Renaissance in Raleigh

After piling up a comfortable first-half lead (52-34) against Duke's Blue Devils, the visiting basketball team from North Carolina State slowed down and started to take it easy&151;a tactic designed to drive any coach to distraction. It was enough to turn State's Everett Case, 53, into a rednecked jumping jack, who bounced and yapped along the sidelines until his boys got back on the ball. Just in time, North Carolina State, led by a pair of gangle-shanks named Cliff Dwyer (6 ft. 10 in.) and Ronnie Shavlik (6 ft. 8 in.) found the range again, and State ran out the game 96-91.

All season North Carolina State has played spectacular basketball. Beaten only once--by Villanova, when State's Dwyer was out of action "with an infected elbow --the Raleigh boys stood third in the nation after Kentucky and Duquesne.* The North Carolina State Wolfpack, regarded a few years ago as just a bunch of puppies, is one of basketball's big success stories.

Hopped-up Hoosier. When Coach Case went to Raleigh (in 1946), North Carolina State was the Little Man of Southern Conference basketball and little more than a mouthful for Duke or the University of North Carolina. After a few years in Raleigh the hopped-up little Hoosier coach worked a remarkable transformation. Case, who had put in a long apprenticeship coaching high-school basketball in Indiana, wisely brought an experienced squad along with him. Half a dozen of his schoolboy stars, seasoned by service basketball, started winning games for Coach Case.

Case kept right on recruiting the gawky giants who make up winning basketball teams. And when State ran off with six straight conference titles, basketball became so popular in Raleigh that home-game crowds added up to as many as 265,000 a season. Shrimpers from Southport on the coast and lumbermen from west Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains turned up in Raleigh to root for the Wolfpack.

Stepped-Up Recruiting. So successful was Case that other members of North Carolina's Big Four (Duke, the University of North Carolina, Wake Forest) were forced to step up their own recruiting. Case still outdid them. His agents roamed far afield. Cliff Dwyer, for example, star center of this year's team, was once the property of Kentucky's peerless proselytizer, "Baron" Adolph Rupp. But when Dwyer dropped out of Kentucky for a year to polish up his studies at Chipola Junior College in Marianna, Fla., Case latched onto him and turned him into a champion. Pivotman Shavlik from Denver, won by Case in a recruiting tug-of-war, now is the Wolfpack's bread and butter player.

Now State would like nothing better than to prove its strength against front-running Kentucky, but for one reason or another, Rupp never finds the Wolfpack on his schedule. And there is no chance that the two teams will meet in a postseason tournament game. State's enthusiastic recruiting led to a suspension from this year's NCAA playoffs. With the best of a long line of good teams on his hands, Coach Case will have to settle for one more conference championship.

*But last week Kentucky lost its first home game in twelve years; it was knocked off by Georgia Tech. 59-58, while Duquesne was upset by unranked St. Francis College of Loretto, Pa., 82-72.

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