By Felix Hoover

For YourNewsColumbus.com

The recent movie release The Express reminds folks that in 1961 a versatile, flashy running back from Syracuse University became the first black to win the Heisman Trophy, symbolic of the top football player in the nation.

Tucked away in the tale is that the distinction easily could have gone to Bob Ferguson of the Scarlet and Gray, instead of Ernie Davis of the Orange.

Only 53 points separated the two in the Heisman vote, the closest margin to that point for the award presented annually by the Downtown Athletic Club.

Former players from both Ohio State and Syracuse agree that the award could have gone either way, especially seeing that Ferguson had already won the Maxwell Award, the College Player of the Year as determined by the Maxwell Football Club.

Even Davis thought Ferguson would get the nod, according to his account in The Express, originally released as The Elmira Express, the Story of a Heisman Trophy Winner.

Long before the awards season, Ferguson had made an impression on the Ohio State campus.

As a freshman at OSU in ’61, Dave Paige of Cleveland was in the Ohio Union when he chanced upon a muscular giant whom he speculated was a football player. It was Ferguson.

Paige got a real introduction to the fullback when he became a pledge in Omega Psi Phi, the fraternity to which Ferguson belonged. During the paddling rites of initiation, “Ferguson was swinging the wood just like everybody else,” Paige said.

Ben Espy of Sandusky was on the freshman football squad at OSU when Ferguson was a senior. Freshmen were ineligible to play on the varsity then, but they assumed the role of scout squad in practice. Squaring off against someone with a size 22 neck was no enviable task, Espy recalls.

Paul Warfield, who gained fame as a receiver in the NFL with the Cleveland Browns and the Miami Dolphins and with the Memphis Grizzlies of the World Football League, was a sophomore teammate of Ferguson, the latter’s senior year at OSU. Warfield was the halfback whose speed complemented Ferguson’s power at fullback. Warfield also played in the defensive secondary.

“It could very easily have gone to Bob,” was Warfield’s take on the ’61 Heisman race.

 But he didn’t fault the selection of Davis, whose flashy, elusive style contrasted with Ferguson’s straight-ahead power style that epitomized a Woody Hayes fullback at that stage of the coach’s illustrious career.

“Bob was a great, great player,” Warfield said. “He was the heart of the OSU running game.”

Ferguson placed emphasis on the team rather than his own glory and “never talked about the Heisman,” Warfield said.

SYRACUSE SIDE

Well, Ferguson might not have talked about it among his Buckeye teammates, but such conversation became the source of good-natured banter at post-season all-star games in which he, Davis and Davis’ Syracuse teammate John Brown appeared.

“If you were from the East, you hung out together at all-star games,” Brown said.

Joking aside, Ferguson never expressed resentment about being runner-up for the game’s most prestigious award.

“I think he was content with getting his Maxwell, and Ernie with his Heisman,” Brown said.

Like Warfield, Brown said he thought that style of play and versatility contributed to Davis’ Heisman victory. Besides being a running back, Davis played on defense and returned kicks.

“If he hadn’t made All-American as a running back, he would have been an All-American defensive back,” Brown said.

Even with the stats posted by Davis, Ferguson and a third black contender for the 1961 Heisman, fourth-place finisher Sandy Stephens of Minnesota, John Brown thought none would win it because of what had happened in 1956.

“After Jim Brown didn’t win it, I didn’t know if any black players would win it in my lifetime,” John Brown said, referring to one of Davis’ few black predecessors at Syracuse. “A lot of people thought that Jim Brown instead of the Golden Boy (Paul Hornung of Notre Dame) should have won it.”

What may have swayed voters in favor of Davis was that his demeanor was more akin to Jackie Robinson, whom Branch Rickey chose to break major league baseball’s color barrier in 1948. Jim Brown, on the other hand, was more confrontational and didn’t win the hearts of Heisman voters, John Brown speculated.

Some might suggest that a few years made a difference as blacks asserted greater rights and gained higher visibility during the Civil Rights Movement.

HOLLYWOOD INFLUENCE

Aspects of the movement were presented in The Express, but often with more drama than authenticity, John Brown said.

Jim Crow segregation demanded that blacks not be served, often not allowed, in many hotels and other public accommodations, especially in the South and Southwest.

One scene in the movie shows Syracuse’s black players relegated to a shabby part of a swanky white hotel, but that’s not the way it was, John Brown said.

African-American players were forbidden to use the elevator or access other parts of the building, but the room they stayed in was top-notch, he said.

Although the scene in question shows three blacks assigned to the room, a fourth teammate, who was white, also slept there, John Brown said.

Among his other objections to the film was the portrayal of Syracuse Ben Schwartzwalder as mean and of Davis as confrontational with the coach.

The coach, a native of Morgantown, W. Va., was “all football,” but not mean, John Brown said. Schwartzwalder, had been a lieutenant colonel in the  Army and took part in the D-Day Invasion of Normandy in World War II, did not swear, contrary to the film depiction.

“He and Ernie were like father and son . . . Ernie would not have been confrontational in public.”

John Brown, “J.B.” in the film, was quick to note it was not a documentary.

“It was a good Hollywood movie,” he said.

John Brown played more than a decade in the pros, with Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

With Cleveland he competed against Ferguson, who lasted only two years in the NFL, one each at Pittsburgh and Minnesota.

Ferguson’s reputation as a punishing runner created a false image of his overall personality as hardened and brutish, John Brown said.

“Personally, I thought he was one of the most sensitive people in the world,” John Brown said. “The system, not talent, shortened the Buckeye his career.”

Illness, not talent or the system, prevented Davis from ever playing a down in the NFL. He died of leukemia on May 18, 1963.

BUCKEYE HEISMANS

Although Ohio State had three Heisman winners before Davis became Syracuse’s one and only – Les Horvath, Vic Janowicz and Howard “Hopalong” Cassady – the Buckeyes wouldn’t have a black in that role until Archie Griffin in 1974. He repeated the following year and remains the only person to win the trophy twice. The University of Florida’s Tim Tebow made a strong bid, but finished behind this year’s winner, Sam Bradford of Oklahoma, and runner-up Colt McCoy of Texas.

Griffin said that he never had the privilege of talking Heisman with Ferguson, but would have liked to.

Two other black Buckeyes would later receive the statue with the straight-arming runner, Eddie George in 1995 and Troy Smith in 2006. Smith was the first black signal caller to win it.