7197: Changing The Game.

From The New York Times…

Southern White Teams Just Didn’t Play Black Ones, but One Game Ended All That

By Samuel G. Freedman

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — On a Saturday night 40 football seasons ago, just before kickoff of the penultimate game in his career, Coach Jake Gaither of Florida A&M strode toward midfield of Tampa Stadium. There he extended his hand to the opposing coach, Fran Curci of the University of Tampa, and they strained to speak above the din of a capacity crowd.

“Jake, this is bigger than I thought it would be,” Coach Curci recently recalled saying.

“Not me,” Coach Gaither responded.

Both men were trying to fathom the event they had set into motion, the first interracial football game in the South, a landmark in sports and civil rights that has gone relatively uncelebrated. It pit the Florida A&M Rattlers, long one of the dominant teams among black colleges, against the Tampa Spartans, a rising power that was overwhelmingly white.

What was at stake that night was twofold. The match-up would prove whether a black team with a black coach from a black school really could compete with a white one. And, in a city that suffered a race riot two years earlier, the stadium was divided racially into its Tampa and A&M rooting sections, and the spectators had to demonstrate that they could peaceably coexist.

Forty years later, the veterans of that game reunited here over the weekend as part of Florida A&M’s homecoming gala, during which the 2009 version of the Rattlers beat Norfolk State, 34-20, with the satisfaction of having succeeded on both counts.

Florida A&M won that 1969 game, 34-28, and despite the intensity on the field, with more than a thousand yards of total offense and the result in doubt until the last 30 seconds, harmony reigned in the stands.

Speaking to about 725 people gathered for the homecoming gala, Mr. Curci repeated the generous words he had spoken to reporters back on Nov. 29, 1969: his team had been outplayed and he had been outcoached. Jake Gaither was not there to hear them on Friday, having died in 1994 at age 90, but a number of his players were. The surviving member of his 1969 coaching staff, Bobby Lang, was M.C. for the evening.

“It was a gamble, and Jake took it,” said Eddie Jackson, a longtime administrator at Florida A&M who recently wrote a history of football there, “Coaching Against the Wind.” “If he’d lost, you know what everyone was saying before — ‘Jake’s a good coach, but he’s a good black coach.’ Jake said afterward he wanted to win that game more than any game he ever played.”

Read the full story here.