At the beginning of training camp for the 1946 football season, Coach Jake Gaither of Florida A&M, an all-black college in the all-black Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, was surprised when one of his new scholarship players — Tom Curtis from Albion, Michigan — brought his younger brother along with him.
“I appreciate you inviting me down on a scholarship,” said Curtis. “I have my kid brother who’s never really played a game of football but he’s athletic and played basketball and baseball. You think you can give him a chance to try out for the team?”
Coach Gaither sized up the younger brother.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Ulysses.”
You didn’t attain a master’s degree from Ohio State University without knowing a bit of Homer. Ulysses was not the greatest of fighting warriors but he was the smartest, the most cunning, and, perhaps most importantly, the most ruthless. Maybe the kid brother had something. And Jake Gaither was not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Besides, he really wanted Tom Curtis on his team so there was no point in creating an awkward situation right off the bat.
“Oh sure, I’ll give him a tryout.”
And so Ulysses Curtis went with the other running backs, and Coach Gaither put him through a series of gruelling drills, the kind that coaches use early to determine who will stick with the program. Ulysses ran around and between a series of pylons that directed him toward the waiting arms of different linemen at every turn. In surviving this gauntlet unscathed and untouched, he not only earned a spot on the team, he also earned himself a nickname: Crazy Legs.
There was no scholarship money available for Ulysses but that was all right with him. He had his GI Bill benefits for two years’ service in the U.S. Navy. Ulysses had gone to boot camp at Naval Station Great Lakes north of Chicago when he was eighteen years old. Great Lakes was segregated, having opened its doors to the first Black Americans in June of 1942. There were separate “Negro Service Schools” to handle basic training for black recruits at Great Lakes. When he finished basic training, he was shipped to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where he was assigned to a munitions ship.
“The ship would come in and load up ammunition from Hawaii, and then go down to Guam, Wake, Saipan, and drop the ammunition off and then come back to Hawaii,” he told me during our interview at a North York community centre where he went regularly to work out. At eighty-four years old, he still looked fit in his track suit.
After two years in the navy, much of it spent in the Pacific sitting atop millions of pounds of explosives at the possible mercy of Japanese torpedoes, Zeros, and battleships, Ulysses figured he had earned every penny of his GI Bill benefits. And he was determined that he was going to get an education out of his service to his country.
When the season at Florida A&M began, Ulysses found himself on the bench throughout a 48–0 rout of Alabama State. What was the point of going through all that work if the coach didn’t have faith in his ability? Ulysses Curtis had never played a down of football in his life before coming to Florida A&M. Not in public school, not in minor organized sports, and not in high school. He had nothing to gauge his talent by. He had starred in basketball and baseball in high school and knew he had the talent to play both, but this game of football was all new to him. Was he even any good? And what was the point? Where was it all leading, if anywhere? He went to see the coach.
“You know I never played football before I came here.”
“I know that.”
“Maybe I should just give it up.”
Jake Gaither felt a kinship with this young man that went beyond coach-and-player relations. He knew what it was like to come into a strange environment, especially the segregated environment of the South, and think, What the hell am I doing here? In Samuel G. Freedman’s book Breaking the Line, the author describes the circumstances under which Gaither and his wife came to Tallahassee in the summer of 1938. Shortly before they arrived, four white men had broken into a local jail and abducted two black teenagers being held for breaking into a department store and cutting an officer with a knife as he tried to arrest them. The frightened teenagers were driven out of town by the four armed men. Once out of the vehicle, the boys were told to run. They did as they were told but did not get far. They were shot in the back, cut down like animals in sport. A sign was found next to their bodies: “This is your last warning, negros, remember you might be next.”
The local newspaper, the Daily Democrat, attempted to put a bizarre positive spin on this shocking double murder by declaring, “As lynchings go, last night’s was about as free from the usual unsavoury angles as any we have heard about. The method adopted was quiet, orderly.”
Quiet? Orderly? That wouldn’t have given the black residents of Tallahassee much relief. Jake Gaither, despite severe misgivings about this new home, eventually settled into his job as assistant coach with Florida A&M with great success. In 1943, Gaither took over the head-coaching responsibilities and would remain the head coach at A&M for twenty-five years, becoming a legend in black college football. But he had only been the head coach for three years when Ulysses Curtis sought him out, wondering whether he even had a future at Florida A&M.
“Oh no, lad,” Gaither told Curtis. “I’ve been watching you and you’re going to be on that bus when we go down to Tennessee this weekend. And Coach never lies so you’ll be there.”
It was exactly the news Ulysses had wanted to hear. He could deal with biding his time now as long as he knew that his time would come. And it did. Ulysses played four seasons for Florida A&M and in his junior and senior seasons (1948 and 1949), he was named to the black All-American team. The Los Angeles Rams, who had integrated the NFL when they signed Kenny Washington and Woody Strode, expressed interest during Curtis’s senior year but never made a solid commitment.
As Ulysses Curtis prepared to move back to Albion and find a job teaching, he received a call from Frank Clair, the head football coach with a team called the Toronto Argonauts up in Canada. Well, Albion was only about ninety miles from Detroit and the border of Canada. How far could Toronto be from there? Not as far as Tallahassee was from Albion, that was for sure. But, as he often did when troubled, Curtis went to his coach, his mentor, and his friend, Coach Gaither.
“You go on up to Canada and you play a year or two and they’ll get you back down in the States,” Gaither told him. “Cause you have the skills to play professional football.”
Whether he was looking for advice or simply seeking confirmation of something he had already decided to do, it didn’t matter, because Ulysses always did what his coach told him to do.
He went to Canada.
The year 1950 was a momentous year in the history of the Toronto Argonauts. Four years earlier, team management and ownership had threatened to boycott a game against the Montreal Alouettes if Herb Trawick took the field. Toronto, the bastion of conservatism, had refused to import any Americans, white or black, even as competing teams across Canada were bringing in the maximum number allowed. But suddenly, the Argos’ owners decided that having the best Canadians available didn’t provide enough of an edge. Toronto, as the flagship franchise and centre of the Canadian football universe, could no longer afford to fall behind the rest of the league.
And so the team went out and hired an American coach, Frank Clair, who had once been an outstanding receiver with Ohio State and had gone on to coach the University of Buffalo Bulls football team. An associate of Clair’s who had attended the all-black Alabama State University provided him with a list of 1949’s black All-Americans. Figuring prominently on that list was the name Ulysses Curtis. In our interview, Ulysses recalled that the hiring of Frank Clair was not a popular move with the Argos players.
“Frank Clair became the first American coach of the Argos. A lot of the Canadian players weren’t too happy about the Argos firing Teddy Morris, who had played football for the Argos and coached the Argos. And so when they fired Teddy Morris, many of the Argo players left and went out west.”
But Teddy Morris adamantly refused to play American imports; there was no point in spending big money on star players from the U.S. if the coach wasn’t going to play them. The growing feeling, not just in Toronto but throughout the league, was that the American coaches coming in and remaking the game in the American image did not trust the Canadian players in key positions. That goes a long way to explaining Teddy Morris’s popularity with his players. He was willing to put his career on the line for Canadians. Consequently, his departure seemed less of a firing and more like an act of martyrdom.
So, goodbye Teddy Morris, hello Frank Clair. The arrival of Curtis, however, created a new problem. Who was going to room with the coloured guy? According to Curtis, that was the whole reason the Argos traded with Montreal for Billy Bass. Now, whether Billy Bass was actually brought in from Montreal just to be Curtis’s roomie is questionable. Bass was an excellent all-purpose back, both offensively and defensively. The hole in Ulysses’s theory lies in the fact that the Argonauts already had another black player on the team, Marvin “Stretch” Whaley from Morgan State College, an all-black college in Baltimore, Maryland. Why not just have Stretch room with Ulysses? Because now they had another problem — who was going to room with Stretch? According to Ulysses, management “decided that one of the Smiley brothers, Doug or Rod, would become Stretch’s roommate. So Billy and I roomed but Stretch had a white roommate in 1950.”
When the trade with Montreal was completed and Billy Bass arrived, he became part of Toronto’s reconfigured backfield alongside Ulysses.
“In those years I was the marquee running back. I ran the ball more,” Ulysses assured me, in case my knowledge of his career was lacking. “Teddy Toogood was the other back and we had a ‘T’ formation with two halfbacks and a fullback. I played left, Teddy Toogood played right, with Billy Bass in the centre. Right and left halfbacks had the same type of plays. I would carry the ball maybe fifteen times a game. But I carried most of the load.”
Winning can change a lot of attitudes, especially among disgruntled athletes coping with a new system and an unpopular new coach. The Argonauts got off to a quick start that season, winning four of their first five games.
“Both Curtis and Bass showed to excellent advantage on Saturday as ball carriers,” said an Ottawa Journal article on September 25, 1950. “The former who has been nicknamed ‘Crazy Legs’ answers that description when on the loose. He has a faculty of driving into two or three tacklers, twisting or churning away from them again at the last expected moments.”
“I loved the wide field because it gave me a little more distance on sweeps,” Ulysses told me. “Now [in the NFL] they sweep and they’re on the sidelines.”
After their early success, the team went into something of a tailspin, winning only two games the rest of the regular season while losing four and tying one. They finished second behind Hamilton in the East. In the two-game, total-points playoff, they promptly lost the first game to Hamilton 13–11 on November 11 before beating them 24–6 in the return match four days later on home turf to take the series 35–19. Three days after that, the Argos took on the winner of the Ontario Rugby Football Union (ORFU), the Toronto Balmy Beach Beachers, winning handily, 43–13. That made three games in eight days, a brutal schedule, especially for those playing both offence and defence.
The Winnipeg Blue Bombers had finished their playoffs a week earlier, giving them the advantage of rest and a chance to scout the opposition, which the Argonauts brass duly claimed was unfair scheduling. But the Argonauts had something of a distinct advantage themselves with the Grey Cup game to be played on their home field, Varsity Stadium.
The Blue Bombers were led by NFL veteran quarterback “Indian” Jack Jacobs, a full-blooded Cherokee from Oklahoma, and Tom Casey, a Black American star halfback from Ohio. After graduating from Hampton University in Virginia — with a break for service in the armed forces — Casey spent the 1948 season with the New York Yankees of the All-America Football Conference. Then he moved on to Hamilton and spent the 1949 season with the Hamilton Wildcats (of the Big Four), which would merge with the Hamilton Tigers of the ORFU the following year to form the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. In 1950, he moved on to Winnipeg where he achieved stardom as both offensive and defensive back with the Bombers, leading the Western league in rushing in his first season.
(Tom Casey would be an All-Star in all six seasons he played for Winnipeg, all while putting himself through medical school at the University of Manitoba. In the year he retired, 1956, he was named Winnipeg’s Citizen of the Year for his accomplishments on the field and for his service in the community. He went on to further studies in neurology in England. In 1962, he married Mary Fuller Smith, the daughter of Samuel B. Fuller, the owner and founder of the Fuller Products Company [not to be confused with the Fuller Brush Company], a cosmetic empire based on door-to-door sales that made Fuller the richest black man in the United States and worth $18 million.
In 1964, Dr. Tom Casey became the first Black American elected to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame. At a Grey Cup dinner that year, Casey, then a staff neurologist at Cleveland Veterans’ Administration Hospital, urged other black players who had come to Canada to make the most of the opportunities provided in this new country. “I cherish the education I received here,” he said. “I cherish my friends and I’ll stand up for Canada until the day I die.”)
On the Friday before the 1950 Grey Cup game the snow began to fall. Six to eight inches were expected for the day of the game with temperatures in the twenties (Fahrenheit). University of Toronto students were clearing off stadium seats, while both teams held separate workouts on the stadium turf that Friday. The field was uncovered, at the mercy of the elements. The night before the game, the grounds crew decided to take matters in hand.
“That was almost unbelievable,” Ulysses remembered. “When it snowed … snowed … snowed that Friday night and the grounds crew at the University of Toronto decided to scoop all the snow off and have a clear field but in the process rolled up boulders and mud and everything.”
It was the Grey Cup dubbed “the Mud Bowl,” with Toronto persevering 13–0 in one of the most boring championship games on record. Winnipeg made exactly two first downs all game. Two! Jack Jacobs had his worst-ever performance as a starting quarterback, throwing two interceptions and fumbling twice. He never did find a way to get a decent grip on the pigskin. Toronto’s quarterback, Al Dekdebrun, had better success handling the ball and there was a reason for that.
“Al Dekdebrun, the quarterback that year, decided that he would tape thumbtacks on his fingers here,” Ulysses told me, tapping the fingertips of his right hand with his left thumb. “And then on the cement wall file them down so they’d be just little pricks that would stick into the football. He threw fair, threw a few completions.”
It brings to mind the New England Patriots and the 2015 AFC championship game against the Indianapolis Colts, now known as “Deflategate,” in which footballs were deliberately underinflated to allow quarterback Tom Brady to get a better grip on the ball. Imagine the field day the media would have if Brady ever got caught wearing filed-down thumbtacks on his fingers!
The next year, 1951, the Argos ended the season with the same 7–5 record as Ottawa and Hamilton, but Ottawa was awarded first place through a tie-breaker system. Though the Argos split the two-game semifinal with the Tiger-Cats, they lost where it counted most — in total points. The Argonauts would be denied a chance to repeat as Grey Cup champions. But Ulysses Curtis would earn a degree of notoriety that year for one of the strangest single plays in the history of the CFL — one that would require changes to the rule book.
It was the last game of the season, which could affect the final standings, between the Ottawa Rough Riders and Toronto Argonauts. The two teams had a history of bad blood between them dating back to the previous season when a fight had erupted on the field. Ulysses Curtis had punched an Ottawa player, which set off a skirmish on the field of play. But the spark for the fireworks had come courtesy of an American player, Howie Turner from North Carolina, who had hurled a certain racial epithet at Curtis. Having been fingered as the instigator by the press, Turner approached Coach Clair before the next game between the two teams and apologized. Clair apparently responded that he was hardly the one Turner should be apologizing to.
“Then Clair called Curtis and the coloured boy [my italics] ran over toward the pair,” reported the Ottawa Journal on October 4, 1950. “Turner stuck out his hand and Curtis grabbed it warmly. ‘What I said last week was in a ball game, Ulysses,’ said Turner. ‘I didn’t mean it and I want you to know I’m sorry.’”
Events took an even more bizarre turn on November 4, in the game between the two teams in Varsity Stadium. The Argonauts were leading 18–12 when the Ottawa quarterback threw a pass intended for none other than Howie Turner.
“Tom O’Malley was the Ottawa quarterback and ‘Touchdown’ Turner was out in the flat,” explained Ulysses. “Frank Clair would put me in on defence in certain situations. So I sensed the pass coming from O’Malley, intercepted it, and then headed down the sidelines.”
With nothing but daylight ahead of him, Ulysses sprinted for the goal line. Pete Karpuk, an Ottawa player sitting on the sidelines, suddenly threw off his parka and charged the field, looking to tackle Ulysses before he could score. He failed to tackle Curtis but slowed him down and redirected him toward a teammate who made the tackle. Pandemonium broke out in the stands. This was a new one. The officials had no idea what to do.
“So the officials got together. Okay, Ottawa will be two men short and move the ball half the distance to the goal line,” remembered Ulysses. “Frank Clair wanted to take the players off the field but we convinced him, ‘No, let’s go.’”
Though he was prevented from scoring a touchdown on the play, it remained something of a claim to fame for Ulysses as it no doubt did for Karpuk, the man who came off the bench.
“Now what were they going to do with the rule book after this?” said Ulysses. “The Big Four got together and decided that it would have to be an automatic touchdown if an extra man came on the field. So then in the Canadian rule book it was re-written. So that was kind of a highlight of my career, having a rule book re-written because of me.”
During the off-season, Curtis and his wife and first child, who was born in the year of the Mud Bowl, would return to Albion, Michigan, to stay with family while he worked for Corning Glass.
“All the Canadian players had jobs because they didn’t make the money the Americans made,” said Ulysses. “The Americans didn’t make great money either; there wasn’t that much money to be made in those years.”
But like Herb Trawick, Curtis did not think that the Toronto brass made much of an effort to find work for the import players, and particularly those who were black.
“Matter of fact, they paid Americans fifty dollars a week expenses,” he said, “because they didn’t want the Americans to work. The Canadian players worked and played. They offered us little menial jobs around and you’d be surprised. They offered me one job, Billy Bass, my roommate and me, loading beer cases on trucks. And then an article came out in the Telegram that said ‘Crowd Caresses Curtis but He Wishes a Boss Would.’ I got very few offers to work outside football. Hockey players got the salesmen jobs and the big promotions jobs.”
There were no bigger stars in Toronto than the Maple Leafs, players who were born Canadian and lived in the city year-round. Teams were not eager to create even larger divides between the haves — generally the American import players and top Canadian stars — and the have-nots (everybody else). For the vast majority of Canadian players, football was a part-time job and their real life was going on elsewhere in plants, factories, schools, and offices that simply made allowances for their football schedule. Ulysses, like Herb Trawick, was looking to find a position locally that might grow into full-time employment upon his retirement, not just a job as a doorman or loading beer cases onto the back of a truck.
In 1952, Ulysses enjoyed his finest season in Canadian football. There were no statistics kept in the East before 1954 regarding yards gained rushing or receiving, but he did score sixteen touchdowns that season, the most in the league. The Argonauts finished with a 7–4–1 record, good for second place in the East behind the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. In a period of twelve days, beginning on November 15, the Argonauts played four post-season games, a ridiculously draining schedule. Three of those games were against Hamilton, with the third game necessary because the teams were deadlocked in total points after the first two games. On November 26, the Argos played against the winner of the ORFU, the Sarnia Imperials, with the Argos winning 34–15. Four days after the game against Sarnia, the Argos were back at Varsity Stadium for the Grey Cup match against the Rollie Miles and Normie Kwong–led Edmonton Eskimos. But the extended playoffs had taken their toll on Ulysses.
“I remember the season more than the Grey Cup. I got off to a tremendous start and scored sixteen touchdowns. Toward the end of that season, I was limping a bit going into the Grey Cup game because the knee was acting up. But I had a season that I’ll never forget. The trainers knew I was injured. When season starts until it’s over, you’re always banged up and bruised all over. Every football player realizes that you’re going to be hurt and it carries throughout the season.”
In the first Grey Cup ever televised live — by CBLT in Toronto — the Argonauts prevailed over Edmonton, 21–11.
“I didn’t have a good game in the 1952 Grey Cup,” admitted Curtis. He was hobbled by the knee injury that plagued him throughout the playoffs.
Ulysses underwent surgery on his knee during the off-season but by the beginning of the next year knew that he had lost a step or two. He never got back to his pre-surgery form, and he played only two more seasons before hanging up his cleats for good.
“After football the big question was what would I do? I had a university education so I applied to the Catholic School Board but I wasn’t Catholic and back in those days …” He shrugged without finishing the statement. “I applied for a job at Corning Glass back in Michigan where I worked during the off-seasons, and nothing.”
He knew by this time that he wanted to stay in Canada. He had another daughter, born in 1952, and the family was comfortable living in Toronto.
“After five years here I felt a warmth. I had been successful in sports here. I did feel that rather than go back to tiny Albion, Michigan, that I would stay here.”
And that’s when a friend, Ray Lewis, entered the picture.
(Raymond Gray Lewis, nicknamed “Rapid Ray” Lewis, was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1910, the grandson of runaway slaves who had followed the Underground Railroad to freedom in Canada. As a high-school athlete, Lewis won seventeen national championships in track. He briefly attended Marquette University in Milwaukee but grew homesick for Hamilton and returned after a single semester. Unable to find more meaningful employment, he signed on with the railway as a porter, and he worked that job for twenty-five years. Legend has it that he used to race alongside the train during stretches on the Prairies. He joined the Canadian Olympic sprint team, and, as a member of the 4 x 440-yard sprint relay team at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, he became the first Black Canadian to win an Olympic medal, taking home a bronze. Shin splints would prevent Lewis from taking part in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. In 2001, Lewis would receive the Order of Canada from then Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, who said, “This should have happened a long time ago.”)
“Ray said, ‘I hear you have to go back to the U.S.’ and I said yes, and he said, ‘Look, after I was a porter I started a cleaning company and I’ve had it for a number of years. I’ll teach you all the techniques, strategies, and pricings and such and maybe you’ll want to stay in Canada and try the business.’”
So Ulysses Curtis went into the building maintenance business. But after eight years he’d had enough. He went back to school in the Faculty of Education at University of Toronto and entered teaching.
“That was a life-saver for me, after working for eight years with my own business.”
Curtis spent thirty years working for the North York Board of Education as a teacher, a guidance counsellor, a race-relations supervisor, and a coach. He was elated to see the changes in opportunities presented to black players after their football careers ended, so different from his time, “when black players couldn’t buy a job.” In 2005, he was named to the list of all-time greatest Toronto Argonauts for his achievements wearing the colours of the “double blue.” Sixth in career touchdowns with forty-seven. Fourth in rushing with 3,712 yards. Second in most yards in a single game with 208. And third in most 100-yard games rushing with twelve. These stats reached in what amounted to a short career, a mere five years long.
“Canada represented a new life for me,” he confessed toward the end of our interview. “As a matter of fact, when I came to Toronto I was twenty-four years of age. And it’s been a real buggy-ride, I tell you. It’s been great to take out a Canadian citizenship, and when I go to Michigan I say well, we’ll be going home on Monday … they say ‘Home?’ Because they can’t really figure out why Toronto is home when I was born and raised in Michigan.”
Ulysses Curtis did make one final trip home. On October 6, 2013, he passed away from natural causes in Toronto. He was buried alongside family members in Albion, Michigan.