Collegiate Sports

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Willie Evans, Who Was Barred From a Bowl Game Because of His Color, Dies at 79
By DANIEL E. SLOTNIKJAN. 7, 2017

Willie Evans, who, as a standout halfback in 1958, helped the University of Buffalo secure its first invitation to a bowl game, only to be barred with a teammate from playing in it because they were black — a decision that so outraged the team that it refused to participate — died on Wednesday in Buffalo. He was 79.

His wife, Roberta Evans, said the cause was injuries sustained in a fall.

Evans, a varsity athlete in several sports in high school, had little experience with football before he started at the University of Buffalo (now the State University of New York at Buffalo) in the mid-1950s.

Coached by Dick Offenhamer, known for his grueling training regimens, the Buffalo Bulls of Evans’s day were a close-knit, hard-hitting bunch. Evans, 6 feet tall and 182 pounds, played on the freshman team for most of 1956 but soon became a force on the varsity squad.

The Bulls favored a punishing ground attack, and Evans led the team in rushing for the next three seasons. He scored nine rushing touchdowns and ran for 1,559 yards during his college career, averaging 6.36 yards per carry, a record that stands at the university.

In 1958, with Evans carrying the ball 70 times for 530 yards, Buffalo went 8-1, beating a favored Harvard team, 6-3, and shutting out Bucknell, 38-0.

“Willie Evans burst through right tackle for 47 yards and a touchdown with the game less than five minutes old, and the issue was never in doubt thereafter,” The Associated Press wrote about the blowout against Bucknell that November.

That season the team won the Lambert Cup, awarded to the best small-college program in the East. A few days later, Buffalo received an invitation to play in the Tangerine Bowl in Orlando, Fla.

But Orlando was in the segregated South, and the Orlando High School Athletic Association, which controlled the stadium, forbade blacks and whites to play together. Evans and Mike Wilson, a reserve end and the team’s only other black player, would not be allowed to play. It was a situation that the University of Buffalo team had not encountered in the Northeast.

Offenhamer left it to the players to decide what to do. According to several accounts, they deliberated for only seconds before unanimously deciding to reject the offer. Their choice made national news.

“My teammates were the real heroes,” Evans told The Buffalo News in 2011. “If you look back, it was not an easy thing to do.”

Buffalo went 8-1 the next season, but the team was not invited to another bowl game that year. The university’s next shot at one did not come until 2009, when Buffalo lost to the University of Connecticut, 38-20, at the International Bowl in Toronto.

Before that game’s kickoff, Evans and some of his teammates were invited onto the field, where they received a standing ovation from the more than 40,000 spectators.

Willie Roy Evans was born on Dec. 1, 1937, in Buffalo, to James R. Evans and the former Anna York. He lettered in cross-country, basketball and track and field at what was then Emerson Vocational High School. But he did not play football until his senior year, because the school did not have a team until then.

Evans worked as a tailor for a time after high school and was offered a track scholarship to Purdue University in Indiana, but he lost the scholarship because of an injury. The University of Buffalo also recruited him for track, but he wound up on the football field.

He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physical education in 1960 and was drafted by the Buffalo Bills of the newly formed American Football League. He was cut without playing in the Bills’ inaugural season.

After working in insurance for a few years, he joined the Buffalo public school system, where he taught and coached cross-country, tennis, basketball, swimming and football. He earned a master’s degree in educational administration from Buffalo State College in 1988 and then worked as the director of physical education for the city of Buffalo.

In addition to his wife of 44 years, the former Roberta Rozek, Evans, who lived in Buffalo, is survived by four sisters, Clara Small, Brenda Kendrick, Antoinette Sims and Paula Evans; two sons, Alan and Neal, both members of the jam band Soulive, and two daughters, Rachel and Rebecca Evans, all from his current marriage; a son, Rodrick, from an earlier marriage; and three grandchildren.

Evans and some of his teammates remained close throughout the years, he told The Boston Globe in 2008, but the lost bowl game rarely came up when they got together.

“No reason to harbor any bitterness about it,” he said. “I think we all felt that we had a very successful collegiate experience.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/sports/football/willie-evans-dead.html?