RALEIGH, N.C. — During Trea Turner’s three years at North Carolina State, the only opponents who could stop him were the ones manning the entrances to the local taprooms. When Turner was a freshman, his buddies on the baseball team would bar-hop on Friday and Saturday nights, many of them bearing driver’s licenses that indicated they were eligible to consume alcohol legally when, in fact, they were not. Turner wanted to go with them. Turner, at first, tried to go with them. He wasn’t going anywhere.
He was skinny as a strip of yarn, listed on the Wolfpack’s official roster as 6-foot-1 and 171 pounds — measurements that had to have been taken while he had lifts in his shoes and paperweights in his pockets — and he had a face that made anyone who saw him question whether he was old enough to drive, let alone drink. It was rare that he could get his hands on a decent fake ID, and even when he did, he still failed to fool the bouncers around town.
“They’d be like, ‘Dude, you look like you’re 12. This is not you. You’ve got to go home,’ ” Brett Austin said. “He could not get into a bar with me.”
