Inside the Football Program

The Dartmouth teams of these years were the winningest in the College's history. Dartmouth took three consecutive Ivy League championships. The 1970 side went undefeated, scored 311 points and gave up 42, shut out six opponents, and won the Lambert Trophy as the strongest team in the East. No Ivy League team has won it since.

Wesley Pugh, Class of 1973, grew up in Cherry Hill, an all-Black neighbourhood in Baltimore, and reached Dartmouth by way of Upward Bound, a federal programme for low-income students. He had been all-state in football, basketball and lacrosse. At Dartmouth he was named All-Ivy safety and punt returner, and a later ranking of the best players in the programme's history placed him third among all its safeties. First on that list was Willie Bogan.

Playing time ran on seniority. Seniors played, and juniors and sophomores waited their turn. Pugh watched that rule bend whenever the senior in question was Black.

In his junior year he was sixth in the country in interceptions and was not in the starting line-up. The coach held him back and sent him on when a game turned: "Pugh, go in." At another point the staff offered to start him at defensive back, a position he did not play, when Dartmouth already had defensive backs.

One afternoon at Memorial Field stayed with him. Dartmouth was beating Brown badly, the coaches emptied the defensive bench, and eight Black players were on the field at the same time. The crowd loved it. It was, Pugh says, "the only time we had an opportunity to play based on talent," because it was understood by him that you did not put too many Black players out there at once.

The College reached a version of the same conclusion five years later. In November 1974 three students, Cave, Redding and Hargrove, delivered a report, Institutional Racism and Student Life at Dartmouth College. The football programme, they found, had never had a Black offensive quarterback. Men recruited out of high school to play quarterback were moved off the position as freshmen. Most Black players who saw significant time played defence. The report called the pattern discriminatory rather than coincidental, and noted that a player who raised it risked covert retaliation from his coaches.

Elsewhere the rule was said out loud. When Pugh visited Williams College with his high school quarterback, the coach told the boy plainly that they did not play Black players at quarterback. Kurt Schmoke, a quarterback in Baltimore and later the city's mayor, went to Yale and played defensive back.

Pugh quit in the middle of a game against Yale. A receiver he was not covering caught a five-yard pass, the coach pulled him off and shouted at him, and Pugh told him his own parents did not speak to him that way. He took his helmet off, threw it down and walked out. Coaches came to his dormitory to talk him back and offered to arrange tryouts with the Dallas Cowboys and the Cincinnati Bengals. He refused for the rest of that season.

Did anything change?

On 5 December 1979 the Valley News, the daily paper for Hanover and the Upper Valley, ran an article by Don Mahler under the headline "Dartmouth Blacks Charge Racism On Football Team." Three years after the Trustees' report, the complaints were the ones the Redding Report had already recorded. Players said they had been moved off the positions they were recruited to play. One had left the team after a coach threw a cup of water in his face during a racist joke.

The article also carried disagreement. Cody Press,the only Black captain in the Ivy League, said he had always been given a fair shot. Joe Yukica, the head coach, insisted that he saw no colour on the field and only football players.