Tobacco Road Rebels

To the basketball-batty crowd of 12,400 that stuffed Reynolds Coliseum in Raleigh, N.C. last week, the annual Dixie Classic tournament was another war between the states. Teams from Utah, Iowa, West Virginia and Illinois marched in to play four Southern teams. By the end of the tournament's first round, all four invaders were licked; after the second round Wake Forest and North Carolina were left to fight it out between themselves. At tournament's end North Carolina was the new champion (63-55) of the "tobacco triangle," a sleepy corner of eastern Carolina that habitually produces two or three of the finest college teams in the land. Actually, it was a great victory for such fine old magnolia-scented, deep-Southern communities as The Bronx, Brooklyn and Bergenfield, N.J.

Carolina's big star and All-America, lanky (6 ft. 5 in.) Lenny Rosenbluth, 23, learned his basketball on the concrete courts of The Bronx. Rosenbluth, whose home is now in Tennessee, came to Carolina, he says, because "I can't see getting on a subway and going to school." Also of the varsity squad, Bob Cunningham, 20, comes from The Bronx; Stan Groll, 19, is still searching about Chapel Hill for a corner delicatessen where he can buy a corned-beef sandwich like the ones he used to eat in Brooklyn; Pete Brennan, 20, hails from Brooklyn; and Tommy Kearns, 20, from New Jersey.

No Complaint. North Carolina fans have no complaint, and none pretended it was any accident that there were so many misplaced Northerners in town. In 1953, when Carolina decided to beef up its team to make it a match for neighboring Duke, Wake Forest and North Carolina State, the Chapel Hill authorities sent for Frank Joseph McGuire, blue-eyed, wavy-haired son of a New York City cop. After five years as coach at St. John's University, McGuire had a readymade network of high-school coaches anxious to ship him the fanciest talent from the basketball breeding grounds around New York.

"I'm very partial to New Yorkers," says Coach McGuire. "I can get any boy I want in New York. I've only got from Oct. 15 to Dec. 1 to practice with them before the season starts, but they're playing all the time. Almost all of them go to the Catskills in the summer, work all day as waiters and play ball at night."

Rough Time. Against State last week, McGuire's troops moved the ball with such polished skill, shot with such consistent effect that they more than backed up his boast that Carolina teams rank with the best collegiate teams around. "We're all rough at home," says McGuire, ruefully reflecting on the unpleasant truth that North Carolina's teams knock each other off so consistently that their won-lost records suffer and they tend to slump in the national rankings. "But we can take any outsider. Any visiting team that comes down this way has a rough time getting through 'Tobacco Road.'"

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