By TOM SHANAHAN
Attention college journalism professors:
Allow me to summarize a couple of sports journalism failures from the 1961 football season. The failure continues to this day.
As UCLA closed in on the title for the 1961 Athletic Association of Western Universities (a forerunner to the Pac-8), the Bruins’ eight Black players threatened to boycott the 1962 Rose Bowl.
After Colorado clinched the 1961 Big Eight title, Colorado’s roster that included five Black players threatened to boycott the 1962 Orange Bowl.
You could win a lot of bar trivia bets on these facts. And enlighten young journalists the Civil Rights movement was ignored on 1960s sports pages. After all, the courage of the 1961 UCLA and Colorado players were written out of history by sports journalism negligence.
Both stories are explained in my book, “THE RIGHT THING TO DO, The True Pioneers of College Football Integration in the 1960s.” UCLA is Chapter 25: “UCLA and Jim Murray Battle ’Bama, Bryant.” Colorado is Chapter 6: “Colorado, Sonny Grandelius and the Orange Bowl.”
The UCLA chapter is a version of my 2022 story that won first place for Enterprise from the Football Writers Association of America.
The untold 1961 stories are a result of the 1960s sports media avoiding race. It feared alienating subscribers, listeners and advertisers. This was a practice that dated to the 1930s known as the “Conspiracy of Silence.” When Jackie Robinson broke the Major League Baseball color line in 1947, race was an afterthought in the game stories. The game wasn’t a sellout.
College football lore still ignores the courage of the UCLA and Colorado players to treat race with the respect due them from the Declaration of Independence.
The Bruins’ Black players, supported by UCLA’s Black students threatening protests outside the Rose Bowl, were upset upon hearing rumors Alabama’s segregated roster would be invited over the traditional Big Ten representative. For context, understand in May of that year, UCLA’s students and players were reading in newspapers about the Freedom Rider bus attacks in Anniston, Alabama. The riders attempted to integrate the bus system in the South.
No one in the media asked UCLA’s Black players about their stance. UCLA’s Kermit Alexander, an African American, explained it to me in a 2015 interview what he would have said in 1961 if anyone asked him:
“If we can’t play on their field in Alabama, why should they be able to play on our field in Pasadena?”
The Rose Bowl’s consideration of Alabama was driven in backroom discussions. AAWU commissioner Admiral Tom Hamilton was Alabama coach Bear Bryant’s U.S. Navy friend from World War II. Hamilton had sole authority to choose the AAWU opponent because of a lapse in the contract between the Big Ten and the Pacific Coast Conference (the AAWU was formed after an NCAA scandal among PCC schools).
But Alabama president Frank Rose – in a rare instance of demonstrating Bryand had a boss — thwarted Bryant’s backdoor maneuvering. Rose announced on November 29 Alabama would play in the Sugar Bowl. Rose, perhaps, feared more stories about Alabama racism, which was detailed in coverage of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Civil Rights movement, would jump from the front page to the sports page. Not to mention Walter Cronkite on the CBS News.
You can read more on the sequences of events from my 2022 story: The 1962 Rose Bowl’s 60th anniversary: UCLA’s Black students and players stared down Bear Bryant with Jim Murray’s break from 1960s media customs – Tom Shanahan Report
Colorado’s players responded to the treatment of their five Black teammates following the Buffaloes regular season game against Miami at the Orange Bowl. Their Black teammates couldn’t stay with them at the hotel or ride on the same buses.
When the team returned to Boulder, team captain Joe Romig, a White player who was enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame in 1984, called a team meeting. He told his teammates this wouldn’t happen again. He was true to his word.
As the Orange Bowl representatives extended their invitation in the Colorado locker room following a win on November 25 over Iowa State, Romig announced the team wasn’t playing unless something was done about Jim Crow.
“If we’re going to go, we’re going to go as a team,” Romig told me for a 2023 interview and repeated in midway through this video: Game Changers of the Century documentary development – Tom Shanahan Report
The Orange Bowl officials scrambled to a pay phone with the news. The Orange Bowl and Miami backed down.
You can buy my book to read the Colorado chapter. Books by Tom Shanahan – Tom Shanahan Report
There is, though, a difference between the media handling the 1962 Rose Bowl and the 1962 Orange Bowl.
The 1962 Orange Bowl and courage of Colorado’s players remain lost to history. The story of the 1962 Rose bowl, though, was distorted by Bear Bryant sycophants and a compliant media blinded by his legend.
The media adopted Bryant’s view expressed in his 1974 book, “BEAR,” as the accepted narrative. Bryant blamed Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray for opposing Alabama’s appearance in the Rose Bowl.
Bryant referenced his 1955 Texas A&M team losing to UCLA 21-0 at the L.A. Coliseum. On Page 174, Bryant stated: “… I snapped at a writer on the Los Angeles paper after the game. He asked if I had thought we could win, and I said, ‘You silly so-and-so, what do you think we came out here for?’
“Those things turn on you. Jim Murray came over and saw us play and made a fuss over our being considered for the Rose Bowl when we won the national championship in 1961. He wrote about segregation and the Alabama Ku Klux Klan and every unrelated scandalous thing he could think of, and we didn’t get the invitation.”
Murray didn’t work for the L.A. Times or any L.A. newspaper in 1955. In the early 1950s, he was with Time magazine and then began working for Sports Illustrated in 1953 as it prepared to launch in 1954. Murray’s 1961 motives were to offer a civics lesson to Bryant and a Jim Crow state.
Murray was a Pulitzer Prize winner. It took Trumpian-like deceptions to cast Murray as a villain. Only Bryant could get away with it.
Such stories also fail to note Mel Durslag of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and Brad Pye Jr. of the Los Angeles Sentinel also wrote stories opposing an Alabama invitation.
Colorado didn’t make a bowl game this year, but Alabama is returning to the Rose Bowl on Thursday against Indiana in the quarterfinals of the College Football Playoff.
In 2023, a story was posted on Al.com when Alabama and Michigan played in the CFB at the Rose Bowl. The headline: “What took Alabama so long to return to the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day.”
The story stuck to Bryant’s misleading narrative. The story doesn’t touch on Hamilton’s duplicitous role. The story suggests Ohio State turning down the Rose Bowl on November 27 set the sequence of events in motion. Actually, Alabama was reported by early November as vying for the Rose Bowl bid in smoke-filled rooms.
Again, the missing facts are detailed in my 2022 story.
The Bryant-slanted versions ignore the fact Hamilton remained tight-lipped in late November when he said he planned to make his pick after the December 2 game, which, by the way, was the day Alabama and Auburn played in the Iron Bowl.
But Rose interceded before then. Hamilton subsequently invited Minnesota.
So far, we haven’t seen a 2025 story claiming Murray sabotaged Bryant’s dream to coach in the Rose Bowl. So far. Also, it’s remains possible College Football Gameday’s crew will turn weepy eyed about Alabama, Bryant and the Rose Bowl.
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I invite you to follow me on Twitter @shanny4055
I’ll put my facts on the true pioneers of college football integration versus Bear Bryant fairytales against anybody, anytime, anywhere. Watch here.
Click here for my story on the 1962 Rose Bowl and Segregation and Alabama.
— Tom Shanahan is an award-winning sportswriter with two books on college football integration, “RAYE OF LIGHT, Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, the Integration of College Football and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans,” and “THE RIGHT THING TO DO, The True Pioneers of College Football Integration in the 1960s.” They are the most accurate accounts of college football integration in the 1950s and 1960s. They also debunk myths about the 1970 USC-Alabama game. The false narrative co-opted the stories of the true pioneers who stood up to Jim Crow and the KKK.
— Two children’s books also explain Michigan State College Football Hall of Fame coach Duffy Daugherty’s impact on integration through the Underground Railroad and the Hawaiian Pipeline: “DUFFY’S COLLEGE FOOTBALL UNDERGROUND RAILROAD” and “HOW DUFFY PUT HAWAII ON AMERICA’S FOOTBALL MAP.”
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PURCHASE LINKS, non-fiction books
— RAYE OF LIGHT, August Publications or on Amazon.
— THE RIGHT THING TO DO, August Publications or on Amazon.
PURCHASE LINKS, children’s books
— DUFFY’S COLLEGE FOOTBALL UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, Order from Barnes and Noble here and Amazon here.
— HOW DUFFY PUT HAWAII ON AMERICA’S FOOTBALL MAP, coming soon on Barnes and Noble and Amazon.
