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Game took swipe at racial barriers

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By JOEY JOHNSTON | The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 22, 2009

Updated: 11/22/2009 12:34 am

TAMPA - Forty years later, former University of Tampa quarterback Jim Del Gaizo still remembers the sights and sounds from an electrifying night at Tampa Stadium.

Thirty minutes before kickoff, the stadium's two free-standing sides were filled to capacity and about a thousand more spectators stood wherever there was room.

On one side, all the fans were white.

On the other, all the fans were black.

"We were part of one of the most exciting games ever played," Del Gaizo said. "Looking back, I know now we were part of history."

It was the first interracial football game played in the South, an intensely competitive back-and-forth showcase Nov. 29, 1969, that saw coach Jake Gaither's Rattlers of Florida A&M University, a black college, outlast coach Fran Curci's overwhelmingly white UT Spartans 34-28.

By the time Del Gaizo's fourth-down pass fell incomplete from the FAMU 14-yard line in the final seconds - and the combined offensive output had reached 1,135 yards - the crowd of 46,477 was alternately energized and limp with exhaustion.

It was a time when much of the nation was ripped apart on issues of race and prejudice, when the South grappled with school integration and civil rights. But on Nov. 29, 1969, a landmark event was staged by two teams, and two diverse sets of fans.

"What an incredible night," said Curci, now retired in Tampa, who sprinted to midfield for a postgame hug with Gaither, the legendary FAMU coach who died in 1994 at age 90.

Last month, Curci spoke at FAMU's homecoming ceremonies in Tallahassee, where 20 members of the 1969 Rattlers were invited back to celebrate the 40-year anniversary of a game that broke racial barriers. Back then, few knew that Gaither began lobbying members of Florida's Board of Regents, which oversaw state schools, two years earlier for permission to play a white school.

He found a willing accomplice in Curci.

"It was the right thing to do," Curci said. "It was time. I heard people saying things like, 'You can't have a white school play a black school. You can't have the fans together. There will be a big riot.' Which was absolute nonsense. We had no incidents - none. Both schools came together and put on a show that nobody will forget."

In some ways, though, history has forgotten the game's significance.

Gaither's opportunity

FAMU did not receive much exposure in the 1960s media. UT, a small-enrollment private school, accelerated its football ambition under Curci, but that barely created a ripple beyond West Central Florida. (UT dropped its football program after the 1974 season.)

In football lore, the seminal race-relations moment occurred in 1970, when coach John McKay's fully integrated Southern California Trojans visited coach Bear Bryant's all-white Alabama Crimson Tide. USC tailback Sam "Bam" Cunningham battered Alabama with 135 yards and two touchdowns.

That clear signal of changing times prompted a famous quote from Crimson Tide assistant Jerry Claiborne: "Sam Cunningham did more in 60 minutes to integrate Alabama football than Martin Luther King has done in 20 years."

A few years earlier, times had clearly changed for Jake Gaither, too. By 1969, his legacy was secure. He had 22 conference titles and six black-college national championships. What was missing?

"Jake Gaither was one of the most respected and revered coaches in the nation, but he was still looked upon as a 'black coach,'" said Eddie Jackson, a longtime FAMU administrator who once served as Gaither's sports information director. "Black colleges only played other black colleges. That's why playing a white team was so important to Jake. He had to prove himself.

"He knew he had to win the game - or at least look very good in the process - or else that chance would pass him by. He didn't tell that to the press or his players, but he knew it, deep down in his heart."

Curci, meanwhile, was a University of Miami assistant when he accepted the UT job. There was one stipulation.

"If you won't allow me to recruit black players," Curci said, "I'm not coming."

Curci knew just the player he initially wanted.

He targeted Leon McQuay, a blindingly quick running back from Tampa's all-black Blake High, nicknamed "All The Way" McQuay. Curci saw McQuay practically every day, attending his games and practices, getting to know his mother, fending off overtures from Big Ten school recruiters, emphasizing that the player's reputation would grow by staying local.

About that time, a letter arrived from Gaither.

Dear Leon,

You are invited to attend Florida A&M University ...

That was how Gaither operated. But times were changing. His recruiting pool was shrinking. His time was running short. He longed for that one opportunity to prove his program's strength.

An electrifying night

Curci, who had four black players on his team in 1969, saw nothing but upsides in playing FAMU. He understood the value of the exposure and publicity.

But as game week approached - with UT (8-1) and FAMU (7-1) both in the national rankings - even he had underestimated the interest level. The tickets were dwindling, and some were being scalped at premium prices.

"At first, people were grumbling about the seats they were getting," Curci said at the time. "Now the scramble is on to get any seat."

At FAMU, Gaither, a master motivator, was humble in his news conferences. During practice, though, he put the spotlight on McQuay.

"He could've been on this field, practicing with us," Gaither said. "But he turned us down. He turned you down."

The Rattlers knew the stakes.

"We felt we were on the level of a Florida, Florida State, Miami and Tampa, but we had never received the opportunity to show that," said former Rattlers safety Leroy Charlton, now a businessman in Miami. "We were not going to allow a defeat."

"This game was different - way different," said former Rattlers running back Hubert Ginn, who played in three Super Bowls with the Miami Dolphins and now is a sales consultant for a car dealership in Savannah, Ga. "You knew that from the moment you walked into that stadium."

In his mind's eye, Del Gaizo remembers a capacity crowd that never stayed seated - and never stopped roaring.

Former Spartans defensive tackle Joe Kolinsky, the former coach at Leto High School, sensed a part-football game, part-social event.

"Everyone was all dressed up," Kolinsky said. "The women were wearing these fashionable hats. Everything was magnified, heightened. The guy that was blocking me talked the whole game, he kept saying how they were going to run us over. It was the most intense, big-time atmosphere we had been a part of."

The game was played at an insane pace.

FAMU quarterback Steve Scruggs, of St. Petersburg, rushed for 111 yards and passed for 189. Del Gaizo was 23 of 45 for 423 yards, including two touchdowns to running back Paul Orndorff, a future professional wrestler.

McQuay, largely held in check, scored two touchdowns, but so did Ginn, including a 4-yard run that put FAMU up 34-28 with 1:58 remaining. Del Gaizo needed just four passes to position UT at the Rattler 14-yard line in the dying seconds. From there, though, with the crowd at fever pitch, he tossed four consecutive incompletions.

FAMU had won.

"Maybe it was nature's way of making it all work out the right way," said Del Gaizo, a former NFL player who now works for a South Florida mortgage firm. "As athletes, it was a football game, not a racial statement. I mean, if society mirrored athletics, we probably would've been colorblind a lot sooner in this country. But let's face it, with the way it happened, a lot of good came out of this game."

Game's legend lives on

Samuel G. Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a writer for The New York Times, is working on a book, "The Big Game: Football and Freedom in the Civil Rights South." Primarily, it's a narrative about the 1967 season, when FAMU faced Grambling for the black college national championship at Miami's Orange Blossom Classic.

But his epilogue features the FAMU-UT game.

"This game has been undeservedly overlooked," Freedman said. "The Florida A&M players still have their sense of history. They know what it meant. And I think they appreciate Fran Curci for agreeing to the game. You presume a lot of white schools wouldn't have taken the game, not wanting to risk a loss."

While attending the Rattlers' homecoming weekend last month, Curci said FAMU President James H. Ammons walked across a ballroom, going out of his way to shake his hand.

"That game has meant a lot to me over the years," Curci said. "I got a lot of credit. I was proud to be involved."

But no one had more pride than Jake Gaither.

That night, Gaither invited Grambling coach Eddie Robinson, who watched from the press box at Tampa Stadium.

"If people in other states can just see what happened here tonight, it won't be long before we and other black schools will be able to play the best of our all-white neighbors," Robinson told a Tampa Tribune reporter. "There are still some rednecks who'd object, but there are enough people who are concerned enough about seeing good football to make it possible for us, too. They know we have to live together now."

The victory against UT was the penultimate game of Gaither's career. He beat Grambling the next week and finished with a career mark of 203-36-4.

Years later, Gaither was honored at a reception.

The talk inevitably turned toward his Hall of Fame career. Out of all your championships, someone asked, which one was the biggest?

"None of those," Gaither said. "The biggest game was when we beat the University of Tampa."

Reporter Joey Johnston can be reached at (813) 259-7353.

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