Sour Tangerine

Photo: Brenda Brenon courtesy of Willie Evans/Boston Globe

It's not easy to believe and it's painful to remember that stories like this one played out in my own life time - but that's the truth. As the bowl games capture our attention (and for Patriots fans, their disappointment) it's helpful to read a story like this in today's Boston Globe in which Kevin Paul Dupont makes sure we don't forget...

BUFFALO - Some of the timeline and finer details escape him now, 50 years gone by, a half-century after the indignity of it all. But he remembers his disappointment, and how admirably all his teammates responded to the bigotry, and those are the important memories for Willie Evans.

The sting of racism didn't hurt just Evans, it coursed through all his University of Buffalo teammates, but it has faded considerably during a lifetime spent raising five children with his wife Bobbie, working some 40 years in Buffalo's public school system, coaching nearly every high school sport under the sun, and sharing in the collective thrills and disappointments of his young student-athletes.

Evans was only days short of his 21st birthday, the star black halfback of the UB football team, as the Bulls wrapped up a sensational 8-1 season in 1958. Bone-jarring hits their trademark under coach Dick Offenhamer, the Bulls were awarded the prestigious Lambert Cup as the best small school football program in the Eastern US, and for the first time in school history the modest university on the city's north side, a humble player on the national college football landscape, had a bowl invitation in hand.

The sun and fun of Orlando awaited. The Tangerine Bowl. This at a time when a bowl game carried the luster and cachet of a Cadillac's brilliant chrome grill and bumper...

"Oh, it was big to us," recalled one of Evans's effervescent teammates, Phil "Boom Boom" Bamford, raised in Methuen, Mass., in a tiny lakeside cottage where he slept year-round in a screened porch, awakening some winter mornings to brush snow off his blankets before dashing inside for the warmth of a pot-bellied stove. "The whole city was nuts."

But faster than one of Evans's off-tackle runs, the trip collapsed under the weight of bigotry. Now 71 years old, his neatly cropped hair a frosty white, the distinguished-looking Evans recalled how he first learned that the Bulls had been uninvited, and how it has never made sense.

"Dumb," he says, calmly and quietly flipping through the faded, brittle newspaper clippings tucked in a meticulous scrapbook he kept during that 1958 season. "Just dumb."

Getting the word
The '58 season complete, the seventh of James and Anna Evans's 10 children awoke that morning at the family's Purdy Street home and headed straight to Cook's, his favorite corner delicatessen, to pick up a copy of the morning paper, the Courier Express. Virtually everyone who lived on his street was black, and while he walked along the sidewalk, one of his neighborhood pal's mothers muttered something to him.

"Now you have to remember, this was a time when you didn't really have much conversation with your elders, black or white," said Evans, sitting at the dining room table of his tastefully-appointed downtown condominium. "You were told what to do, and all you did was listen. As I passed Mrs. Davis, all she said was, 'I guess they don't want you black boys down there.' That was it. I didn't know what she was talking about. I just kept walking."

Moments later, while he stood in Cook's with his Courier Express in hand, the front page story brought Mrs. Davis's words into focus.

"UB Rejects Tangerine Bid," read the headline. "Discrimination Is Cause."

The Bulls, with their two black players, Evans and Mike Wilson, a reserve defensive end from New Jersey, weren't going anywhere but back to the Main Street classrooms for the winter. According to the report, the Orlando High School Association, leaseholder of the Tangerine Bowl, forbade blacks and whites from being on a playing field at the same time.

This was an era in the South when blacks routinely were prohibited from using the same public drinking fountains and restrooms as whites and many hotels and restaurants banned African-Americans. The Bulls were free to accept their Tangerine Bowl bid. They could play in the game. But it would mean neither Evans, who lugged the ball 530 yards that season (an impressive 7.6 yards per carry) nor Wilson could be in uniform...

(for the rest of the story)

-Kevin Paul Dupont

-ConcordPastor