Sam...
..dontcha just love how in the Ye Olde Days you couldn't even tell one team from another unless you happened to know their colors and those colors happened to differ between the two teams on the field.
They all seemed to have pretty much the same goofy v-shaped markings on their jerseys and their pants and helmets all looked about the same too.
Whole lotta white folk, too.
And check out that eager beaver ref! Bwaaa!!
Btw, in terms of recent Bama games of major import, I always preferred this one...
The game that changed the world
Before 'SC whipped Alabama in 1970, Bear Bryant's team was all white. A year later, the Tide had turned.
By BLYTHE BERNHARD
The Orange County Register
Dick Danehe doesn't lack for good stories.
He talks about driving cross country with his dad in a Plymouth to accept a football scholarship to USC at the end of the Great Depression. He'll regale you with tales about the glory days of college, interrupted by his service in the Army Air Corps during World War II. Or living the high life, when he played professional football with the Los Angeles Dons. And the national fame he reached as a sportscaster and host of a weekly golf show.
As a radio and television personality in the 1950s, Danehe was so well-known that his name was a clue in a TV Guide crossword puzzle. The tall, strapping blond broadcaster was recognized on the street and received buckets of fan mail. President Eisenhower, a golf enthusiast, would request films of Danehe's show, "All Star Golf," before it aired Saturday nights.
Danehe's neighbors in Laguna Hills know him best for his devotion to Nayda, his wife of 62 years. The college sweethearts, now 87 and 86, write love poems to each other on birthdays and anniversaries. She bought him his first easel, and their home is decorated with his oil and watercolor landscapes. At twilight, the couple like to join the neighbors in singing "America the Beautiful" on the lawn.
There are so many stories left to tell. But this one is about the night Dick Danehe, in his last year as a college football announcer, called the game that changed the South.
THAT SEPTEMBER NIGHT
It was 1970, and Danehe was on the radio team broadcasting USC football games. The season-opening road game wasn't just a game – USC would be the first fully integrated team to play against Alabama at Legion Field in Birmingham.
Danehe remembers a feeling of trepidation on the flight to the Deep South.
Nearly a third of USC's team was black, (edit: YEAH, BOYEEEEE!) including quarterback Jimmy Jones.
Although it was seven years after the National Guard was called in to escort two black students to enroll at the University of Alabama, integration had yet to reach the football field.
"It seems late, doesn't it?" Danehe says. "But Alabama had no black players."
Before the game, Danehe remembers Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant and his team marching around the stadium in their dark suits and crimson ties, Bryant wearing his trademark checkered cap. Each section of fans stood and applauded in turn.
But they wouldn't have much to cheer about after that.
The Trojans ran "through 'em, over 'em, around 'em and everything else" on that muggy September night, Danehe recalls. The final score was USC 42, Alabama 21. The Trojans dominated on the ground – 485 rushing yards to Alabama's 32.
And no one ran the football better than Trojan sophomore fullback Sam "Bam" Cunningham – 135 yards in just 12 carries.
Every USC touchdown was scored by a black player. Cunningham had two.
THE TIDE TURNS
Professional baseball, basketball and football had long since been integrated. The University of Kentucky basketball team signed its first black player the year before the USC-Alabama matchup.
But until USC crushed the Crimson Tide in 1970, college football in the South, and particularly in Alabama, remained the last major stronghold of segregation in sport.
Some say Bryant, who died in 1983, knew his fans would be won over by the clearly superior, racially diverse USC team. That could be why he invited coach John McKay's Trojans to hand him a certain loss, as told in the recent book "Turning of the Tide: How One Game Changed the South."
Whatever Bryant's motivation, it worked.
At the postgame reception at the hotel, Danehe remembers the throngs of Alabama fans and the coaching staff buzzing about the Trojans' strength.
"I never heard a derogatory remark," he says. "I must say that compliments were advanced to the entire Trojan team."
The next year, when Alabama came to the Coliseum to play USC, John Mitchell became the first black player to start for the Crimson Tide. Integration helped bring a decade of dominance for Bryant's Alabama football teams in the 1970s. Mitchell went on to become an all-American and is now the assistant head coach for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Sometimes the most defining moments in history aren't realized until years or decades later. For the USC players, the September night in Alabama was just another season-opening victory. They'd been playing and winning together, black and white, for decades.
It was later, as the media accounts and speaking engagements piled up, that the players realized what they had done for football, for Alabama and for the country.
Cunningham spoke to the 2003 Trojan team before its season opener against Auburn University, as recounted in "Turning of the Tide." He told them how he felt before his debut in the same Southern state more than 30 years before.
"My motivation was to play well enough so that I could play the next week. That was it. It had nothing to do with changing color lines, doing anything like that.
"But you never know when you will get the chance to do something special."
TROJAN FOR LIFE
Growing up in Missouri in the 1930s, when schools were segregated, Danehe could always find the USC-Notre Dame game on the radio. Then as now, USC's championship lore attracted blue-chip athletes from across the country.
Danehe doesn't know how the coaches found him, a big center and linebacker from the Midwest, but their discovery set the course for his life.
In those days, the shops on University Avenue put up posters of the players in the windows. University President Rufus B. von KleinSmid tipped his hat to Danehe every afternoon as the student-athlete raked leaves in front of Doheny Library.
It's a lofty privilege, being a Trojan football player, and one that never goes away, Danehe says.
"I could take everything but my experience at USC out of my life, and I'd still have a full life. I made the ball club and played first string, and that's all you can ask."
Today another group of talented young men – black, white, Asian and Hispanic – will take the field for both teams when USC plays at Nebraska as the top-ranked team in the country.
Danehe will be watching and listening for the fight song. It won't make a difference who scores the touchdowns.
In the Trojan family, the only colors that matter are Cardinal and Gold.
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Sam, if it's true that Bear actually scheduled that game with the intention of forcing integration in the south by making his own fans witness his own team getting shit stomped by racially integrated USC then he was a far greater man than I ever gave him credit for...
"...and thayat's all I have to say about thayat."
