They played a football game in Toronto on Saturday and, as has happened in so many big games before, the team from Buffalo came out on the losing end of the score.
In the big scope of things that really didn't matter much.
The UB Bulls fell to the University of Connecticut Huskies 38-20 in the third annual International Bowl. A record crowd of 40.184, the majority of them sporting clothing honoring the blue and white of UB, soaked in the pomp and circumstance that surrounds an NCAA bowl experience.
I took in the game with an old friend, Frank Zarrillo. We drove up the night before and checked into the stylishly decorated Hampton Inn and Suites in nearby Mississauga, ON. During the ride my mind wandered to the importance of the game for UB, its players of a half century ago, its Athletic Director and its coach.
Surely the game would matter to fans of the immediate and obvious, both on the scoreboard and along the heartstrings. But in an eternal and progressive sense the game held implications that transcended it beyond anything that would happen between the sidelines.
In 1958, the UB football team was one of the best in the nation. The team posted an 8-1 record and won the Lambert Cup, recognizing them as the best small college team in the East. They then were offered an invitation to play in the prestigious Tangerine Bowl in Orlando, Florida.
The team soon learned a hard lesson in the differences between the South and the North that were prevalent in this country 50 years ago. Bowl officials notified the team that a rule imposed by the local school district, which controlled the stadium the game would be played at, banned interracial sporting events. The Bulls were told to leave their two African-American players, Willie Evans and Mike Wilson, at home.
The team gathered to take a vote on whether to accept the invitation and came to a unanimous decision almost immediately.
"It was: 'Shall we leave the Italians home? Oh my God, really?' There was a lot of anger," Offensive Tackle Jack Dempsey told the AP. "We just threw the ballots on the floor and left. It was, 'Let's get out of here and go get a beer.' "
"They insulted two of our teammates, and we were going to hit them back between the ears by refusing to go without our teammates," added Quarterback Joe Oliverio.
The team stayed home and the sports chronicles show that East Texas State won the Tangerine Bowl by defeating Missouri Valley by a score of 26-7. The chronicles of social activism show that the UB team struck a blow for equality that continues to reverberate some 5 decades later.
Chuck Ealey quarterbacked the University of Toledo to three straight Tangerine Bowl appearances from 1969-71. The color of his skin is black. Ealey recently told the '58 team that his success in the bowls was a direct result of their stand.
It's hard to imagine today that what in the grand scheme of things was just an instant ago, players were barred from playing an American favorite sport because their ancestors had originated from somewhere other than European soil.
Somewhere as we passed St. Catharines, I got to thinking about former NBA great Charles Barkley. Sir Charles screamed out to anyone who would listen that coach Turner Gill's inability to parlay his success at UB into a job piloting a program from a major college, most notably Barkley's alma mater Auburn, was nothing more than racism run amok.
It's hard not to agree with old Chuck. Gill turned a moribund program, deemed maybe the worst in the nation, into a champion in just 3 seasons. Furthermore, he comes across as an intelligent, well-spoken family man. What else but the fact that he's black, or that his wife is not, could have led to a whole host of large schools to bypass him in favor of coaches with inferior records of success?
As a player attempting to start a pro career after a stellar career at Nebraska, Gill had to go to Canada to realize his dream. It just felt prophetic that his career had led him full circle.
Warde Manuel is the guy who hired Turner Gill. As we passed Hamilton I remembered that as UB athletic director, he is one third of an unmatched triumvirate in all of NCAA 1-A sports. Manuel, Gill and Men's Basketball Coach Reggie Witherspoon make up the only African-American grouping of men to hold those three positions at one school simultaneously.
Considering the disproportionate number of African-American players in those two sports the UB anomaly seems especially egregious.
By the time we made it to the Rogers Centre the next morning and were awaiting the start of the game, my mind was awash with visions of Harriet Tubman. It was "Moses" after all who led slaves along the Underground Railroad across the bridge spanning the lower Niagara to new lives as free citizens in Canada.
Many of those free men and women then recrossed the border and put down roots on US soil, giving our city a rich, integrated culture that it still enjoys today. The North Star led right to our doorstep and beyond and ensured that our region would always stand at the forefront of the fight for racial equality in America.
Just before kick-off a wonderful piece ran on the Jumbotron detailing the plight of the 1958 team. As the septuagenarian members of that squad walked onto the field to a rousing ovation, I had a sense of something happening that seemed to connect the past with the present in a way that I couldn't quite get my head around. Fortunately, Lee, the female half of a lovely couple of UB alums from Pittsburgh in the seats next to mine, spoke just the right words to put it into perspective.
"It's hard to believe that happened to men from our school," she said, before adding as Coach Gill was announced to the crowd, "but look at where we've come to now."
Yes, the sports almanacs will tell the tale of a team that went down to defeat last Saturday. But the ledgers where we are judged for all time will document nothing but winners on the two UB football squads bonded as brothers then, now and forevermore.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | January 6 2009 |