The Joker by Andrew Hudgins

Author:Andrew Hudgins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Eight

The Perilous Needs of the Joke Teller

In the South, sports leads where religion, intellect, decency, and the United States Constitution have failed to take us. Sitting on my future in-laws’ couch, I watched the all-white 1970 University of Alabama football team begin the season with a loss to the University of Southern California. The Crimson Tide was slaughtered at home in Tuscaloosa, 41–21, and Sam “Bam” Cunningham, a black fullback for USC, ran for 135 yards and two touchdowns on just twelve carries. We stared at the TV, thunderstruck, as a team from Los Angeles manhandled our Tide. How could a football team from the land of the lotus-eaters be good enough to beat us? Beat us? Hell, they kicked the living, breathing crap out of us. And those of us in my future mother-in-law’s den were not the only viewers staring at their console TV slack-jawed in disbelief.

The defeat shocked the entire state. How could surfers, hippies, suntanned rich boys—and African-Americans—so thoroughly manhandle an Alabama football team? No one outside the South, where football and personal identity are more deeply entwined than anyplace else, can quite conceive the magnitude of this loss.

But Bear Bryant, Alabama’s legendary coach, understood the implications. In a widely published story, one that seems too good to be true, he invited Cunningham into the Alabama locker room after the game, pointed to the black man, and told his defeated players, “Men, this is what a football player looks like.” Bryant later commented that Sam Cunningham had done more in sixty minutes for civil rights in Alabama than Martin Luther King Jr. had done in twenty years. And some observers fantasize that Bryant may have engineered the pivotal moment behind the scenes, scheduling the game with his good friend Coach John McKay of USC. Bryant knew that Alabama’s inability or unwillingness to put black men in crimson jerseys had left them incapable of beating the best teams in the country. He certainly knew that he had invited to Legion Field in Birmingham the first fully integrated team to play in the state—an achievement in itself. USC was one-third African-American and frequently played with an all-black backfield at a time when Alabama, because of pressure from the state government, had avoided playing integrated teams when it could. Frustrated at losing talented black players to northern schools, Bryant was setting up his team to get clobbered by the deeply talented Southern Cal Trojans.

That’s the way the story is usually told. But as Samuel Johnson observes of the tale about why John Milton was not executed after the restoration of the English monarchy, “The objection to the anecdote is its neatness. No good story is quite true.” Sam Cunningham recalls that, though Bryant did take the unusual step of going into the visitors’ locker room to congratulate him and other Trojan players, “It wasn’t anything earth-shattering.” Likewise, the famous assessment comparing Cunningham to Martin Luther King Jr. has been attributed to two different Alabama assistant coaches. When the Wall

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.