‘I got a jackpot!’ Hundreds pack Catawbas’ NC casino on opening day
Jason Brewer had just entered the Catawba Indian Nation’s new gaming facility in Kings Mountain on Thursday morning when he sat at a Mega Wheel Spin slot machine and the screen, not 10 minutes later, lit up.
“I got a jackpot!” Brewer said aloud. “Two kings.”
The 46-year-old car salesman from Winston-Salem had just won $2,037.32, the screen showed.
Brewer had just spent $100 gambling, plus $15 at the Mega Wheel machine before his big win.
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Was it just chance that he wore his black-and-white Hard Rock Hotel & Casino “My Lucky Slot Machine” T-shirt and landed on two kings, which coincidentally, is the name of the Catawbas’ casino?
Brewer joined hundreds of other players from across the Carolinas and beyond who’d lined up outside the single-story, 500-slot machine facility on its opening day.
The 24/7 facility is the first phase of the planned $273 million Two Kings Casino Resort. Work on a larger “temporary” casino building nearby is scheduled to begin by year’s end and take about a year to finish, the Observer previously reported.
Casino officials opened the doors to players at least an hour before its scheduled noon opening Thursday, after a ceremonial ribbon cutting led by Catawba Chief Bill Harris. He called the opening “a long time coming” and said the casino would “change the face” of the Rock Hill-based tribe “not only right now but into the future.”
The ceremony hadn’t even ended when dozens of cars awaiting a parking space lined the parking lot entrance and Kings Mountain Boulevard at Interstate 85 Exit 5. The lot has 649 spaces.
Gamblers flock to casino
Like Brewer, about a dozen or so players interviewed by The Charlotte Observer said they brought a finite amount of cash — $100 or $200 —and would leave after the money ran out.
Every last player interviewed by the Observer also said they’d no longer trek three or four hours to one of the two casinos owned by Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in the North Carolina mountains. The Cherokee operate the only two other casinos in the state.
In a statement in December, Principal Chief Richard Sneed of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians said his tribe was “facing competition from all sides,” the Cherokee One Feather newspaper reported. The Catawba casino, he said, “poses a potential loss of revenue to our Tribe that could easily exceed $100 million.”
Lumbee Indians Lonnie and Barbara Locklear drove from Robeson County to the Catawba casino. The retirees, both 81, “just enjoy getting away from home” and visited the Cherokee casino in Cherokee two or three times a year, Lonnie Locklear said. Their combined spending limit at a casino is $300, he said.
“It’s nice, it’s pretty,” Barbara Locklear said of the Catawba casino and its 500 bright and colorful slot machines, as the couple played at Mega Wheel Spin slot machines.
“We’ll be back,” her husband said, despite being $60 down as he spoke with a reporter.
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Charlene Gaines of Saluda, S.C., was so excited about the casino opening that she took a day off from work at a manufacturing plant that makes soup packets. She didn’t tell her boss why she needed the day off.
She took $3,000 to spend at the casino, Gaines said.
“I’m a gambler,” the 54-year-old said. “I just left Vegas,” where she’d spent a week. “I wanted to come here and try my luck.”
“It just gave me $64,” Gaines said of the Double Easy Money slot machine she played Thursday morning. “So I’m about right right now.”
Brewer, the Winston-Salem resident, drove to the casino with his parents, James and Gail Brewer, a respective 84 and 79 years old.
He showed up with $100 and withdrew an additional $300 from an ATM.
“I just have fun,” Brewer said.. “It’s great so far. I’ll definitely be back.”
