Football, the great racial leveler
Mort Persky, en eminent Southern journalist whose path crossed mine in Augusta during the springtime of our careers now lives in retirement in New York City, and occasionally shares with me his insight on what's happening in Gotham City and its environs.
His latest missive was a story lifted from the New York Times website in which the Good Gray Lady took a nosy peek into the football goings-on in Valdosta, Ga.
Mort marveled that the Times had devoted so much ink to the Valdosta High School Wildcats, the Crimson Tide of Georgia high-school football.
The Times painted a portrait of a school and town where high-school football had grown to outsize proportions but now is ebbing as the winning tradition shifts from Valdosta High School, now 75 percent black, to predominantly white Lowndes High School, just outside city limits.
It's not surprising that the school just out of town is mostly white. Since World War II, the trend has been for the affluent to move out of the inner cities and into the ever-expanding suburbs, and in Valdosta, as in most places, whites have outnumbered blacks in the ranks of the affluent.
It also isn't surprising that community loyalty has been flowing away from Valdosta High and toward Lowndes High as the demographics have shifted. We're just 55 years removed from Brown v. Board of Education, and deeply embedded cultural attitudes take time to dissipate.
But they have dissipated. Whites in Southern college stadiums have learned to cheer enthusiastically for black athletes. Coaches throughout the Southeastern Conference and the Atlantic Coast Conference enthusiastically recruit black athletes. Those who don't recruit them don't win.
Up through the 1960s, if you had asked a University of Georgia football fan to pick the Bulldogs' greatest player, you would have heard names like Charley Trippi, Frank Sinkwich and Fran Tarkenton - all certifiably white.
If you were to ask that question in Athens, Ga., today, you would probably hear one name: Herschel Walker, the big running back who, as a freshman in 1980, carried the Bulldogs to their last national championship. Herschel is certifiably black. The quarterback for the national championship team was Buck Belue, a Valdosta High School alumnus who became a fine college quarterback but is remembered mainly as the guy who handed the ball to Herschel.
My memory of Georgia high-school football goes back to 1955, my freshman year at the university, when the state's two top teams were the Athens High School Trojans and the Valdosta High School Wildcats. The Athens team, led by a quarterback named Fran Tarkenton, won 41-20. The Wildcats lost to Lowndes last month by an even more lopsided margin: 57-12.
But Valdosta remains the winningest high-school team in the nation. It has won 23 state championships and six national championships of one stripe or another.
Still, Valdosta's 11,000-seat Wildcat stadium no longer is filled every Friday night, and the school's enrollment has dwindled below the minimum required to meet the standards for Division 5A schools. Lowndes is now the larger school.
Furthermore, as Belue, now an Atlanta sports radio host, has observed, politics has entered the picture - politics with a racial dimension. Should the coach of a 75 percent black school be white or black?
The logical answer should be the one Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping used to defend his market-oriented heresy against the communist doctrines of Mao Xedong: "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice." It shouldn't matter whether a coach is black or white as long as his teams win championships.
I have a feeling that Valdosta will work through the racial question. Football seems to have a great leveling effect. Even as far back as my college days, the kids seem to have been ahead of the politicians. The only panty raid I observed during my stay at the University of Georgia came in 1955, when Gov. Marvin Griffin tried to prevent Georgia Tech from playing against the University of Pittsburgh in the Sugar Bowl. His reason: Pitt had a black player, Bobby Grier, on its squad.
Students at the University of Georgia chose the panty raid as a vehicle for protesting this attempt to keep their arch-rival from collecting its post-season reward. I covered the raid as a reporter for the Athens Banner-Herald and remember it as my first encounter with tear gas.
Maybe the kids from Georgia were just looking for an excuse for a panty raid, but they could probably have found plenty of others besides concern for the rivals who had been beating them every November. I remember that episode as an early case of football trumping racism.
Anyhow, Georgia has been in mourning all season over the loss of its sensational running back, Knowshon Moreno, who on top of being black is originally from New Jersey. But we're looking forward next year to some great performances by Caleb King and A.J. Green, both black and both offensive sparkplugs.
Here in the back yard of Clemson University, we've heard the roar from Death Valley as C.J. Spiller has pursued the Heisman and led the Tigers to the ACC playoffs. C.J. likewise is black.
And at Williams Brice, the Gamecocks over the past couple of years have remedied a gap in their schedule: They're now playing predominantly black South Carolina State.
Yeah, I think Valdosta will advance the ball beyond the color line. That's the way to remain a football city.
Readers may write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson, SC 29625, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.
Gene Owens is a retired newspaper editor and columnist who graduated from Graniteville High School and now lives in Anderson.