[HBO] Breaking the Huddle: The Integration of College Football

I missed this when it debuted last month on HBO, but saw it last night and was really impressed. It's a fantastic look at college football in the 60's. There is a great interview with Hayden Fry and Jerry LeVias for you SWC fans. Alabama and "Bear" Bryant are the main focus.

Just a heads up if you are a history buff or a college football fan, set the DVR - It's worth it.

Schedule


SMU player Jerry LeVias is among the trailblazers in "Breaking the Huddle." (Southern Methodist University/collegiate Images Via Getty Images)

HBO Winningly Shows How A Playing Field Was Leveled

There is a school of thought in the South that says that Sam "Bam" Cunningham, a black running back for the University of Southern California, did more for integration in Dixie than did Martin Luther King Jr.

As shown in HBO's "Breaking the Huddle: The Integration of College Football," premiering tonight, this (slightly) tongue-in-cheek ethos comes from a Sept. 12, 1970, football game in Birmingham, Ala., between Cunningham's integrated USC team and the University of Alabama, which had yet to have a single black player.

Cunningham ran up, down and all over the Crimson Tide, en route to a 42-21 beatdown. It was there, the theory goes, that 72,175 anti-integration white Alabama fans woke up to reality: Their dearly beloved football team would never again compete for a national title without making use of black players. After the game, legendary Alabama coach Paul "Bear" Bryant -- who already knew this -- thanked the USC coaching staff for "what you did for us today."

Alabama had black players the next year.

You can say whatever you'd like about the Deep South's football mania, but you can't doubt its primacy in the culture. This entertaining, hour-long documentary works best when it gets at the regional belief that there are not life lessons to be learned in football -- there are football lessons to be learned in life. And when white Southerners realized that they would literally have to team with their black neighbors to achieve the common goal of winning football games, well, that was the emotional backbreaker for segregation.

It's an interesting sidelight to the bloody integration struggles of the era, and this entry in HBO's "Sports of the 20th Century" documentary series gets almost everything exactly right. It is told through archival footage of the games in question and interviews with the coaches and players who were then on the field.

Most riveting is when we get the sense that we're being issued a sideline pass into a world hidden from the headlines of the times. One of the best such episodes is the story of James Meredith's integration of the University of Mississippi. This is a standard hallmark of the civil rights movement, and most people know that President John F. Kennedy and Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett were engaged in tense negotiations over Meredith's admission.


But less remembered is that Ole Miss's football team was then a national powerhouse, and the Rebels were playing a key game the weekend that Barnett and Kennedy were trading phone calls. At halftime of the Saturday night game, with Ole Miss leading Kentucky 7-0, Barnett walked onto the field to rapturous applause. "I love Mississippi. . . . I love and respect our heritage!" he bellowed. The all-white crowd went berserk.

"It brought to my mind Nuremberg. . . . It was almost surreal," remembers Ole Miss punter Frank Lambert, who watched the scene from the sideline, comparing Barnett to Hitler. Lambert, who later played in the NFL, translates Barnett's coded meaning as: "I love white supremacy. I love the way we do things here."

Barnett, galvanized by the crowd, went back to his office, called Kennedy and told him any deals were off. Kennedy sent in Meredith and sent in troops, riots ensued, people died.

But it's the grainy black-and-white footage that takes you back to that time: The thousands and thousands of Confederate flags that Ole Miss fans waved at games (and would continue waving for decades); the fact that they had a mascot dressed as a Confederate officer, complete with white gloves, leading the team onto the field with his saber drawn.

Equally compelling are the stories of such players as Darryl Hill, a District native and the first black player for the Maryland Terrapins. He recounts the bitter racism he encountered during the mid-1960s, and has a great anecdote about black activist H. Rap Brown, who made the mistake of calling Hill a "punk" for not being more militant.

Most touchingly, Hill recounts playing an ugly game against Clemson, in South Carolina. He emerged from the locker room to find that "50,000 drunk Southern gentlemen are waiting to see this brother come out on the field." Amid the racist taunts, Hill set a league record for pass receptions in a game.

During the game, Hill's attention was drawn to a small rise outside the stadium, behind an end zone. Black people gathered there to watch the games because they weren't allowed inside. After the game, the men and children came down from the hill to crowd around the Maryland bus. They wanted to congratulate him. They wanted, in the late afternoon heat, to touch him, to look into his eyes, to take the measure of the man.

You don't forget moments like that because you can't. Football, and real life, can be like that.