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Bernie Mock taking a shot for NC State in 1943.

NOTE: This story was originally publish at www.GoPack.com just before NC State had a 100-year anniversary celebration in 2011. It has been updated to reflect the passing of both Bernie Mock and Fred Swartzberg. If you enjoy reading "One Brick Back" and would like to help offset research expenses for stories such as this one, please make a small donation to the cause and help keep posts like this free of ads.

BY TIM PEELER
© NC State Athletics, 2011

Bernie Mock (July 30, 1921-June 8, 2012)
Fred Swartzberg (March 16, 1927-July 31, 2013)
Horace "Bones" McKinney (Jan. 1, 1919-May 16, 1997)

RALEIGH, N.C. – Bernie Mock couldn't make it to 2011 reunion of more than 100 former NC State basketball players, coaches, managers and support personnel to celebrate the program's 100th anniversary. But, oh, how he wished he had.

At the time, the 89-year-old former captain of the Red Terrors lived in Waynesville, N.C., and was taking care of his ailing wife of 67 years. As one of NC State basketball’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. He was a Red Terror, back before all varsity teams became the Wolfpack in 1948.

Mock came to NC State in the fall of 1941 from Boonville, N.C., just before the start of World War II, the event that forever changed college campuses, many of 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, whether in gymnasiums on college campuses or airplane hangars on a South Pacific island.

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.

Horace "Bones" McKinney was a skinny drink of water.

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 tournament in 1929.

“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 attended the 100-year reunion, the culmination of the school’s celebration of 100 years of basketball, to talk about the days before basketball was North Carolina's biggest sport.

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.

Mock and Swartzberg saw it all put into motion. Both had to leave NC State for military service, but both returned to their home state to play at UNC-Chapel Hill, earning degrees there after the war ended. Mock was elected team captain at both schools, the only player in history to do so.

McKinney, the Durham High kid everyone called "Bones," was the first State College player to leave for the Army then enroll at Chapel Hill. His former Red Terror teammates went to Fayetteville's Fort Bragg to play against McKinney's U.S. Army team that featured...

"They beat the hell out of us," said Swartzberg, who enrolled at NC State at the age of 16 in 1943, enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1945 and graduated from UNC in 1948. [Watch an interview with Swartzberg about his Navy experiences here.]

McKinney was a member of UNC’s 1946 team that played for the national championship under coach Ben Carnavale. Mock and Swartzberg played for the Tar Heels a year later, after Carnavale left for Navy because he could earn more money and was replaced by Tom Scott. It was the same season Case took over NC State and brought big-time basketball to the South.

“The first time [Case and his team] 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.”

Fred Swartzberg (left) at the 2011 reunion.

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 lived there until his death in 2013. “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 eight more, made four trips to the Final Four and is one of 17 NCAA schools to win two or more national championships.