bjj-sportliterate

Thick Ice

by Bill Vernon

I go back to when I hid my Schwinn Phantom bicycle and Middletown Journal bag among short bushy cedars along the gravel driveway at the Standard Oil pumping station, then soared away on skates over water that three days of zero degrees and three nights below zero had told me was as solid as the streets. On top of the pool under the Cincinnati Avenue bridge, I made circles while the traffic was roar, roar, roar, unaware of my presence, passing above me, my coat flapping like a cape, sleeves draped over my shoulders and tied together in front. Although on the edge of downtown, I was hidden in a glacier’s gift, a thousands-of-years-old gouge.

I was there despite my mother, but not to spite her. Knowing that Dave Kotte had fallen through the ice here last year, she’d made me promise not to skate on the creek this year. I’d argued that Dave had started a bonfire on the ice and the water wasn’t very deep. “Promise,” she insisted until I did. To make her feel better. She worried about everything any more, but Mom wouldn’t know, and I’d start no fires on the ice. Dave did crazy things, like driving his old Chevy convertible with its top down in weather even colder than this. Plus it really wasn’t dangerous. This was not a suicide mission. The opposite: like an attempt to affirm that life was worth living and the world had beauty. I’m still a little silly that way, many years later.

Maybe my plan comes to mind because of the season, which the pandemic is in now. I was happy-sad that day, 72 hours before Christmas Eve, having delivered papers and collected. Most of the customers who answered my knock on their doors gave me tips. Several gave me two dollars in singles and said to keep the change. The paper’s weekly price was $1.15. Others paid me with so many coins, the metal stuffed my front denim pockets and pressed against my thigh almost painfully. In my wallet were 18 one-dollar bills counting Mrs. Dougan’s three brand new ones. After I’d laid The Golden Lamb’s four papers on its counter, the manager paying his bill gave me a cup of hot chocolate. I stared at it a second — Mr. Cheapo — but said thanks, drank the cocoa in one gulp, then hurried here.

I intended to skate down the creek out of town as far as I could. It would be an adventure, odd, something no one else had ever done, at least to my knowledge. The idea had grown in me with a feeling of ingenuity and desire for discovery. The area where I lived had been cloaked in a dark pall for months, and I wanted to clean up my thinking. Experiencing the area I knew in a closer way might do that. In fact it already was doing it. I’d been excited from the idea’s first inception. I might not learn any secrets, but as had happened most of my life until now, I believed that common, ordinary things could surprise me.

I’d know exactly where I’d be at all times. Beyond the steep banks and thick trees obscuring the Route 42 side of Turtle Creek were the Glendower Home and Museum, plus three mansions where the town’s rich merchants once lived, their yards sprawling from the hilltop down to the street. The northwest side rose gradually from the creek with a floodplain full of scrubby trees and brush, then narrow streets and homes where most of my paper route was, then higher up a church and new housing developments.

The town ended and stubble cornfields started about where I flowed under the bridge on Southwest Street and passed the closed tomato cannery. Reaching there actually took over 10 minutes, not the three minutes I’d guessed. Although my distance was correct, the easy, gravity-driven half-mile glide as the hills leveled out wasn’t as simple as imagined.

The reality was that jutting rocks and natural debris on the surface slowed me, branches, sticks, pebbles, walnuts, buckeyes, but the human-made obstacles took even more time. I had to tiptoe over rip-rap and around the pilings of a railroad trestle. Then worse farther on, skirt a pond of murky water polluted with transmission fluid, oil, and other smelly gunk. I had to walk awkwardly ashore around it so my blades sank into the just partially frozen earth, which scratched and discolored my black skates, which I’d just bought for this excursion. I had to sit on a boulder and clean them as well as I could with a tee shirt and a paper bag from other debris on brush and low tree limbs. My idyllic journey wasn’t ideal, but I’d known it wouldn’t be. I’d just neglected, or more likely refused, to think about whatever might disturb my plans.

Of course the reward I sought was beyond all that, open land. Reaching there and heading farther away from town, toward the distant horizon, were long stretches of clean ice through mostly cultivated fields. I upped my speed and felt free. There was no wind to contend with except what I threw at myself moving forward, and the tingling that brought to my cheeks seemed like a reward, a charge of energy.

I screamed a few times and felt as if I were one of the animals who survived there. As if this were my natural place. Feeling more alive than I’d felt in weeks, I took pleasure in cottontail rabbits watching from the banks. In starlings flocking high on trees like dark knobs, then aware of my approach, erupting noisily and swooping aloft in wild, black, perfectly coordinated turns against the blue sky. I felt a kinship. Except that I was alone, they were doing what I was doing. I felt at home, connected with Nature’s possibilities and beauty.

Off to my left across the highway was Sherwood’s Market with six cars parked in front. My distance away put it into a broad panorama, a shingle-sided building among low, wooded hills that seemed to shelter it. Farther on, the new plant nursery on my side of the highway was almost mathematically neat, situated in old pasture-land. It had a large greenhouse that reflected the sun into my eyes. Several acres on three sides of the building contained exactly measured rows of shrubs and trees of different sizes. For some reason these two businesses impressed me as different from the farms I passed.

Farms were businesses too, but also dwellings, with red barns and other out-buildings, homes where families lived, some near the highway or the county road, some down long lanes. None close to the creek. I passed a field of horses and two of Holstein cows grazing. Some sheep grazing elsewhere. The animals heads raised as I passed and their calls accompanied the scrunches of my steel cutting into the ice. This was my private, self-guided tour, and though I’d basically seen it all before, I hadn’t experienced it as I was now from this intimate perspective.

When the creek turned more directly south, the setting sun made me squint and look away. It was a warning: I couldn’t go as far as I’d wished. I’d have to return soon to be able to see the obstacles on the way back. I congratulated myself, that was mature thinking, but proceeded on because I was enjoying the trip so much. When the creek bent more left, eastward toward its union with the Little Miami River, suddenly it and I fell into deep shadows, following a route along the base of a steep hill. Seeing the creek ahead cross under the highway shocked me. I was already over two miles from town. Alarmed by the shadows, I turned back, moving more purposefully with the dying light.

The thought occurred to me that skating was a game. It was like playing with the elements, adjusting to them. Moving forward around obstacles was part of living. All the way back, skating like this, God seemed to be playing with me, and that made me feel proud. Obstacles were opportunities. Using my own energy, concentration, balance, and other skills was letting me respond to Nature successfully.

Coming and going I knew where I was because I’d visited the areas around my home walking. Skating past the nursery I remembered the place where my brother-in-law, just playing around, said, “See that crow. Watch this.” He pulled his father’s German Luger from its holster, fired from the hip, and the distant bird fell. We were amazed. Retrieving it, Frank said, “I didn’t think I’d hit it.” Neither did I. I didn’t like killing things for recreation either. This incident among many eventually convinced me to quit hunting altogether.

The railroad track alongside the creek a bit farther along was where, hunting rabbits, I’d met a man who said he was born on a southern plantation, the son of slaves freed by the emancipation proclamation. He was, he said, hunting as African natives hunted, with a throwing stick, and he joked that using my .20 gauge shotgun was not fair to God’s critters. I didn’t think he could take one with a simple dowel rod wrapped in tape with a ball of lead on one end, but he took a sitting rabbit that day. Nearer town, the little tributary creek I passed ran alongside my house, and from it I had taken six snapping turtles. Friends of mine liked to make turtle soup.

Friendships were on my mind approaching the Southwest Street bridge. I was in contented, deep thought when someone yelled my name. There was Dave leaning over a rail, his roadster parked nearby, its lights on, its top down. “Your mom told me you’d be here skating.

I laughed. “She said that?”

“Yeah. It’s Saturday, man. Want to go get a cup of coffee and something to eat?”

“I have to get my bike at Standard Oil.”

“I’ll meet you. We’ll load it in the trunk and take it home, then go to Frisch’s. Your mom said it’d be okay.”

“Sounds good.” I continued to my bicycle amazed that my mother knew so much more than I’d thought. Grateful for it and for Dave too.

Delivering the Cincinnati Times-Star newspaper, Dave’s route overlapped mine and so we often met. We were altar boys at the St. Francis de Sales Church and had attended grade school together at St. Susanna’s in Mason five miles away, close to my meandering creek.

I realize now that his friendship helped me. The unexpected loss of my father had greatly disrupted my family and caused anxiety and confusion in me. Before that, the world seemed solid and benevolent. Perhaps Dave recognized that year’s Christmas as the first we’d have without Dad. In the ‘50s, the people I knew, even my own family, didn’t often speak about such things, but I think Dave’s friendship and my mother’s love were as natural a gift as the fresh air I breathed, skating through the countryside. An elemental need, a solace of the most human kind.

Death such as the pandemic has brought? It reminds me of what I sometimes try to forget, that such a demise is always present. My skating story tells me death’s possibility is beyond human control, that it is unavoidable, an obstacle no one skates past. The old memento mori idea. I learned back then that it also helps me love more deeply the good things I have.

Bill Vernon, retired teacher in Dayton, Ohio, has published poems, short memoir stories, and fiction on golfing, running, canoe racing, playing baseball, fishing, piano playing, hunting, international folk dancing, and walking. As you may have guessed, he spends a lot of leisure time these days reminiscing in print about those activities.

 

 

Whitewashing the Bear:
Timing right to reexamine the Alabama coach’s folklore

by Tom Shanahan

“Although no one in the documentary says it, there seems to be a feeling that Southern Cal’s rout of Alabama was the shock that the University and a majority of the fans needed to support integration of the football program. But in fact, that same shock probably came the previous year when the Tennessee Volunteers, the team that Bryant always regarded as the Tide’s most bitter foe, thrashed the Tide 41-14 at Legion Field in Birmingham. (I know — I was there.) Two of the Vols’ best players — receiver Lester McClain and linebacker Jackie Walker — were Black. Why history has chosen to ignore this game and focus exclusively on 1970 Alabama-USC is a mystery.”

— Allen Barra, The Atlantic, Nov. 15, 2013

Covid-19 killed the 1970 USC-Alabama game’s 50^th anniversary season opener that was scheduled for Sept. 5 at “Jerry World,” but folklore from a half-century ago remains vaccinated. The inoculation has worked without scientific evidence supporting the myths.

Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant remains celebrated as a blend of a White Knight and Svengali for orchestrating college football’s desegregation. He invited integrated Southern Cal as a game to lose before his bigoted fans at Legion Field in Birmingham. A loss untied his hands, allowing him to recruit Black athletes.

That’s the myth, anyway.

Older media and fans have been complicit. They love tales that cling to a celebrated, folksy coach who courted the media. Younger media don’t appreciate how recent was segregation; questioning Bryant doesn’t resonate with them. And without a challenge on a major media platform, the folklore, which ignores the reality of white privilege, lives on.

That continuation played out once again when ESPN aired a report on College GameDay to coincide with the game’s 50th anniversary date, Sept. 12, 1970. The report ignored contradictory evidence. It also skipped over the story of Bryant taking Sam Cunningham into the Alabama locker room — a story now accepted as fiction by all sides — that formerly was the foundation of the myth.

“There is more fiction in those 1970 USC-Alabama stories than anything. You’d think that’s when the SEC began recruiting Black athletes. I was almost out of school by 1970.”

— LESTER McCLAIN, Tennessee

The fiction, born in 1980s Los Angeles rather than Tuscaloosa, has been long regurgitated via print, film and word of mouth. They include premium network documentaries on HBO, “Breaking the Huddle” in 2008, and Showtime, “Against the Tide,” in 2013. ESPN’s 150th college football anniversary films in 2019 included one on integration that promoted Bryant mythology. Such stories ignore Bryant never discussed the “plan” in his 1974 book, Bear, with John Underwood, or in other interviews prior to his 1983 death.

“There is more fiction in those 1970 USC-Alabama stories than anything,” said Lester McClain, Tennessee’s first Black player (1968-70) and the SEC’s first Black player to score a touchdown with six TD catches in 1968. “You’d think that’s when the SEC began recruiting Black athletes. I was almost out of school by 1970.”

Nor does the fairytale include a customary reckoning for Bryant dragging his feet until dressing his first Black player in 1971. Auburn, Alabama’s in-state rival, integrated a year earlier with James Owens. Auburn officials and teammates freely admit in retrospect they should have done more to support Owens in his struggle. Backfield mate Terry Henley became a lifelong friend.

“It was a learning curve for me, the players, and the coaches,” Henley said. “I was raised in an all-white community.”

The timing is right to reexamine Bear Bryant mythology — at least for anyone outside of Bryant hagiography. More Americans are open to understanding social injustice and systemic racism following the death of African-American George Floyd in Minneapolis in police custody.

McClain and Owens are among the true 1960s pioneers dispossessed of their place in history. A quote from Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Maraniss justifies examining their careers: “History writes people out of the story. It’s our job to write them back in.”

Others are Southern Methodist’s Jerry Levias, Maryland’s Darryl Hill and Kentucky’s four desegregation horsemen, Nate Northington, Greg Page, Walter Hackett, and Houston Hogg. The coaches that acted long before Bryant were Maryland’s Tom Nugent and assistant Lee Corso, SMU’s Hayden Fry, Kentucky’s Charley Bradshaw and Auburn’s Shug Jordan with assistant Jim Hilyer.

The South’s early pioneers had their stage set by Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty’s Underground Railroad. His 1960s teams formed college football’s first fully integrated rosters. The Spartans were a beacon in the South; he reached out to southern Black high school coaches.

They laid the tracks to the Underground Railroad that brought 44 southern Black players to East Lansing from 1959 to 1972. The passengers included College football Hall-of-Famers Bubba Smith, George Webster, Clinton Jones and Gene Washington, as well as the South’s first Black quarterback to win a national title, Jimmy Raye of Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Hackett (1968-70) was an SEC All-Sophomore pick and the SEC’s first Black team captain in any sport (1969). He had dreamed about playing for Daugherty until Kentucky desegregated. He was pleased with HBO’s representation of Kentucky’s pioneering contribution but not the film’s overriding theme.

“I was very disappointed with the way they portrayed Bryant,” Hackett said. “I have the utmost respect for him as a football coach, but what they showed was totally wrong. They wrote it as if Bear Bryant desegregated the Southeastern Conference.”

Hackett added when he saw a similar CBS story a few years ago, he telephoned the network to offer his correction. No one called back.

Hackett, from Louisville, took two recruiting trips, a campus visit and attendance at the 1966 Michigan State-Indiana game in Bloomington. “I met Duffy and spent some time with him; he was a great man,” he said. “He made me feel like Michigan State was the right place for me. He was open and genuine. I loved my time there; the people were so nice. Duffy was so genuine about recruiting African-American athletes. I spent time with Bubba and Webster and other guys. Bubba was as big as a house.”

But with Kentucky opening its doors by the time he graduated from high school, he accepted to his parents’ wishes he stay closer to home.

LeVias (1966-68) was the SWC’s first Black scholarship football player. When SMU opened its 1968 season at Auburn, LeVias and his two Black teammates were booed. Nevertheless, LeVias integrated SEC end zones with a touchdown and a two-point conversion in a 37-28 win. Similar to overlooked Tennessee at Legion Field in 1969, LeVias scored two years before USC visited Birmingham.

“People today do not realize the price and pain that was paid by an individual that broke barriers in segregation,” said LeVias, a College Football Hall of Famer who played six NFL seasons.

When LeVias took the field at the University of Texas’ Memorial Stadium in 1966, Longhorns fans waved nooses at him. They thought it was funny. Texas didn’t have a Black football player until the 1970 season — one year prior to Bryant’s foot dragging. LeVias also played at game at TCU under a death threat with FBI protection.

Bryant was a winning football coach, perhaps the greatest, that earned his statue for six national titles at Alabama. But the Bear Bryant that was silent in the dark times of 1950s and 1960s failed as a leader — the conclusion of Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam in a 2002 ESPN article.

THAT Bear Bryant is a Confederate statue that needs to be tumbled.

In 1961, Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray, a Pulitzer Prize winner, exposed Bryant as a man dismissive of segregation as an issue outside of the South.

Murray’s trip to Birmingham was prompted by rumors Bryant was working behind the scenes to have No. 1-ranked Alabama replace the Big Ten champion’s annual berth to the Rose Bowl. Bryant had support from his World War II buddy, Admiral Tom Hamilton, who was then commissioner of the Association of Athletic Western Universities (forerunner to the Pac-12).

However, UCLA’s Black players, led by future NFL player Kermit Alexander, began to say behind the scenes they wouldn’t take the field against Alabama. Murray asked Bryant for a comment the day before the Georgia Tech-Alabama game in Birmingham. Bryant said he had none – nor does “the university I’m sure.

It might be the only time Bryant said no comment.

Then, some Alabama reporters in the room turned and glared at Murray. He quoted one saying, “Tell them West Coast N-lovers to go lick your boots, Bear.” (See Los Angeles Times, Nov. 30, 1961.)

With Murray’s reporting, the NAACP Los Angeles chapter became involved. Rose Bowl officials stopped listening to Bryant and Hamilton. If Murray had not traveled to Birmingham, we wouldn’t know Bryant’s true feelings — a lack of empathy. But in the pre-social media and cable TV era, the Bryant/Hamilton coup was largely a local story without national legs.

Five years ago, I quoted Alexander when I interviewed him during the time Missouri’s football team successfully executed a threatened boycott of a game over a campus racial issue. Alexander, who said he was proud of Missouri’s players, explained the UCLA protest: “If we can’t play on their field, why should they be able to play on our field?”

But the moment faded into history. Bear Bryant mythology allowed him to sidestep the controversy and be viewed instead as an integration leader.

It took Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights movement to pressure a resistant southern culture, including its revered college coaches, into change.

“I reiterate what I said on the (2019 ESPN) documentary,” Lane Demas wrote in an email: “Alabama football integrated because an organized, sustained movement of Black Americans nationwide forced it to, against its will. That’s the only answer that makes sense if you study the broader historical context.”

Demas, a Central Michigan University history professor with a PhD from UC Irvine, authored the 2010 book, Integrating the Gridiron: Black Civil Rights and American College Football.

“The USC-Alabama story is in a long line of white myths that serve to deny black people their agency in terms of changing America,” Demas added. “Focusing on figures like Branch Rickey or Bear Bryant create narratives in which it is ultimately white people who make cautious, thoughtful, calculating decisions to create change and integrate on their own terms. They become the agents of change, not Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, or the thousands who struggled in the streets.”

Folklore, certainly, is Americana, but Daniel Boone’s legend credited the authentic Kentucky frontiersman — not a tenderfoot that never “Kilt A Bar.” Bryant was a tenderfoot until the 1970s. Another excuse Bryant’s apologists offer was Alabama’s avowed racist governor, George Wallace, wouldn’t allow him to recruit Black athletes. But Wallace was out of office by Jan. 16, 1967. Bryant’s 1967, 1968 and 1969 recruiting classes were all-white.

The revisionist history also overlooked a 1967 quote from SEC commissioner A.M. Coleman. Kentucky professor Derrick White cites it in his book, “Blood, Sweat and Tears. Jake Gaither, Florida A&M Football and this History of College Black Football.”

“There’s no longer any ban, written or unwritten, on Negro athletes,” Coleman said on April 3, 1967.

The quote is used with context that Gaither and other coaches at Historically Black Colleges and Universities saw the future. They recognized their talent pool was being tapped by segregated White colleges finally opening their doors.

The myths also aggrandized USC’s role. Southern Cal has a long integration history, but the Trojans were among the status quo in the 1960s, limiting their rosters to a half-dozen or so Black players. USC, despite the diverse talent pool of Los Angeles, had only five on its 1962 national championship team, seven on its 1967 national title roster. Minnesota was another example of an integrated national champion with few Black athletes in 1960.

Daugherty’s mix of Black and White athletes from his Midwest base had set new standards for African-American recruits prior to the Underground Railroad gathering steam. In 1962, the Associated Press reported Michigan State’s 17 Black athletes formed “the largest delegation of Negro players in the history of major college football.” That total included only five of Daugherty’s total of 44 Black recruits from the South between 1959 and his final season, 1972.

That has led to a misperception the Spartans weren’t fully integrated until the 1965 and 1966 national championships gained attention. A tipping point moment was the 1966 Game of the Century matching Notre Dame and Michigan State.

A television record 33 million fans saw the contrast on their screens as Notre Dame dressed one Black player, Alan Page, and the Spartans 20. Michigan State’s Black starters were more than other schools’ entire rosters.

The nation noticed. In the five years from 1967 to USC’s next national title in 1972, the Trojans total grew from seven to 23 Black players. By Notre Dame’s next two national titles in 1973 and 1977, the Irish Black players numbered 10 and 13, respectively.

Today’s national champions are well past 50 percent Black and other minority athletes.

In addition to complicity of the older and younger media supporting Bryant myths, a third group of media and fans remains unaware, leaving them vulnerable to taking their turns regurgitating and spreading. It’s as if baseball fans were unaware of Jackie Robinson.

That actually happened. In 1990, a Sport Magazine survey revealed many Black pro players either didn’t know about Robinson or knew little of him. Major League Baseball addressed the issue on April 15, 1997, the 50^th anniversary of Robinson breaking the color line. It has continued the annual celebration of an American hero.

Today’s college football players stand on the shoulders of the true 1960s pioneers. Can they be reintroduced similar to Robinson? Or has Bryant mythology forever reduced them to footnotes?

Alan Barra’s 2013 question about historical recognition never granted 1969 Tennessee-Alabama remains unanswered. It reaffirms a Hollywood axiom from the 1962 movie, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

 THE FAIRYTALE

The plot begins with Bryant scheduling USC shortly before the season as Alabama’s 1970 opener. A January 1970 NCAA ruling permitted adding an 11^th game.

USC routed the Crimson Tide 42-21 on Sept. 12 before 72,175 fans at Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama’s second home labeled “The Football Capital of the South.”

That much is true. The rest of the tale has facts slide off it like football tailgate bratwurst in a Teflon pan.

— To accept the myth Bryant needed a loss to USC for permission to recruit Black athletes is to believe the preeminent coach in the South was too timid to be a leader among bigots.

A more logical explanation is Bryant was content with the status quo. He didn’t care enough to use his power. As events unfolded into a void, myth crafters added a Black Prince, USC sophomore fullback Sam Cunningham. He ran roughshod with 12 carries for 135 yards and two touchdowns.

— To accept Cunningham spurred Bryant overlooks Wilbur Jackson as Alabama’s first Black recruit. Jackson watched the 1970 USC-Alabama game from the stands with the freshmen team (NCAA rules prohibited freshmen eligibility until 1972).

The fable reached a crescendo when Bryant was said to invite Cunningham, stripped to his football pants and built like a Greek statue, into the Alabama locker room. He had the conquering hero stand on a bench, telling his players, “This is what a football player looks like.”
Bryant’s athletes were miffed upon hearing the myths. They not only told Mobile Press-Register sportswriter Neal McCready it never happened they added Bryant wouldn’t embarrass them.

Cunningham, unwittingly swept up in the myth, played along until a 2003 interview with McCready. He was writing a 1970 retrospective prior to USC returning to the state to play Auburn in a season-opening Top 10 matchup.

“I made a lot of phone calls, but I finally talked to him,” said McCready, who is now publisher of Rebel Grove, the Rivals.com site for Ole Miss. “It was a fascinating conversation. He couldn’t have been nicer, but he wasn’t comfortable talking about it. When I asked about the post-game, he was almost sheepish. He finally admitted it was a myth. He definitively told me it did not happen.”

That was straight from the man’s mouth 17 years ago.

Cunningham danced around the question in HBO’s 2008 “Breaking the Huddle,” but he denied it in Showtime’s 2013 “Against the Tide.” ESPN’s 2019 “Integration” film and 2020 report didn’t ask him the question, even though the Cunningham fiction fueled the Bryant mythology.

The late Clem Gryska, a trusted Bryant assistant coach and later executive at the Paul “Bear” Bryant Museum, scoffed when asked multiple times in print and video interviews. He said his boss never scheduled a game to lose it.

ESPN senior writer Ivan Maisel says of the scheduling scheme in a 2019 ESPN film, “… I’m not sure anybody knows.”

The Cunningham locker room tale is more disturbing for another sin beyond its falsehood. The myth crafters — and those gleefully retelling it — failed to realize depicting a Black man on a platform was reminiscent of the slave trade.

Murray attended the 1970 game nine years after his 1961 stories exposed Bryant. The headline to Murray’s 1970 column was, “Hatred Shut Out as Alabama Finally Joins the Union.” In a 2002 ESPN article, Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam wrote Bryant “was very late to the dance.” The headline: “Just a coach, not a leader.”

THE TENNESSEE WALTZ

As Barra noted in his 2013 Atlantic article, the myth ignored Tennessee routing Alabama 41-14 on Oct. 18 before 72,443 at Legion Field. An Alabama loss in the 52^nd edition of the “Third Saturday of October” rivalry cut deeper than losing to a California school.

McClain caught one pass for 12 yards, but linebacker Jackie Walker, another Tennessee pioneer, thrust a dagger early, returning an interception 27 yards for a touchdown. Tennessee myth crafters, if they wanted to create fiction, could have beaten USC’s mythmakers to the punch. They could have had Jackie Walker paraded by Bryant and educating Alabama’s bigoted fans.

“Jackie Walker was a great player,” McClain said of his Tennessee Hall of Fame teammate that died in 2002. “He still has records.”

Walker’s pick was among five career touchdown returns, a total that shares an NCAA record. His five picks are missing from NCAA listings, an oversight venerable Tennessee historian Bud Ford said he is in the process of rectifying. Walker, who is on the College Football Hall of Fame ballot, was a two-time All-American linebacker and 1971 team captain.

The five SEC programs that integrated ahead of Bryant were Kentucky (1967), Tennessee (1968), Florida, Mississippi State and Auburn (1970). Alabama brought up the rear with Vanderbilt in 1971 and the last three holdouts in 1972, Georgia, LSU and Mississippi.

“A few years ago, I watched a CBS show about Bear Bryant and the USC game,” Hackett said. “I called CBS to correct them, but nobody called back.”

Believing Bryant simply flicked a light switch denigrates Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights battles dating to the Montgomery bus boycott (1955-56) through bloody encounters with police brutality in Birmingham (1963) and Selma (1965).

Darryl Hill integrated the Atlantic Coach Conference with Maryland in 1963, LeVias and Baylor walk-on John Westbrook led the SWC in 1966 and Kentucky’s Nate Northington broke down the SEC door in 1967 (Greg Page enrolled with Northington in 1966, but he died from a spinal injury suffered in a 1967 preseason practice). Hackett and Houston Hogg followed a year later.

Regurgitated stories gloss over Bryant stating on film he couldn’t find an academically qualified Black athlete in the 1960s. Not one. Such excuses ignore Bryant used his power to get players he wanted into school.

Alabama legendary quarterback Joe Namath (1962-64) was admitted after Bryant learned from Maryland coach Tom Nugent that Namath had been denied admission. Namath was previously denied admission at integrated Michigan State.

The simplicity of Bryant’s scheme also belies the difficulty of staging a trigger to a tripwire moment in time.

In 2016, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the National Anthem as a protest to police brutality, but the message backfired on him. NFL owners and right-wing fans hijacked it and made it about dishonoring the military.

Kaepernick’s message was lost until the May 25 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. Black Lives Matter awareness was triggered, but no one foresaw Floyd’s tragic death spurring national and global moments.

DENIGRATING MLK

In 2020, the FBI investigated as a hate crime a noose found hanging in Black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s speedway garage. MLK’s Civil Rights movement eventually brought about that kind of awareness.

But Texas fans waving nooses at LeVias in 1966 wasn’t enough. The FBI waited for a credible death threat.

LeVias received one for SMU’s game at Texas Christian, and FBI agents escorted LeVias to and from Carter Stadium. During the game, they scanned the crowd for a sniper, while LeVias’ teammates stood away from him on the sideline.

Throughout LeVias’ career he relied on words from King. When MLK spoke at SMU in the spring of 1966, a private meeting was arranged by SMU president Willis Tate and football coach Hayden Fry.

“We talked before he went on stage,” LeVias said. “He told me, ‘This is the thing I want you to remember … always keep your emotions under control.’”

LeVias repressed anger to respond to cheap shots. Without that advice he might have lashed out, possibly ending his SMU career and closing doors a few more years for future African-Americans.

MLK cleared paths for opportunities, but his work has been overshadowed by a flippant quote from former Alabama assistant Jerry Claiborne (1958-60): “Sam Cunningham did more for Civil Rights in 60 minutes than Martin Luther King did in 20 years.”

In one of many versions of the myths, Claiborne is portrayed as Kentucky’s head coach. In 1970, he was the head coach at Virginia Tech, the same year John Dobbins was the Hokies’ first Black scholarship football player.

Claiborne’s comment dismissed King and the Civil Rights Voting Act of 1965. It’s as if President Lyndon B. Johnson invited Bryant, McKay and Cunningham to the White House for the signing ceremony, while King was left at home.

The quote also overlooked simple math: King lived only 13 years between the Montgomery bus boycott and his 1968 assassination in Memphis. But Claiborne’s quote keeps finding its way into stories and films.

ESPN again avoided correcting history with its Sept. 12, 2020 feature that ignored the Cunningham fiction. It dubiously trotted out before cameras John Papadakis, a USC linebacker (1970-71) and bon vivant Los Angeles-area restauranteur good with telling a tale. Papadakis and USC assistant coach Craig Fertig had speculated in “Against the Tide” Bryant smiling after the game upon shaking hands with McKay demonstrates Bryant had a sly plan to outfox his fans. Overlooked by that assumption was USC had the game in hand by the second quarter. McKay substituted liberally, beginning in the third quarter.

Bryant would have been a Bobby Knight-like maniac to still have an unsportsmanlike temper raging over an hour later when he shook hands with his old friend. Maybe Bryant was smiling because he was grateful McKay took it easy on him.

Another reason to doubt Papadakis was revealed on Page 368 of Barra’s 2005 book, The Last Coach. Barra noted Papadakis tried to sell a screenplay he wrote, “The Turning of the Tide.” Papadakis’ movie wasn’t produced, but Showtime’s “Against the Tide” trumpeted a similar title. USC alumnus/actor Tom Selleck provided the voiceover, adding a veneer of credibility.

“I still believe the Cunningham story is not about celebrating Cunningham or USC, nor is it even really about celebrating Bryant or Alabama,” Demas wrote in his email. “It’s one of many white stories that emerge in the South during the 1970s that were meant to denigrate King, the countless marches and protests, the student sit-ins, and even the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and U.S. Supreme Court. The ultimate point of the Cunningham-Bryant myth is ‘see, we didn’t need any of that other stuff.’”

USC Cinema and Media Studies professor Todd Boyd, who has a PhD from Iowa, says in the ESPN 2019 film Bryant and other southern coaches were comfortable winning with all-white teams until the Civil Rights dynamic forced change.

Dr. Harry Edwards, a Professor Emeritus of sociology at Cal and a Civil Rights activist dating to the late 1960s, points out southern schools recruited Black athletes, but they continued to fly Confederate flags and symbols.

 1970 ALABAMA MYTH BORN IN LATE 1980s — IN L.A.

By 1970, SEC integration was fait accompli.

So much Black talent had found opportunities in football programs throughout the nation, including Deep South schools Auburn and Mississippi State, the floodgates Bryant’s apologists say he opened already flowed.

Alabama had been the last of the SEC campuses to integrate, in 1963. Alabama football and Vanderbilt football were the sixth and seventh conference schools to recruit a Black football player in 1970 and have him take the field in 1971 (NCAA rules prohibited freshmen eligibility until 1972).

Only Georgia, LSU and Mississippi waiting another year, 1972, prevented Bryant from ranking tied for last in the nation. By 1970, 18 of the 26 then members of the SEC (10), Atlantic Coast (8) and defunct Southwest (9) dressed Black players ahead of Bryant’s enlightenment.

USC-Alabama 1970 game stories published the next day were about a one-sided loss — without mentioning race or any suggestion of a Bryant ploy to create and Alabama awakening. In those days, sportswriters had free rein to the locker room. If Bryant had escorted Cunningham to the Alabama locker room, they would have witnessed and reported it.

Jim Murray of the LA Times referred to Bryant being dragged into the 20^th century. His column the next morning, Sept. 13, 1970, began this way under the headline: Hatred Shut Out as Alabama Finally Joins the Union.

BIRMINGHAM — “OK, you can put another star on the flag.

“On a warm and sultry night when you could hear train whistles hooting through the piney wood half a country away, the state of Alabama joined the Union. They ratified the Constitution, signed the Bill of Rights. They have struck the Stars and Bars. They now hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal in the eyes of the creator.”

Bryant, in his book, criticized Murray, whose primary point was merely segregation vs. Democracy and the U.S. Constitution.
Walter Cronkite’s CBS cameras weren’t in Birmingham that 1970 night as they were in 1963. CBS and other networks exposed the brutality of Bull Conner and the Birmingham police attacking non-violent protesters. That education pushed forward the Civil Rights movement.

The coach never addressed the state’s Black fans, explaining a new world was open to them. USC players say in documentaries they played the game and flew home. Change in the air wasn’t discussed.

USC author and alumnus Steven Travers, to his credit, in his 2007 book, One Night, Two Teams, traced the folklore’s origins to the late 1980s and the USC football office.

Travers writes McKay was “probably embellishing” when he said he helped Bryant. McKay left for the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1976, but two former McKay assistant coaches were still around the program and smitten with telling the story. Fertig was a Fox analyst for USC games (1992-2003) after his coaching days; Marv Goux upon retirement was active in the Trojan Club throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Fertig claimed in Showtime’s documentary McKay received a mysterious phone call from Bryant, asking to meet at a Los Angeles International Airport hospitality room. That’s where the scheme was revealed, Fertig dubiously contended. In the same film McKay’s son, J.K., says Bryant and his father spoke frequently on the phone and took long golf vacations to Palm Desert.

In a 2000 Los Angeles Times interview, McKay said the 1970 Alabama game was arranged over the phone. He doesn’t reference a furtive trip to the airport or a ploy to manipulate Alabama’s fans.

Travers also acknowledged USC broadcaster Tom Kelly began to repeat the myth in 1987 as he promoted a USC video, “Trojan Video Gold.” Then Travers stated in the Long Beach Press Telegram’s Loel Schrader was among the sportswriters that printed the story.
Five decades later, the national media still fails to do its homework.

 CONJECTURE + ALTERNATIVE FACTS = MYTHS

If Mark Twain were alive today as a college football fan, he might have said, “There are lies, damn lies and conjecture.”

But if there had been a kernel of truth to myth, the USC player for Bryant to educate his bigoted fans was USC quarterback Jimmy Jones. Unlike Cunningham, Jones was a returning starter that made a Sports Illustrated cover in 1969.

In 1970, Condredge Holloway was a highly recruited senior quarterback at Lee High in Huntsville, Alabama. Holloway has said Bryant told him Alabama wasn’t ready for a Black quarterback and he only recruited him as a defensive back.

Holloway, instead, made history at Tennessee as the SEC’s first Black quarterback (1972-74). Holloway was embraced in a neighboring state that had its share of bigots.

Bryant’s words to Holloway need to be weighed against him when speculating on his mindset in 1970. To accept he feared the alumni has been a specious excuse for too long.

In 2006, Papadakis was selling the USC/Alabama/Sam Cunningham mythology in a book with bestselling author Don Yaeger and Cunningham, Turning of the Tide. Yeager, to his credit, cites McCready’s 2003 reporting that exposed the Bryant/Cunningham locker room tale as fiction.

However, Yeager devotes nearly a full page with Papadakis’ fictional account of Bryant taking Cunningham into the locker room. Papadakis quotes Bryant belittling his players, telling them Cunningham, “ran your slow motion-asses right out of our own house.” The demeaning words explain why Alabama’s players were miffed, stating Bryant would never embarrass his players in that manner.

Alabama players such as then-sophomore John Hannah had already played with Black athletes once his high school in Albertville had desegregated. It was Bryant that needed to learn Black and White athletes could co-exist.

Hannah and Cunningham were later teammates with the New England Patriots. If Cunningham in the Alabama locker room had been a true story, they would have talked about it over old times.

Why Bryant has been celebrated for waiting until 1970 to recruit a Black player is an unanswered question. Speculation Bryant needed McKay in 1970 also overlooked Bryant and Daugherty were good friends. Daugherty took Michigan State on the road to play at segregated North Carolina in 1964, the height of the Civil Rights movement.

Alabama/Bryant authors Keith Dunnavant and Don Keith also rely on conjecture in their books and film appearances. They ignore Bryant, in his 1974 book, never mentioned or hinted at the plot.

In the pre-Internet age, stories about LeVias, Hackett, McClain, Owens and other pioneering SEC Black athletes were limited to their local media markets. Anyone in Los Angeles dreaming up a myth was likely unaware of the numerous integration steps – including Tennessee’s 1969 rout at Legion Field — that had taken place outside of Bryant’s realm. They created an oversimplified view of the changes taking place outside national attention.

Travers, when asked where he stands in 2020 on the Cunningham locker room parade, wrote in an email, “it is a myth.” He added: “Very early I knew it was untrue and wrote it, and at least in SC circles debunked a decades-old story and took some heat over it.”
Travers’ email added Fertig exaggerated the Cunningham story and Papadakas, “eventually backed off on the story.” But he stands by the theme, “USC/McKay was the perfect conduit.”

Yeager said in an email “no one suggested Bryant’s efforts changed ALL of college football … but it did change the game in the South. It would be a stretch to say others were harmed by the USC-Alabama story just because they did it earlier.”

He added he interviewed all Bryant’s then-living the assistant coaches and, “they were unequivocal that he was always intentional in efforts, especially re: scheduling. No one believes it was an accident that he chose an integrated team to come when the opportunity presented itself.”

REVISIONIST HISTORY FROM GENERAL LEE TO COACH BRYANT

USC’s 1970 team started only five Black players: Cunningham, Jones, tailback Clarence Davis, linebacker Charlie Weaver and defensive end Tody Smith.

The Trojans didn’t resemble Grambling, the Historically Black College and University football powerhouse, another element the myth purports. USC’s five Black starters were only three more than Tennessee at Alabama in 1969 — or 17 fewer than Grambling. Smith was a transfer from Michigan State, so it could have been four Black starters.

Davis is portrayed as an example of Bryant recognizing the need to keep Alabama kids at home. Conveniently skipped over, though, was although Davis was born in Birmingham, he moved away at age 11. He graduated from Washington High in Los Angeles. He played at East L.A. Junior College before transferring to USC.

Throughout the Showtime film, Alabama coaches and fans comment on how Alabama’s all-white team was overmatched against USC’s bigger and faster Black athletes. Left unsaid was same would have been true in 1966 if Alabama’s 11-0 all-white No. 3-ranked team had faced No. 2 Michigan State, with 20 Black players and 11 Black starters.

Michigan State’s 1965 and 1966 teams featured two of college football’s greatest defenses, led both years by defensive end Bubba Smith and rover George Webster. They were College Football Hall of Famers and the first and fifth picks of the 1967 NFL draft. Smith was a 6-foot-8, 285-pounder and Webster 6-5, 230; both players were ahead of their time with the size and speed for their positions.
Alabama’s 1966 All-American offensive lineman was Cecil Dowdy (6-1, 202), a ninth-round NFL draft pick. Who was going to block Smith or Webster?

Notre Dame halfback Rocky Bleier, who went on to win four Super Bowl rings with the Pittsburgh Steelers, has said when the Irish couldn’t block Smith, they ran away from him. The result was he suffered a lacerated kidney from a Webster tackle.
Alan Page (6-4, 245) was Notre Dame’s lone Black player, he was College and Pro Football Hall of Famer. Who on Alabama’s roster was going to block him?

Alabama fans have complained a half-century the 1966 Crimson Tide was a victim of reverse racism due to the Civil Rights movement for finishing behind No. 1 Notre Dame (9-0-1) and Michigan State (9-0-1). The Irish and Spartans played to a 10-10 tie in the Nov. 19, 1966 Game of the Century.

In the Showtime film, a quote from Jim Murray’s 1961 story was misrepresented, juxtaposed as if it was stated in 1966.
Left unsaid was by 1970 Alabama’s players, assistant coaches and fans accepted their players were smaller and slower. Why do they think 1966 was different?

Bryant’s apologists were quick to embrace the myth no matter its LA origins nor how many holes have been punched in it. Folklore overlooking Bryant’s silence during the Civil Rights movement relates to another case of southern-based historians deceptively capturing a narrative.

In the History Channel’s 2020 mini-series, “Grant,” the writers use appearances from today’s prominent historians to explain how influential southern historians from the early 1900s captured the narrative, shifting it from the South fighting to preserve slavery to a battle for states’ right. They labeled it “The Lost Cause” against northern aggression. They cast the South’s Robert E. Lee the noble general, the North’s Ulysses S. Grant as a butcher.

However, military historians that have studied the final battles concluded Grant outmaneuvered Lee, trapping his Lee’s depleted troops from reaching a train depot near Appomattox for supplies. Lee had no choice but to surrender.
The Civil War, of course, is an apocalyptic battle. The 1970 USC-Alabama game was just a football game. But both examples try to obfuscate the fact the South’s leaders were on the wrong side of history in the 1860s and the 1960s.

IGNORING ALABAMA’S GRASS ROOTS

The desegregation of SEC football began at the grass roots level – high school football.

Alabama’s high schools, under threat of losing federal funding, began to comply with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling in the late 1960s. To paraphrase Hemingway, it was a little at a time and all at once.

Some schools were ahead of others, but by the 1968-69 school year it was complete. It was the first year of statewide competition among Black and White athletes; the Alabama High School Athletic Association merged with the state’s Black schools governing body.
That was the tipping point.

College coaches – who previously drove past Black high school campuses – encountered African-American athletes upon visiting familiar recruiting haunts. Auburn was the first to see the open door — gaining Owens’ commitment — that Bryant had missed.

In the fall of 1968, Auburn assistant coach Jim Hilyer visited Fairfield High near Birmingham. He told head coach Ralph “Shug” Jordan the Tigers should offer Owens a scholarship. Jordan gave the green light.

No one fired Jordan or Hilyer. Owens played on Auburn’s freshman team in 1969 and made his varsity debut in 1970. It wasn’t complicated. It was simple – for anyone willing to budge from the status quo.

Bryant’s apologists claim Jackson’s 1970 commitment capped a “search” to find the right player, but it’s a specious argument attempting to match Bryant with Branch Rickey’s search for Jackie Robinson. Jackson played his senior year at Carroll High, a desegregated school in Ozark, Alabama. Does Alabama find Jackson if he was still at D.A. Smith, Ozark’s Black school that was closed?

In the fall of 1968, Alabama missed on John Mitchell at Williamson High in Mobile, Alabama. Mitchell was one of five Williamson High science team members that placed third in a state competition; all five were offered Alabama academic scholarships.

But Bryant’s “search” was unaware of Mitchell, a student-athlete that had earned a football offer from Grambling in addition to the Alabama academic scholarship. Bryant, rationalizing, had said on film in the 1960s he couldn’t find African-Americans. “We haven’t so far found many, if any, who are academically and athletically qualified in both.” Bryant’s apologists view this comment as a part of his “search” rather than the condemning statement it actually represents.

The search as defense of Bryant was further discredited once McKay offered Mitchell a USC scholarship. McKay would have landed Mitchell had he not revealed Mitchell’s name and homes state to Bryant when they played golf in the 1971 off-season. Bryant subsequently asked an Alabama alumnus in Mobile, Judge Ferrill McRae, to call every “Mitchell” in the phone book until the prospect was found. Mitchell flipped to Alabama. He started the 1971 season opener as a junior, making him officially Alabama’s first Black player; Jackson was a sophomore backup.

So much for Bryant’s “search.”

He also overlooked two future NFL players – if not other Division I athletes. Ken Hutcherson of Antioch High was a senior in 1968. He attended Livingston (now West Alabama) on his way to a three-year NFL career. John Stallworth was a senior in 1969 at Druid High, Tuscaloosa’s pre-dominantly Black high school in Bryant’s backyard. He went to Alabama A&M and on to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
In documentaries and sports reports Dunnavant and Howell Raines, an Alabama native and former executive director of the New York Times, are trotted out to defend Bryant.

Raines, unlike other Bryant apologists, faults Bryant for not speaking up sooner. But he also ambiguously defended Bryant, speculating the coach didn’t want to get down in the mud with a racist governor. Wallace’s term was 1963-67 — Bryant’s 1967, 1968 and 1969 recruiting classes were all-white.

 THE MYTH’S BIRMINGHAM WHITEWASH

What better setting for a Bryant parable than to overcome hate-filled Birmingham? But Bryant didn’t lead “Bombingham” out of its rubble.
On Aug. 28, 1963, MLK delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” in Washington, D.C. The Ku Klux Klan responded on Sept 15 with a bomb planted at the 16^th Street Baptist Church, killing “Four Little Girls.” CBS reporter Harry Reasoner said on TV, “No one has been charged with the bombing of the church, no one has been convicted for any of the more than 50 bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham.”
Korean War veterans that learned explosives fighting for Democracy on foreign soil set off the white terrorists’ attacks on American citizens.

The nation’s efforts to move forward from its racist past requires a reckoning. George Wallace, in 1979, apologized for his racism. This is the difficulty with celebrating Bryant for waiting until 1970 to recruit a Black athlete, especially with the false pretense of the 1970 USC-Alabama game fueling it.

Bryant’s 1974 book includes a disturbing tone-deaf passage on that suggests integration meant little to him in 1963 or with more than a decade to reflect on an infamous day in University of Alabama history.

June 11, 1963 was the day Wallace stood in the Alabama schoolhouse door to block the admission of Vivian Malone and James Hood. Bryant referenced it in his book, describing himself having meal at a Chicago airport prior to a connecting flight. He left “a generous” $20 tip, but the waiter chased him down, telling him he didn’t want his money.

“He was a white guy, too,” Bryant wrote in the book. “I put the money back in my pocket. If he wanted to cut off his nose to spite his face, that was alright with me.”

Bryant didn’t “get it” that day in 1963 nor with the passage of time. And that’s to say nothing of John Underwood writing the anecdote as if it was worth a chuckle over how Bryant as the sly fox pocketing tip money.Alabama 1960s football retrospectives focus on Bryant’s teams as the only pride white Alabama fans had in their state. They don’t ask why Bryant couldn’t lead like Maryland coach Tom Nugent signing Darryl Hill in 1962; SMU coach Hayden Fry, Jerry LeVias, 1965; Kentucky coach Charley Bradshaw, two Black players in 1966 and two more in 1967; Tennessee coach Doug Dickey, Lester McClain, 1967; and Auburn’s Shug Jordan, James Owens in 1969.

USC was added to an Alabama regular season schedule as one of nine integrated opponents. Seven were southern schools (Virginia Tech, Florida, Tennessee, Houston, Mississippi State, Miami and Auburn). Oklahoma made the final count nine out of 12 in the Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl (24-24 tie).

Alabama’s bridge to an integrated scheduled had already been crossed by the time USC arrived at Legion Field.

The 2019 ESPN film included misleading conjecture from Michigan author John Bacon and others contending Bryant was “tired” of losing to Black athletes. They cite Alabama’s slump from 1966 (11-0) to 1969 (6-5) as an impetus, but it’s a misleading theory.

Bryant’s 1967 team was 8-2-1 and ranked No. 8 in the nation; it didn’t lose to a Black player. The 1968 club was 8-3 and No. 17; it faced two African-Americans in the regular season, losing to Tennessee and Lester McClain (10-9) and beating Miami and Ray Bellamy (14-6).
In 1969, three of Alabama’s four regular-season losses were to all-white teams (Vanderbilt, LSU and Auburn); the fourth to SEC champion Tennessee, 41-14. The Liberty Bowl loss was to integrated Colorado, 47-33.

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD’S TRACKS

Daugherty’s passengers represented eight of 11 southern states – all but Alabama, Tennessee and Maryland. His chief engineer for the Underground Railroad among southern Black high school coaches was Willie Ray Smith Sr., a Texas high school coaching legend for 33 years with 235 career wins and two Black state titles. His final 18 were at Charlton Pollard in Beaumont, near Houston.

Smith sent Daugherty nine players, including three starters in the 1966 Game of the Century, his son Bubba, Charlton Pollard; Gene Washington, Baytown Carver; and Jess Phillips, Charlton Pollard Smith tried to steer Jerry LeVias of Beaumont’s Hebert High, but once SMU’s Hayden Fry recruited LeVias to break the SWC color line, LeVias said he opted for warmer weather closer to home.
“College football needed Duffy Daugherty and Hayden Fry to do the right thing,” LeVias said. “Michigan State should be proud of what they did. Instead of sitting back and waiting for someone to tell their story, if I was a Michigan State recruiter in a living room with a kid’s family, I’d be saying, ‘Do you know the history of Michigan State?’”

A story circulated for years Bryant had sent Charlie Thornhill, an All-Big Ten linebacker from Roanoke, Virginia, to Daugherty. Thornhill died in 2006, but his younger brother William said Charlie had committed to Michigan State without Bryant’s involvement. They did meet when Bryant spoke at 1963 Roanoke football banquet, but Roanoke’s newspapers had already reported Thornhill’s commitment to the Spartans.

Although Minnesota’s 1960 national title team gained an Underground Railroad identity, Gophers coach Murray Warmath’s recruits were limited to contacts in North Carolina. Bobby Bell was from Shelby, Carl Eller Winston-Salem and Charlie Sanders Greensboro.
Illinois found Pro Football Hall of Famer Bobby Mitchell of Little Rock, Arkansas, through Illinois alum Henry Britt, an Arkansas judge. Britt’s college roommate was Illini assistant coach Mel Brewer.

Michigan State’s 1966 transcendent roster sold integration on TV screens like Madison Avenue pitched products. Visibility is viability.

•  The South’s first Black quarterback to win a national title was Jimmy Raye of Fayetteville, N.C. He was one of two Black starting QBs in the nation in 1966.
• Eleven Black starters — four on offense, seven on defense – not only represented half the lineup, but it was also more than entire rosters at other integrated schools.
• Four College Football Hall of Famers, Bubba Smith, George Webster, Gene Washington and Clinton Jones, marked a first for African-Americans from the same class.
• Two Black team captains, Smith and Jones, without a one of the captains a white teammate sharing the role
• The first all-minority backfield behind Raye, Jones, a halfback; Dwight Lee (Black), halfback; and Bob Apisa (Samoan), fullback.
• Apisa was college football’s first Samoan All-American. The Godfather of Polynesian Football from Honolulu launched the wave of Polynesians that permeates every level of the game. Daugherty’s Hawaiian Pipeline dated to the 1950s.

Daugherty had the backing of school president John Hannah (1946-69), whose integration efforts permeated the campus. Hannah was the first Civil Rights Commission chairman as appointed in 1957 by President Dwight Eisenhower.

Documentaries on Bryant and the 1970 USC-Alabama game leave the impression Michigan State’s influence began with Daugherty recruiting Bubba Smith out of Texas on the 1965 and 1966 teams.

Dunnavant states in the ESPN film that Michigan State was “… one of the most integrated programs in the country.” The misleading impression from Bryant apologists and USC myth crafters overlook that the AP reported Michigan State’s 17 African-Americans in 1962 was a record for major college football the same year USC had only five Black players.

HBO, Showtime and ESPN failed to capture a portrayal of Daugherty and other the pioneering southern school coaches driving the integration bus in the 1960s. The bus had left the station by the time Bryant tried to catch a ride.

SHAPING THE FUTURE

The influence of Daugherty and his southern high school coaches as engineers continued onto to greater heights. In the 1967 NFL draft, four of the top eight picks were Spartans: Smith No. 1, Baltimore Colts; Jones No. 2, Minnesota Vikings; Webster No. 5, Houston Oilers; and Washington No. 8, Vikings. Also unprecedented: six of the top 10 were Black.

The 1967 draft was the first combined NFL/AFL draft following the merger. In all, there were 10 Black payers out of 26 teams. A year earlier, there were only four Black players taken among 16 NFL and 10 AFL teams; two years earlier, three among 26 teams.

The increased number of Black players on college rosters Michigan State launched in the 1960s was trickling “up” to pro football.
“Duffy’s legacy has endured through our associations with him,” Raye said. “Because Duffy gave me the opportunity to come from North Carolina to Michigan State, I played in the limelight of a championship team with some the greatest players of in history of the game.”

Daugherty also launched coaching careers of Raye (1972) and Sherman Lewis (1969). Lewis was Daugherty’s first Underground Railroad All-American in 1963 when he placed third in the Heisman Trophy voting; Raye was the South’s first Black quarterback to win a national title as a backup in 1965 and starter in 1966.

When Raye joined the San Francisco 49ers in 1977, there were only seven other Black assistant coaches in a 28-team league. He was one of the league’s first coordinators as the offensive coordinator with the Los Angeles Rams in 1983.

Lewis remained at Michigan State until moving onto the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers in 1983. He won three Super Bowl rings with the 49ers and a fourth as an offensive coordinator with the Green Bay Packers.

Lewis and Raye were college and NFL assistants for decades, rising to NFL offensive coordinators, but they were denied a chance as a head coach.

Super Bowl champion and Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Tony Dungy considers Raye a mentor. Raye recruited Tyrone Willingham in Daugherty’s last class out of Jacksonville, N.C. Willingham played under Raye and Lewis until his own coaching career, breaking barriers as a Black head coach at Stanford, Notre Dame and Washington.

“No. 1, they both deserved to be head coaches,” Willingham said. “The system malfunctioned not allowing them a chance.”

HEROES AWAIT SALUTE

Debunking the 1970 USC-Alabama myths aren’t about erasing Bryant’s 323 wins and six national titles; he remains arguably the college football’s greatest coach.

It’s about correcting a narrative that dispossessed the true pioneers their place in history. Today’s players stand on their shoulders. Can the true 1960s pioneers be reintroduced similar to Robinson?

Colonel Jack Jacobs, a Vietnam War Medal of Honor recipient, provided an explanation on how some heroic stories become celebrated and others pushed to the corners. In Jacobs’ role as an MSNBC military analyst, he commented on an Afghanistan War Medal of Honor recipient. As the segment ended, the show’s host asked, how does someone win a Medal of Honor?

Jacobs explained first you have to do something. Then somebody that saw it has to write it up. And, finally, somebody at the top has to salute it.

The true 1960s pioneers continue to wait for their salute.

Tom Shanahan, an award-winning sportswriter and the author of Raye of Light, spent the bulk of his career in San DIego writing for the San Diego Union-Tribune. He has covered NCAA Tournaments, Super Bowls, Rose Bowls, the NBA Finals and the World Series in a career that included writing for many outlets, including the Detroit Free Press, Raleigh News & Observer, MLB.com, Rivals.com and the National Football Foundation’s Football Matters. He won multiple first-place awards from the San Diego Press Club and first place from the Copley News Service Ring of Truth Awards. The National Football Foundation/San Diego Chapter presented him its Distinguished American Award in 2003. USA Track and Field’s San Diego Chapter presented its President’s Award in 2000. Raye of Light: Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, the integration of college football and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans explains Duffy Daugherty’s pioneering role and debunks myths that steered recognition away from him to Bear Bryant.

Hungry

by Georgia Cloepfil

My family used to tell me I ate like a growing boy. I wonder where all of the extra went. Did it come out the soles of my feet, or the top of my head when I ran? I think about how a body uses time and energy, how it burns itself up. At my hungriest, I finished an entire entrée of ravioli before my family had been served and then ordered a second plate. At other times, I barely skimmed the top of the salad bar offerings: shaved beets, spinach, sunflower seeds.

In Tibetan Buddhism, hungry ghosts dwell in their own realm on the Wheel of Life. They are teardrop-shaped and have a neck so thin that to eat would be painful, to swallow impossible. They have “mouths the size of a needle’s eye and a stomach the size of a mountain.” These ghosts are representative of souls who, even in afterlife, are saddled with terrestrial, material desires.

The soccer landscape of my childhood was dotted with fast food and truck stop dinners. Sub sandwiches and spaghetti. On the bus, piles of damp pizza boxes in the aisle and liters of soda poured into open mouths. This kind of food was not meant to taste good, to be savored or enjoyed. It was sustenance; there is a 30-minute window after concluding exercise in which you should refuel the body.

Before the Olympics one summer, Michael Phelps documented his daily food intake for a reporter at the New York Times. Breakfast: three fried-egg sandwiches, coffee, a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grain, three slices of French toast, three pancakes. Lunch: one pound of pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches, energy drinks. Dinner: one pound of pasta, an entire pizza, energy drinks.

Most teams I played for had us wear GPS devices that tracked how many calories we burned, how fast we accelerated and how much distance we covered in a single game or a practice. The average training: 1,500, 30.1, 6.1.

You can get tired of eating when you have to eat so much. Some elite athletes consume nearly 8,000 calories to break even. My number was closer to 4,000 but it still drove me crazy. I ate toast or ice cream to pad the stats. I got full before I had eaten enough, so I ate six times a day. When I added things up, I was often barely at 2,000. I wondered where my body stole from to get the rest.

When I played in Korea, I could request whatever food I wanted before a game. Each week I ordered grilled steak, greens, omelets and rice, with sides of kimchi and soybeans. The team ate meals three hours before the game and I stayed at the table long after my teammates had excused themselves, finishing off every bowl of bapsang, every grain of rice. On days when we needed extra, they sent boxes of fried chicken to our rooms before bed and I sat with my teammates in a circle on the floor eating until it was gone, licking fingers. When we played well, we were treated to barbequed eel or intestines. When we played poorly, we ran laps around the almost-concrete playing field, pounding our legs and backs into submission. We played poorly enough, for long enough, that I developed a herniated disc in my back. I could feel it bulge and resonate with every step, but I couldn’t stop running.

In our limited free time, I went with my teammates to 7/11 and bought snacks. The convenience store had the comforts and the fluorescence of home. The snacks were much the same, too – Pringles, Kit-Kat, Coca Cola. But everything had a different flavor: green tea and cherry blossom chocolate, lychee soda. I learned to say yes to all food as I had learned to say yes to contract stipulations, flight times and living arrangements. When my new friend held out a Dixie cup full of boiled chrysalis, I skewered one bug with a toothpick and crunched into its liquid-filled shell. The taste of soil and blood.

An old teammate wrote about her retirement in a blog. Only after she quit, she wrote, did she begin to identify the small and pervasive stresses that she had grown accustomed to living with. A ceaseless chorus of questions. What if I walk there instead of drive? What if I have a glass of wine with dinner? What if I have an apple instead of a banana? What if I don’t sleep enough? The constant labor of eating and hydrating. Hunger can be the loudest thing in a person’s head.

At my college, football players were instructed by nutritionists and coaches to eat multiple burgers at each meal. They gorged themselves to gain weight, to bulk up, to listen to their coach, to be better at their sport. They gathered in groups on bar stools and ate straight through the hour-long mealtime. When their careers ended, this eating was one of the last habits to die. I watched graduating seniors sit in the dining hall alone, wondering when they should stop, fingering catsup onto their patties.

I think of the hungry ghosts, milling about on the edges of life and death. Their realm is just above hell and just below the human. The ghosts are each held back in different ways. Some of them have external obstacles; they are thirsty and see a stream far away that eludes them. These ghosts can never find what they need. Other ghosts struggle against more internal obstacles. Water will evaporate before it gets through their microscopic mouths and into their bellies. These ghosts can never satisfy their hunger or their thirst.

Desire to improve, desire to win, above all the desire to continue. When I stopped playing, I knew I would have to learn how to move less, how to eat less and how to feel fullness. Hunger encompasses both a lack and a craving; the word is a sealed loop of longing and fulfillment. If I am hungry, I am empty. If I am hungry, I eat more.

Georgia Cloepfil, originally from Portland, Oregon, is currently an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Idaho. Her work has been previously published at n+1 and Howler Magazine and has been featured on The Rumpus, Longreads, and WBUR Boston. She was listed a semi-finalist for the 2020 Southeast Review Ned-Stuckey Prize for nonfiction. She is working on a book-length work about playing professional women’s soccer around the world.

My Cuppa Coffee

by Anne Barney

I had my cuppa coffee in the bigs.
It tasted of air travel,
instead of Greyhound,
and hotel rooms
where the bathmats
weren’t made of paper.

It tasted of a meal
I hadn’t bought at a bus station,
and a uniform with a number
I’d never worn before,
one I’ll play
in the next Powerball drawing.

It tasted of a moment
when the crowd was louder
and the light was brighter,
but not bright enough
to turn hard cheese
to a beach ball.

It tasted of a moment
back in high school
when I finally got that girl
in the back seat,
but she said no,
and started to cry.

My cuppa coffee in the bigs
was hot and sweet to the taste,
but it burned my throat
goin’ down,
and it’s kept me awake
ever since.

Anne Barney is a poet, grant writer, and pastel artist in Rehoboth Beach, Delaward. She is author of four books of poetry: After the Barn Door Opened (Pudding House Publications, 2007), Nosegay (Pudding House Publications, 2002), Pinned to the Corkboard (Pudding House Publications, 2000) and Stolen Joy: Healing After Infertility and Infant Loss (Icarus Books, 1993). Her work has appeared in regional and national publications, including the Maryland Poetry Review, Antietam Review, Pudding Magazine, Chiron Review, and Little Patuxent Review. She thanks Jack and Jill magazine for first recognizing her poetry with an honorable mention when she was nine years old.

Driving Range

by Chris Abbate

Like monks in a scriptorium
leaning into their labor,
we are a perfect row of men,
each in his own hitting bay,
an oasis of concentration:
legs shoulder-width apart,
hands below the chin,
gripping the club gently, as if holding a bird.

Except for the occasional grunt,
feathered curse,
or sigh of disapproval,
we have taken a vow of silence.

We should have mastered it by now,
a simple rotation of the shoulders and hips,
a half-orbit around a white, dimpled sphere:
each ball a petition,
an agent of self-worth
we launch into this graveyard
of lofty expectations.

From a distance, one would wonder
what we are trying to prove
or disprove: a defiance of gravity,
a delaying of the inevitable descent to earth.
We have our own definitions
of madness, every swing closer
to the ten thousand required for perfection.

Hitting a golf ball should be easier than this,
easier than balancing a mortgage and marriage.
And sometimes it is,
like the times it feels effortless,
when the actor and action become one,
the way love feels at first,
the tiny moon of a man
rising above the tree line,
cresting into an arc of satisfaction,
a confluence of toil and desire
he points to and says,
Look. Look what I can do.

 

 

Chris Abbate’s poems have appeared in Connecticut River Review, Chagrin River Review, Timberline Review, and Comstock Review, among other journals. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net award and has received awards in the Nazim Hikmet and North Carolina Poetry Society poetry contests. His first book of poetry, Talk About God, was published by Main Street Rag in September 2017. Chris received his master’s in English from Southern Connecticut State University. He is a database programmer for a pharmaceutical company in Raleigh and since 2009 he has served as a volunteer coach for The First Tee of the Triangle golf program. Chris resides in Holly Springs, North Carolina.

Out in the Open

by Linnie Greene

At the Mets-Willets Point stop in Flushing, Queens, there are only two kinds of people, emblematized on a sign that reads “baseball” then “tennis,” which arrows pointing opposite directions. “Ahh, the two genders,” I thought as I turned right and down a long wooden boardwalk that dead-ended at the entrance to the Billie Jean King Tennis Center. That’s where I met Dad, who had carted a plastic bag full of Lance crackers and granola bars on the pre-dawn flight from North Carolina in case we got hungry mid-set. He splayed them proudly on a bench where he’d waited for me, the sky just lightening from an early morning gray.

The complex itself resembles a large, well-appointed shopping mall. On the left, a Polo store with emblematized rugby shirts and pleated skirts; on the right, a row of fast-casual dining options. Between were gazebos selling t-shirts and commemorative merchandise, and scattered throughout the park were other sirens beckoning the wealthy — brand-name European espresso, BMWs parked on display, Chase financial kiosks that doled out portable loaner phone chargers. The engineers of the last great recession are generous with their loaners, it turns out.

Things were branded more overtly than they were at the tennis clubs of my youth, but the feeling was much the same. I was wearing a pair of $2 plaid shorts from the Prospect-Lefferts Gardens thrift store and salmon pink Lacoste I’d ordered secondhand, thinking I’d show up as a parody, the caddy in a stoner comedy. Instead, I just looked like an imposter. Everyone else sported sleek, expensive workout wear, their stony calves suctioned into Lululemon or Nike as if they themselves might be called upon to sub in. If Serena couldn’t play, there were brave Peytons and Christinas from Long Island waiting in the wings to take her place.

Tennis has been a presence in my life since infancy, like television news or airport Chili’s: peripheral, mostly, but remarkably consistent. As a diapered child in Florida, I pointed to the boxy television and mistook men in the broadcast for my father and his singles partner. “Daddy, Todd. Daddy, Todd,” I helpfully explained as the professionals lobbed the ball back and forth.

In the suburbs, no one grunts like they do on TV. Affluent people in the gated North Carolina community where my stepmother lived when she and my Dad started dating tended instead toward chatter and collegial laughter, their strokes more languid, unhurried and unbothered. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it buys leisure. I never noticed a competitive edge, but then again, I only really paid attention from the corner of my eye, Discman playing Everclear, ordering French fries at the walk-up grill.

At my mom’s house in the same county, grass sprouted through the subdivision’s old clay courts defiantly; they were largely unused save for preteen boys horsing around on skateboards. The same facility takes on a different purpose depending on what surrounds it: the long-limbed unfussed versus the young and delinquent, elegant looping driveways versus squat two-bedrooms flush with gravel roads. In certain circles, “The Club” is synecdoche for an entire social sphere, and in others, it means nothing at all, just like “love” to a tennis player.

And because of these distinctions, it’s always seemed like those who belong can sniff out those, like me, who don’t. I possessed some ineffable quality that made me other, and it was never a matter of having the right shoes. My K-Swiss phase was short-lived, like two misplaced boats on my feet. I wanted to like Lilly Pulitzer more than the Paul Frank t-shirts from Delia’s with the monkey covering my prepubescent chest. I was both pained by and proud of the awkwardness I felt in places that capitalized the C in club, and then later at a big state school renowned for its athletics. It was not only that I could not really fit in but that I had no desire to. Tennis emblematizes a lot of the difficulty I felt in a particular wedge of the South: snobby, conformist, and married to tradition.

In my family, though, the ardor crops up everywhere, across social and political lines. My mom recently informed me that my aunt, a liberal former history professor, was a nationally-ranked mixed doubles player who served on the USTA committee. My dad plays weekly against hot shots half his age and volunteers swatting practice balls to my alma mater’s collegiate team. My parents’ own failed marriage began on courts in Mandeville, Louisiana, where they met reaching for Abita beer samples over the net. In a way, I owe my entire existence to the human proclivity for smacking a neon yellow ball into a narrow rectangle. That, and booze.

The booze in this particular corner of Flushing was of a decidedly different variety — $25 glasses of Moët-Chandon and botanical, effervescent cocktails. I saw fewer tattoos than any crowd in which I’d mingled for the past five years.

But as much as I felt like one planted in an alien land, that in itself was a familiar sensation, so I shrugged it off and followed Dad to the seats he’d secured mid-level near the courts. Knowing only a handful of tennis stars to begin with, I was oblivious to everyone who walked onto the rectangle of DecoTurf, but Dad’s commentary in my ear ran constantly, a pleasant tickertape.

“That’s John Isner,” he’d say while a presumably friendly giant bounced a ball against his racquet. “He’s from Greensboro.” There were never more than two degrees of separation from my father and the professional athletes on the court — they knew a tennis pro he knew, or their wife had looked at property he sold, or they played a tournament in Winston-Salem he’d attended, or their husband had coached his buddy back when he had played the circuit.

It was much like if I’d brought a relative along to a literary festival, enumerating the talents and dramas of the people who lurked around Brooklyn clinging to their manuscripts and complexes. “She got long-listed for a Booker and dated Jonathan Franzen’s assistant,” I might say, the largest difference being that everyone in earshot would be five foot two and taking antidepressants.

We rotated between matches and paused occasionally for overpriced Cokes. Tennis might be the only place where die-hards are more identifiable by their decorum than their lack of it; no one brandished signs or statement tees, the WASPy fear of tackiness manifest in all the khaki and sweat-wicking athleisure. Tennis, perhaps, is a last bastion of snobbery, growing to include minorities but drawing the line at people without taste. “The only taste she has is in her mouth,” my roommate’s mother is known to say, and I thought of this and pulled my new U.S. Open bucket hat further onto my head.

I could appreciate that aspect, at least. Even if my taste was an outlier, at least it wasn’t gauche; I can palate neutrals more easily than the kitsch of a Yankee’s fan or the showiness of the monied courtside at a Lakers game. The U.S. Open attracts rich people who intimidate not by throwing their affluence in your face but by adopting the cool confidence of someone who doesn’t need to brag, who has transcended such juvenilia. It’s just like the tech that suffused my West Coast life — the people in the vests making more than the woman with the Louis Vuitton purse, leaving the rest of us to chart those class nuances like high school gossips.

As the afternoon progressed it got hotter, and half the seats at any given match were in the direct glare of the sun. Dad pulled sunscreen from one his many Ziplocs and we reapplied.

I preferred to watch the women — rooting for Kazakh Zarina Diyas’s expressive game against the stoic Karolina Pliskova, to whom she barely lost. Holding my breath as American Sabrina Vickery lengthened her arm skyward and lobbed a serve over the net at Elina Svitolina. The impossible elegance of such quick movement, the way an angled racquet could make the ball touch down on a minute square inch.

Later, we ventured into the upper tiers of Louis Armstrong to watch minute versions Andy Murray and James Duckworth, like peering down at a diorama in a museum or a child’s set of matchbox cars.

It’s hard to know the last time my father and I shared anything about our inner lives. In adulthood, unlike childhood, we’ve achieved pleasantness, an anodyne and palatable state wherein we talk on the phone about once a month and text in the meantime — about the weather, a meme of a golden retriever, some distant relative’s new baby. We only occasionally broach politics and I made the mistake of buying him Hillbilly Elegy, a book he loved, before I knew what it was.

He probably finds my predilection for cats, socialism, and baroque thrifted outfits as puzzling as I find the scoring system in tennis, or the reason people play golf. He is a Scorpio, I am a Capricorn. We’re two vastly different people, and yet we share the same eyes and chin. We share the same context, the same knowledge of filling station BLTs and the superiority of certain mountain towns. For a day at the end of August, he shared the thing he loved most, and in his open enthusiasm, the enveloping quality of this sport in his life, I felt I knew him a little bit better.

Dad flew South again the same night he flew up, retreating quickly to his own job and the comfort of home, with its beagles and tree-dense solitude. It was as if he feared voyaging North too long might make him acquire a taste for absinthe or rideshare services. Later that summer, I would find out we had bed bugs and spend a weekend crying into plastic vacuum bags; he would tend to his ailing mother, situated in a nursing home in the Appalachians.

When the coverage came out about the final match — a tense set between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka that culminated in a series of questionable (racist) calls around Williams’ comportment — I was the first to text, clicking between several open tabs. “Can you believe this?” I said, in essence, tapping out a screed against racism, sexism, and the umpire in particular. A few minutes later, he replied, exasperated for altogether different reasons — something about sportsmanship, the embarrassment of chaos. We had found a new lingua franca. In the late East Coast summer, we had reached over the net and across the years, and unlike love in a tennis match, it meant something, even if I couldn’t tabulate the score.

 

Linnie Greene grew up in Durham, North Carolina and lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. She’s contributed to GQ, The New York Times, Pitchfork, and others, and is at work on a novel about art and jobs. Find her online at linniegreene.com, or at home with three cats, watching “Twin Peaks.”

Doubleheader

by Jeffrey Alfier

Thanksgiving. I listen to the final voicemail
my father left me, third week of September,

autumn but a hint fanning the heat of late summer.
He says he’s fallen again, this time in the kitchen

while leaning on my mother’s chair —
the woman who’d left three years ago

in a morphine sleep. I enter the house
and he appears unhurt — a toppled but intact statue

who’d found himself at a right angle to gravity.
I am angry with him for no discernibly sane reason.

But I don’t let it show. He wears that stupid red sweater,
as winterworn as a fugitive’s.

Lifting him is lifting a sparrow, so frail now
he leaves no footfalls. I take him upstairs,

settle him in his chair and we watch
a ballgame together — a late doubleheader.

He will fall again before the final inning,
relievers in the bullpen, warming up,

and staring at the rain.

 

Jeffrey Alfier’s most recent book is Gone This Long: Southern Poems (2019). The Shadow Field, another poetry collection, is forthcoming from Louisiana Literature Press (2020). His publication credits include The Carolina Quarterly, Chiron Review, Copper Nickel, Midwest Quarterly, Permafrost, Southern Poetry Review, and Sport Literate. He is founder and co-editor of Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review.

Turkey 

by Alex Taylor

I get drunk and buy a bowling ball. The first game I bowl a 122. I’m the only one here besides the manager and a girl running the snack-shack. I’d say the silence of the place is because of COVID-19 but it’s a Monday afternoon in a Gillette bowling alley.

“How’s the ball feel?” asks the manager, who sold it to me.
“Alright,” I say.
“Try another game, you get three for free with the ball.”

I order another pitcher of Bud Light from the snack-shack and she brings two glasses along with it. I fill both. It’s my first day living in Wyoming and, between the beer, the ball and shoes, I’m already $175 invested into a new hobby.

I think of the first night you and I went bowling together back in Michigan. Neither of us were any good. We drank beer and ate bowling alley nachos. You complained they didn’t give you enough sour cream. I placed eight two-ounce cups of sour cream on the table while you were in the bathroom.

I start another game and bowl a 116. The snack-shack employee goes to smoke a cigarette in the parking lot. I finish both beers and pour two more.

“Any better?” the manager asks.
“Worse.”
“You just have to get angry at the pins,” he says. “That’s what I do.”

I think of the engagement ring collecting dust in your closet. I start another game and bowl a 154.

“Drinkin’ for two?” the snack lady says.
“Habit.”

She brings me another pitcher, $8 more to the tab. Monday is the alley’s pitcher special, like a minor league baseball team having $1 hotdog nights without any fans.

Maybe it’s the shoes, I think, so I buy a pair of bowling shoes. My tab grows to a considerable percentage of the building’s rental payment. I pour two more beers and slip into the footwear that makes me feel like I’m wearing clogs.

I think of all the unanswered messages and the missed graduation, of the happy birthday that never came and the new guy you’re probably using to erase the memory of me. I bowl a 171.

“That’s better,” the manager says, with nothing else to do but critique my game and pretend to wash bowling balls. “Did the advice work?”

I think of shame. I think of the time spent feeling bad for myself. I think of the year I’ve spent away from you and the year you’ve spent away from me. I bowl a 182.

Another $8 to the snack lady nets me a fresh pitcher as I fight the craving to smoke.

“You gonna be here all day?” she asks.
“Lookin’ that way.”

She takes the empty pitcher and goes back to her bar stool across the alley. The dog at home needs to be let out. One more game of therapy.

I think about the day you promised we’d never break up. I think about all the days I believed you. I think about the letters you wrote for all our anniversaries. I think about you and aim straight at the two-pin. I think about you and bowl two turkeys. I think about you and bowl a 211.

“Whatever you were thinking about was working,” the manager says.

I pack the bowling ball and the bowling shoes in my trunk. I drive away from the bowling alley not feeling much like a winner. I haven’t been bowling since.

 

Alex Taylor is a sports reporter for the Gillette News Record in Gillette, Wyoming. He graduated from Western Michigan University with a creative writing degree and regretted it so much he went and got an MFA in creative writing at the University of Tampa. His work has been published in the Tampa Bay Times, Fleas on the Dog, and The Daily Drunk.

To Sport Right Now

by Dale Rigby

I sympathize with what baseball is trying to do,
but it is almost like they are swatting at locusts.

                                           –Bob Costas on CNN, July 28, 2020

Swish. It’s sixth grade Field Day, and I’ve already won the chess tournament, the South America trivia contest, and finally nipped Cindy Barr, my secret sharer, in the 50-yard dash.   And now she’s peeking a smile from over by the hopscotch chalk when I bend my knees and swish my first free throw.  “Attaboy” shouts Mr. Snell.

 Is to watch Justin ginger locks Turner hit a walk-off intra-squad home run and feel deep despair, a premodern eclipse, as a visible caravan of cars queue in the panoramic Dodger Stadium parking lot cum makeshift testing site.

 Swish. Have some faith, Montaigne! This be no pimply-male-captain-of-the-playground narrative. Count on sum comeuppance. Even now I’m not sure why I tainted that triumphal stage. But boy did the boy. This gafted child broadcast to a playground of peers a curious propensity he’d hidden like Portnoy his wanking from all but his pinkie-sworn parents.

Is to remember that the 1918 Red Sox World Series victory over the Cubs ended on September 11, in a season shortened by the national draft board’s “work or fight” order that deemed sport unnecessary labor.

 Swish. At the age of my kindergarten naps with Dick and Jane you, the Doogie Howser of the early Renaissance, were already un-schooling in your father’s famous petri dish, gamboling from peasant nursery to Latin mastery, groomed a free and feral spirit from the larval stage.

Is to wonder whether to call this week’s waltz from West Side Story between the Dodgers and the sign-stealing Astros a melee or a brouhaha or a bench-clearing-brawl or a fracas or a donnybrook when it brings to mind jittery juveniles social distancing at a Sadie Hawkins dance.   

 Swish. And then, alas, at age six, he banished listless you to the College de Guyenne and the fourth grade. That sucked, eh? When even steely Headmasters fear to accost a superior tongue, the fellows don’t exactly welcome one of the fellers. Take me out to the bully-game, eh?

 Is to revere Dr. Fauci’s Topp’s card despite that errant opening pitch, while remembering with recrudescent anger that President Woodrow Wilson never uttered one single solitary public word about the 1918 influenza which would, ironically, cause his debilitating stroke.

Swish.  And you might have grown to hate reading like your fellow nobles but for the indulgence of a mentor allowing indolent snatches at Ovid’s Metamorphosis; my savior was a Mr. Snell in sixth grade, who just smiled when catching me dawdling with The Natural during his basal math lessons.

 Is to kneel for eight minutes and forty-six seconds before the National Anthem.

 Swish. You contend that at “dancing, tennis, wrestling, [you] have never been able to acquire any but very slight and ordinary ability; at fencing vaulting, and jumping, none at all,” but your every sentence speaks gymnastics. And you, modest one, were an inveterate horseman.

 Is to discover that in 1918 Babe Ruth, presaging The Curse of the Pandimo, went 13 and 7 and hit .300 with eleven home runs.

Swish.  Micheau, was your sport colored by the tragic fate of your soldier brother,  hit by an innocuous court-tennis ball a bit above his right ear,  dying of apoplexy five or six hours later sans contusion or wound?

Is to watch Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old and grasp why the mandatory 1918 draft sent “many ballplayers,” patriots rightly horrified by trench warfare, “scurrying for jobs that were ‘essential,’” according to John N. Barry’s The Great Influenza.

Swish. Montaigne, you had some stones. When the plague zone reached your Tower in August of 1586 you became a homeless wanderer, leading a small caravan from your estate for six miserable months, unable to settle, forgoing your Essays, having to “take to road again as soon as any one of us felt so much as a pain in the tip of his finger.”

Is a childhood daydream listening to velvety Vin Scully — Davis goes back, a WAY back, to the wall — she’s gone! — before awaking to the piped-in nightmare of the ball rending asunder a cardboard cutout in the left field stands.

 Swish. In case of contact, the quarantine was forty days and forty nights, while you were “grieved to see the bodies of the dead scattered about the fields at the mercy of the wild beasts, which quickly overran the country.” Healthy folks would “dig their own graves betimes,” whilst “others lay down in them while still alive.”

Is to not whistle past the grave fact that after only eight days of Major League Baseball a full 20 percent of the games are postponed.

 Swish. My dear Montaigne, you said you were only made fearful those six months by the onus to “bear with the suffering of others,” because you carried your own “antidotes within me — which are resolution and patience.” Might you help us out a little here? We need an antidote, for our-center-is-not-holding, that’s for sure, but surely you’ve got something less below the Mendoza line, less bromide-like than resolution and patience?

Is to swat at locusts.

Clank!!  “Some groovy scene, all-timer school record and all little man…” said the hippie child DJ with a rainbow-dappled microphone from the community radio station….

“Oh that’s not so boss,” I told him, sounding like I’d just caught The Red Balloon, and then I went… 248163264128256512102420484096…droning on…oblivious…doubling digits into the many-too-many millions…like a precocious 1970 poster child for Ritalin.

Is to aver that even in virulent times it feels essential work to confess that my Winnie Cooper, the prettiest and smartest and fastest girl in the whole world, froze into an embarrassed frown at this new nerdy boy crazed with cooties. For to sport right now is to shelter in this place, to allow that, in memory’s cardboard cutouts, I am still that boy and she still that girl.

Dale Rigby, when not coaching nonfiction prose and trying to sell that Montaigne had some stones within the MFA program at Western Kentucky University, may be found on the golf course sporting black and gold headcovers from his beloved Iowa Hawkeyes. Among others, his essays have appeared in Sport LIterate, Fourth Genre, Iowa Review, Writing on the Edge, and Under the Sun.