Bear Bryant & Sam Cunningham: Everyone LIED About 1970 — The REAL Story

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[00:00:00]Here is what every sports documentary, every [music] ESPN feature, every history book tells you about September 12th, 1970.

[00:00:10]Bear Bryant secretly called John McKay at USC. [music] He arranged a game he planned to lose.

[00:00:17]After the final whistle, he walked Sam Cunningham, still in his football pads, sweat [music] still on his jersey, into the Alabama locker room. Stood him on a bench in front of 60 broken players and [music] said seven words that changed American football forever.

[00:00:35]This is what [music] a football player looks like.

[00:00:39]Great story.

[00:00:41]One problem. Sam Cunningham was asked about it directly, on the record, in 2003 by ESPN.

[00:00:51]His answer was simple. That never happened.

[00:00:55]Bryant's own autobiography, published in 1974, does not mention a secret plan. Not one sentence.

[00:01:05]McKay's book, the same year, shows identical silence.

[00:01:10]And the famous quote everyone attributes to McKay, the man who actually said it was a former Bryant assistant that most people have never heard of.

[00:01:21]For 50 years, we have been telling the wrong story about the right game.

[00:01:26]Because what actually happened on September 12th, >> [music] >> 1970, without the Hollywood script, without the invented locker room moment, without the secret phone call, is something far more complicated, far more honest, and far more powerful than anything [music] anyone could have planned.

[00:01:47]This is that story.

[00:01:50]Paul William Bryant was born in 1913 in Moro Bottom, Arkansas, a A so small it barely qualified as a community.

[00:01:59]One of 12 children, a father who farmed until his health gave out. A mother named Ida who held the entire family together through poverty and Arkansas winters with nothing but will.

[00:02:12]Young Paul was big for his age. By 13, big enough that when a traveling carnival came through Fordyce and offered a dollar a minute to anyone willing to wrestle a captive bear, he volunteered.

[00:02:25]He didn't win. The bear put him on the ground, but he stayed. He kept getting up, and when it was over, they didn't pay him.

[00:02:34]The bear had been muzzled mid-match, voiding [music] the deal.

[00:02:38]He walked home with nothing except a nickname.

[00:02:43]And something harder to name, a quality that would define every room he ever walked into for the next 70 years.

[00:02:51]The absolute refusal to stay down.

[00:02:56]By 1970, Bear Bryant was the most powerful figure in Southern college football. 56 years old. Houndstooth hat.

[00:03:05]Voice like gravel. Six national championships at Alabama. A program he had rebuilt from four wins in three seasons to the gold standard of American college football.

[00:03:17]And he was watching his empire crack.

[00:03:20]Not on the scoreboard. Not yet. In the talent.

[00:03:25]Across the country, the most gifted young football players were black.

[00:03:30]This wasn't political opinion. It was arithmetic Bryant could see [music] in game film, in recruiting numbers, in the gap widening between Alabama and the programs pulling away from them.

[00:03:43]USC, Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State.

[00:03:49]He understood the problem completely.

[00:03:51]What he had done about it, and when, is where the story gets complicated.

[00:03:58]Because here is what the mythology always leaves out.

[00:04:02]By the time USC arrived in Birmingham, 33 of the 37 major Southern football programs had already integrated.

[00:04:11]Five Southeastern Conference schools had done it before Alabama. Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi State, Auburn.

[00:04:19]Even Alabama's own basketball program had signed a black player the year before.

[00:04:25]Bryant was not a pioneer.

[00:04:28]The man who had rebuilt a program from nothing, who had outworked and out-thought everyone around him for 20 years, had, on the defining issue of his era, waited longer than 77% of his peers.

[00:04:44]The reasons were real.

[00:04:46]The political pressure from boosters, from the governor's office, from a fan base that had built its identity around this team, all of it was real.

[00:04:56]But the reasons were also, in the end, insufficient.

[00:05:01]And Bryant, who could read a situation better than almost anyone alive, knew it.

[00:05:09]Sam Cunningham grew up 2,000 miles away in Santa Barbara, California.

[00:05:14]A different world.

[00:05:16]He was 6'3", 226 lbs by the time he arrived at USC.

[00:05:22]But the number that tells you more about him is not a measurement.

[00:05:26]It is a story from his high school years.

[00:05:30]A teammate, 4'11", the smallest kid on the squad, was being bullied relentlessly.

[00:05:37]One day, Cunningham walked into the locker room and addressed the team directly.

[00:05:42]"Anyone who wants to get to him," he said, "goes through me first."

[00:05:48]The bullying stopped that day.

[00:05:50]That was Sam Cunningham at 17.

[00:05:53]By 20, he was about to walk into Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama, and do something similar on a much larger stage without knowing it.

[00:06:03]It was a Friday night.

[00:06:05]72,000 people filled Legion Field, >> [music] >> one of the largest crowds in Alabama football history.

[00:06:12]The Crimson Tide faithful had come to watch Bear Bryant's team open the season against a California program. Most of them expected a win.

[00:06:22]Most of them had never seen USC play.

[00:06:26]What they did not know, what almost no one outside of USC's locker room understood that night, was that they were about to watch history being made by a 20-year-old fullback playing in his very first college football game.

[00:06:41]Sam Cunningham had been a freshman the year before, ineligible under NCAA rules. This was his debut, his first snap in a real game.

[00:06:53]He was nervous. He focused on his assignments.

[00:06:57]USC's starting backfield that night was entirely black. Fullback Sam Cunningham, quarterback Jimmy Jones, running back Clarence Davis, the first all-black backfield in Division I history.

[00:07:10]They had driven from Los Angeles to Birmingham knowing what the city was, knowing what the stadium represented.

[00:07:17]Cunningham remembered the reception as divided. White fans watching in cold, uncertain silence.

[00:07:25]Black Alabamians cheering from their sections with an intensity that went beyond football.

[00:07:31]Something was in the air that night.

[00:07:34]Everyone could feel it. Nobody could name it.

[00:07:38]There is something Cunningham said decades later that has stayed with me more than any quote in this entire story.

[00:07:47]He was asked what he remembered most about that night in Birmingham. He said, "It was loud in the beginning, but it got kind of quiet."

[00:07:56]Think about what that means.

[00:07:58]72,000 people, a Friday night, the Alabama Crimson Tide at home.

[00:08:05]And somewhere in the second quarter, the noise stopped.

[00:08:09]Not because the crowd was bored, not because they were polite, because something was happening on that field that 72,000 people had no framework for.

[00:08:20]Sam Cunningham, 226 lb, moving like the Alabama defense was not there, ran through the heart of Legion Field on 12 carries, gaining 135 yd and scoring two touchdowns.

[00:08:35]All six of the touchdowns by USC were scored by black players.

[00:08:41]The final score was 42 to 21.

[00:08:45]It was not close. It was never close.

[00:08:49]And that silence Cunningham remembered, that quiet that fell over the stadium sometime in the second quarter, was not the sound of a crowd giving up on their team.

[00:09:00]It was the sound of 72,000 people realizing all at once that everything they had been told might be wrong.

[00:09:08]Not recognition of injustice, not that night, not yet, not for most of them.

[00:09:15]Something more immediate, more visceral.

[00:09:18]The recognition that the system they had been defending, the system that kept players like Cunningham, like Jones, like Davis out of crimson jerseys, [music] was costing them.

[00:09:31]Bear Bryant stood on the sideline in his houndstooth hat and watched.

[00:09:37]And unlike 72,000 people in the stands, he already knew what he was seeing.

[00:09:43]He had known for years.

[00:09:47]After the game, Bryant walked across the field.

[00:09:50]There was a brief exchange near the tunnel between the locker rooms.

[00:09:54]He congratulated the USC players professionally, graciously.

[00:09:59]Cunningham was there.

[00:10:01]The exchange was, in Cunningham's own words, unremarkable, courteous.

[00:10:08]Nothing like what the myth describes. No bench. No seven words. No moment designed for a documentary.

[00:10:17]But here is where the real story, the one that doesn't need embellishment, actually begins.

[00:10:25]Because Bryant went home that night and looked at what he already knew to be true with new clarity.

[00:10:32]Wilbur Jackson had already signed with Alabama in December 1969, 9 months before the USC game.

[00:10:40]He had watched that September night from the stands as a freshman, ineligible under NCAA rules.

[00:10:48]Bryant had already made his decision before the final whistle of the 42-21 loss.

[00:10:54]The mythology that the game alone caused the change is too simple, too clean.

[00:10:59]The truth is messier and more interesting.

[00:11:04]Because Bryant had also, that same year, told a highly recruited black quarterback from Huntsville named Condredge Holloway something that tells you everything about how complicated this moment really was.

[00:11:17]He offered Holloway a scholarship, but only as a defensive back.

[00:11:22]Bryant told him, "Alabama's fans aren't ready for a black quarterback." Holloway went to Tennessee instead.

[00:11:30]He became the SEC's first black starting quarterback in 1972.

[00:11:36]And Bear Bryant, who understood the arithmetic of talent better than anyone, had just told one of the most gifted [music] players in the state that his position on the field would be determined not by his ability, but by what the crowd would accept.

[00:11:52]That is the Bear Bryant of 1970.

[00:11:56]Not a villain, not a hero.

[00:11:59]A man making calculations in real time in a state that was still, in 1970, deeply hostile to the changes happening around it. Some calculations right, some wrong, moving forward when the pressure made standing still impossible.

[00:12:17]John Mitchell, a junior college transfer, became the first black player to take the field for the Alabama Crimson Tide in 1971.

[00:12:27]Wilbur Jackson, who had watched the USC game from the stands, became a starter.

[00:12:33]By his junior season, he was leading the SEC with 7.1 yards per carry.

[00:12:39]>> [music] >> He became a team captain. He was drafted ninth overall in the 1974 NFL draft.

[00:12:47]By 1973, 1/3 of Alabama's starting lineup was black.

[00:12:53]That same season, [music] Alabama went 11 and 0 in the regular season.

[00:12:59]Bryant won his fourth national championship.

[00:13:03]The arithmetic, it turned out, worked exactly the way he had always known it would.

[00:13:08]And Jerry Claiborne, a former Bryant assistant, later head coach at Virginia Tech, Maryland, and Kentucky, looked back at September 12th, 1970, and said something that became one of the most quoted lines in college football history.

[00:13:25]Sam Cunningham did more to integrate in 60 minutes than Martin Luther King did in 20 years.

[00:13:33]It's a controversial statement. Many find it reductive. Many find it unfair to a man who gave his life to a movement far larger than any football game.

[00:13:44]But it captured something true about how change sometimes moves in America.

[00:13:50]Sideways, through a stadium, through a silence that falls over 72,000 people who can no longer look away.

[00:13:59]Bear Bryant coached Alabama until December 1982.

[00:14:04]His last game was the Liberty Bowl, a 21 to 15 victory over Illinois in Memphis, Tennessee.

[00:14:12]When reporters found him afterward and asked what retirement would look like, Bryant went quiet for a moment. Then he said something that made everyone in that room uncomfortable.

[00:14:24]I don't know.

[00:14:25]I might just die.

[00:14:28]28 days later, on January 26th, 1983, he was admitted to Druid City Hospital in Tuscaloosa, complaining of chest pains.

[00:14:39]He died the following day.

[00:14:41]He was 69 years old.

[00:14:43]What happened next says everything about what he had built.

[00:14:48]His funeral procession moved through Birmingham for 3 miles. 3 miles of people standing on sidewalks, on overpasses, on the rooftops of buildings, in the January cold, to watch a hearse carry a football coach home.

[00:15:03]Black and white, together.

[00:15:07]The following month, President Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Bryant the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.

[00:15:18]Sam Cunningham played nine seasons with the New England Patriots.

[00:15:22]He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2010.

[00:15:27]He died on September 7th, 2021.

[00:15:31]He was 71 years old.

[00:15:33]In the decades between that September night and his death, he was asked about the 1970 game hundreds of times, about the myth, about the locker room, about the seven words.

[00:15:47]Every time, he was patient. Every time, he set the record straight.

[00:15:53]And every time, he came back to the same truth.

[00:15:58]You do not realize at the time that it is happening.

[00:16:01]You realize a day later or a year later.

[00:16:06]And that is what happened to me.

[00:16:09]He was not a symbol that night.

[00:16:12]He was a 20-year-old fullback, the same kid who had once stood between a bullied teammate and the people trying to hurt him, playing his first college game, trying to do his job well.

[00:16:25]The symbol came later, not built from a speech, not from a secret plan, not from a Hollywood moment that never happened, from something that cannot be staged, 60 minutes of football, a scoreboard, and a silence that fell over a stadium like a confession, 72,000 people understanding all at once what they had been missing.

[00:16:52]Bryant understood it, too, had understood it for years.

[00:16:57]He was already in the process of changing it before that night, moving imperfectly, too slowly by any honest accounting, but moving.

[00:17:08]That is not the story of a hero.

[00:17:11]It is not the story of a villain.

[00:17:13]It is the story of a A from Moro Bottom, Arkansas, who learned at 13 that the world would not hand him anything, who spent 60 years refusing to stay down, finally, stubbornly, doing the right thing.

[00:17:30]Not because a scoreboard told him to, because the arithmetic was undeniable.

[00:17:36]And because on a Friday night in Birmingham, a 20-year-old kid from Santa Barbara ran through his defense and made the silence do what no speech ever could.

[00:17:47]If you spent years believing the myth, you are not alone.

[00:17:53]What made me dig deeper was one question.

[00:17:56]If the story is this powerful, why did the man at the center of it spend 20 years quietly saying it never happened?

[00:18:05]Because the truth did not need the myth.

[00:18:09]The truth was a scoreboard, a silence, a stadium full of people who could not look away, a coach who moved too slowly and then moved decisively.

[00:18:21]A young man who was just trying to do his job and ended up doing something none of them fully understood until years later.

[00:18:30]That is the real story of September 12th, 1970.

[00:18:35]And it is, in every way that matters, better than the legend.

[00:18:40]If this is the kind of story you want more of, the real ones, the complicated ones, the ones that hold up when you actually dig in, subscribe.

[00:18:52]Hit the like button. Share this with someone who thinks they already know what happened that night in Birmingham.

[00:18:58]Because the most powerful moments in sports history don't always look the way we want them to.

[00:19:05]Sometimes they look like 60 minutes of football and a silence nobody planned.