Carolina Panthers PR pioneer brings NFL Hall of Fame honor home to Hilton Head, SC

Charlie Dayton once made the All-Madden Team, that rare, to-kill-for honor for burly National Football League players who could hide a Charlie Dayton in the folds of one bicep.

But the Hilton Head Island retiree topped that this summer when he was named one of the best storytellers of all time in the NFL during a ceremony at the league’s Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

Before going long over the bridge to Hilton Head, where Dayton says the view from your car strips away the shoulder pads of life, Dayton was for 40 years a public relations executive with four teams in the crushing, next-man-up world of the NFL.

He started as an assistant in the PR office of a hapless start-up, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It was not a happy story, but Coach John McKay kept things interesting with one-liners. When asked what he thought of his team’s execution he said he was in favor of it.

Dayton got a Super Bowl ring with the Washington Redskins and worked 10 years with the Atlanta Falcons before mama called. He became the inaugural director of communications for the Carolina Panthers when the expansion team was created in 1994 in his native North Carolina.

Before retiring in 2017, the Panthers named the press box at Bank of America Stadium for Dayton.

Now he is one of five PR directors to be honored in the NFL Hall of Fame’s inaugural Awards of Excellence class which celebrates people behind the scenes who ceremony emcee Dan Fouts said “helped form the backbone of the NFL.”

But former Charlotte Observer columnist Tom Sorensen, who covered the Panthers for almost 20 years, gave Dayton what I’d consider his greatest award. When they renamed the press box, Sorensen told a Panthers official: “Charlie is as honest and as decent as anybody I’ve ever met. He never lied. He didn’t always tell me what I wanted to know. But he never lied.”

When we sat down at the Harbour Town Clubhouse to discuss these signs and wonders, two old storytellers from different sides of the ink barrel, Charlie assured me he is not the story.

The real story, he said, was featured at the NFL Hall of Fame induction ceremony last weekend.

TOBACCO ROAD

Charlie Dayton grew up in a Mayberry world, in the capital city of Raleigh before the Research Triangle Park and IBM came to change everything.

He still has a photo spread in The Raleigh Times showing him as a 7-year-old with a little neighbor girl taking spills on a bicycle and roller skates.

His father worked for the railroad and his mother was a secretary at N.C. State University. She’d drop him off at the Wolfpack baseball field where Roman Gabriel was playing centerfield.

There, the 10-year-old came under the spell of Frank Weedon, a legendary sports information director at N.C. State.

Dayton learned early from the old pro about the power of statistics, deadlines and storylines.

At Wake Forest University, besides being a history major in the class of 1967, Dayton became the de facto assistant sports information director.

One duty was to get up two other players for a three-on-three basketball game before practice to take on coach Jack McCloskey and his assistants, Billy Packer, who was a star at Wake before becoming a famous TV basketball analyst; and Neal Johnston, a hook-shooting center who had been a six-time All Star in the NBA and led the league in scoring three times.

Maybe that’s where Dayton got the toughness seen today on the South Beach tennis courts, where he plays several days a week with a team known as the Pelicans.

Maybe it helped him thrive for four decades in the crosshairs of a daily firing squad of reporters, team owners, top management, coaches, players, fans, sponsors, civic leaders, deadline and social media.

A happenstance conversation with a Wake Forest graduate who ended up in NFL team management led to Dayton’s first job offer in the league.

“You never know when 10 minutes will change your life,” he said.

KEEP POUNDING

You don’t need to know anything about him, Dayton said, but your life will be enriched by the most improbable man to ever enter the NFL Hall of Fame.

The best story Dayton ever saw got his due last weekend when Panthers legend Mills was inducted into the Hall.

Mills stood 5-foot-9, which in the NFL is only slightly larger than the coin they flip to start the mayhem.

He was never drafted. He was cut twice. He had gone home to teach high school shop when he got a break. By then he was not only too small, he was too old at 27. But in 15 professional seasons he became one of the best middle linebackers of all time.

Mills was the ninth of 12 children born to Juanita Bennett Mills. They escaped the life of sharecroppers in Bennettsville, South Carolina, when Mills was 11.

They lived in the projects in New Jersey, but his mother worked as a nurse to save enough to buy the family both sides of a duplex. Sharecroppers aren’t supposed to own anything, but Juanita Mills’ work ethic, they say, defined her son.

He walked on at Montclair State University and became a star.

He used his wrestling experience to leverage his strength against much larger players and his speed and intellectual grasp of the game to make game-changing plays.

He got to the Hall of Fame because he was a great football player.

But his statue outside the Panthers stadium is also a tribute to his treatment of people, from the grass groomers to the owners.

Never was his encouragement and example more pronounced than the day he fired up his team prior to a playoff run that would end in the Super Bowl.

It was after he’d retired as a player and was coaching Panthers linebackers.

And it was after he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer that was to give him but three months to live.

In this speech to the players after practice on a crisp afternoon, Mills said something like this, according to Darin Gantt of the Panthers:

“When I found out I had cancer, there were two things I could do: quit or keep pounding. I’m a fighter. I kept pounding. You’re fighters, too. Keep pounding!”

Sam Mills was only 45 when he died of cancer in 2005.

“Keep Pounding” lives on as the rallying cry of the franchise.

The impact of Sam Mills kept pounding when 25 players from his Montclair State team of 40 years ago rode a bus 400 miles to see him inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame.

“That said everything to me,” Dayton said.

David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.