North Carolina State University Athletics
The Wolfpack, and Red Terrors, Too
1/23/2011 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Jan. 23, 2011
NC State (11-7, 1-3 ACC) vs. Miami (12-6, 1-3 ACC)
January 23, 2011 • Noon
RBC Center (19,700) • Raleigh, N.C.
TV Coverage: ACC Network
NC State Game Notes | GameTracker
NC State Hosts Miami Sunday at Noon
Pickup With the President
A Lifetime of Basketball Memories with C.A. Dillon
RALEIGH, N.C. – Bernie Mock can’t make it to Sunday’s reunion of more than 100 former NC State basketball players, coaches, managers and support personnel. But, oh, how he wishes he could.
The 89-year-old former captain of the Red Terrors lives in Waynesville, N.C., and is taking care of his ailing wife of 67 years. As one of NC State's oldest living former basketball players, he has plenty of stories to tell of the days when on-campus games meant trudging to Thompson Gymnasium, not the palatial arena that was under construction to replace it.
Mock came to NC State in the fall of 1941 from Boonesville, N.C., just before the start of World War II, the event that forever changed college campuses, which were turned into military training facilities, and the game of basketball, which became the primary indoor spectator sport for enlisted men all over the world.
He played one season each for a pair of NC State College alumni, Bob Warren, who was called into active duty in 1943, and Leroy Jay, who moonlighted from his job as an official in the North Carolina Transportation Department as the Red Terrors part-time coach.
He played one season with the legendary Horace “Bones” McKinney, and another year with long-forgotten stars like Howard “Touchdown” Turner, a dual-sport star who was an All-Southern Conference selection in football; Paul “Buckwheat” Carvalho, Fred Swartzberg and Leo Katkavek. In 1944, they advanced to the semifinals of the Southern Conference tournament, something that had not happened since NC State won the 1929 tournament.
“I played center at 6-foot-3,” Mock remembered. “Today, I wouldn’t be big enough to be a water boy.”
Of his former teammates, only Swartzberg and Bill Jackson remain. Both of them plan to be at Sunday’s reunion, the culmination of the school’s celebration of 100 years of basketball, to tell about the days before basketball was the biggest sport on Tobacco Road.
They played at a time after the steel girders of what would eventually become Reynolds Coliseum were erected, but before it was completed. And it was before the great seismic shift in athletics – caused by the arrival of legendary Indiana high school coach Everett Case in the summer of 1946 – to make that arena a reality.
But Mock and Swartzberg saw it happen. Both had to leave NC State for military service, but wound up playing at North Carolina because active duty personnel could participate in collegiate athletics there. The same was not true at State College. McKinney was the first to leave for the Army and wind up in Chapel Hill. He played for UNC’s 1946 team, which played for the national championship. Mock and Swartzberg played a year later, when Case took over NC State and brought big-time basketball to the South.
“The first time they came over to Chapel Hill, they threw a full-court press on us, something we’d never seen before,” Swartzberg said. “They beat the hell out of us too.”
The Tar Heels didn’t even get to avenge loss. When they were scheduled to play the return game in Raleigh, the NC State campus was so crazy over basketball, it overflowed aging Thompson Gym, forcing the Raleigh fire marshal to cancel the game.
“We barely got in the front door,” said Swartzberg, a native of High Point who still lives there today. “There was a mob inside and down into the dressing rooms downstairs. The officials had to come into the building through the windows in the bathroom.
“There were so many fans, they were hanging off the backboard.”
From that point forward, college basketball was never the same. Case won nine championships in his first 10 years at NC State. The Wolfpack has since won seven more, made three Final Four appearances and is one of 17 NCAA schools to win two or more national championships.
And many of the players, coaches and staff who made that possible will be at Sunday’s game.
• By Tim Peeler, tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
