From an interview with Pitt great Tony Dorsett:
Your alma mater, Pittsburgh, is going through tough times. Do you see the Panthers improving?
I hope for nothing but the best. I spoke with [Pitt coach] Dave [Wannstedt] right before the Notre Dame game. He told me he had a concern about the defensive line being a little undersized. It showed that evening when they played Notre Dame. If we give Dave a chance to recruit his own players — he’s a Pittsburgh guy and knows what it’s about, and he knows Miami — I think he’d do well recruiting in Western Pennsylvania., Ohio, West Virginia, and down South. He’ll be able to recruit some players. He’s been in the pros, so he knows what the game is all about. He could have some influence. It’s like when I came out. If you want to be a part of something new, Pitt is the place to go. I think he’ll get it done if we give him time to get the players in there.
As both Pitt and UConn played mid-week, they have extra time off. This means filling the gaps in the normal cycle for stories. Add in the recent passing of Rosa Parks, and there is a story about Bobby Grier.
A month before the game, Georgia Gov. Marvin Griffin asked Georgia Tech to boycott the game unless Grier was banned from playing. A group of students at Georgia Tech, and people across the nation rallied against the idea. And Grier’s teammates voted to play only if Grier played.
The game was on. But Grier still had to deal with discrimination in New Orleans.
“I stayed at a hotel in the black area of town and my teammates were at the team hotel,” he said.
Grier said he wasn’t thinking about his place in history when Pitt took the field. He was proud, he said, because the Panthers had earned a bowl bid.
“All I was thinking about was playing the game and my responsibilities,” Grier said. “It wasn’t like today, where there are like 25 bowl games. Back then there were five or six. And if you got into one of them, it was a huge accomplishment. That’s how I felt.”
Georgia Tech won 7-0, the only touchdown set up by an interference call against Grier. To this day, he insists he committed no infraction.
“The ball was three to four feet over my head,” he said. “I was on the ground where the receiver had pushed me down. And the official threw the flag.
“Who knows, maybe the ref saw something else.”
You mean other than skin color?
Grier’s story tends to get overlooked in the annals of desegregation. In college football, far more is made of Bear Bryant taking the USC running back into his team’s locker room after a loss and announcing that, “this is what a football player looks like.”
That may have heralded the end of segregation of college football in the South, but Grier was a trailblazer for everywhere else in the country.
