James Mack tells stories about football the way the game used to be, seven decades ago, long before high school stadiums were built of steel and aluminum and synthetic turf and lit bright as a Friday night Christmas.

He tells about kids playing pick-up, in neighborhoods that belonged to only them, in the 1950s, before desegregation changed things.

He tells about being a little guy, about 119 pounds, and suiting up to play for Reid High School in Belmont, where Black children from Mount Holly, Lowell, Cramerton, McAdenville, Neely’s Grove and south Gastonia attended before the school closed in 1966, and its buildings were demolished.

Mack was in the Class of 1961.

“High school games were a lot different. We practiced on a red clay field, and when it rained it was just like practicing on cement,” he says. “We played games at the old Belmont Park, and it was half baseball field and half grass. They marked it off in some kind of way, but there was a lot of infield dirt. It’s a lot different now. They got real fields they can play on.”

Mack was born in 1943.

He tells stores about his uncles playing football, including one who got a full ride to Florida A&M.

Mack became a three-year starter at Reid High, at defensive back as a sophomore and halfback-defensive back as a junior and senior. He played baseball three years, as a relief pitcher and outfielder. Colleges, including Elizabeth City State Teachers College in Pasquotank County (now Elizabeth City State University), noticed his football ability, but Mack didn’t sign. “I thought I was too small,” he says.

So he got bigger – up to 165 pounds – and played some semi-pro, with the Gaston Patriots alongside defensive linemen listed as 6-foot-7, 330, double his weight, and 6-foot-7, 275.

The thing about James Mack, a 2024 inductee in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame, is his determination to play the game of football while trying to not be hindered by a physical impairment.

When he was 14, Mack was caddying a golf match in Mount Holly when a ball hit his eye. “I was caddying for a group of players, and I was out in front and one of the guys sliced it,” he says. “I had an operation and they patched it, but I went back the day after Thanksgiving because they missed a spot and they had to take it out. I had already got hit in that same eye with a rock, so I couldn’t see too good out of it.”

In semi-pro, he and a friend tried out. “They found out they (other players) couldn’t hit no harder than I could hit, so the first year I was a kickoff and punt receiver, second team,” he says. “Then I was a linebacker, and we played our first game in Marietta, Georgia, and they played me because I loved to hit.”