- Jul 20, 2014
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Fifty Years On, Remembering The Tampa Football Game That Broke Racial Barriers
I remember the Tampa college team well. A few years later they had Freddie Solomon at QB and he was unreal. Always had some great players. The QB in this (for Tampa) game was the backup QB at Miami when they won those Super Bowls. I never heard this story before. Fran Curci went up in my mind from this. We called him Fran Cursed when he pitched that fit over the game Reaves broke the yardage record against scUM.
Fifty years ago, a college football game in Tampa helped change the course of race relations in America. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, November 29, 1969, a predominantly white school played an all black university in the Deep South for the first time.
The University of Tampa was a mostly white football team on an eight-game winning streak. Florida A&M, in Tallahassee, was also winning a lot, but was unranked, because its players were all African-American and they played only black teams. Maybe 78 has some input on this. Surely, Tom McEwen wrote about it
I remember the Tampa college team well. A few years later they had Freddie Solomon at QB and he was unreal. Always had some great players. The QB in this (for Tampa) game was the backup QB at Miami when they won those Super Bowls. I never heard this story before. Fran Curci went up in my mind from this. We called him Fran Cursed when he pitched that fit over the game Reaves broke the yardage record against scUM.