Bobby Bell, Without Question, the Greatest Football Player I Ever Saw in Person
For anyone who does not believe the above statement, please read this very well written profile of Bobby Bell written by Larry Watts for the Big Ten's Black History Month:
http://www.bigten.org/genrel/020210aab.html
Bobby Bell grew up in Shelby, North Carolina, a poor textile mill town where he played quarterback on a six man football team at all-black Cleveland High School. The year was 1958, blacks were not allowed to play for the all-white major college teams in the South. A true Southern Gentleman, Murray Warmath, was getting garbage thrown on his lawn because he had the audacity to lose a bunch of football games as the Gophers coach, and, worse still, recruit black players from the South and the East, while at the same time integrating the Big 10 Football Conference. Sandy Stephens, Judge Dickson, Bill Muncey, and Bob McNeil had come before him. Meanwhile, in the South, black American citizens were being lynched, murdered, beaten, bitten by police dogs, fire hosed and denied their civil rights as American citizens. Against this backdrop, Bobby Bell got on an airplane for the first time in his life, in 1958, and flew up to a state he had never heard of to play football for a Southern Gentleman who would change his life forever and give him the opportunity to become the greatest football player I have ever had the honor of seeing play in person.
In the fall of 1960, Bobby Bell, former six-man high school football quarterback, had been transformed into a 6'5", 217 pound, sophomore offensive tackle and defensive end who never came off the field when the outcome of the game was in doubt. When Gopher football season rolled around, I was a 16-year-old Gopher football fanatic, and a patient at the University of Minnesota Hospitals for the last eight months with a full body cast and halo as a result of spinal fusion surgery. Toward the end of the season, I was lucky enough to receive one of the greatest thrills of my young life. I had just gotten out of my body cast and was able to sit up in my wheelchair for the first time in 10 months. The doctors and nurses knew how much I loved Gopher football, and arranged for a young orderly to take me to the Gophers game to sit on the sidelines near the Gophers bench and watch the first Gophers game I had ever seen in person during that National Championship Season. As a skinny sophomore offensive tackle and defensive end, Bobby Bell dominated the action on his side of the field that afternoon. He was only a sophomore, but you could already see that he was special. Stephens, Bill Muncey, and Judge Dickson were magnificent on offense. I will never forget this wonderful experience, as long as I live.
A few words about Murray Warmath are in order. Murray Warmath was a true pioneer and civil rights leader, although he would be the very last to admit that. Being a product of the Old South, he knew what tremendous untapped football talent was represented by the young men who played for all-black high schools in the South. He had the guts and the foresight to provide these young men with an opportunity that was not available to them at Southern football factories, or Big 10 teams for that matter. He recognized the talent that was their and did something about it. Bobby Bell said it best, "I would go to war with that guy. He stuck with us (black players)."
