Half Century Later, Buffalo's Courage Finally Rewarded

ORLANDO -- The longest bowl trip in college football history closed Saturday night when Buffalo took the field.

The players ambled out to midfield. One of them needed a cane. The rest just needed hair dye to look like they did when the bowl bid arrived.

It was 1958, and the Bulls promptly rejected it. They could have come to Orlando, but their African-American players would not have been allowed on the field.

Fifty-one years later, they were given a standing ovation.

"It was a chance to right a wrong," Gerry Gergley said.

He was one of 34 players who finally got their trip to Florida. By now you've probably heard the story of that team. It never gets old because you can learn something valuable every time the old Bulls get together.

"It wasn't anything we planned," said Willie Evans, one of the two African-Americans on that team. "For it to reverberate 50 years later, that's a long time."

What reverberated with me was how society has progressed in the last half century, but how our sports culture has gone in reverse.

Nobody at the UCF game was involved with the 1958 Tangerine Bowl. Yet everybody felt they owed Buffalo an apology.

When they heard the present-day Bulls were playing at Bright House Stadium, local government and civic leaders arranged free airfare, hotel rooms and a reception for the ex-players. In a way, the old guys were lucky their trip took so long.

In 1958, there was no Disney World to visit. The bowl activities probably consisted of a cookout and a trip to a cross burning.

Evans (pictured right) grew up in Buffalo and had heard about things like Whites-Only drinking fountains. He never knew his skin color would cost his team a holiday vacation.

"I didn't know the ugly finger stretched into athletics to the extent it did," he said.

Orlando's school district operated the stadium where the Tangerine Bowl was played, and it banned integrated games. Nobody in Buffalo realized that when they got the bid. They were just pumped to have gone 8-1 and won the Lambert Cup.

That went to the top small college program in the East. It may not sound like a big deal now, but it warranted an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show back then. Team captains Nicholas Bottini and Louis Reale accepted the trophy on national TV.

Everybody looked forward to getting out of frigid Buffalo and playing Florida State in far-off Orlando. Then the team was informed of the Tangerine Bowl's policy. It held a vote whether to accept the bid.

"There wasn't really a vote," Gergley said. "We had no choice. We had to do what was right. Besides, Willie was our leading rusher and scorer."

You wouldn't know it by talking to him. Evans is 71 now, though he's the one guy who looks as if he could still play. He was drafted by the Buffalo Bills after college and is in five athletic halls of fame.

"That's not the kind of thing you brag about," he said, "and I hope you don't spend much time on it."

Imagine that, an athlete asking a writer to go easy on the praise.

"It's not modesty," Evans said. "It's how I feel about it."

It's a feeling we could use more of in this chest-beating era. Maybe it's a generational thing, but the old Bulls love to talk about each other, not themselves. They were a team that did everything together.

If Evans and Mike Wilson weren't going to Orlando, nobody was going. What's more, if anybody has a right to scream about being victims of racism, it would be the 34 men in navy blue shirts Saturday night.

There wasn't hint of bitterness in the section where they sat. Sure, they were mad young men 50 years ago. But after they told the Tangerine Bowl what it could do with its bid, they moved on.

"You can't hold on to anything like that," Evans said.

These days, people can't let go of the race card. The ugly finger Evans spoke of is still there. But the point gets lost when players like Milton Bradley interpret fan animosity as racial persecution.

Or Sammy Sosa's bat explodes with cork and he blames the ensuing scrutiny on the fact he's Hispanic. Or Torii Hunter says Barry Bonds was reviled because he's African-American. Or Michael Vick is considered the victim instead of his dogs.

If only these modern-day martyrs could have spent a December holiday in Buffalo instead of Orlando 50 years ago, they would appreciate what real racism is. The Bulls took a stand against it, even if they didn't realize what a grand one it was.

"It's just something that happened," Robert Muscarella said. "We made a decision and never really thought about it."

Nobody really did until the Buffalo got the first bowl bid in school history last year to the International Bowl in Toronto. Then people started realizing it was actually the second.

"Now the story's been told hundreds of times," Stanley Kowalski said.

Only now it's been told in a place where it all began. And it finally has a happy ending.