Link to that story here:
It’s also linked here:
https://wildcatville.blogspot.com/2020/09/linfields-1965-football-team-and-coach.html
Or, scroll to end of this posting and the story text is there,
too.
The story is about what happened in Augusta, Georgia, to the Linfield football team after
playing in the 1965 NAIA national championship game in Augusta on Dec.
11, 1965.
But, the photo (versions of it posted with this text) with the June 7, 2020, Oregonian story was from the same 1965 season, but taken Nov. 27, 1965, in Midland, Texas, after Linfield won a game playoff game which got it into that national title game.
Look closely at the photo and you’ll notice Linfield players celebrating
the win. Each player has a bottle of Coca-Cola in their hand.
This posting explains the Linfield Wildcats/Coca-Cola connection
almost 55 years ago (as of Sept. 10, 2020).
In the evening of Saturday, Nov. 27, 1965, in Midland, Texas,
the Paul Durham-coached ninth-ranked Linfield College Wildcats played
the nationally second-ranked Bobcats of Sul Ross State College (of Alpine,
Texas, about 165 miles from Midland on the southern plains in the state's
western area) in a NAIA national football championship playoffs semi-final
game.
In an upset, Linfield won, 30-27. After the game, in its Midland Memorial Stadium locker room, Linfield team members celebrated by drinking bottles of Coke.
It brings to mind a well-known (used about 1963-1969) Coca-Cola advertising jingle, “Things go better with Coca-Cola, things go better with Coke …” Indeed, for Linfield in Texas after that game, things did go better!
That post-game moment in a Midland Memorial Stadium locker room was recorded in a famous photo showing Linfield player #20 Leroy Fails, teammates and others.
Taken by Linfield student Dennis Burkhart, the photo appeared in the 1966 Linfield Oak Leaves yearbook, a 1965 edition of the McMinnville News-Register and here (with this posting).
Oregonian sports writer Dick Fishback traveled to Texas and reported on the game in the newspaper’s Sunday, Nov. 28, 1965, edition. He wrote, “Linfield engineered a modern-day miracle” Link to the story’s clipping:
http://wildcatville.blogspot.com/2017/01/in-midland-texas-nov-17-1965-linfield.html
Oregon Journal 1965 coverage before, about and after Linfield football vs. Sul Ross, Texas. Stories by Journal sportswriter Neil Andersen. Link:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/17663360/5562303923569882110
Link to the 1965 Wildcat football team's Linfield Athletics Hall of Fame enshrinement text:
https://golinfieldwildcats.com/honors/linfield-athletics-hall-of-fame/1965-football-team/121
In 2014 Leroy Fails’ provided Wildcatville with these game Linfield at Sul Ross in 1965 post-game memories:
- “Yes,
a case of bottled Coca-Cola was provided in the locker room. I don't know
whether or not the company was a sponsor, just that we had it (there)
after the game,” said Leroy.
- One
of Fails’ Linfield teammates was Dean Pade. One of the fans
attending the game was Pade’s mother. So excited after the win, “she came
into the locker room to hug the guys. You should have seen their
expressions because they were in various stages of undress,” Leroy said.
Someone asked about her locker room visit. She responded, "I have
seen it all before."
- There's
"Friday Night Lights" connection to the Linfield vs. Sul Ross
game, said Fails. Indeed, the game site -- Midland Memorial Stadium -- is
connected to the book "Friday Night Lights," upon which a well-known
movie and a TV show were based.
:::::::
Linfield’s 1965
football team and coach Paul Durham stood on principle and against racism
Leroy Fails (20) and his Linfield teammates celebrate a victory in the 1965 NAIA semifinals. (Linfield College)
By Ken Goe, Oregonian, posted 6/6/2020, update 6/8/2020
Odis Avritt had concerns, which is why he went to Linfield College football coach Paul Durham’s office late in the fall of 1965.
Linfield had rallied to beat Sul Ross State
and advance to the NAIA championship game against St. John’s of Minnesota.
Avritt was a Linfield running back.
The title game was in Augusta, Georgia,
home of the famed Augusta National Golf Club and the Masters Tournament. It was
deep in what then was the segregated South. Avritt is black.
“I never had been that far south in my
life,” Avritt says. “I’d read and heard about teams going down there, and
teammates being split up. I wanted to know what was going to happen.”
Durham heard him out before answering.
“Coach Durham said we’re going there as a
team and we will be staying together,” Avritt remembers. “That was the end of
it.”
The Wildcats went to Augusta and all stayed
in a hotel hosting the teams and NAIA officials. They lost the game and went
back to get ready for an NAIA banquet and hall of fame induction ceremony in
the hotel that night.
After Linfield’s traveling party filed into
the banquet room, some players noticed Durham talking to a hotel official and
then making several trips into the kitchen.
“I wondered what in the world he was
doing?” defensive lineman Bob Ferguson says. “What’s coach doing in the
kitchen?”
When the food came out, it was served to
everyone but the Linfield players, coaches and boosters.
Linfield had a 33-player traveling squad
that included several black and Hawaiian players. Everybody was hungry, and a
little taken aback.
Ferguson, Avritt and other Linfield players
pieced it together later from those who overheard some uncomfortable conversations
between Durham and the hotel staff.
“As Coach Durham was escorting our team
into the banquet hotel, he was approached by the manager of the banquet area,”
Avritt says. “He said, ‘Your black and brown players will have to eat in the
kitchen.’
“I can’t really say how that conversation
transpired, other than Coach Durham’s response was: ‘Well, if those players
have to eat in the kitchen, our whole team will eat in the kitchen.’ Coach was
informed: No, they couldn’t serve the whole team in the kitchen. So, Coach
Durham said, ‘Well, if you’re not going to serve our whole team in the banquet
area, then don’t serve us.’”
The hungry players didn’t hear it from
Durham. He simply gathered them together after the banquet, pulled out his
wallet, handed each one $5 and told them to find something to eat.
People on the hotel staff told Linfield’s
black and Hawaiian players of a restaurant that would allow them inside. Avritt
went with mixed feelings.
“I felt bad,” says Avritt, who is retired
and lives in Portland. “I guess I knew somewhere along the line something
wasn’t going to work out. I had that feeling.
“But I think Coach Durham lived up to his
word to me. We were there as a team. That was reflected in his actions.”
Ferguson, who is white, concedes he didn’t
think much about it at the time. In his mind, that was the South. That was how
things were there then.
Over time, he says he has come to a greater
understanding about how dehumanizing the experience had been for some of his
teammates. He has come to believe Durham not only was backing his non-white
players, he was teaching something to the entire team by standing on principle
and living up to his word.
“It was later in life, we realized how much
guts that took for him to do something like that,” Ferguson says. “But it was
so in his character.”
Durham coached football at Linfield from
1948 to 1967 and started a streak of consecutive winning seasons that now
stands at 64 years. He left for the University of Hawaii to be athletic
director. He died in 2007.
As the years passed, a number of his
players wanted to ensure he didn’t fade into history. They organized and raised
money to have a monument of Durham put up on the Linfield campus. Details of
his 1965 stand against racism are inscribed on the monument.
