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The first tough guy
By Josh Katzowitz, CNATI.com Posted December 15, 2009 1:44 PM ET
This week, Cnati.com looks back at the history of the University of Cincinnati with excerpts from Josh Katzowitz's Bearcats Rising: Rags to Division I Riches: How A Gridiron Minority Bludgeons Its Way Into The Big Time
Willard Stargel wasn't the first African-American to play sports at the University of Cincinnati -- that honor belonged to Ralph "Eight Stride" Belsinger, who ran track from 1911-15 -- but when you talk about the trailblazing black player who began to make an impact on how the school viewed race, Stargel was the first. Oscar Robertson came eighteen years later, and there's little doubt that his greatness on the basketball court and his unwillingness to back down from prejudice led to a UC campus that began to view blacks as equals.
But Robertson looked up to Stargel, and there's a good reason why. Stargel was the one to break many of the barriers that Robertson encountered again almost two decades later.
Stargel grew up in the West End of downtown Cincinnati in an all-black neighborhood, and from the very beginning, he was an excellent athlete. Basketball, football, and track, he excelled in them all. One day, with his self-confidence at its peak, he challenged Ezzard Charles, the future heavyweight champion of the world, to a fight.
A few minutes later, Stargel's eye was blackened, his jaw swollen. He had been humbled by Charles and afterward, he said, "I will not box again." Instead he focused on the rest of his athletic endeavors and eventually matriculated to UC, where he played basketball for two seasons, became a star on the football field, and ran track (he held the school record for the 120-yard high hurdles and the 440-yard intermediate hurdles for decades afterward).
"He was," said his son Jason, who played football at UC from 1982-85, "one of those rare athletes."
Football, though, was his true calling. Originally, he attended UC on a basketball scholarship and walked on to the football team. But when basketball coach Bob Reuss told him he needed him exclusively for the hard court, Stargel said, "It's not going to happen. I'm playing football."
By the time Stargel joined Joe Meyer's football team in 1941, only two other African-Americans had played for the Bearcats -- Chester Smith from 1931-33 and London Gant in 1936. Nobody on the current squad was used to playing with an African-American, but Stargel was content to make a name for himself. At the urging of Quadres, an African-American social group no longer in existence at UC, Stargel ran for student council in 1942. He was not voted in -- "He got twenty votes," Jason Stargel said with a chuckle, "because there were twenty blacks" -- but years later, a Quadres member named Marian Spencer said that his candidacy proved African-Americans were making inroads against segregation on campus. That might be true, but four years later, after Stargel completed his tour of duty in World War II, he felt the slap of racism.
One caveat of the Sun Bowl's invitation to UC in 1946 was that Stargel couldn't play, due to Texas customs. The fact the team unanimously accepted the bid, knowing Stargel would be left behind, galls some to this day.
"What does that say about the character of the guys on that team?" Oscar Robertson said. "I went through some of the same things. The school could have corrected a lot of the stuff. It should have been corrected. But they chose not to."
This, though, was nothing new for Stargel. Twice during the 1946 season, the Bearcats' opponent banned him from playing, and both times -- a home game vs. Kentucky and a road game at Tulsa -- UC lost badly. Today, Don McMillan's voice fills with regret when talking about the problems Stargel encountered.
"That was sad," McMillan said after a moment's hesitation. "Honest to gosh, we came close to saying, 'OK, if he can't play against Kentucky and play against Tulsa, we won't play.' But damn it, we softened up and went ahead and played. I know how bad Willie was hurt. It's too bad. Maybe if we had stuck by our guns and said, 'We're not going to go . . .'"
Of course, it's easy to look back and decry the lack of player character. But they were relatively unsophisticated young guys whose major life experience had been in the military. While the foxhole was splendid preparation to play for Nolting, it didn't necessarily prepare the players for the emerging Civil Rights struggle in America and its attendant difficulties. The newspapers covering UC maintained a status quo stance, didn't make much mention of Stargel's exclusion, and to most, it was nothing out of the ordinary. To the African-Americans, of course, such a lack of their perspective was extraordinary.
And it likely was for Stargel.
"I know it cut him when UC decided to go ahead and accept the bowl bid," Jason Stargel said. "Dad said it left him out in the dark. A number of those guys when I was playing in the '80s -- Thurman Owens, Alkie Richards -- they'd always be so nice and cool with me and dad. It showed how much progress has been made. But it was tough back in the '40s."
Willard Stargel knew about tough. Once, when he played for a barnstorming basketball team -- similar to today's Harlem Globetrotters -- he found himself competing against an all-white team.
On one possession, after scoring a basket, the defender's rebuttal was to punch Stargel in the mouth. Stargel looked to the referee.
"That's not legal," Stargel helpfully pointed out. "He can't sock me in the jaw."
"Just play ball."
Stargel, though, didn't get to play ball against Virginia Tech in the Sun Bowl. Instead, Ray Nolting bought him tickets for a pro football game in Chicago, so that's where Stargel spent part of his Christmas holidays. Away from his team, isolated inside his dark skin.
Stargel knew when to make his point. He also knew when to back away. One day, Don McMillan, his wife Patty and some other Bearcats teammates attended a circus event at Crosley Field. Stargel and his wife approached to say hello. "Come with us, come sit beside us," Patty McMillan said.
But Stargel declined.
"I thank you, but I promised that I'd sit with my friends over there."
"You know why he did it?" Patricia asked a few generations later. "He didn't want to embarrass us by being the only black people to sit with us. He wouldn't have embarrassed us. We wanted to see him. But there were still some feelings from before. There should have been."
More than a decade later, Oscar Robertson, perhaps the most successful athlete ever to come out of UC, also felt the sting of racism. Perhaps Robertson should have known problems would arise when Austin Tillotson, a local baseball player who competed with and against many Negro League baseball stars, told him, "Man, black people don't go to school here."
Robertson knew how Stargel felt in 1959 when the basketball team took a road trip to Houston, and the manager of the Shamrock Hilton Hotel called Coach George Smith at midnight and told him Robertson wasn't welcome. Eventually, Smith had to walk into Robertson's room and tell him he was the only Bearcats player who would be moving that night. It wasn't all about the hotel's decision, Robertson said later. It was about how his teammates didn't say anything at the time. That was exactly Stargel's sentiment.
The year before Robertson's snub, the University at Buffalo football team was invited to the Tangerine Bowl. But once the school determined that its two black players weren't allowed to participate, the Bulls backed out of the game. It almost certainly didn't go unnoticed by Stargel.
While Robertson comes off as bitter much of the time, Stargel didn't appear that way. Although Jason Stargel said the snub from UC bothered his father the rest of his life, he masked the pain and sent two of his kids to play sports there.
Stargel, who died in 1990, also made quite an impact during his own coaching career. He coached high school athletics for twenty-two years at Walnut Hills and at Taft, and in 2004, the Taft football stadium in downtown Cincinnati, a few blocks away from where Stargel grew up, was christened the Willard R. Stargel Stadium.
"Dad was always about school first," Jason Stargel said. "All these guys who went to Taft had these humble beginnings. Dad would always have college coaches in and he'd say, 'He's not a risk. He's a doer.' He got a number of kids to matriculate to the next level. He was so passionate about education first."
For the kids he coached. And for his own sons.
"Certainly Cincinnati is a conservative city, and it always has been," Jason said. "We've made great strides in terms of racial relationships. Dad never thought that anything was beyond our reach in terms of being able to accomplish what we wanted and to succeed in life. He said, 'Son, if you get your education, they can't hold you back. They can't stop you.' That was what he preached to me and his students."
Categories: College, Featured Stories, Features, Football, University of Cincinnati Bearcats
Tags: Bearcats Rising, Josh Katzowitz, Oscar Robertson, Willard Stargel
Comments (1)
I graduated from Walnut Hills and UC and knew coach Stargel and his son Jason. I never knew the struggle he had. He was a graceful beautiful man and I respect what he did to pave the way for the rest of us.
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