From the woman who loved him: The real greatness of Ernie Davis transcended football (2024)

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Ernie Davis of Syracuse University, 1959, against Boston University.

(The Associated Press)

Helen Gott hung back from the dance floor. She was a quiet kid, one of a handful of black freshmen in 1959 at Syracuse University. She'd joined those friends on an excursion to the Tippin' In, a nightclub with a primarily black clientele at McBride and Madison streets, in the old 15th Ward.

Many older students were already there, including members of the track and football teams. Helen soon found herself in conversation with a young man who shattered her image of athletes as loud, pushy and abrasive.

It was her first step toward falling in love with Ernie Davis.

"He was a sophom*ore, a year ahead of me, although we didn't actually start dating until his junior year, " said Helen, the religion editor at the Kansas City Star. "I didn't know that much about football, and I do remember telling him I didn't know he was a big star, and him laughing."

She was attracted, she said, to the way Ernie was deeply masculine while always being gentle and soft-spoken. Later that year, Helen would be named "weekend queen" of the freshman class, an honor celebrated at a football game. She has a feeling that's when Ernie noticed her again.

They eventually became a couple, a time still precious to Helen, almost 50 years later.

"Syracuse is really beautiful in the fall and in the spring," she said. "I just remember it as a really beautiful place. We would hang out as a group at the Tippin' Inn; some people were just really great dancers, and we'd play the music and dance a lot and everybody had a great time.

"When we wanted to be ourselves, we'd go for a drive; Ernie had this car, an Edsel, and it was a lemon, a total lemon, I don't know where he got it. We'd go to a park (Thornden Park, near SU) when we just wanted to walk and get away by ourselves, and there was an Italian restaurant we loved near campus; that's where we had our final meal together."

She will not be in Syracuse tonight for the opening of "The Express, " the film on Ernie's life. Helen has heard she does not exist in the film, that Ernie's cinematic girlfriend is a fictional composite. That doesn't really bother her. Conscious of the boorish, self-centered behavior of so many of today's celebrities, she'll be happy if the film underlines a basic point:

Ernie Davis was the kind of man a boy should want to be.

"I want people to know you can excel in your profession, entertainment or sports, and you can also be a gentleman," she said. "Ernie was a wonderful person; he could be gentle and kind, and still manly. That's a really rare quality with men, but he was a rare individual."

She was a senior in 1963, when a chaplain came to Sigma Delta Tau -- the sorority in which she'd become the first black member -- to tell her Ernie was dead of leukemia. She went on to study at Columbia University before settling in Kansas City, where she married a minister and built a journalism career as Helen Gray.

Ernie, she said, exuded class despite going to college in what really was a segregated city. Just beyond campus, the black community was confined to homes in the 15th Ward. John Brown, an SU lineman who was Ernie's close friend, said university dormitories and classrooms were integrated, and athletes would sometimes go together to a bar called the Clover Club. But outside the football team, most students lived lives of black and white.

In response, the tiny group of blacks at SU formed a close, protective circle. Sylvia Mackey, whose husband, John, became a Hall of Famer in the National Football League, remembers how she and Leroy Boyd, a standout in track and field, were coordinators of an informal group known as "The Members."

On weekend nights, Sylvia said, roughly 70 or 80 black students would rent a room at a Syracuse restaurant and throw dances. The main attraction was often Felix Cavaliere, an SU student who later helped to found the rock group "The Rascals." Admission to those shows cost $5, Sylvia said. The events had such joyous energy that many white students showed up at the door.

As for Ernie, he roomed with John Mackey, now suffering from an illness similar to Alzheimer's disease. The story goes that John lacked the nerve to ask Sylvia out, claiming he was broke and had no car. Ernie threw him the keys to the Edsel, handed him $5 and told him to take Sylvia to a club where another Orange player would be tending bar.

John gave in. He went to the club, bought a drink for Sylvia and handed the bartender the five. He got five singles back in change, and didn't buy a drink all night.

Ernie, from afar, made sure the date was a success -- knowing his roommate didn't have much choice on where to go.

"The (black students) had to come to our hangouts, because things on campus were a little bit different, " said Ben Bunting, owner of the Tippin' Inn. He still has the tavern, now on South Avenue; it opens on weekends.

If student athletes weren't welcome in the greater community, they were greeted with pride in the 15th Ward. John Brown remembers how he and Ernie attended Bethany Baptist Church, not far from SU. They were often invited to dinner at the home of a black cleaning woman they met in the dorms and by Willie and Doris Gilbert, a black policeman and his wife.

They were especially close to the late E.D. Cowsert, a regular working guy in Syracuse who took generations of black players under his wing, routinely treating them to ample meals of "soul food" at his mother's house.

"It was like being part of a family," Brown said, "at a time when we didn't have any money, and no real place to go."

That exclusion, if anything, only enflamed a sense of mission. Brown, after his NFL career, became a banking executive. John Mackey would be a groundbreaking leader of the NFL Players Association. As for Helen, an editor in Kansas City, she is sure Ernie would have achieved great things once he was done with football.

"He was just driven to excel, " she said. "He was focused, he was serious, there was nothing about him that could tolerate failure. When he'd say everything would be OK, even when he was sick, that's why I believed it."

She and Ernie were never officially engaged, although they'd started to talk about marriage. Helen describes herself as a "person of faith, " and she accepts Ernie's death as part of a greater plan. But her voice, when she speaks of him, reflects a lasting truth.

"I would have loved him if he never touched a football, " Helen said, which in the end was the real greatness of Ernie Davis.

Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Post-Standard.