Seventy years ago, they were the last of the Red Terrors and the first of Everett Case’s 10 conference champions. It was a team so exciting and so capable that the only thing that could stop it was the Raleigh fire chief.
Case’s collection of newcomers — most of which, like the coach, were from Indiana — went to Chapel Hill on Feb. 1, 1947, to face a UNC team still called the White Phantoms, also under the guidance of a first-year coach, Tom Scott. The previous year, UNC had gone to the NCAA title game, a run of success that earned second-year head coach Ben Carnavale a promotion to become head coach at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Case and Scott were old friends from the Navy, where they both coached teams during World War II. They were also capable foes on the basketball court, even though Scott never beat Case in a college game.
At that time, North Carolina played its home games at Woollen Gym, which bears no resemblance to the Smith Center where NC State will travel to play the Tar Heels at 8 p.m. on Saturday. The old gym had pull out bleachers and held roughly 6,000 spectators, about twice as many as NC State’s home court, Thompson Gymnasium.
The game was thought to be a tossup, even though Case’s Terrors had only one letterman, Leo Katkaveck, returning from the previous year. Case, however, had stocked his squad with talent that he remembered and recruited from his home in Indiana and six years of coaching military teams from the Depauw Pre-Flight School in Indiana to the Ottumwa Naval Air Station in Iowa.
Officially the Red Terrors, the roster of Katkavek, Dick Dickey, Eddie Bartels, Charlie Stine, Pete Negley, Warren Cartier, Jack McComas and Norman Sloan were informally known as Case’s “Hoosier Hotshots” because so many of them followed him down from Indiana.
Case and his team had spent weeks on the road, traveling hither and yon to face whatever decent team would take them in. And then the Old Gray Fox and his team beat them.
Their first four games were against U.S. Marine teams at Cherry Point and two local industrial textile teams., the McCrary Eagles of Asheboro and Hanes Hosiery of Winston-Salem. The wins counted towards the 26-5 overall record in that inaugural season.
Case took his team on a five-game tour of the Midwest over Christmas break, beating Tulane at Indianapolis, Anderson College, Franklin College, Akron at Akron and most impressively national power Holy Cross with freshman guard Bob Cousy. The Crusaders later won the NCAA Tournament, a postseason championship event that the Red Terrors were not invited to.
The Terrors terrorized the Southern Conference, winning five league games along with a setback at Duke before heading over to Chapel Hill.
Scott’s Phantoms, who had not lost a home game all year, had seven lettermen and three starters coming back from a team that lost to Oklahoma A&M in the NCAA title game. They returned All-American hook shot specialist John “Hook” Dillon, center Bob Paxton, forward James Hayworth and Norman Kohler, who was the twin brother of former NC State guard Stan Kohler.
And the prognosticators were right. The game couldn’t have been closer.
The White Phantoms led by four at the half, but the Red Terrors roared back in the second half, despite losing center Eddie Bartels to a side injury. Bob Hahn came off the bench to help Case’s team tie the game at the end of regulation.
Late in overtime, McComas hit a one-handed jumper from the corner to give the Terrors at 48-46 victory, kicking off a celebration that lasted late into the night in Raleigh when the 1,500 students who attended the game returned to Hillsborough Street.
It was the first of 15 straight wins over UNC for Case and his charges. North Carolina had lost only 12 games to State College in the previous history of the rivalry.
What that game played on a cold night in Chapel Hill did, however, was change everything in the Old North State.
New York University’s team had come to the state to play North Carolina and Duke. They hastily added a game against Case’s Terrors, a move they might have regretted after losing a 47-43 decision at Thompson Gym a few nights after the win over UNC.
The Terrors lost once more in conference play, at Wake Forest, but excitement on campus couldn’t have been more rampant among the World War II veterans when Case and his team hosted a rematch with the White Phantoms in the final game of the regular season.
Demand for tickets on campus, which had swelled to more than 6,000 students because of the GI Bill of Rights, was unprecedented, with all tickets reserved for student and their dates.
Except for the next-to-last game of the season, against Davidson, in which students voluntarily gave up all their seats so the general public could see Case’s team play, with all proceeds —more than $3,100 — going to the completion of the Memorial Belltower. The structure had been started in 1921 to honor war veterans but had stalled out during the Depression and World War II.
On Feb. 25, students began to fill Thompson Gym’s 3,200 seats early in the day for the rematch against North Carolina. By the 7:30 game time, more than 5,000 students filled every seat, every aisle and every open space around the court.
When Raleigh fire chief W.R. “Ralph” Butts walked in to the packed arena, he told spectators that NC State would have to forfeit if the aisle were not cleared.
When there were two butts in every seat, those outside the gym demanded to take up the open spaces and physically tore down the doors. Butts quickly canceled the game and, surrounded by a police escort, left campus.
“Fire Chief Butts was nearly mobbed on several occasions by the sullen crowd, but he was escorted to safety by a cordon of local gendarmes,” reported the Technician, NC State’s student paper. “As the chief’s car pulled away, it was met by a hail of rocks and curses, but he escaped without injury.”
Spectators hung around for an hour more waiting for someone to change the chief’s ruling, but that never happened. To be fair, it was a dangerous situation, the gym was oversold and the night before in Indiana, three people died and 300 more were injured when a set of wooden bleachers collapsed during halftime of a Purdue-Wisconsin game.
In the student paper’s next issue, it called for the school to restart the construction of the coliseum adjacent to Thompson Gym, a skeleton that had sat untouched since 1942 and one of the big lures the school used to attract Case to campus.
It took getting Thompson Gym condemned the next season and holding all home games at Raleigh’s downtown auditorium until Reynolds Coliseum was completed in December 1949 to contain the campus excitement.
Case’s 1947 team won both the Southern Conference regular-season and tournament championships, but was snubbed by the NCAA committee, which chose Kentucky to represent the southern district.
The Wolfpack went to New York’s Madison Square Garden instead to compete in the National Invitation Tournament, where it beat St. John’s, lost to Kentucky (teams were allowed to compete in both postseason tournaments at the time) and defeated West Virginia in the third-place consolation game.
The next year, following a campus-wide vote of students, all NC State teams became known as the Wolfpack, a nickname equally unique among NCAA teams.
In all, Case’s teams won nine of the next 10 conference tournaments it played in, six Southern title and the first three Atlantic Coast Conference titles, a streak that is unmatched by any major college coach.
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
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