'Breaking the Huddle' shows how barriers are broken

Whicker column: The HBO documentary tells how integration finally came to Southern college football, and how Sam Cunningham and USC hastened it along with an eye-opening victory at Alabama.

By MARK WHICKER / The Orange County Register

The USC bus rode through the margins of Birmingham, Ala.

The next night would be Sam Cunningham's first game. He looked out the window and saw black men, women and children running to the edge of the street. Reaching out to the bus. Cheering. Does this happen all the time?

"I found out later that it didn't," Cunningham said, laughing.

Then Cunningham and the Trojans went to Legion Field to play Alabama, the white knights of college football. He was the second-string fullback.

The first team ran at will, Cunningham came in and gained 135 yards and scored two touchdowns. Even the third team had its way.

"They weren't very big or powerful," Cunningham said of the Crimson Tide. "I'm not saying they weren't talented. But it wasn't a very difficult game."

USC won convincingly, 42-14.

And the people they convinced were the Alabama fans who, up until that moment, refused to accept the concept of black faces in red helmets.

What they didn't realize is how Coach Bear Bryant, their holy father on earth, had made them witness the truth.

Bryant was race-neutral, which made him a progressive, and he was a pragmatist. He knew integration would only happen when he demonstrated how it would win more games for Alabama.

This game, arranged with his buddy John McKay, could have happened in L.A. Playing it in Birmingham brought everything back home.

McKay told the players in the spring that they were about to do something far more important than win a game. He never elaborated.

"Prejudice is nothing more than sensual hate," said John Papadakis, a linebacker for those Trojans. "The people needed to see a black man score a touchdowns and a white man embrace him, to share their sweat.

"Really, this was the 'Guess Who's Coming To Dinner' of college football. As Trojans, we were conditioned to go on the road, take everything and leave people with nothing. That night we took everything and left them with something valuable."

Wilbur Jackson was on the freshman team. He played varsity in 1971. So did JC transfer John Mitchell.

Bryant would claim three more national championships in the 1970s.


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