BUFFALO, N.Y. — Willie Evans doesn’t know if his mind is failing or whether he’s repressed the memories of what happened 50 years ago. Evans is unable to remember the fateful team meeting at which he felt the bite of racism and learned about the power of friendship to overcome it.
If the details have faded, it doesn’t matter. When his University of Buffalo teammates retell the story, they can place exactly where Evans was sitting in the classroom when the team unanimously rejected a chance to play in the 1958 Tangerine Bowl, the school’s first — and it turns out, only — bowl bid.
“Well, I’m getting old,” said Evans, a former coach and physical education director for Buffalo schools who turns 71 this month. “Maybe, I’ve blocked it out. You really don’t understand how your subconscious works all the time or your conscious. But I really draw a blank.”
Evans was the star halfback on the ’58 Buffalo team that finished 8-1 to claim the Lambert Cup — awarded to the top small school in the East. The school initially accepted the Tangerine Bowl invitation.
But there proved to be a problem. Not long after the Bulls agreed to play, Tangerine Bowl officials informed Buffalo that the local school district, which operated the host stadium in Orlando, Fla., barred integrated games.
The players were left to decide whether to play without Evans and teammate Mike Wilson — the only African-Americans on the team.
It was quickly evident which way the players were leaning. The vote was taken before ballots could even be distributed.
“It was, ‘Shall we leave the Italians home? Oh my God, really?’ There was a lot of anger,” former offensive tackle Jack Dempsey said. “We just threw the ballots on the floor and left. It was, ‘Let’s get out of here and go get a beer.’ ”
Quarterback Joe Oliverio remembers how infuriated he was.
“They insulted two of our teammates, and we were going to hit them back between the ears by refusing to go without our teammates,” he said.
History will show East Texas State defeated Missouri Valley 26-7 in the Tangerine Bowl that year. To the Bulls, they scored a big victory, too.
“Someone asked me if we ever talk about the incompleteness of the season because we didn’t go as far as we could’ve,” said Phil Bamford, an offensive lineman and linebacker. “I think now looking back, if we had given in, caved in, gone to the game and won the game, we would’ve never had the camaraderie we have now. We would’ve always felt we let our buddies down.”
And Evans was definitely present for that meeting, his teammates said.
“Absolutely, I can picture where he was sitting and Mike Wilson,” Dempsey said. “I can remember walking out and players putting their arms around (Evans). . . . I can remember it vividly.
“It wasn’t like hearts and flowers. We just walked out . . . let’s get out of here.”
For Evans, his first memory of learning of what had happened came a day later, when he picked up the newspaper to find his and Wilson’s picture on the front page beneath a headline, “UB Turns Down Bid To Tangerine Bowl.”
Evans grew up in an integrated neighborhood in Buffalo, a multi-ethnic manufacturing city at the time.
Evans doesn’t recall much in the way of racial tensions growing up, though he vividly remembers seeing the graphic coverage of Emmett Till’s 1955 slaying in Mississippi that helped mobilize the civil rights movement.
But that occurred in the South, a faraway place for Evans, who was voted student president of his integrated grammar school, and attended a high school in the predominantly Polish part of town.
He played basketball and football on integrated teams. And when the assistant principal attempted to track down Evans and his friends for cutting class to buy doughnuts at a Polish bakery around the corner, the owner, Ziggy, would let them sneak out the back way to elude being caught.
It wasn’t a perfect life. Black men in his neighborhood who had returned from World War II faced barriers to being considered for civil service jobs. And yet Evans hadn’t personally experienced such flat-out bigotry until Buffalo got the Tangerine Bowl bid.
The experience affected him personally in some ways, leading Evans to avoid visiting the South for many years despite having many relatives in Virginia and Mississippi.
“It wasn’t a grudge. It was an ‘I don’t care’ attitude,” Evans said. “I just didn’t want to deal with it.”
Wilson, his African-American teammate who was a backup on defense, died several years ago.
It wasn’t until the early 1990s, when Buffalo was scheduled to play a game against Central Florida in Orlando, that Evans accepted the team’s invitation to make the trip.
Perhaps it’s some sort of cosmic karma, but 50 years later the Bulls (6-4) — after years of futility and a stretch in which the school pulled football altogether — are in contention to earn a bowl bid this season. The ’58 Bulls get together fairly often and there’s talk of another reunion if Buffalo gets a postseason bid.
This year’s team is split about evenly between African-Americans and whites, is led by a black coach, Turner Gill, and a program headed by a black athletic director, Warde Manuel.
