Crimson Red Sports

The contest between Alabama and USC on Sept. 12, 1970 at Legion Field in Birmingham has come to represent a watershed moment in the Crimson Tide football program's long journey toward integration. When the Trojan team, led by the black running back Sam Cunningham, trounced the Tide 42-21 the last vestiges of segregation were swept away and Bear Bryant was finally forced to make room on his roster for African-American athletes.

Which is all wonderful and inspiring except for the bothersome fact that it is absolutely untrue.

By the time of the 1970 season opener, the Alabama program had been moving toward integration for more than a decade and actually had one black player on the roster (but, as a freshman, was ineligible to play due to NCAA rules). While integration came slowly to Alabama the last barriers barring blacks from Crimson Tide sideline fell in the same time period as the rest of the Southeast Conference. A little later than some, a little earlier than others.

Needless to say, the presence of these facts hasn't stopped the mythology factory cranking out ham-fisted reinterpretations of the 1970 season opener and at the top of this unsightly heap is Steven Travers' 2007 tome, One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game that Changed a Nation.

The book is an almost unreadable mishmash of idle historical observation, philosophical navel gazing and patronizing pontification. Every now and then you stumble on a bit about football and, if you are lucky, it might even be relevant to the 1970 Alabama USC game. One Night, Two Teams gains a little more coherence toward the end while giving its account of the game itself but any goodwill toward the work was burned up a good 200 pages prior.

But let's talk about the positive aspects of this effort before diving into the details of its many many flaws. Travers clearly did a yeoman's job getting interviews with many of the people who participated in the 1970 game as well as their contemporaries. To its credit, One Night, Two Teams presents many of these as unexpurgated question and answer passages which provide a great historical resource.

And it has an index. Which is handy.

Outside of that One Night, Two Teams is pretty much a horrorshow. The first problem is the reader has to wade through pages upon pages of almost completely unrelated sermonizing to find material that has anything to do with the teams and people involved in the game that is ostensibly the book's subject. This is complicated by an incoherent organization that presents the information in such a haphazard manner it's impossible to detect any type of narrative structure to the work.

Here's an example. The book's second chapter is titled "Platonic Justice." The title isn't a metaphor. You literally get five pages of discussion of Greek philosophy that culminates in a bizarre exposition of Plato's Republic that concludes with a florid and completely irrelevant violation of Godwin's Law. Just when you think your eyes could possibly roll out of your head you get this passage:

How does this apply to the 1970 USC-Alabama game? By understanding the nature of truth, which is never misunderstood when it is viewed in the American arena. The fans at Legion Field were observing the truth.

So, it seems, we backwards and parochial Southerners had to have a team from the enlightened paradise of the West Coast demonstrate the ills of segregation for the scales to fall from our eyes, reveal unto us our sins and lead us all upward to a better tomorrow.

And here we didn't even send a "Thank You" card....