Ex-UK coach Curci helps celebrate first interracial game

By Samuel G. Freedman / New York Times News Service

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," Curci recently recalled saying.

"Not me," 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.

Forty years later, the veterans of that game reunited 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 1,000 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, Curci, who had gone on to coach at the University of Kentucky from 1973 to 1981, repeated the generous words he had spoken to reporters back on Nov. 29, 1969: His team had been outplayed, and he had been outcoached.

Gaither was not there to hear them on Friday — he died in 1994 at age 90 — but a number of his players were.

"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."

In 1967, Gaither had begun privately lobbying members of Florida's Board of Regents, which oversaw state schools of both races, to allow him to play a white team. A year later, when Curci took over as head coach in Tampa, Gaither found a willing collaborator.

Trying to make a small-time program big-time fast, Curci was scheduling and beating larger schools such as Tulane and Mississippi State.

A game against a black team, he knew, would generate a large crowd and plenty of coverage. And he had his idealistic reasons; he had broken the color barrier within Tampa, recruiting its first black players.

The game featured more than a dozen players later drafted by the NFL and three who went on to win Super Bowl rings: Hubert Ginn of A&M and Jim Del Gaizo and Noah Jackson of Tampa.

A week after defeating Tampa, Gaither beat Grambling in the final game of his quarter-century as head coach, retiring with a career record of 203-36-4.

Paradoxically, the coming of integration to Southern football degraded the caliber of the black teams. Football factories such as Alabama, Louisiana State and Florida State scooped up recruits who, in the past, would have gone to a Grambling or a Florida A&M. For its part, Tampa gave up football after the 1974 season.