Sam Bam Could Have Been at 'Bama

The kid just wanted to play. And live to tell about it.

He wasn't trying to change the world. Or even the small part of the planet that looked upon him with eyes that only saw his skin and believed he was someone to be loathed or feared or dreaded. Or worse.

Sam Cunningham was just a sophomore who had never played a collegiate game on that September afternoon in Birmingham, Alabama 36 years ago, because freshman weren't eligible to suit up with the varsity. He was one of 18 black men (17 athletes and an assistant coach) who flew across the country to represent the University of Southern California Trojans , a national powerhouse then as now, in a game against famed coach Paul Bear Bryant and the Crimson Tide of Alabama , a team that fielded not a single black player on that day. Or on any before it.

It was the opening game of the 1970 season, and Sam Cunningham just wanted to play. It's been some time since a football game changed us. Changed how we thought. Or how we act. Sports is finally entering its most passionate season. College football and the NFL still stir the most in us. Other sports, other teams, make us care. But football makes us stop, engage and invest in our teams. (When was the last time you saw a painted body part on a so-called grown up at any other sport?)

I cheer for Stanford, my alma mater, and root for the Cardinals' success. But even my collegiate brethren know I was Sooner born and Sooner bred and, well, you know the rest. Proximity made me a Dallas Cowboys fan when it was cool (and safe) to be so. I cringe at this current bunch. Bill Parcells (who'll always be a Giants coach) couldn't seem to be having less fun if he was forced to watch High School Musical nine times. T.O.? He simply does not deserve to wear the star. But I still signed up for real-time Cowboy scoring alerts to be zapped to my Blackberry.

Despite our passion, sports rarely challenges our perceptions, our misconceptions – our way of life - anymore. Oh, there remain mountains to climb. No African-American coach has won the Super Bowl. But when it happens, I don't believe the victory will rise as an emphatic repudiation of some deeply entrenched societal belief that a black man can't win the big one. Heck, every American who wasn't a Pittsburgh Steelers fan was rooting for Indianapolis coach Tony Dungy to get a ring last season.

Of course there are still knuckle-heads in our midst. (Wouldn't life me boring without them?) But the same sort of take that feeling won't stir inside us as it did 18 years ago when Doug Williams led the Washington Redskins to victory in Super Bowl XXII to become the first black QB to win the biggest game in sports. Today, thanks much to Williams and his peers, black QBs are so plentiful in the NFL they tend to pop up on the TV screen and make you say, "Who's that?" In college, there's even a black starting QB at Southern Mississippi, for goodness sakes.

When a black coach is carried off the field on the shoulders of his players at the end of a triumphant Super Bowl, the feeling will be more like: Cool. Check another one off the list.

On September 12, 1970, Sam (Bam) Cunningham, and everyone else at Legion Field that day, changed us. All but the most peripheral (and perhaps the youngest) college football fans recall the contest as the game that changed college football forever.

It wasn't much of a contest The Trojans crushed the Tide 42-21, and Cunningham was the hammer. He rushed for 135 yards on 12 carries and scored two touchdowns.

The humiliation of the all-white Tide is credited with being the catalyst that changed the minds of even the most stubborn segregationists and caused Alabama -- along with other southern football schools -- to begin recruiting black players. In reality, no one who was there that day saw the significance of their experience. "Nobody knew what the long-term outcome would be," Cunningham said last week via telephone from his home in Los Angeles. "No one had a clue."

Cunningham is the co-author of a new book that offers a fascinating look at what may be the most significant sports event this side of Jackie Robinson's major-league debut. He joined talented sportswriter and bestselling author Don Yeager (like me, an ex-Sports Illustrated staffer) and Trojan teammate John Papadakis to create the just-released "Turning the Tide: How One Game Changed the South" (Center Street).

The book is as enlightening as it is entertaining. It places the game in the context of the times -- seven years after the historic March on Washington, six years after the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and two years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Change -- slow as it was, and remains -- was upon us. Almost everywhere except Southern college football schools, which is why some of Cunningham's black teammates carried guns with them on this particular road trip. "You have to consider how volatile things were," Cunningham said. "We were all aware of what was still going on in the South." The book dispels many myths and misconceptions about the game, including the widely held belief that Cunningham scored more than two touchdowns and rushed for some 500 yards. It only seemed that way to 'Bama fans.

Then there are the urban legends surrounding Bryant. Even I'd come to believe the one that had him turning to one of his assistants towards the end of the game and saying, "Go get me one of them." Meaning a black player. In fact, Bryant already had a black player, Wilbur Jackson, a freshman running back from Ozark, Alabama. He was in the stands in street clothes because freshmen were not even allowed to suit up on Saturdays.

The other myth is that Bryant apparently never took Cunningham into the Tide locker-room after the game, stood him before his players and said, "This is what a football player looks like." C'mon, everybody believes that happened.

Perhaps the most intriguing discussion in the book involves the idea that perhaps The Bear had a bigger plan than just scheduling a high-profile opponent. The book recounts a clandestine meeting between Bryant and his good friend, USC coach John McKay, that took place at LAX in early 1970 not long after the NCAA voted to allow teams to play eleven games rather than ten as previously ordained. Most teams scheduled the softest patsy they could find. Instead, Bryant flew out to LA and met McKay in an airlines VIP room. The Trojans had finished the 1969 season undefeated and competed in their fourth straight Rose Bowl. After sipping a vodka rocks with McKay, Byrant apparently said: "I'd like to give you a hundred and fifth thousand dollars to come to Birmingham and play us in the opener this year." McKay puffed his cigar and countered: "What if I offer you two hundred and fifty and you come back and play us the following year in LA."

The guess is that Bryant knew perhaps the only way to clear the final barriers of resistance to recruiting blacks in greater numbers was to have the nation's premier integrated team come to Alabama and kick the Tide's tails in front of the home folks.

One revelation not found in the book but offered by Cunningham during our conversation is as stirring as almost any found on its pages: Sam (Bam) Cunningham, a high school star in San Diego, could have been the first black member of the Crimson Tide.

"I got a recruiting letter from Alabama," he said, almost in passing. "I didn't really consider it. I immediately put it in the round file. I didn't think it was where I should be. I wished I'd kept it now."

When I mention that had he accepted, he not Jackson, would have been perhaps college football's most significant trailblazer, Cunningham, who now owns a landscape construction company, laughed out loud. Several times.

"I wanted to play college football but I didn't want to go that far, and I didn't want to make it that difficult for me."

But what if you had gone? "I'm not sure I'd be the same person I am now," he said. "I'm sure Coach Bryant would have done what he could to make it not as culturally tough as maybe I thought it would be. I'm sure he guaranteed our safety when went down there. But it would have forced me to take a stand one way or the other. The way I grew up I could pretty much do anything I wanted to do, go anywhere. Down there, I couldn't. I would probably have been more adamant about certain lines that I could not cross. Maybe I would have looked at black-white relationships differently. Who knows? Maybe I would have been more of a political persona rather than concentrating on being an athlete."

Cunningham is not unaware of the flipside of his decision and experiences. When southern schools began recruiting blacks -- particularly those from the South -- it shifted, albeit slowly, the balance of power from northern schools that had been harvesting the talent and all but ended the halcyon days of black college football. In those days the top black college teams may have been as good as anyone in the nation. "Tide" quotes Mark Wangrin in the 2005 edition of ESPN College Football Encyclopedia: "Predominantly black colleges, which produced 20 first-round picks from 1970-1978, lost their pipeline and produced only 12 first rounders in the next 23 drafts"

Cunningham just wanted to play. But 36 years later, he knows the game wasn't about him or anyone else on the field. "It changed a lot of things for a lot of people. [Mississippi State head coach] Sylvester Croom [one of the first black players at Alabama, and the first black coach in the SEC] is even a beneficiary. It was like a pebble being dropped into a pond making ripples that continue to have an effect the farther they continue. That pebble is still reverberating today."

Because, sadly, so few pebbles have dropped since.