He led the CFL in rushing four times in front of cheering Canadian throngs less encumbered by ignorant hatred that our country has still not entirely purged. Those who know the story well have an obligation to pass it on. Those who don’t will be better just for listening.
— TERRY HERSOM, SIOUX CITY JOURNAL
October 20, 1951. The Drake University Bulldogs out of Des Moines, Iowa, were in Stillwater, Oklahoma, for a game against the Aggies of Oklahoma A&M, a game that could amount to the Missouri Conference championship. The Bulldogs had begun the season 5 and 0 behind the offensive talents of Johnny Bright. For three years straight Bright had led the nation in total offence — running, passing, and receiving — and was the odds-on favourite to win the Heisman Trophy, an annual award that goes to the most outstanding college football player in the United States. If he won the Heisman, he would be the first Black American to achieve that honour.
In three seasons, Bright had heard his share of racist taunts and endured the usual cheap shots administered by opposing tacklers when the referees weren’t looking. Back in 1934, the head coach with Iowa State (and a former Drake football coach), Ossie Solem, was quoted after a particularly brutal game against Minnesota, “There’s no use kidding anyone — a Negro player, even if his opponents play cleanly, always gets plenty of bumps and particularly when he is a star football carrier.” Solem was referring to his black running back, Oze “Ozzie” Simmons, who was knocked out three times during that Minnesota game. “They were blatant with their piling on and kneeing me. It was obvious, but the refs didn’t call it,” said Simmons, years later. Nicknamed “the Ebony Eel” by a white press given to hanging ludicrous monikers on sports figures, Ozzie would be a victim of his times, one more black athlete who would never get to measure his game against the best in professional football because of the colour of his skin.
The Drake Bulldogs, including Johnny Bright, had actually played against Oklahoma A&M in Stillwater, Oklahoma, two years previously. Bright was the first black player to set foot on the Lewis Field turf, in a game that the Aggies won by a score of 28–0. There had been some concern at the time about how Bright would be received, especially by Drake supporters, but after the game Bright said that A&M was one of the cleanest teams that he had played against. Some of the Aggie players had even shaken his hand after the game. That might have been the influence of the Aggies’ head coach at the time, Jim Lookabaugh, who had gone on record as saying that Johnny Bright would be treated with respect by his players. Oklahoma A&M had aspirations of moving beyond the Missouri Valley Conference and becoming part of a larger, more prestigious conference. It would not further their cause to appear like some backwater breeding ground for psychopathic rednecks. So restrained was their conduct that Drake’s athletic council chairman, Frank Gardner, wrote a letter to the Oklahoma A&M leaders expressing his “deep appreciation” for the manner in which Johnny Bright had been treated.
But that was 1949. By 1950, Jim Lookabaugh was gone. Oklahoma A&M brought in a new head coach from Georgia, J.B. Whitworth, whose philosophy was fairly basic: if it moves, hit it hard. He rode his defence relentlessly, especially the end, Wilbanks Smith, whom he accused of being soft. In the run-up to the game against Drake there was talk that Whitworth had made a point with his players about targeting Bright, accusing him of not being a team player, of faking injuries, of being a prima donna, the kind of negative traits associated back then with talented black players. He never told his team to go after Bright because he was black. One of Bright’s teammates was told by an A&M student that Whitworth had gone so far as to encourage his players to get Bright out of the game “even if you have to kill him.” One player took the coach’s advice very much to heart. That player was Wilbanks Smith, defensive end.
There was a different vibe in the air that day of the game. Racial tension had spread from the playing field into the mainstream media. Articles had appeared in both the university and local newspaper warning that Bright was a marked man. The locals had heard rumbles all week that there was a price on Johnny Bright’s head and had come to see whether one of their beloved Aggies would collect that bounty. Two photographers, Don Ultang and John Robinson from the Des Moines Register, had set up early on the press-box roof.
They had heard the rumours circulating and decided that they would focus their cameras on Bright. That way, if something did happen on the field, they might get a decent shot. But if something was going to happen, it had better happen early; the two photographers had to fly back to Des Moines, and if they were to make the paper’s deadline they could not stay for the entire game. They wouldn’t have to stay beyond halftime. In just the first few minutes of the game, they would get more than they bargained for. They would get a Pulitzer Prize.
If hearing rumours of his own demise on the gridiron was not worrisome enough, Bright had to contend with the standard issues of segregation in Stillwater and the surrounding region. Bright had been turned away from the hotel where the team had stayed just two years before, so the coach had decided to take the whole team elsewhere. The team found accommodations in the A&M student union hall but, once again, no black people were allowed. Finally, the team was able to arrange for Bright to stay with a local black minister. If Bright was overly concerned about the rumoured threats against him, he did not let on. He was more concerned with matters of the future. Just a few more games left in the season, and if he continued to produce as he had been, he would be a shoo-in for the Heisman. Just two weeks earlier he had rumbled for 265 yards and four touchdowns in the first half of a game (at which point his coach had applied the mercy rule and replaced Bright at halftime). Winning the Heisman Trophy would guarantee him a top spot in the upcoming National Football League draft and a sizable pro contract that would allow him to provide his family with a quality of life he had never known growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
On Drake’s first play from scrimmage, Johnny Bright took the snap from centre. He handed the ball off to fullback Gene Macomber. As Macomber burst through the line, defensive tackle Wilbanks Smith made a beeline for the unsuspecting Bright, who stood watching the play unfold. Smith drove his forearm into Bright’s jaw, knocking him to the turf. His jaw broken, a dazed Bright picked himself up off the grass and returned to the huddle. On the next play, he launched a pass deep to receiver Jim Pilkington, who snagged the ball and continued into the end zone untouched. A sixty-five-yard completion for a touchdown. But the pain in Bright’s jaw was so intense that he barely celebrated.
The Bulldog defence stopped Oklahoma and the Aggies were forced to punt. Drake’s offence, led by Bright, once again took the field. On the first play, Bright handed off to his wingback and, as before, Wilbanks Smith ignored the runner and went after Bright. Once again, no penalty was called despite an apparent attempt to injure. Drake’s news director, Paul Morrison, watched uneasily.
“I was in the press box at the time and there was no question that this guy Wilbanks Smith was the designated hitter. After two or three plays I said to [Des Moines Register sportswriter] Maury White, I said, ‘Boy, they’re really getting after John.’ They just decided that to win the conference championship, they had to get rid of John.”
On the next play, Bright ran a sweep and gained seventeen yards. As he lay at the bottom of the pile, absorbing further punishment, he heard the word, a snarling hiss in his ear. Nigger. Bright slowly made his way back to the huddle, the word reverberating in his helmet. He saw the hateful stares of his opponents, any one of whom could have uttered the vile epithet. But Johnny Bright was not about to back down. On the next play, he handed the ball to Macomber, who went left, then cut back up field. As Bright followed the play, he failed to see Wilbanks Smith approaching, his arm drawn back to launch another forearm into Bright’s unprotected jaw. In the stands, Ultang and Robinson were ready. The shutter clicked six times. The two photographers looked at one another and wondered whether anyone else had noticed what they had just witnessed.
Johnny Bright’s chance at the coveted Heisman Trophy ended on the grass of Lewis Field that day. After only two sets of downs he was forced to leave the game, his season all but done. His jaw was fractured, his teeth wired shut for weeks. He would lose close to twenty pounds. No coach in his right mind would let him play despite his protestations that he was fine, just fine. The risk of further or permanent damage was too great. He had no doubt been concussed but who kept track or even noticed back then? He had his bell rung. He saw stars. But a broken jaw was another matter. There was no way to hide the evidence.
The fallout from that single game by far overshadowed the importance of the game itself as it pertained to the standings, or the effect on Bright’s collegiate career or even the slipping away of the Heisman Trophy from his grasp and the chance to make history as the first Black American to win it. That day would live on in infamy through the power of the photo sequence taken by the team of Don Ultang and John Robinson, who would win the Pulitzer Prize in photography for their shots. That sequence would become known as “the Johnny Bright Incident.” The photographs first appeared in the Des Moines Register on October 21, 1951, the day after the game, and would be picked up by every major newspaper in the country.
The pictures show Johnny Bright handing the ball off to the running back, Gene Macomber. Bright then watches as Macomber cuts back against the flow of play to head upfield. As other Aggies give chase, one lineman does not. Wilbanks Smith. He is seen heading straight for Bright, who remains oblivious to the danger approaching. It’s like watching a sequence of photographs of a shark fin approaching a swimmer who’s casually floating on his back, without a care in the world. As Smith draws closer to the unsuspecting Bright, he pulls his fist back. In the final shot, his right forearm comes into contact with Bright’s unprotected face, seeming to crush it almost flat until it disappears inside his helmet. There was clearly no attempt to deviate from his course or limit the damage inflicted on an uninvolved and unsuspecting victim. The evidence was there for the whole world to see. The Des Moines Tribune printed a series of opinions from various newspapers the following week.
Oct 20 should go down in football’s record book as “Black Saturday.…” Bright’s teammates, headed by Capt. Bob Binette, charged that the boy’s injury was “deliberately inflicted.…” And all who saw the pictures of the “incident” in Monday’s Denver Post must agree with that charge.
— Denver Post
Some are considerate enough of the offending young man to contend that he was out to “get” Bright not because he was a Negro but because he was a star athlete. Even such a concession is anything but complimentary to both the young man and his coach. But we don’t go along with it. To us what happened is reflective of a racial intolerance which is by no means restricted to Oklahoma.
— Mason City Globe Gazette
Certainly the least that should be done is to bar Smith from any further competition. But whether he was instructed to slug Bright at every opportunity or concocted the murky scheme himself, his coach and school should be held responsible.… It’s about time steps were taken to make football a game again.
— Marshalltown Times-Republican
There was immediate outrage across the country from football fans decrying the horrific acts of violence perpetrated against Johnny Bright. Bright himself was quoted in the Morning Democrat in Des Moines: “When he hit me the first time I thought nothing about it. Those things happen in a game. But when he repeatedly struck me, doesn’t it seem pretty obvious?”
Warren Gaer, Drake’s head football coach, expressed curiosity as to how the opposition would respond. “I’ll be very interested in seeing what Coach Whitworth will do about Smith after he sees pictures like this.”
But Oklahoma A&M coach Whitworth took a page from the modern political playbook and simply denied the truth that was evident to all.
“I can say right now our boys didn’t gang up on anyone,” Whitworth said. And in a slippery way, he was telling the truth, for it was hardly a group action but the work of a lone assassin, or, as Paul Morrison called him, a “designated hitter.”
Drake University president Henry Harmon petitioned the Missouri Valley Conference council to take action against Wilbanks Smith, but his attempts were blocked by what amounted to a determined resistance on the part of the so-called Southern Bloc of the conference, who had no intention of upholding sanctions against either Smith or Oklahoma A&M. Harmon then met with the presidents of the participant universities, again to no avail. While the general consensus was that Smith may have crossed a line, there was no clear admission of wrongdoing or collective will to do anything about it. With the domination of the Southern Bloc, Harmon discovered the hard facts of Jim Crow attitudes and unspoken laws. For instance, any school that yielded to the temptation to integrate, whether to build a winning football team or just because they thought it was the right thing to do, had lost the right to expect justice on some moral higher ground.
Harmon had a fallback plan. He proposed that Oklahoma A&M issue a public apology for the on-field behaviour of Wilbanks Smith and the Aggies players. Not only would such an apology satisfy Drake officials but it would also go a long way to appeasing Bulldogs fans throughout the state of Iowa. Oklahoma representatives refused. To issue a public apology would be to openly confess that their players were in the wrong or, worse, that they had conspired to target Johnny Bright because a) he was black, or b) he was great, or c) he was both black and great. Harmon was furious. With no punishment for Smith nor any acknowledgement that he had transgressed or even just felt a hint of remorse for his blatant attack on Bright, and with no apology from Oklahoma A&M for the actions of their football team, Harmon threatened to take Drake University right out of the Missouri Valley Conference.
“Our fans and constituency kept hounding at [Drake] to take some action,” explained Paul Morrison.
When Oklahoma officials failed to respond to this ultimatum, President Harmon called a meeting of Drake’s athletic council and made it clear that his decision would be based on the council’s recommendations. He also made it clear that he felt that the university should have nothing to do with a conference that abided the actions of Oklahoma A&M. The council agreed. With the support of the Drake student body and the vast majority of Iowans on his side, President H.G. Harmon announced that Drake University was resigning from the Missouri Valley Conference on November 27, 1951. Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, also announced that they were leaving the conference in a gesture of solidarity.
“Johnny Bright’s broken jaw now has lost the Missouri Valley Conference two of its most influential members,” announced Iowa’s Waterloo Daily Courier, which sounds like a case of blaming the victim. Bright never asked anyone to do anything on his behalf. He certainly never expected the university to pull out of the Missouri Valley Conference in order to make a statement against overt acts of racism (which it wasn’t so much as a statement against the stubborn refusal to apologize). Johnny Bright was a black man. He knew the score better than those acting in his so-called best interests. After all, he had been forced to live off-campus because he was black. He recognized that his athletic prowess had earned him a measure of esteem among his student peers but never true acceptance. What did a white administration honestly think could happen to a black man on the playing fields of the South? Only two years before, Drake officials had sent a letter to Oklahoma A&M praising them to the skies for not crippling or maiming Bright on his first visit to Lewis Field. And now suddenly they decided that they could no longer be a part of a conference that condones racist ideology?
Fortunately for Johnny Bright, he would recover fully from his injuries, too late to finish his senior season of college football or attain his dream of winning the Heisman Trophy, but he would partake in both the East-West Shrine Game and the Hula Bowl, two All-Star games featuring the best collegiate players in the country (although he saw limited action because of his injured jaw). At the NFL draft held on January 17, 1952, at the Hotel Statler in New York City, the Philadelphia Eagles chose Bright as the fifth-overall pick. The Eagles naturally assumed that Bright would jump at their offer to play pro ball. He was poor; he was black. They added insult to injustice by offering him much less money than they would have offered a white player of similar capabilities; that is, if they could have found a white player with similar capabilities.
But Johnny Bright was a changed man. His eyes had been opened by the treatment he’d received in Oklahoma. He knew that the NFL was full of white Southern players who, like Wilbanks Smith, would love to take a free shot at a cocky young black star. Did he want to subject himself and, by extension, his family to that sort of treatment? But what else could he do? He knew his options were limited, that it was a rigged game, especially for Black Americans.
And then representatives from two teams in the WIFU, the Edmonton Eskimos and the Calgary Stampeders, came calling. Bright, on the advice of Coach Gaer, let the Eagles know that teams in Canada were interested in signing him. That way, if the Eagles were sincere about him, they would have to increase their offer.
“I would like to see Johnny play the toughest ball because I’m absolutely certain he could play with the best,” Gaer told reporters. “However, if this offer [from Canada] is such from a dollars and cents standpoint that Johnny can’t turn it down, then I think it would be right by playing in Canada.”
The cards were on the table. The Eagles thought he was bluffing. Why would any American football player, regardless of colour, go play football in some rinky-dink league in the Arctic wilderness or wherever the hell they played up there? And then the Stampeders made their offer: $12,000 a season plus a $2,000 signing bonus. It was an offer that blew Philadelphia’s out of the water. Still, Bright thought it only proper that he give Philadelphia general manager Vince McNally one last chance to make an offer Bright could not refuse.
“The Eagles’ offer will have to be a good one or I’m going to sign with Calgary,” Bright told the press.
The story goes that Stampeders president and Calgary oilman C.E. Chesher, perhaps sensing that all Johnny Bright needed was a small display of financial sincerity to get his name on a contract, came to Des Moines, took Johnny Bright to the legendary Blue Willow, a hugely popular local café for Drake students, and laid out twenty $100 bills in a row across the table, the full amount of his bonus offer. He told Bright that he would be more than the face of the Calgary Stampeders — he would become the face of professional football in Canada. It was a nudge in Calgary’s direction that Johnny Bright could not resist.
“I have worked four years to get in a position where I could help my mother and dad. I just couldn’t let the offer go by,” he told reporters.
McNally was outraged when he heard the news. He went to the papers and claimed that Bright had not given the Eagles a final chance, not that it would have changed their position. McNally had made it pretty clear that he had no intention of budging on his initial offer. Bright had gone back on his word, he claimed, having promised to come to Philadelphia for a final contract discussion. McNally painted himself as the deeply wronged party who lost out on Bright by being patient and not wanting to crowd him regarding a decision. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “McNally added that he hoped Bright knew what he was doing. The circumstances, he said, indicated that the halfback was high-pressured into signing with big promises and a display of large greenbacks.” So apparently the story of Chesher’s Blue Willow sales pitch, whether truth or whimsy, had reached the Eagles’ ears. It’s hard not to detect a condescending tone in McNally’s comments and his suggestion that Bright might be too naive to understand the big picture, so dazzled was he by the colour of money.
Bright was stunned by McNally’s posturing.
“Everything I’ve said lately seems to have been changed around to insult someone. I don’t want hard feelings.”
What McNally did not figure into Bright’s decision was a quality of life factor. Not even Calgary could guarantee that Bright would never encounter racist attitudes again, but he would not have to face Southern racist attitudes in Canada. As Bright admitted years later, he was never sold on the idea of playing for Philadelphia.
“I would have been their first Negro player. There was a tremendous influx of Southern players into the NFL at the time and I didn’t know what kind of treatment I could expect.”
There was no rejoicing in Canada (except in Calgary) when Johnny Bright signed with the Stampeders, not because of his race but because of the price the Stamps paid to sign him. Even then, throughout Canadian football there were predictions of doom and gloom if salaries escalated, especially when it came to import players. There was a real concern that teams with deeper pockets than others could create a great imbalance in talent. The Johnny Bright signing particularly rankled the western-based teams. Al Anderson, general manager of the Edmonton Eskimos, called it “the beginning of the end for Canadian football,” according to the Winnipeg Free Press. “That’s too much,” he went on. “Canadian clubs can’t stand it.”
Calgary’s signing of Johnny Bright also became a matter of some concern with teams in the NFL who feared that other first-round stars might follow Bright’s lead and head north. That was really the beginning of what the U.S. press began labelling a “war” with Canada, a war that heated up even more when Heisman Trophy winner Billy Vessels, a white running back from Oklahoma and first-round pick of the Baltimore Colts, signed with Edmonton one year later. Though Baltimore matched Edmonton’s offer, Vessels still chose to go to Canada.
“Up in Canada, they also get me a job,” said Vessels, when asked what the deciding factor in Edmonton’s favour was.
What really angered the Americans was that they no longer had their draft picks over a barrel. They would have to negotiate, something they had never had to do when it was their way or the highway. Now that highway actually led somewhere. It led to Canada.
Rollie Miles, one of the greatest all-purpose backs in the history of Canadian football, did not come to Canada to escape racism in the South. Rollie Miles didn’t even come to Canada to play football. He came to play baseball for the Regina Caps of the Southern Saskatchewan Baseball League. Baseball was his game. But at his alma mater, St. Augustine’s College, an all-black school in Raleigh, North Carolina, he had been (and still was) one of those natural athletes who played several sports. St. Augustine’s is also where he met his wife, Marianne, now a retired psychologist in Edmonton.
“He came with a group of five athletes from Washington, D.C.,” said Marianne, “and these five guys were just outstanding in all areas of athletics. So [the administration at St. Augustine’s] wanted to do something to improve or upgrade the school. It was small; they called it a liberal arts college.… I was working in the library, it was one of my jobs, and most of the students there were all black. They didn’t say black then, they said ‘coloured.’”
The library was within walking distance from her grandmother’s house where Marianne was living while attending school. It was also the house where she had been born. Her mother had come down from Harlem when she was pregnant with Marianne so that her own mother, who was a midwife, could deliver the baby. Later, Marianne and her mother returned to the family home in Harlem.
St. Augustine’s may not have been Marianne’s first choice for college but it seemed the most logical. “I knew I could live in the house I was born in, and we didn’t have money for tuition.” But Marianne, as a northerner and a native New Yorker, found the Jim Crow attitudes and laws of the South demeaning and absurd.
“You could go to Catholic Church, but you sat upstairs in the balcony. If you went to confession you had to wait until all the white people had confessed. Doesn’t that sound ridiculous? But we did it. We thought, well, we’ll go to hell if we don’t go to church.”
And so she went to the on-campus church and that’s where she met Rollie Miles for the first time, coming out of the church. She had seen him before on campus, walking with his friends, their fashion sense setting them apart from the locals.
“He was wearing what they called dungarees in those days. Rolled up, white bucks, argyle socks, and a red sweater, V-neck, with a T-shirt underneath. And I was, mmm, he’s pretty fine, but he’s probably got a chick already.”
She invited him over to her grandmother’s for something to eat and he brought all his friends along. Soon enough, Sundays became a regular meal day at Marianne’s grandmother’s house for Rollie and his friends. By the next spring, Rollie and Marianne were married.
Rollie and Marianne’s son, Brett Miles, an Edmonton-based jazz musician and writer, remembers his father telling him of his barnstorming days during his summers off from St. Augustine’s, playing the baseball circuit with and against teams from the Negro leagues, teams that were dependent on the money earned on the road playing exhibitions and tournaments.
“A couple of teams would go to a little town and play games against each other all weekend,” he told me. “And then the same two teams would go to another town. And that’s how they made their money.”
Satchel Paige did this all over the United States and developed such a reputation that people, black and white, flocked to see the famous — some would say “infamous” — Satchel Paige pitch. His fame was almost entirely word-of-mouth. He was a living legend. According to Brett Miles, Rollie once hit a double off “Satch,” a little piece of well-deserved glory that he carried with him all his life.
Rollie signed a contract with the Boston Braves and they farmed him out to the Regina Caps in 1951. The Caps had been the first-place club the previous season. Post-war western Canada was a hotbed of baseball, with teams at every level from amateur to semi-pro to major league farm teams carrying players on professional contracts. American Negro-league teams would tour the Prairies, playing local teams or tournaments.
“It is doubtful if any Saskatchewan baseball fans will have a look at old Satchel Paige this summer,” read a June 3, 1950, article in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix. “The Satch’s terms are a bit too high for the average club operator. All he’s asking is a cool $500 per inning.”
One team owner complained that he would have to charge fans $3.00 a ticket to pay Satchel the kind of money he demanded, presumably for nine innings’ work, which would have set him back $4,500 and required at least 1,500 paid attendees. But if there was any pitcher on the planet who could demand that kind of payday, it was Satchel Paige. If you thought that a black ballplayer like Rollie Miles would be conspicuous on a ball diamond in Regina in 1951, you’d be wrong. There were seven black players on the 1951 edition of the Regina Caps, five position players and two pitchers; eight, if you include the manager, Bob White.
So high was the demand for exceptional professional baseball in the West that in 1950 the mayor of the town of Indian Head, Saskatchewan, population 1,500, travelled to Wichita, Kansas, the home of the National Baseball Congress, an organization representing a number of amateur and semi-pro leagues across the United States, and bought the Jacksonville Eagles, a team that up to that point had been part of the Negro American League. The Jacksonville Eagles, in their entirety, boarded a bus and rode it 2,215 miles (3,565 kilometres) from Jacksonville, Florida, to their new home in Indian Head, Saskatchewan, where they were re-christened the Indian Head Rockets. In retrospect, “Rockets” would seem an appropriate name. They must have felt as if they’d been hurtling through infinite space in a metal tube for an eternity before landing on an unexplored planet. Who knows what thoughts must have gone through their heads as they stepped down from the bus into the vast, flat, empty prairie that would be their home for the next six or seven months. That season the Rockets played no less than eighty games including tournaments and exhibitions.
Much of the money to be made in these various western leagues lay in tournament play, where ball teams from different provinces would come together with a certain amount of prize money on the line. One such tournament was scheduled for August at Renfrew Park in Edmonton, sponsored by a Saskatchewan oilman to the tune of $7,300. Rollie Miles and the Regina Caps were in town for that tournament, plagued as it was by rains and a muddy infield. In the press box to cover the Caps’ first game was Edmonton sportswriter Don Fleming.
“Miles was an outstanding second baseman and a good hitter,” said Fleming, quoted in author Brant E. Ducey’s The Rajah of Renfrew. “After the game, I mentioned him to Regina’s owner, Cliff Ehrle. He said, ‘Yeah, and he’s some kind of football player. Came out of one of those small colleges and nobody knows anything about him.’”
Fleming phoned Annis Stukus, the head coach of the Edmonton Eskimos football team, to tell him of his discovery.
Stukus recounted the story to sportswriter Graham Kelly (in Kelly’s The Grey Cup: A History). “Stuke,” he remembered Fleming saying, “there’s a kid here with the Regina Caps who is an All-American football player. He’s got a bad ankle, but he’s stolen seven bases so far.”
Stukus was desperate for running backs, having lost a couple to injuries. He told Fleming to tell Miles to stay over after the tournament and Stukus would fly him back to Regina. With nothing better to do, Rollie went out to the Eskimos’ practice. He made an immediate and lasting impression on Stukus.
“I was running a short-side play. I couldn’t get a guy who could run to his left and throw a pass,” Stukus told Kelly. “I hear a voice behind me. ‘Hey, Coach, I can run that.’ I turned around and there was Miles in uniform. The way he ran it, you’d think I’d been dreaming of Rollie Miles when I designed that play.”
After Rollie played a few games on a tryout basis (with pay), Stukus had seen enough and signed him to a three-year contract to play football for the Edmonton Eskimos.
From the very first moment they arrived in Edmonton, Rollie and Marianne let it be known that they were not the type of people who were afraid to rock the boat on matters of racism and injustice whenever they encountered it.
“When we got here,” remembered Marianne, “the first thing I saw, going down Jasper Avenue — they had billboards on top of the buildings — was a little black boy; it was really animated, or what, I don’t know what the right word is, but they had overexaggerated the lips. It was really a put-down, or what they used to call ‘pickaninnies.’ It was advertising black Vicks cough drops.”
(Pickaninnies were caricatured depictions of black children with huge bulging eyes, big red lips, and wild kinky hair, given to chowing down on watermelon and fried chicken when they weren’t being chased or eaten by alligators. It’s hard to imagine more racially offensive depictions.)
“Rollie went down to the company in Edmonton who put it up, and they took it down and apologized.”
It makes for a good story, a commentary on the Canadian temperament. How do you get a hundred Canadians out of a pool on the hottest day of the year? You ask them. That is, of course, how we like to see ourselves, issuers of apologies, willing to right our wrongs. There are certainly worse national traits to promote. It clearly never occurred to the advertisers of Vicks cough drops that their billboard would be considered offensive among an overwhelmingly white populace. It was exactly that kind of casual, thoughtless racism that Rollie and Marianne Miles were determined to call out whenever they came upon it. People had to be made aware. They had to be educated.
In 1953, Rollie Miles had a career year and considered himself in the running for the Schenley Award in its first year of existence, an award for the Most Outstanding Player in the combined IRFU (the East) and the WIFU (the West). Prior to the Schenley, there were separate outstanding player awards for East and West: the Jeff Nicklin Memorial Trophy in the West and the Jeff Russell Memorial Trophy in the East. That first year, the Schenley went to Miles’s Edmonton teammate Billy Vessels, playing in his first and only year in Canada. Rollie felt that he himself had deserved the award and, although he didn’t outright accuse the voters of racism, he could not help but feel that racism had played some small part in the choice of Vessels over him. As Normie Kwong, who had endured his own brand of racism during his playing days, not the least of which was the moniker hung on him by the press, “the China Clipper,” later admitted, “Conditions in the country then weren’t conducive to a person of colour winning awards.”
There was no doubt in Marianne Miles’s mind who was the more deserving player.
“That was Rollie’s award.”
Billy Vessels, however, had the right pedigree. He was the Heisman Trophy winner in 1952 with the Oklahoma Sooners. He was the second-overall NFL draft pick in 1953, chosen by the Baltimore Colts. He was the All-American golden boy who chose Canada over sure stardom in the States. He had the hype, drew attention, created a buzz wherever he went and whenever he played. By any standards of the day, Billy Vessels had an outstanding year. But even Vessels thought Rollie Miles was more deserving of the award.
“Whenever I asked my dad about [the award], he said he didn’t care because that was the year he had incentives on his contract,” Brett Miles said. “But even Billy Vessels said my dad should have won in his acceptance speech. He said, ‘This is Rollie’s.’”
Marianne laughed remembering Rollie’s reaction to Vessels’s embarrassment over winning the Schenley. “Rollie kept saying, ‘Then give me the money. Give me the money, Billy, if that’s how you feel.’”
Expectations were high in Calgary when Johnny Bright arrived in training camp. The Stampeders’ management sold tickets on the slogan “Things will be brighter with Bright,” after the team had gone 4–10 the previous season. Quarterback Keith Spaith and receiver Sugarfoot Anderson, both capable players, were still with the team. But early in that first season with Calgary, Johnny Bright injured his shoulder and, though he continued to play, he was never without pain. Nevertheless, Bright managed to rush the ball 144 times for a total of 815 yards and two touchdowns. His rushing yardage led the WIFU that season. He also completed twenty-nine passes from the quarterback position for a further 494 yards and two touchdowns. Behind Bright, the Stamps made it into the playoffs for the first time in three years. In the first game of the two-game, total-points semifinal against arch-enemy Edmonton, Calgary came away with a 31–12 victory. Bright caught passes for two touchdowns and rushed for a third. A nineteen-point lead going into the rematch seemed more than enough to guarantee the Stamps would be moving on. But anyone familiar with the history of Canadian playoff football knows that nothing is ever a sure thing. This time it was Rollie Miles who shone for Edmonton, with two touchdowns, one on a pass and the other rushing. The final score was 30–7. Edmonton would advance on total points, 42–38.
During the off-season, Bright worked on rehabilitating his shoulder but it did not seem to improve. Early in training camp he developed appendicitis, which set him back. The shoulder and a number of other nagging injuries limited Bright to seeing action in only nine games, mostly in a defensive position. He carried the ball only thirty-eight times all season. The first of the grumblings that Bright might be “injury-prone” began to surface and would run over into the next season when Calgary started slow out of the gate, losing their first two games. By that time, Bright was seen as damaged goods, and the Stampeders’ management unloaded him to Edmonton, who were only too glad to have him.
It was early on in that 1953 season that Marianne and Rollie Miles and the kids were out for a drive around Edmonton, indulging in one of their favourite pastimes: searching for other black people. They would lay bets on who would spot the first black person on the streets.
“That’s how we found Johnny Bright,” explained Marianne. Bright was in town with the Stampeders for a game against the Eskimos.
“Stop the car!” shouted Marianne that day. “There’s a black man. Stop the car!”
“No, it isn’t,” Rollie answered, a fierce competitor in any contest, from Scrabble to skiing. He kept driving.
“There he is! Stop the car! I can tell by the way he walks.”
Rollie stopped the car and got out. He and Johnny Bright shook hands for the first time. And Marianne won the bet.
Early the next season, Johnny Bright was traded to Edmonton and the friends were reunited. Calgary had already gifted Normie Kwong to the Eskimos a couple of years earlier in a lopsided trade, and this deal represented yet another bone-headed move by Calgary management. There was one more offensive great added to the Edmonton backfield that year — Jackie Parker from Mississippi State, another triple-threat back capable of throwing, catching, and running. Edmonton’s coach Pop Ivy saw a different role for Bright coming over. With Bernie Faloney at quarterback and Miles, Kwong, and Parker in the backfield, he decided to install Bright in the linebacker position, a perceived weakness on the team that Bright could fill.
Bright was given few offensive touches that year, which bothered him as far as wanting to be a major part of the team’s offensive success, but it did allow his body to avoid the added wear-and-tear of playing both ways constantly. That year the Eskimos went 11–5 and made it all the way to the Grey Cup game in Toronto against the heavily favoured Montreal Alouettes led by Sam “the Rifle” Etcheverry and perennial All-Star Herb Trawick.
The outcome of that game hinged on a now-famous fumble by Chuck Hunsinger, which Parker smoothly recovered and then ran ninety yards for a touchdown. The ensuing controversy surrounding that play — was it a fumble or an incomplete pass? — and a blown whistle negating another fumble recovery and touchdown run by Herb Trawick took some of the sheen off the Edmonton victory. Montreal players and supporters suggested that calls on the field were heavily slanted Edmonton’s way and contributed to their fluke victory.
Today we would have had a coach’s challenge on the Hunsinger play, watched it repeatedly from a dozen angles in slow motion, and then seen the ruling on the field overturned or upheld. Johnny Bright thought it was a fumble. He was hoping to scoop it up but the ball took a favourable bounce toward Jackie Parker, who picked it up instead and went the distance. Ironically, Chuck Hunsinger had told a teammate on the bus on the way to the game, “The only thing I don’t want is to be a goat.” Poor Chuck. For every prayer answered there can be an emphatic and crushing denial.
The 1955 season saw Johnny Bright becoming more of a contributor offensively to the “Split T” formation and its multitude of options. Parker moved into the quarterback position when Bernie Faloney returned to the States to fulfill his military obligations, and Bright took Parker’s vacant spot in the backfield. Bright had three times the number of touches he had had the previous season and gained 643 yards on the ground. Rollie Miles now found himself with the fewest rushing attempts of all the backs, only one-third the number of times he had handled the ball in his breakout year of 1953.
Once again, Edmonton was matched up with Montreal in the Grey Cup, which would be played at Empire Stadium in Vancouver, the first time the Grey Cup game would be held on Western turf. Montreal was seeking to avenge their previous season’s loss to Edmonton, a game they felt that they should have won in a cakewalk. Edmonton players were seeking vengeance as well, but for entirely different reasons. They felt that they had been so disrespected by the Montreal players and their fans for last year’s victory that they hoped to shut a few mouths this time around.
The Eskimos lacked the flair of Montreal’s offence, built around Etcheverry, who filled the air with beautiful arcing spirals from anywhere, any time. In essence, Montreal thumbed their noses at Edmonton for not playing their style of game and instead relying on a brand of football that simply wore down teams, deceived and confused defences, and won games doing it. As one Toronto Argonaut lineman complained after a game against the Eskimos in 1955, “I made nineteen tackles but not once did I get the guy with the ball.”
And that was more or less the story of the 1955 Grey Cup. Before the largest crowd in Grey Cup history until that time, the Alouettes’ defence, physically and mentally exhausted from chasing sleight-of-hand illusionists around the gridiron, collapsed from fatigue in the second half. The final score was 34–19, despite Sam Etcheverry’s passing for a Grey Cup–record 508 yards. The Esks outscored the Alouettes 16–0 in the second half. Johnny Bright scored one touchdown on a forty-two-yard run from scrimmage. But it was his second rushing touchdown, though it was much shorter, that would prove the most memorable for him.
Throughout the game, a defensive back with the Alouettes, J.C. Caroline, had been trash-talking Bright and painting elaborate mental pictures of the damage he was going to inflict on Bright if he got half a chance. With the ball on the eight-yard line, Parker called for a pitchout to Bright. Here was the opportunity both men had been waiting for.
“I turned the corner on the pitch,” said Bright. “I ran over J.C. and knocked him out and scored a touchdown. From there on nobody challenged me very much in that game.”
The big question entering the 1956 season was could the Edmonton Eskimos win the Grey Cup for a third time in a row and achieve, in today-speak, a three-peat? Actually the bigger question might have been could anyone stop the Eskimos from winning or should they just hand them the Grey Cup and play the season for the right to be runner-up? At the end of the regular season and the playoffs, the Grey Cup matchup was settled and, once again, Edmonton would be facing their sparring partners from the Big Four, the Montreal Alouettes. For their part, Montreal hoped not to achieve their own three-peat distinction as losers.
Three quarters into the game the score was deadlocked 20–20. Would Montreal finally get revenge over their Western nemesis? Uh, no. From that point on the Eskimos outscored the Alouettes 30–7. The final score was 50–27. Once again the Alouettes’ defence had been run ragged. With Miles nursing a prior injury, Bright was given a greater workload. He did not disappoint. He rushed for 169 yards (a Grey Cup record until it was broken in 2013 by Kory Sheets of the Saskatchewan Roughriders). He also recovered a fumble, intercepted a pass, and scored two touchdowns in what many sportswriters considered his best game ever. Looking back years later, Bright felt that he really came into his own in that 1956 Grey Cup.
Quoted in Graham Kelly’s lively history, he said, “In 1956 I made more of a contribution to the overall success of the team than at any other time. That was the greatest satisfaction I had.”
That game would prove a turning point in Johnny Bright’s career. No longer would he be one of a number of options out of the backfield. He became the main man, the go-to offensive weapon. In the next five seasons Bright rushed for 7,359 yards, an average of 1,472 yards a season. In 1956 he had carried the ball ninety-three times. In 1957, he was handed the ball 259 times, nearly three times as many as the previous season. And in 1958, he rushed an astounding 296 times for 1,722 yards! Johnny Bright had become the premier running back in Canada. There was, however, a trade-off. As Bright’s own career took off, the team did not take flight with him. In 1957, the Eskimos had a 14–2 record, but in the Western final against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, a team on the rise, they could not find a way to put points on the board despite outplaying the Blue Bombers by a wide margin. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong: fumbles, penalties, and dropped passes. It was one of those nightmare games a player hopes he will wake up from and be able to say, Ah, it was just a dream.
“We tried nine field goals in that game and never got a single point,” Bright remembered years later, the sting of that loss still evident.
The Eskimos would not return to the Grey Cup game until 1960, knocking off the heavily favoured Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the Western final, a touch of revenge for their 1957 upset. But the Eskimos were a battered group going into that Grey Cup game against Ottawa. They had just finished a gruelling best-of-three playoff series, against Winnipeg, with all three games played in the space of a week. Johnny Bright was hospitalized with two severe charley horses after the series and doctors had to drain blood from his legs to reduce the swelling enough that he could walk. He walked out of the hospital in Edmonton on Thursday, arrived in Vancouver late that night, briefly worked out with the team on Friday, and Saturday took part in the Grey Cup game.
Bright wasn’t the only Eskimo backfield member hurting. Parker, Kwong, and Miles were all hobbled by various injuries. Most professional athletes facing a championship game want to play and will hide their injuries, lie about the extent of their injuries, or do and say whatever it takes to get the go-ahead to play from their coach. That was a lot easier to get away with before there were regulations and procedures and medical interventionists and agents, as there are today, that prevent an individual from risking his future career and maybe his life by playing. But in this case, the entire Edmonton backfield might as well have spent the game in the infirmary. Ottawa won 16–6, not a huge disparity in points, but they also managed to hold the trio of Parker, Kwong, and Bright to a mere twenty-two yards rushing.
That game really marked the last gasp of that once-formidable backfield. Normie Kwong retired after the Grey Cup game that year. Rollie Miles retired following the 1961 season. Jackie Parker was traded to Toronto in 1963. And Johnny Bright, after a couple of seasons of seeing his workload reduced to near irrelevance, retired in 1964. If you had told any of those four back in 1956 that they had won their last Grey Cup as a unit, they would have never believed it. Sure, a season can fall short of expectations and anything can happen in one game, as it did that day against Winnipeg in 1957, when the Edmonton kicker missed nine field goal attempts and never got so much as a single out of any of them. But 1958 through 1960 with Johnny Bright racking up an average of 1,450 yards per season? In that light, three Grey Cup championships, regardless of their being in a row, could be seen as a disappointment.
When Johnny Bright retired, Maury White of the Des Moines Register, the sportswriter who had sat next to Drake news director Paul Morrison for that game in Stillwater, Oklahoma, thirteen years before, wrote in his column of August 26, 1965: “The world’s best distance runners can cover eight miles, ninety-nine yards in about thirty-eight minutes. It took Johnny Bright sixteen years to gallop that exact yardage. Of course, people kept knocking Bright down.”
What White did not say is that for every time Johnny Bright got knocked down, he got right back up. After his retirement from football, Bright went into teaching full-time, as did his great friend and former teammate Rollie Miles, taking up teaching and coaching in the Edmonton Catholic School Board system immediately upon his retirement in 1961. Today, there’s an athletic field with a track, bleachers, and a soccer pitch in Edmonton named in his honour: the Rollie Miles Athletic Field.
On September 15, 2010, the Johnny Bright School opened in Edmonton. Principal Scott Miller addressed the media that day on Bright’s legacy as an educator and citizen of Edmonton, accomplishments in his life beyond the confines of the gridiron.
“We are able to go to the heritage that Johnny Bright gives us. The sense of excellence. We speak about three pillars. We speak about excellence in academics, excellence in athletics and activities, and excellence in citizenship.”
For his part in the Johnny Bright Incident, Wilbanks Smith always claimed innocence as far as the hit’s being racially motivated. To his way of thinking, it was not even an illegal hit. It was just a message. Look out, it said, I’m coming for you. The NCAA introduced measures the following year to discourage the kind of head-hunting Smith displayed that day. One rule read, “In an effort to discourage rough play and make it more costly, ejection from the game has become mandatory in cases of flagrant personal fouls.”
There was a second rule change introduced as a result of the Johnny Bright Incident and that involved players’ equipment: face masks and mouth guards are now mandatory in college football. Neither change could guarantee that such an event would not take place again, but at least the game was recognizing the potential dangers to the victims of such blatant attacks. And with the national coverage given this incident courtesy of Ultang and Robinson’s photography, on-field officials now understood that they could not afford to turn a blind eye to such egregious actions in case an eye in the stands was watching. The advent of televised games would bring the kind of wilful ignorance displayed by the officials in Stillwater on that October 1951 day to an end.
“There’s no way it couldn’t have been racially motivated,” Johnny Bright said years later in an interview with the Des Moines Register. “What I like about the whole deal now, and what I’m smug enough to say, is that getting a broken jaw has somehow made college athletics better. It made the NCAA take a hard look and clean up some things that were bad.”
In 2005, fifty-four years after the infamous incident, Oklahoma State University (formerly Oklahoma A&M) president David Schmidly wrote an official apology to Drake’s president, David Maxwell. It read, in part: “The incident was an ugly mark on Oklahoma State University and college football and we regret the harm it caused Johnny Bright, your university, and many others.…” President H.G. Harmon, who had argued so vehemently for action against either Wilbanks Smith or Oklahoma A&M on Bright’s behalf, was not alive to receive the long-awaited apology. Neither was Drake’s head coach at the time, Warren Gaer, who had encouraged Bright to follow his heart in signing with Calgary and declared that in all his years of coaching, Johnny Bright was the best he’d ever seen. And then there was the man himself at the centre, Johnny Bright, the man whose injuries had touched off the national debate. He had died in 1983 of a massive heart attack in an Edmonton hospital while undergoing anaesthetic preparation for knee surgery. The only one of the major players in the original gridiron drama still living was Wilbanks Smith, and he felt bitter and betrayed by the apology issued by his alma mater. He was now a man alone.
At Drake University today, all the Bulldogs players learn the story of Johnny Bright, the greatest football player the school has ever seen. It’s hard to avoid his name. In 2006, the field at Drake Stadium in Des Moines, Iowa, was renamed Johnny Bright Field. Every time those players step on that field they’re reminded of his courage, commitment, and singular talent.