Here are more reasons to understand Tommy Love’s moment unfairly lost to history
PHOTO: Michigan State’s Tommy Love was a Parade High School All-American, in 1966.
More: The media is blinded by Bear Bryant Hagiography.
More: Tommy Love was a game-changer on college football integration, in 1967
By TOM SHANAHAN
Not so long ago, Tommy Love planted a 1967 flag symbolizing a tipping point to college football integration. Yes, that was decades ago, but the mainstream media ignored Love’s Civil Rights leap through sports on a 1960s timeline.
Without the mainstream media understanding the depth of Love’s significance on the 1960s timeline, an accurate first draft of history wasn’t written then and the story hasn’t been properly told now in the modern media.
Love’s legacy remains lost to college football lore. That’s why it’s important to learn his untold story.
Love’s recruiting journey was a game-changer as an African American earning 1966 Parade High School All-American honors at desegregated Sylva-Webster, a school in North Carolina’s western mountains that had integrated well ahead of most of the state’s campuses, in 1964.
WHY IT MATTERS
Love playing at an integrated high school helped him gain mainstream media attention otherwise denied Black kids playing in the anonymity of Jim Crow Black schools. And when Tennessee and North Carolina made it publicly clear they were pursuing Love, he was essentially the first Black kid from the South with options to stay home at a major school.
Houston’s Warren McVea was recruited by northern schools, but Houston was the only southern program recruiting him in 1964 when head coach Bill Yeoman desegregated the Cougars’ program with McVea.
Wake Forest’s Bob Grant had committed to Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty in 1964, but Grant later switched to Wake Forest when the Demon Deacons desegregated. Grant changed plans only because his high school coach convinced him of the importance to open doors in the South.
Daugherty, Tennessee coach Doug Dickey, Ohio State coach Woody Hayes and North Carolina coach Bill Dooley all visited with Love at Slyva-Webster. The shifting paradigm presented Daugherty with new competition to board his Undergound Railroad. And the leap Love represented opened doors wider for future southern Black kids.
PHOTO: Tommy Love with his White teammates in the backfield at Sylva-Webster, one of North Carolina’s early campuses to desegregate.
Sadly, though, Love has been remembered merely as a star-crossed player whose promising career ended tragically. He led the Spartans in rushing as 1968 sophomore before he suffered knee injuries his junior and senior seasons. The winter after his senior season, on March 2, 1972, he dropped dead of a heart attack at age 22 while playing basketball at a Michigan State Intramural Building.
I’ve previously written about Love and the Underground Railroad, but John Park, a college football historian and Tennessee graduate based in Memphis, provided me with new research that provides a deeper look. What I didn’t know was sportswriters Bob Terrell of The Asheville Citizen-Times, Love’s hometown area newspaper, and Marvin West of Knoxville News-Sentinel, which covered Tennessee football, understood times were changing. They reported what the mainstream media missed in an era when it avoided race.
THE BIG PICTURE
In the News-Sentinel story on January 26, 1967, West wrote that Love would be Tennessee’s “first Negro athlete” – the vernacular of the times. Terrell added, “(Love) has already visited Knoxville. He likes (head coach) Doug Dickey’s offense. He’d be a tailback with the Vols. He is not anxious to campaign through the Southeastern Conference, but he’s plenty brave enough to give it a try.”
In the Citizen-Times before the April 1 Big Ten signing date, Terrell wrote Michigan State’s 47,000 students are “from all over, and people there could care less about race, creed or color. That probably was another factor in Love’s choice of Michigan State. Up there he will have to worry only about studying and playing football. That he is a Negro will make not a whit of difference to anyone.”
That, of course, was an oversimplification in a nation with bigots everywhere, but his point was Michigan State had a reputation, particularly in the South, as a North Star for Black athletes.
Terrell’s story also quoted Love on picking the Spartans:
“I was thinking of the universities of North Carolina and Tennessee before I visited Michigan State, but after I went up there, I made up my mind pretty quick.
“I liked everything I saw in East Lansing. It looks like a great place to go to college.
“The football players I met impressed me very much. I met Bubba Smith, and he drove me around in his car. I liked Clint Jones, and of course, that North Carolina boy, Jim Raye.”
Love’s observation that Black athletes fit in better MSU than on other predominantly White campuses was a common conclusion among Black athletes on their Michigan State recruiting trips. The Spartans were a singular story in the 1960s.
Other programs outside the Mason-Dixon Line followed an unwritten quota limiting Black athletes to a half-dozen or so. Black players were isolated. For example, USC won the 1962 national title with only five Black players. That same year the Associated Press reported Michigan State’s 17 Black players was the most in major college football history, although the story failed to note Daugherty’s 1961 and 1960 rosters were the previous records.
Before Love considered his options to stay home, previous southern pioneers at Wake Forest and Houston (1964), Southern Methodist (1965) and Kentucky (1966) arrived quietly. They encountered resistance – the first ones through the door always face the toughest challenge — but the dominos they helped tumble later opened the floodgates.
THE COLD, HARD TRUTH
By the 1970 season, 33 of 37 major southern programs were integrated. Alabama, with coach Bear Bryant dragging his feet, was the seventh of 10 Southeastern Conference programs to join the 20th century, in 1970.
Today’s athletes – Black and White alike – don’t understand the roads Love and other 1960s true pioneers cleared to equality.
“I know they don’t, because I’ve asked them,” said Dr. Dennis Thomas, whose resume includes College Football Hall of Famer at Alcorn State in Mississippi, retired commissioner of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and former athletic director and coach at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
So, compare 1967’s tipping point to what qualifies as today’s tipping point: The controversial transfer portal that provides an easy avenue to move on and/or to cash in on Name, Image and Likeness money.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Tommy Love’s 1967 tipping point was bit more noble, but the mainstream media remains distracted the past four decades by myths about the 1970 USC-Alabama game. The false narrative was crafted and spread 20 years after the game was played. Bryant hagiography sustains the myth despite a lack of supporting evidence.
The fairytale was Bryant scheduled USC as a game to lose to gain permission to recruit Black athletes. The revisionist history “plan” succeeded with a focal point of Sam Cunningham, USC’s Black fullback, running over Bryant’s all-White team. The revisionist history also ignored Bryant had signed Wilbur Jackson as his first Black months before USC arrived at Legion Field in Birmingham.
The popular misconception worked its way into the national folklore with the aid of poorly researched sports writing. Adding insult to injury, college football lore highlights Cunningham and ignores Love, even though by Cunningham’s own admission he didn’t deserve his place in history that had been crafted for him.
In a 2016 Los Angeles Times story, Cunningham said, “It’s already a historic story without adding sauce to it, you know what I mean?”
Former NFL player Reggie Berry, a Cunningham friend, knew what he meant. He had previously explained the role of the many 1960s Black pioneers in the South, including mutual friend Bob Grant, a former NFL player from Wake Forest out of Jacksonville, N.C.
“I told Sam, ‘Bob and other guys desegregated the South; Bob was at Wake Forest in in 1964,’” Berry said. “Sam was a smart guy. What I told him he acknowledged. He looked at me and he said, ‘You’re probably right.’”
Yet the 1970 USC-Alabama fairytale regurgitations survive to this day in print and film, HBO, Showtime and ESPN documentaries.
They ignore the Ashland and Knoxville newspaper archives reveal there were White advocates for racial progress. The South wasn’t a monolith of bigots, but for the 1970 USC-Alabama fairytale to spread, it relies on the perception of the bigoted South. It also serves to obfuscates Bryant dragged his feet until the 1970s.
Although Tennessee lost out on Love, two more 1967 flags of progress were planted when the Tennessee signed Lester McClain as its first Black player and North Carolina signed Ricky Lanier as its first Black player. McClain was the SEC’s first Black player to score a touchdown with six as a sophomore in 1968. Lanier was the South’s second Black quarterback as a sophomore in 1968 after Wake Forest’s Freddie Summers was the first, in 1967.
Lanier also heard from Big Ten schools while competing for an All-Black school in Williamston, N.C., but Love’s ground-breaking stands out as a milestone through national attention on the All-American team he gained in part for playing at a desegregated high school.
The integrated campus at Sylva-Webster, now called Smokey Mountain High, also led to Love being one of the first two Black players named to the North Carolina-South Carolina Shrine Game in the 30th year of the series. Love was named MVP with touchdown runs of 29 and 57 yards to end North Carolina’s three-year losing streak to South Carolina. The NC Shrine team’s other Black player was Titus Ivory, who played at predominantly Black school, West Charlotte, and went on to play at Morgan State, a HBCU in Balitmore.
Previously, Black athletes were limited to North Carolina’s “Negro Shrine Game.” Three years earlier, Jimmy Raye was MVP of the Negro Shrine game played in Durham. Raye was on his way to Michigan State out of Fayetteville’s E.E. Smith High, and Michigan State assistant coach Cal Stoll was on hand to present him with the award.
In 1967, Love was MVP of the desegregated NC-SC Shrine game while on his way to Michigan State. Times were changing — even in the South — as Tommy Love planted a flag on the 1960s timeline.
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Tom Shanahan is an award-winning sportswriter and frequent contributor to Spartanamag.com. His new book on Michigan State leading college football integration is, “THE RIGHT THING TO DO, The True Pioneers of College Football Integration in the 1960s.” His first book was “RAYE OF LIGHT, Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, the Integration of College Football and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans.”
Below are links to click on to purchase my books focused.
My books tell the true story of college football integration in the 1960s and address the myths and fiction that allowed a false narrative surrounding the 1970 USC-Alabama game to usurp the credit from the true pioneers. As I said when I spoke at the National Sports Media Association book festival, no two books provide an accurate portrayal more than RAYE OF LIGHT and THE RIGHT THING TO DO.
I’ll put my facts up against anybody, anytime, anywhere. Watch here.
Click here for my story on the 1962 Rose Bowl and Segregation awarded first place by the Football Writers Association of America. I tell untold stories on Michigan State’s leading role and the true pioneers of college football integration. Click here to read the summary as a first-place story.
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Click here to purchase The Right Thing To Do
THE RIGHT THING TO DO
The True Pioneers of College Football Integration in the 1960s
Foreword by Ruffin McNeill
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Click here to purchase Raye of Light.
RAYE OF LIGHT
Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, the 1ntegration of College Football and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans
Foreword by Tony Dungy
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Click here to purchase my children’s book, Bubba’s Dad, Duffy and College Football’s Underground Railroad
The book for now is only a Kindle version on Amazon. Print and audio platforms available soon.
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My next children’s book coming soon: How Duffy Put Hawaii on the Football Map
