Spartanburg loses the Carolina Panthers this summer, and a magical era comes to an end

The Carolina Panthers have been going to Spartanburg every summer for the past 30 years. It’s like an annual beach vacation, without the sand — although I’ll tell you a funny training camp story about sand later.

I’ve been going to Spartanburg every summer, too, to cover every one of the team’s training camps. But this story will be my only Panthers-related one with a Spartanburg dateline this summer.

The Panthers, following a growing trend among NFL teams, are staying home for training camp in Charlotte this time around instead of setting up shop for several weeks at Wofford College in Spartanburg. Fans can still come to training camp in Charlotte — you have to reserve free tickets in advance at Panthers.com — but there’s no way the setup in Charlotte this year will be as ideal as the one Wofford had developed with three decades of practice.

It’s the end of an era in Sparkle City, as those of us from there (like me) sometimes call our hometown. We say it somewhat ironically. For years, Spartanburg didn’t sparkle. But the Panthers helped Spartanburg’s image tremendously.

Said Panthers superfan Beverly Knight, who lives in Spartanburg, owned PSLs for years and is undoubtedly one of the training camp’s most frequent attendees ever: “When I was out of town someplace and people would ask me about Spartanburg, one of the first things I would say — after ‘It’s the home of BMW North America’ — was ‘We’re the summer training camp home for the Carolina Panthers.’ It was a source of pride to be able to say that. It gave us a cachet that Spartanburg hadn’t had before.”

Knight once taught me AP English at Dorman High School in Spartanburg. She was a tiny bit scary, in the way the best teachers often are. She can discuss “The Scarlet Letter” and the Panthers’ offensive line with equal fluency (the first one is a lot harder to get through than the second).

If you’ve never been, Spartanburg is 80 miles southwest of Charlotte on Interstate 85, the highway from hell that I believe has been recycling the same orange traffic cones for the past 30 summers.

From Charlotte, get to the big peach water tower in Gaffney and you’re nearly there. The trip technically should take about 90 minutes door-to-door. Your results may vary.

‘A big win for the city’

David Britt, a Spartanburg political institution, has watched the Panthers come, relished them while they were there and now has watched them leave.

Britt has served on Spartanburg’s county council since 1991. He played baseball at Wofford in the 1970s, and the Wofford background he shared with with former Panthers owner Jerry Richardson gave them something in common. They became friends. Richardson was once a football star for the Terriers and then played for two years in the NFL. Britt remembers well when Spartanburg hosted the Panthers’ camp for the first time, in 1995, and how big a deal it was.

“Spartanburg was reeling in 1995,” Britt said. “We had lost so much hope. The announcement that the Panthers were going to train here was a big win for a city that hadn’t had many other wins for a while.”

In the past 30 years, Spartanburg has grown to include a number of cool restaurants and hotels downtown. In April 2025, it will open a new minor-league ballpark that should help the downtown in much the same way the Charlotte Knights’ new stadium boosted uptown Charlotte. That ballpark and all its home dates — far more than the Panthers ever provided — will help to make up the estimated $7.2 million economic impact that the 2023 Panthers camp had in Spartanburg.

Britt said that Spartanburg “never would have been considered” as a place that would get a gleaming new minor-league park, home to a Texas Rangers farm team, before the Panthers came and proved the concept possible.

The baseball team will be called the Hub City Spartanburgers , a nod to Spartanburg’s former status as a major railroad hub and its still-current history of good eats (including some of those Hardee’s restaurants Richardson opened when he was just starting out).

As for losing the Panthers, Britt said: “We knew one day the dream might end. We’re not going to cry over spilled milk. Having the Panthers train here for 25-plus years helped put us on the right trajectory. It was a great economic boost for us.”

The Richardson connection

Richardson, who died in 2023, had his memorial service at Wofford in Jerry Richardson Indoor Stadium. That alone may give you some idea of his impact on the school. Richardson was the driving force behind training camp being held at his alma mater. He loved the place. He gave it a staggering amount of money — more than $260 million — over his lifetime. There’s a statue of him on campus.

Richardson hinted as early as 1992 — a year before the team was awarded to Charlotte in a vote of the NFL owners — that the training camp could come to Spartanburg.

A pep rally in Spartanburg that year that included an appearance by Richardson’s former NFL quarterback Johnny Unitas drew 12,000 people into downtown.

At that event, then-Panthers general manager Mike McCormack said: “If we should happen to hold camp here in Spartanburg, you’ll see a closeness here. The heroes of this team will be your heroes, our heroes. You’ll see a wide receiver make a great catch in the morning practice, then you’ll be at the barber shop and he’ll come in for a haircut. You’ll get to rub shoulders with these guys.”

‘The shade of a light pole’

And there was some of that.

You’d see Panther rookies sometimes going across the street from Wofford to the Krispy Kreme to buy hot doughnuts for the veterans. Panther players gravitated to certain bars in Spartanburg in the early years, although the team frowned more on that as time went on.

The most reliable way to see players, of course, was at the free training camp practices. You could get some autographs at the beginning or the end of almost any practice. Maybe you wouldn’t get exactly the players you wanted, but you’d get somebody.

The first years at Wofford were in some ways the best and, in some, the worst.

You wanted a nearby restroom? Tough.

You wanted shade? Tough.

“I remember that first year I tried to sit in the shade of a light pole,” Knight said. “As the sun would move, I would kind of move around. It was this little sliver of shade. Like a sundial.”

But if you wanted access to NFL players, it was terrific. Coach Dom Capers ran two-a-day practices much of the time from 1995-98, and camp lasted for close to a month.

By the time head coach Frank Reich ran the final training camp in Spartanburg, in 2023, camp was more like two weeks long. And there was only one practice a day that fans could attend. On the upside, there were portable toilets, places to buy water, a miniature football field to play on for kids and a number of places where you could find a patch of shade.

The NFL summer stay-cation

NFL teams used to almost all go off to training camp, the theory being they would get away from the “distractions” of family and friends and go bond as a team under a brutal summer sun.

In 2001, the seventh year of the Panthers’ camp in Spartanburg, 22 of 31 NFL teams went off to training camp (71%). But this year only eight of 32 teams will go off-site (25%). As the infrastructure and the coaching staffs and the practice squad and everything else got bigger and bigger, it got harder and harder to move the entire operation somewhere else for a few weeks.

“I understand the trend to do it at your facility — it’s just much easier,” said former Carolina quarterback Jake Delhomme, who went through most of the training camps in the 2000s with the Panthers. “If you don’t do it at your own place, you’re basically moving an entire building somewhere else. And that’s a big building.”

Delhomme liked Spartanburg, though, as many of the Panthers players did each year once they got there. It was homey. And his favorite part were the football fields.

“They treated us great there, and the fields were amazing,” Delhomme said. “Those practice fields at Wofford were better than the majority of the fields we played on in the NFL.”

The fields indeed were gorgeous — but not right before that very first training camp, in 1995. And that brings us to the story about sand.

In June 1995, a few weeks before the Panthers were going to arrive for the first time, Wofford got a donation of sand.

“We were on a budget, and right before they came that summer, we put some sand on to top-dress the field,” said Richard Johnson, who worked at the private liberal arts school with approximately 1,900 students for close to 40 years, the last 23 as its athletic director. “Well, it wasn’t the appropriate kind of sand. It had pebbles in it. And so we were all down there on bucket brigade — us, some local Boy Scouts, whoever. We were walking the fields with buckets, picking up pebbles.”

Cam, Josh and training camp news

Unless you’re the Dallas Cowboys, NFL training camps don’t make national news unless there’s a controversy, a huge signing or an injury.

The Panthers have had a few of each of these over the years, the most notable being the Cam Newton-Josh Norman fight in 2015.

Norman intercepted a Newton pass and showboated a little on the return. Newton took exception to that, grabbed Norman by the shoulder pads and the two scuffled. David T. Foster III, The Charlotte Observer’s late and great photographer, got the best photos of the incident, and those were beamed worldwide.

And there were other stories over the years: Placekicker John Kasay broke his kneecap on the first day of camp in 2000 and missed the entire season. Quarterback Kerry Collins, in his young and immature days, occasionally caused a ruckus. Newton would make some sort of news every year in the 2010s.

Mostly, though, training camp was as pleasant as standing out in 90-degree weather for two hours can be and pretty low-stakes, except for the players vying for a spot at the end of the roster. Fans and media had time to talk and to sample Spartanburg’s restaurants (I’m going to miss Willy Taco and Cribbs Kitchen ).

Attendance at the practices varied wildly, often depending on how well the Panthers had done the year before. Sometimes there were only a few hundred people. Occasionally, it was a few thousand, or more, for a special event.

Spartanburg’s chamber of commerce, called OneSpartanburg, provided me the attendance from 2023 for the two best days of camp. There were 10,217 tickets distributed for a joint practice with the New York Jets, who featured Aaron Rodgers, and 15,267 tickets distributed for the annual “Back Together” practice that was held each year in Wofford’s Gibbs Stadium rather than on the three practice fields, which didn’t have as much seating capacity.

How Wofford looks now

I visited Wofford on Wednesday and walked the same fields that I’ve seen every summer since 1995. Gibbs Stadium, where those 15,000-plus gathered about this time last year, had a “Fields Closed” sign posted in the middle and was being watered with sprinklers.

It was nice to see the other three practice fields in use, however — Wofford was holding a football camp for grades 9-12. Maybe a dozen players’ parents were watching.

The Panthers haven’t entirely abandoned South Carolina. They will hold their “Fan Fest” practice at Clemson’s “Death Valley” stadium on Aug. 1. That practice has a few more bells and whistles and costs $5 to attend with the proceeds going to charity. Clemson was Carolina’s original home for the entire 1995 season, because Bank of America Stadium wasn’t ready until Year 2.

Mostly, though, the Panthers have condensed their operations to Charlotte. Richardson, by then plagued with a massive workplace misconduct scandal that you won’t hear mentioned much around Wofford, sold the team to current Panthers owner David Tepper in 2018. That bill of sale, when signed, also put the writing for Spartanburg on the wall.

Tepper had no connection to Spartanburg. As Britt, the local politician, said: “Once David Tepper bought the team, we were living on borrowed time. If Richardson still owned the team, the Panthers would still be here today. We’ll definitely miss them, just like we miss Jerry Richardson.”

Tepper’s original plan was to build an opulent team practice facility and headquarters in Rock Hill.

“Once that deal was announced, we started kind of divorcing ourselves from the idea of the Panthers being here every year,” said Knight, the Spartanburg superfan. “So we’ve been weaning ourselves off this for a while.”

But the Rock Hill deal fell apart, finger-pointing and lawsuits ensued and the Panthers kept signing short-term contracts with Wofford. Only in 2020 did Carolina skip its annual sojourn to Spartanburg, and that was because COVID-19 kept all NFL teams home for summer camp that season.

Now, though, it has come to an end between the Panthers and Spartanburg. We think. As Britt said, you should never say never.

“I’m not about burning bridges,” Britt said. “I want to build them.”

But it does appear the Panthers have pulled out of Spartanburg permanently.

“Wofford will miss the Panthers,” said Johnson, the former Wofford AD. “And Spartanburg will miss them, too, and not just from an economic standpoint. From a personal standpoint, we became friends with a lot of the Panther staff. I remember Brandon Beane (the current Buffalo Bills GM) when he was just an intern with the Panthers. It was almost like your long-lost relatives coming back for a family holiday every year.”

As for me? I won’t miss I-85, the ghastly interstate that haunts my dreams.

But I will miss Wofford’s gentle pace, and how close the campus was to my family that still lives in Spartanburg, and the conversations I would occasionally strike up with Panther supporters on the hill. I usually watched practices there, among the fans, because for the past several years the media was curtailed to one corner of the field that offered a terrible view.

The fans’ view in Spartanburg was actually the best view, and it was free. It was a pretty sweet deal.

Now Gibbs Stadium sits empty, at least until the Wofford players show up for the college season. Sparkle City and the Panthers have finally gotten a divorce.

It’s hardly the end of the world.

But for the Panthers, and their most ardent supporters, summer will never quite feel the same.

2024 Panthers training camp details

▪ The Carolina Panthers will hold training camp in Charlotte this year rather than in Spartanburg. Watching practice is free, except for “Fan Fest” in Clemson, but a majority of the 14 practices open to fans in Charlotte are already sold out (free tickets must be reserved online via Ticketmaster ; you cannot just show up and go into a practice).

▪ Check panthers.com for more details on how to sign up for tickets and which days are still available. Covered seating is available for fans at the Charlotte practices — seating capacity is approximately 2,000 people for each Charlotte practice at the team’s practice fields.

▪ Training camp begins July 24 at the Panthers’ practice fields in Charlotte (705 W. 4th Street.) Each practice will include interactive fan activities, concessions and the opportunity for some player autographs after practice. Ticketed fans can enter starting one hour before practice begins. Fan access ends 30 minutes after practice concludes.

▪ The team will hold its annual “Back Together” practice in Bank of America Stadium at 9:30 a.m. on July 27 and a special “Fan Fest” practice at Clemson, S.C., in Memorial Stadium on Aug. 1. The Death Valley event is $5 per ticket, with proceeds going to charity.

The “Back Together” practice is free and will be the easiest one to get tickets for in Charlotte due to the stadium’s enormous capacity.