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Brian Piccolo
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According to Gale Sayers, the idea of interracial roommates was "no big deal"
to either him or Brian Piccolo.
"We were teammates," Sayers said.
But it was a big deal in society in the 1960s when the Chicago Bears decided to room by
position instead of race. Ed McCaskey, now chairman emeritus of the Bears, went to Sayers
to ask if he would mind rooming with Piccolo. Then he informed Piccolo.
"Why did you ask Gale first?" Piccolo asked.
"Because he’s the star," McCaskey explained.
"I’ll do it as long as Sayers doesn’t use the bathroom," Piccolo
said.
The heart-warming, heart-breaking story of Sayers and Piccolo, immortalized in the 1971
movie "Brian’s Song," was remade with a new script and new cast and will
air Dec. 2 on ABC. The Buffalo-San Francisco game that night is in for some tough
competition.
The movie dwells on the racial aspect of the story to a far greater extent than anybody
remembers it actually being. George Halas, owner-coach of the Bears, convinced Sayers the
decision had everything to do with game strategy and almost nothing to do with social
work.
"I don’t think he had in mind, ‘Hey, let’s get blacks and whites
together,’ " Sayers said. "It was, ‘You can talk about plays. You can
go to the film session and look at things and come back to the room before the game and
talk about what you guys need to do.’ So, hey, players started rooming together by
position, and Brian and I matched up. It could have been Brian and Ralph Kurek, but it was
Brian and Gale Sayers. It was no big deal; it really wasn’t."
Whether the Bears were the first NFL team to room regardless of race is not known.
According to Dick Schaap, who chronicled the Packers at the time, Jerry Kramer and Willie
Davis roomed together. No doubt it was no big deal to them either, because interracial
interaction is one area football could not avoid. That doesn’t mean there always has
been interracial harmony, but coaches and players both soon acknowledged the necessity of
interracial dependency.
Ralph Kurek, Piccolo’s best friend on the Bears, recalls: "I didn’t feel
any racial tension on the team whatsoever. If a guy didn’t produce, he didn’t
produce, and guys looked down on him. If a guy tried hard no matter whether he was white
or black, he was one of the players. Halas wouldn’t have stood for it any other
way."
Halas’ leadership was vital. Like most of the rest of the NFL, he was slow on
initial integration, but once he started, he was never reluctant nor prejudiced. In 1953,
he hired the league’s first African-American quarterback, the aptly-named Willie
Thrower from Michigan State. The previous year, Halas drafted the Bears’ first
African-American player, Eddie Macon.
When teams used to play exhibition games in the South, many hotels refused to house
black players. Some teams acquiesced and split their squads. Kurek remembers an incident
involving Halas:
"We were down in Nashville, and they had the black players staying at a different
hotel when we went to check in. I didn’t know about stuff like that. The old man
(Halas) stood up and said, ‘All my players stay in this hotel, or none of them stay
in this hotel.’ We all stayed in the same hotel. I heard it at the front desk. It was
an argument. The older black guys thought the old man was something."
Sayers said neither he nor Piccolo had experienced much contact with other races before
they roomed together, but they never discussed it to any degree of seriousness whatsoever.
"Brian was a good guy. Simple as that. He didn’t give a damn about race or
color or whatever," Sayers said. "If he liked you, he liked you. And we got
along. There was never anything about, ‘How do you feel about this or that?’ It
never came up. When somebody asked about us rooming together, he always had a joke,
he’d come up with something to make it funny. But no, it just never came up, and I
think that’s why we got along."
Chicago was a segregated city in the ’60s. Still is.
"Most of the black players lived on the South Side," Sayers said. "All
the white players lived Northwest or whatever. I would ride to practice with George Seals
or Jimmy Jones or Dick Gordon. If they’d say, ‘Who do you want to room
with?’ I’d say I’ll room with George Seals or Dick. The only time we got
together — black and white — was practice and games. After that, gone. If we had
a team party or something like that, we got together. But again, although we were split,
it wasn’t like we didn’t like each other. It was just the way it was."
Sayers said rooming with Piccolo taught him virtually nothing about race relations.
"Really, I don’t think so," he said. "We had no preconceived ideas.
We were on this football team to go out and win ballgames and try to win a championship,
that’s all."
To the players, this was not some kind of experiment for an anthropology class. They
were football players trying to earn a living.
Still, Sayers admits his example as dramatized by the movie has far-reaching benefits.
"It came out in 1970, and back then, we were having some race problems, and the
Vietnam War was going on and a lot of things were happening," Sayers said. "I
think for the first time, people saw that a black and a white could get along together,
could have a good time together and may be friends."
Don Pierson covers pro football for the Chicago Tribune. |
