News-Record.com

I shouldn't let another day go by without saying something about the redoubtable Mouth of the South, Bill Currie.

The former Tar Heel radio play-by-play man and High Point native died on Feb. 11 at the age of 83.

I'm remiss in not posting something sooner but it is some ways it seems appropos to give the Mouth his props on the cusp of another NCAA Tournament.

Currie called Heels games in the 1960s and early '70s, before the term March Madness had been coined and when only the winner of the ACC tournament made the NCAAs.

How long ago was it? Fewer games were televised, so the radio broadcasts were more prominent.. Dunking had been outlawed because of some kid at UCLA named Alcindor.
Black players were still a rarity in the ACC during most of those years. Clemson and South Carolina (then still an ACC member) fielded all-white teams.

I don't know that there's been as colorful and entertaining a sports radio personality since.

Win or lose, Currie made listening to basketball fun with his cornpone witticisms and his predilection for irreverence.

Just ask one of his kids.

"He was eclectic," Margaret Currie Granger, the youngest of his three children, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "He made sports interesting for people who didn't follow sports. He was a nut. He was crazy. He was outrageous. He always was a character and was a character until the day he died."

She ought to know.

The Mouth once described the infamous 12-10 N.C. State slowdown victory over Duke in the ACC Tournament as exciting "as watching artificial insemination."

When the Heels would clear their bench during a lopsided win he'd call it "opening the floodgates of mercy."

I also remember Currie doing games for the ABA's Carolina Cougars, in a league that was rich with the strange and unusual, a treasure trove of material for the Mouth's immortal one-liners.

He'd quip about empty arenas, bikini-clad ballgirls and a South Florida arena he described as an "aircraft hangar."

If memory serves, for a little while he did Cougars and Tar Heel games before moving on to Pittsburgh.

Where Dick Vitale is merely loud and a little bit crazy, the Mouth was smart and funny. And it all flowed so naturally. You couldn't script that stuff.

Sorry, Woody, but Bill Currie remains my all-time favorite Carolina play-by-play man.