Big East Rewind podcast with Dr. Sonny Spera, who played at Villanova’s Big East rival Syracuse from 1981-85. The two started the podcast to “explore the legacy of the Big East Men’s Basketball Conference.”
“We’ve had the idea to get a 360-degree view of the conference from the people’s perspective who were there,” Everson said. “That means coaches, players, managers, trainers, referees who ref the games, mascots, cheerleaders, media people, and writers. We’ve had on probably, close to 90 Hall of Famers, too. So it’s been a really cool experience for us.”
They recently hosted current Villanova forward Duke Brennan on the most recent episode of the podcast.
Everson is still heavily involved in the Villanova men’s basketball program. He keeps alumni connected and still attends a large number of games every season.
