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New York Times bestselling author Jim Dent pens the compelling story of how a black and white player came together to break the color barrier in Texas football in 1965. Jerry LeVias and Bill Bradley bonded as friends at the Big 33 high school all-star game, producing a dramatic finish that fans still talk about.
Jim Dent takes the reader to the heart of Texas football with the incredible story of how two young men broke the chain of racism that had existed for more than half a century. In 1965, black and white players barely mixed in Texas. That summer, Jerry LeVias and Bill Bradley came together at the Big 33 game in Hershey, Pennsylvania. When no one else would room with LeVias, Bradley stepped forward. The two became the closest of friends and the best of teammates. LeVias called Bradley "my blue-eyed soul brother.'' Big-hearted, gregarious, and free-spirited, Bradley looked out for LeVias – one of three black players on the team.
The Texas team came to Hershey with a mandate to win. A year earlier, Texas had lost to the Pennsylvania all-stars 12-6 in the most significant defeat in the state's proud history. This was considered blasphemy in a place where football outranked religion. Texas coach Bobby Layne was mad-as-hell that he was forced to play with second stringers in '64. So he and assistant coach Doak Walker traveled to Austin and asked Texas governor John Connally to end the scheduling conflict with the in-state all-star game so he could suit up the best players. Layne also sought permission to recruit black players. After all, Texas was flush with black stars, some of whom would mature into the most notable players in the history of the National Football League.
Layne's scheme never would have worked without Bradley and LeVias. Together—and with Layne's indomitable will to win—the two led their team proudly to face down the competition at Hershey Stadium. The Kids Got It Right is a moving story, reminiscent of Remember The Titans. Jim Dent once again brings readers to cheers and tears with a truly American tale of leadership, brotherhood, and good-ol' Texas-style football.
- Sales Rank: #193720 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-08-20
- Released on: 2013-08-20
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
“If I could have any sports wish granted today, it would be that every student from seventh grade up in Southeast Texas be required to read Jim Dent’s latest and, without question, most important book ― The Kids Got It Right. Dent, who is a masterful story teller, is at his best with this real-life tale of how a courageous black athlete from Beaumont, Jerry LeVias, and a white superstar from Palestine, Bill Bradley, helped break down racial barriers in the 1960s in the context of a football holy war between Texas and Pennsylvania.” ―Port Arthur News
“Consummate sports chronicler Dent (Courage Behind the Game: The Freddie Steinmark Story, 2012, etc.) examines a transformative football event in Texas that blurred racial boundaries… A passionate, well-reported history of the role Texas football played in America's racial integration.” ―Kirkus
“Dent (The Junction Boys) spotlights on of the prouder moments in Texas gridiron lore, with its first high school football integration effort winning the 1965 Big 33… A work of tolerance, sportsmanship, and friendship, Dent's account of coach Layne and his boys is a feel-good American story that never slumps into slogans or stereotypes.” ―Publishers Weekly
“Porlific and popular sportswriter Jim Dent relates the forgotten story of the 1965 Big 33 All-Star game between high schoolers representing Pennsylvania and Texas… A warm and positive take on times of change that should appeal to football fans and broader readers.” ―Library Journal
“I know how big the Big 33 game was because I covered it back in the sixties in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was the Super Bowl before there was such a thing. Recruiters and writers came from everywhere just to see the talent. Once more, Jim Dent has brought home a story that is both fun and inspirational. Great writing, great stuff.'” ―Randy Galloway, ESPN Radio and Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“I've been covering major sports in Texas for more than thirty years, and I must confess that my favorite ones are always about the high school athletes. This terrific tale about the friendship of Jerry LeVias and Bill Bradley shines a bright light into a dark hole concerning the death of segregation. It is the best high school story I've seen yet. Of course, there is no one better to write it than Jim Dent because he is the best story-teller I know.” ―Dale Hansen, WFAA Sports Anchor
“It was first down and seemingly a lifetime for racial integration of Texas high school football. Jim Dent tells the compelling story of how two great players began that drive.'” ―Randy Harvey, Houston Chronicle
“Jim Dent has a great sense of the history of football in Texas, and it's place in our state's culture. Like his other books, The Kids Got It Right carries a message that will resonate with any reader. His book takes you back to a fascinating time in our country that seems distant, and yet really wasn't that long ago.” ―George Dunham, KTCK, The Ticket
“Jim Dent, dadgum him, keeps writing books I wish I'd written. Like The Junction Boys and Twelve Mighty Orphans, to name two. Now here he comes with another terrific effort, Courage Beyond the Game, the story of the most courageous kid to ever pull on a football suit. If you pick it up, it's guaranteed to pick you up.” ―Dan Jenkins, author of Semi-Tough and Dead Solid Perfect
“Jim Dent is a world class story teller, and in Freddie Steinmark's courageous and triumphant fight to be a man of substance, he's found a tale worthy of his ample talents. Dent will bring tears to your eyes, and Steinmark's example will make you want to be a better person.” ―Joe Drape, New York Times bestselling author of Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen, on Courage Beyond the Game
“You will cheer and you will weep as you read Jim Dent's irresistible rendering of one of the great real-life dramas in college football history. Dent has brought plenty of tough guys to life in his other books, but little Freddie Steinmark surely ranks as the toughest. Dent has brilliantly re-cast a Longhorn legend. I could not put Courage Beyond the Game down.” ―John Eisenberg, author of That First Season: How Vince Lombardi Took the Worst Team in the NFL and set it on the Path to Glory, and Cotton Bowl Days: Growing up with Dallas and the Cowboys in the 1960s
“Freddie Steinmark's story will inspire you and make you cry, and Jim Dent has told it better than anyone in Courage Beyond the Game. Jim's eye for detail and gifted writing will take you back to another place and time, and a new generation of college football fans will learn why Freddie lives forever in the hearts of those he touched in his brief life.'” ―Richard Justice, lead sports columnist for The Houston Chronicle
“Courage Beyond the Game is a wonderful book whose protagonist, the doomed University of Texas safety Freddie Steinmark, delivers just what the title promises. Veteran sports author Jim Dent infuses a narrative whose ending we all know with depth, tenderness, and unexpected insights. His Steinmark could have easily been a cardboard saint. Instead the Steinmark we meet is intensely human, inspirational, funny and utterly unforgettable. This was a book I couldn't put down.” ―Bill Livingston, Cleveland Plain Dealer sports columnist
“Jim Dent once again proves his mastery of the way football felt and sounded in the days of Texas and the Southwest Conference. His inspirational portrait of Freddie Steinmark takes us back to a purer time.” ―Mark Whicker, Orange Country Register sports columnist, on Courage Beyond the Game
“Freddie Steinmark defined college football with his unquenchable thirst for life, unbridled spirit through adversity, and rare passion for the game he lived to play. Jim Dent can tell a story life like few others and brought this must-read, must-be-told account back to life for all to relish with his riveting, gut-wrenching book, Courage Beyond the Game.” ―Kirk Bohls, Austin American Statesman sports columnist
About the Author
JIM DENT, a New York Times bestselling author, has written ten books including fan favorites Twelve Mighty Orphans and Junction Boys, which became a popular ESPN movie. He is an award-winning journalist who covered the Dallas Cowboys for the Dallas Times Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram for eleven years. For more information on the author and his book-signings, visit Jim Dent on Facebook on his personal page.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
The Blond Bomber
That steamy August night in the faraway hills of central Pennsylvania, Bobby Layne stomped the ground like a man snuffing out a grass fire. His full-throated Texas twang sounded like the whine of a distant crop duster. He yanked the spent Marlboro from his lips and fired it into the grass.
Unfolding before his eyes was the horror of losing the biggest game of his coaching life. Never mind it was his coaching debut. On August 1, 1964, Layne’s team of Texas high school all-stars was faltering against a bunch of overfed, heavy-legged Pennsylvania boys by the score of 12–6. The scene in Hershey grew more hopeless with each tick of the scoreboard clock.
The Texas team had traveled fourteen hundred miles to participate in the Big 33 Football Classic. It was called the Big 33 because thirty-three players were selected for each team. Weeks earlier, the all-stars from both Texas and Pennsylvania had graduated from high school. The vast majority were about to embark on college football careers. The contest had been arranged by a group of Pennsylvania promoters who were dead set on proving their state played a better brand of high school football than the arrogant Texans. A few months earlier, Sports Illustrated had ranked Texas as the No. 1 high school football state in America, followed by California and Pennsylvania. This was not surprising. After all, Texas high schools bragged of more football teams than all of America’s colleges combined. Texas was known for cattle and oil, but the state’s most prominent identity was derived from the Friday night lights that glowed from Dalhart to McAllen, and from Orange to El Paso.
So much was at stake in the final two minutes of the inaugural Big 33 game between Texas and Pennsylvania that Bobby Layne had worked himself into a menacing mixture of foot stomping and foul language. Nothing revealed the madman inside Layne like failure. His longtime friend Doak Walker once said, “Bobby never lost a game in his life. Time just ran out on him.”
Just three years earlier, Layne had walked away from a legendary fifteen-year NFL quarterbacking career that included back-to-back championships in 1952 and 1953 with the Detroit Lions. From 1950 to 1955, Layne was reunited with Walker, his best friend since high school days at Dallas Highland Park. Fans in the Motor City once considered Bobby Layne bigger than General Motors. His worshippers compared him to Mickey Cochrane, the catcher/manager who led the Detroit Tigers to their first World Series title in 1935. In an era when stars were measured more by magazine covers than TV exposure, Layne was the first football star to grace the cover of Time. The story read, “The best quarterback in the world is Robert Lawrence Layne, a blond-haired, bandy-legged Texan with a prairie squint in his narrow blue eyes and a athletic paunch on his ample, 6-1, 195-pound frame.”
Before Layne, the pro game ranked just a notch above championship wrestling. There were only fifteen million television sets in America in 1952, and the players operated in a sea of electric snow. Those in the stadium, though, knew that Layne was cocky and fun to watch. He played with a constant chatter that pleased the crowd and angered opponents. More than anyone else, he delivered the pro game into the golden age that officially began with the 1958 Colts-Giants championship game that went into overtime and almost sent America into cardiac arrest. Johnny Unitas was standing on Layne’s shoulders late that afternoon as he drove the Colts down the field in the shadows at Yankee Stadium. Alan Ameche’s 1-yard touchdown burst in sudden death overtime won the championship for Baltimore and changed the game for all time. They all could thank Bobby Layne for wallowing in the muddy trenches before the game was finally delivered to the masses on a clear Sylvania screen.
Before retiring in 1962, Layne held NFL passing records for attempts (3,700), completions (1,814), yards gained (26,768), and touchdowns (196). He was also credited with starting the two-minute offense. If he had thrived during the sports TV boom of the 1960s, he would have been Roger Staubach with a drinking problem.
After leading the Lions to a third straight NFL title game in 1954, and losing to the Browns, Layne began to battle injuries that included a torn labrum in his right shoulder. Still, no one was surprised that he stared down the pain. By 1957, his loosely hinged throwing shoulder felt like it had been stuck with a hot poker. He often medicated himself in the locker room with shots of straight whiskey. Baltimore tackle Art Donovan once sacked Layne and upon smelling his breath asked, “Bobby, have you been drinking?” “Hell yes,” Layne snapped, “and I plan to have a few more at halftime.”
Bob Hope once quipped, “He’s the only football player who had a water bucket on the sideline with a head on it.”
As the late nights took their toll, Layne’s football mystique began to fade in 1957. Still, he led the Lions to the brink of yet another NFL title game before shattering his right ankle in a late-season game against the Browns. He was viciously high-lowed by tackles Don Colo and Paul Wiggin. The lower right leg and ankle collapsed with a cracking sound, three bones breaking at once. His replacement, Tobin Rote, steered the Lions all the way to the NFL championship game, where they pounded the Cleveland Browns 59–14. The third league championship of the decade should have belonged to Layne, but the toast of the town turned out to be Rote.
When Layne was no longer the brightest star in Detroit, his drinking accelerated. The wary Lions traded him to the Pittsburgh Steelers after the second game of the 1958 season. The Steelers were the doormat of the NFL before Layne arrived. Pittsburgh turned out to be no place to send a thirsty man like Bobby Layne. The town was cold and lonely, and the Steelers were a hopeless bunch. Boos roared down on Pitt Stadium like a blizzard off the Monongahela River. Still, Layne cobbled together three winning seasons in five years.
Layne’s drinkathons were as famous as the binges of Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle. Not surprisingly, Mantle and Layne hit the bars at full speed when their off-seasons overlapped back home in Texas.
When his controversial career ended in 1962, Layne still firmly believed he would become the next great head coach in the NFL. It was the same trap that Babe Ruth had fallen into during the mid-1930s. Ruth believed he could eat, drink, and chase women until dawn and still wind up a manager. He found out the hard way. “Ruth, you can’t even mange your own life,” Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert told him. “How can you manage a baseball team?”
Not a single NFL team was willing to roll the dice on Layne. He could not outrun his own reputation. His friendship with renowned football fixer Donald “Dice” Dawson had set in motion rumors that Layne bet on his team during the glory years of the 1950s. Dawson once admitted to fixing thirty games. There was no way that a competitor like Layne fixed games, but NFL players gambling on games in the 1950s was as common as helmets without face masks. Average salaries ranged from $8,000 to $10,000. Players could make mortgage money by betting on or against their own teams.
Layne’s friendship with Dawson was widely known. They spent time together in Detroit, and Dawson traveled to Lubbock during the off-season and stayed at Layne’s house.
During the late 1950s, Layne struck up a friendship with Green Bay running back Paul Hornung, who would be suspended by the NFL in 1963 for betting on games. Hornung and Layne were known for their carousing, and both loved to gamble. In a book titled Golden Boy that was published in 2004, Hornung wrote, “Bobby gambled more than anybody who ever played football, period. How did the league go all those years without ever getting him?”
Layne denied ever gambling on games. He wrote in his 1962 autobiography, Always on Sunday, “I know that I’ve been accused of gambling, especially when the team loses … But I would have to be crazy to endanger my livelihood for a few thousand dollars.”
The official crackdown on gambling began with the hiring of Pete Rozelle as the NFL commissioner in 1960. The game would have to be cleaned up if the league was ever to make megamillions off the TV networks. One of the first players to be summoned to Rozelle’s New York office to discuss gambling rumors was Layne. No action was ever taken against him, but the rumors still persisted.
As part of the cleansing, the commissioner suspended two of the league’s best players, Detroit tackle Alex Karras and Hornung. Ironically, Karras spent a good portion of his rookie training camp partying with Bobby Layne and learning the ropes.
Upon Layne’s retirement, the atmosphere was not right for his ascension to the head coaching ranks. When no one hired him, Layne took a part-time job with the Steelers, working the press-box phones and relaying information to coaches on the sideline. Not exactly the kind of job you would expect a two-time NFL championship quarterback to have.
For two long years, Layne did not receive a single call from an NFL owner. So he telephoned Buddy Parker, his former coach in Detroit and Pittsburgh, to ask why.
“Bobby, I hate to tell you this,” Parker said, “but Rozelle is trying to purify the game. You’re one helluva competitor, but you’ve got a bad reputation. Nobody is looking to hire you.”
Never in his life had Layne faced a challenge he could not conquer. He was the dogged street hustler. In the spring of 1964, though, Layne was on the outside looking in.
No one was surprised when he jumped at the chance to coach the Texas Big 33 all-star team. Men like Layne are forever searching for redemption. Old jocks do not readily adjust to life after football, especially when your name is Bobby Layne. He was pushing forty when he got his first coaching offer and a whopping $500 to lead the Texas high school all-stars into the biggest game of their lives.
Layne believed the Big 33 game before 25,000 fans at Hershey Stadium would be his ticket back to pro football. He visualized the national sporting press converging on Hershey for the single purpose of trumpeting his return to the national stage. He would buy the writers fresh drinks and regale them with old stories. Surely they would be smart enough to recognize the promise of his coaching prowess.
The Big 33 game was a grand experiment cooked up by a Harrisburg sportswriter and a team of promoters in central Pennsylvania. The Pennsys were pissed off that they were a distant third behind Texas in the most recent Sports Illustrated high school rankings. How could a state that had bred and reared such players as Joe Namath, John Unitas, and Johnny Lujack not be No. 1? The Pennsylvania promoters were itching to call out the Texans.
During the winter of 1963, the Pennsy organizers decided to contact Texas sportswriter Fred Cervelli and proffer a game. Cervelli was baffled to receive the Western Union wire, along with a phone call from Harrisburg Patriot-News sports editor Al Clark. Cervelli was just a small-town sportswriter from Orange, deep in the southeast corner of Texas. He was a kindhearted man without an arrogant bone in his body. He loved every high school kid he covered.
Clark asked Cervelli if he would pick the best thirty-three players in the state to represent Texas against Pennsylvania. He would also be in charge of hiring a head coach.
“I guess I can handle it,” Cervelli said. “But here’s my question for you, Al. Why didn’t you call one of the big-time writers from Houston or Dallas?”
“Because you know high school football better than anyone in Texas,” Clark said.
Having grown up in Texas, Cervelli could smell bullshit upwind or downwind. He knew Clark was not telling him the whole truth.
Without delay, Cervelli contacted Layne, his childhood hero, to ask if he would coach the team. The two had never met, but the sportswriter was certain that Layne was the right man for the job.
“Hell, yes, Fred, I’m your man,” Layne said.
To Layne, the Big 33 all-star game between Texas and Pennsylvania seemed larger than an NFL title game. He quickly picked Doak Walker, the Heisman Trophy winner at SMU in 1948, to be his No. 1 assistant. The two had been best friends since high school playing days at Highland Park High in Dallas and played together for several years in Detroit.
The giddiness of it all lasted two full days before Cervelli called Layne with the bad news. As it turned out, the Texans had been hornswoggled. The date of the Big 33 game, August 1, was the same as the Texas North-South All-Star Game. The Pennsylvanians had intentionally set the August 1 date to make sure the Texans would not be bringing their best players north. In effect, Layne would be coaching Texas’s junior varsity.
“Bobby,” Cervelli said to his new coach, “the Pennslvania promoters took advantage of me. I could smell a rat when they called. They already knew our all-star game was on August 1. I should have seen it coming. I’m real sorry, Bobby.”
“Hell, Fred, we all get caught with our panties down,” Layne said. “Your panties just happen to be bigger than most. Don’t worry, Freddie boy. We’ll still whip their asses with the fourth stringers if we have to.”
When the team traveled north in late July, Layne’s trademark cockiness never slept. He swaggered into his first press conference and said, “We came up here with our second stringers, but we’ll still whip these lard-ass boys from Pennsylvania. We’ve got speed and they don’t. Wait till those fat boys from Altoona see our quick little rabbits.”
On Layne’s roster was some decent talent. Still, his only blue-chipper was Palestine halfback David Dickey. (The town is pronounced Pal-uhsteen.) Layne had big plans for the swift, agile, and powerful Dickey until he tore two ligaments in his right knee on the first play of the game.
Layne’s playbook might have been thicker than a Baptist hymnal, but it was shredded before halftime. His pro-set passing offense was hapless without a strong-armed quarterback. Sports Illustrated writer Robert H. Boyle described the action as “three yards and a mushroom cloud.” He also wrote, “The teams played as though they were fighting over a bone instead of a ball.”
The Texans crossed the 6-yard line three times and came away with only 6 points. The game might have ended in a 6–6 tie if not for a breakdown in the Texas kicking game. With 5:30 to play, Texas punter Ken Hebert sent a high, 43-yard punt down the middle that was fielded by Ben Gregory at the 20-yard line. Gregory took two steps upfield, rammed into a Texas defender, then bounced to the outside. Gregory found his picket line of blockers down the left sideline and dashed 80 yards to the end zone.
After the game, Layne stormed off the field and dog-cussed everyone in his wake. The Hershey PA announcer bellowed, “Hey, Texas, do you want a rematch?”
Layne glared into the press box and wagged the dirty finger at the man. “Hell, yes!” he yelled. “We’ll be back next year with our real team!”
Layne would never forget the catcalls rumbling down from the overwhelmingly partisan crowd. The Hershey fans even blamed the Texas players for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy nine months earlier.
“Hey, Texas, you killed our president,” they yelled. Layne almost climbed into the stands, but Walker stopped him.
For weeks, Layne could barely sleep. The loss had been nothing short of blasphemy in a state where football outranked religion. Even more disheartening was the wild celebration in Hershey and the chest thumping that followed.
“We knew all along that we were the best football state in America, a lot better than those braggarts from Texas,” Pennsylvania governor William Scranton said.
No doubt, Texans had invented the art of full-blown bragging. So hearing a windbag like Scranton chattering on about planetary supremacy was a bit unsettling. Since the advent of the leather helmet, Texas had billed itself as the Cadillac of high school football.
Layne blamed himself for the defeat. “Doaker,” he said, “I feel so danged bad. Hell, I couldn’t coach frogs to jump.”
He promised himself that he would return in exactly one year with a better team and a superior game plan. He would win next time, even if it killed him.
Copyright © 2013 by Jim Dent
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
The Kids Got It Right
By David Dickey
Jim Dent chronicles what today would be an insignificant occurrence - a white athlete rooming with a black athlete - but in 1964 it was a giant leap for
and a major break through in college football in the South. Jerry Levias courageously broke the color barrier in the treasured and storied Southwest Conference. Some might say Bill Bradley was courageous for volunteering to room with Levias at the Big 33 game in Hershey, PA. It was not courage. It was Bill Bradley being Bill Bradley. A friendship emerged that transcended the historical significance of that week in Hershey. Having played against Levias in college I can only imagine the courage it must have taken for him Saturday after Saturday to visit the hostile stadiums of the SWC - including his own home stadium - the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. And not only to face the hostility every week, but to play at the level he played is truly amazing.
A great read and a fun read. Dent's narrative of Bradley's friend and teammate from Palestine, Curtis Fitzgerald, and the courage he displayed in Vietnam could be a book within itself, if not a movie.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
An Inspirational and Enjoyable Book
By Bookreporter
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and the great demonstrations across America in support of the Civil Rights movement. Much has been written and spoken about this chapter in our nation's history. Throughout the discussion, many have recognized the influence of athletics in opening the doors of white-only institutions and the resulting integration of our society. Many share the belief of Alabama assistant football coach Jerry Claiborne, who observed, "Sam Cunningham did more for integration in sixty minutes than Dr. Martin Luther King did in twenty years."
Cunningham was an African-American football player at USC. In 1970, his team travelled to Birmingham to face the University of Alabama, a school that still refused to recruit black players. The Trojans of USC crushed Alabama 42-21. Cunningham ran wild in the game, and the following year Alabama officials allowed Bear Bryant to recruit black athletes. The last walls of segregation at southern colleges crumbled away.
THE KIDS GOT IT RIGHT is the story of another event that served to move the civil rights meter a few steps closer to the goal of equal justice. Jim Dent, who has written football history (from Bronco Nagurski to Bear Bryant), tells the story of the Texas-Pennsylvania high school football rivalry of the 1960s where the two states, both claiming superiority on the gridiron, battled in the Big 33 game in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
The first Texas-Pennsylvania battle occurred in 1965. Pennsylvania made certain they would win the game by scheduling the contest for the same weekend as the annual Texas High School All-Star game. The best Texas players stayed home for the most prestigious game in the state. The Texas team was coached by former NFL great Bobby Layne, who took the Texas loss personally. He vowed not to suffer the same fate in 1966. When Pennsylvania once again scheduled the game to conflict with the Texas all-star battle, Layne went all the way to Governor John Connelly to get the Texas game rescheduled. Of course, he appealed to state pride to accomplish the task, and the Governor intervened to eliminate the conflict in games. In the '60s, as well as today, Texas football is king.
The Texas-Pennsylvania game may have been an exhibition, but the fiercely competitive Layne pulled out all the stops to win. He knew that with the proper players, his team would have a speed advantage over Pennsylvania. One of the players Layne wanted on his team was Jerry LeVias, the African-American quarterback of Hebert High School in Dallas. Layne wanted LeVias to play wide receiver. Black football players were not considered for Texas high school all-star games until Layne selected LeVias for the Pennsylvania game. LeVias was a pioneer in other respects. He was the first African-American to play in the Southwest Conference after he chose to accept a scholarship to Southern Methodist University.
THE KIDS GOT IT RIGHT is the story of LeVias and Big 33 game teammate Bill Bradley, who would attend the University of Texas, a school that would not even recruit LeVias or any football player of his color. Their friendship as they prepared for the contest with Pennsylvania speaks volumes about overcoming racial prejudice. After the game, Levias would toast Bradley as "My blue-eyed soul brother."
Through personal recollections of the participants and a wonderful ability to put those memories into words, Jim Dent has written an inspirational and enjoyable book. His books on American football are an incredible history of the game that has become America's pastime. Football has come a long way since the era when African-American players of the South left their home states in order to play college football. The primary goal may have been to win a football game, but along the way, we became a better nation when segregation was defeated on the football field.
Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
The Kid's Did OK, The Adults Failed
By The Professor
This is a fascinating book; not only for the story it tells, but even more so for the many more it fails to tell. The core of the book is the intertwined stories of Palestine high school and University of Texas quarterback Bill Bradley, and Beaumont Hebert and SMU All American receiver Jerry Levias, the first Black player to be offered a football scholarship in the old Southwest Conference (SWC) in 1965. There are a number of qualifiers in my previous sentence, and these actually point to some themes that are germane to this story. First, the SWC no longer exists, its eight teams scattered to the football winds, with Texas, Texas Tech, Baylor and TCU currently lodged in the Big 12 (or 12-2, since it currently has only 10 teams), and TCU only joined after an abortive flirtation with, of all conference, the Big East, after Arkansas and Texas A&M fled to the Southeastern Conference, apparently seeking lower academic standards. The remaining, poor relations (athletically, if not academically) Rice and SMU, have jumped from conference to conference, seeking permanent homes. SMU can claim the glory for having destroyed the SWC when its football program was given the "Death Penalty" in 1986 for paying players before Time Magazine thought it was OK.
I digress, but not as much as you might think, because SMU became an outlaw among the good old boys of the SWC for signing Levias, and subsequently other black players. The subtheme here is that Levias was not the first non-white to play SWC football, because, unlike contemporary Republicans, Texas good ole boys were specialized racists, targeting only blacks. The core of Dent's book is the courageous and noble act of Bill Bradley, who, when asked at the Big 33 All Star game in which Texas high school stars played against those from Pennsylvania, agreed without hesitation to room with Levias. This event is the core of Dent's book, and it deserves recognition as the time, just after the passage of the Civil Right's Act, at which a high school senior football star could show greater moral courage than College Presidents and athletic directors. Equally interesting, but barely alluded to by Dent, is that Levias was not the only non-white on Texas' Big 33 team. There were two other Black players, and surprisingly, Bradley's fellow UT recruits, the Choctaw guard and linebacker Danny Abbott and Chris Gilbert, an Arab American running back from south Texas.
Unfortunately, Dent spends very little time telling the stories of Abbott and Gilbert, both of whom had interesting experiences as well. I was a classmate of theirs at UT, and had the privilege of watching Abbott trying to talk older teammates out of their racist attitudes. I had the less pleasant experience of having to break up with a girlfriend because she told me she was upset when Gilbert agreed to escort a young woman who invited him to her high school awards banquet. When I asked why, she replied, "He's Mexican". I pointed out that he was Arab, and she said, "I guess that might be OK", but my gorge was sufficiently buoyant by then. Ironically Abbott and Gilbert were the All-Americans from UT's 1965 recruiting class, whereas Longhorn coach Darrel Royal benched Bradley, when he switched to the "wishbone" offense. Royal is a major example of the adults who failed this situation. Royal could have recruited Levias, and many other Black players, but he did not offer a Black player a scholarship until 1969, and did not truly integrate the program until he recruited Earl Campbell in 1974.
Dent provides an intriguing anecdote concerning 18 year old Bradley, encountering a nine year old Campbell picking fruit on an east Texas farm, and recognizing him as a potential football star. The best parts of this book deal with Levias and Bradley, and their now lifelong friendship. I wish there had been a deeper exploration of UT's football team in 1966 and 1967, which finished 7-4 and 6-4 respectively. As an outsider who knew several players, it was my impression that the divide on the team between the younger progressive players and old-line racists like Fred Edwards and Joel Brame, split the team and hurt their morale. After these dinosaurs left (I would never say graduated, because I watched Diron Talbert leave campus the day after his last football game in 1966, never to return), UT reversed its fortunes, winning the 1968 national championship. Oddly, this team is described as the last all-white team to be National Champions. With Gilbert and Abbott playing key roles, this is clearly untrue.
In conclusion, Dent has written a useful and interesting book. If only he had focused more on the politics of Texas in the 1960;s and how they continue little changed until today, and less on binge drinking and groupies from Pennsylvania, this would have been a transcendent book. I would like to close by mentioning one final omission by Dent. He barely mentions John Westbrook, a walk on at Baylor who was actually the first African American to appear in a SWC game, because he seems to feel that would detract attention from Levias. Westbrook went to Baylor for the right reason, he planned a career as a Baptist minister, and Baylor had the top divinity school. Today The Reverend John Westbrook is still a role model for young men of all races.
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