It's All Your Fault Marcus Dupree!

I played small college ball. We taunted opponents with our SAT scores. I'm pretty sure in 1982 the Southwest High School Indians from Kansas City Missouri could have beaten the crap out of the Grinnell College Pioneers. This thought was definitely in the back of my mind that Saturday afternoon in mid-October when after another Division III loss, I found my way back to the lounge in my freshman dorm to watch the Kansas Jayhawks make a rare appearance on national television (this was before you had gazillion sports channels to show you everything down to a bird fighting a cat). A couple of guys I'd played against in high school had made it to the Big Eight and I guess I wanted to fantasize about what might have been. I switched on the set -- turned the knob -- and there he was, Big Charles, fullback out of Raytown South, on the sideline in rock-chawk blue. By fullback, I mean Earl Campbell, Skoal Brutha fullback. But what's this? Is he shaking his head? Is Big Charles actually on the sidelines crying? Before I could tell, the camera cut to: this. No, you really need to click on this. If you don't know who this is, watch ESPN's 30 for 30: Marcus Dupree, The Best That Never Was. Just the other night I watched it again and came away moved. Forget about what he never was after his freshman year, I want to know why we haven't honored him as, if not our generation's Jesse Owens, our black Jesus, at least as our Billy Budd. In the time before steamships, or then more frequently than now, a stroller along the docks of any considerable sea-port would occasionally have his attention arrested by a group of bronzed mariners, man-of- war’s men or merchant-sailors in holiday attire ashore on liberty. In certain instances they would flank, or, like a body-guard quite surround some superior figure of their own class, moving along with them like Aldebaran among the lesser lights of his constellation. That signal object was the “Handsome Sailor” of the less prosaic time alike of the military and merchant navies. With no perceptible trace of the vainglorious about him, rather with the off-hand unaffectedness of natural regality, he seemed to accept the spontaneous homage of his shipmates. A some-what remarkable instance recurs to me. In Liverpool, now half a century ago, I saw under the shadow of the great dingy street-wall of Prince’s Dock (an obstruction long since removed) a common sailor, so intensely black that he must needs have been a native African of the unadulterate blood of Ham. A symmetric figure much above the average height. The two ends of a gay silk handkerchief thrown loose about the neck danced upon the displayed ebony of his chest; in his ears were big hoops of gold, and a Scotch Highland bonnet with a tartan band set off his shapely head (Read Some Herman Melville). As you probably know, Liverpool England was one of the major ports involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and had a large black population. And, as W. Jeffrey Bolster points out in Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, so many black men and boys were involved in working on whaling and merchant and naval ships that it was easy to overlook a slave named Frederick Douglass sneaking around pretending he was a sailor while waiting to make a mad dash to freedom. By the 1970s, even with American just fresh out of Jim Crow, it was easy to overlook black boys running free in segregated towns like Philadelphia Mississippi, the location of one of the most notorious triple murders in the Civil Rights Era (Dr. King argued that the barbaric expression he found there was as bad if not worse than Hitler's Nazi Germany). But like Billy Budd, you couldn't miss Marcus Dupree, even in a place with a history as bloody as Philadelphia's. According to ESPN's documentary, damn near every coach there was in college football made a pilgrimage to court him. No doubt, more coaches came in 1981 than Federal investigators ever did in 1964. In that recruiting class, the football class of '81, part of the first class of Southern kids to complete their educations from first grade to 12th in integrated schools, head and shoulders above everyone, Marcus Dupree literally sucked up all the oxygen. No wonder a guy like Big Charles ended up at Kansas instead of Texas or Nebraska. They didn't have time to come see him. No wonder an also-played like me ended up in Division III. It was all Marcus' Fault! What a shame he disappeared after that notorious concussion his sophomore year at OU. But to love and honor Marcus Dupree the way that I now love and wish to honor Marcus Dupree you do need to understand why he ran. Marcus humbly says he ran for his brother Reggie who had cerebral palsy and couldn't walk and for the pride of his family. I don't think it is a stretch to say he ran for all the sons and daughters of slaves still trapped like his family in Mississippi poverty; that he ran for all the working-class white, black, latin and native boys who worked it out together on the football field in Philadelphia while bootleg preachers still posed and klansmen still held public office trying to pretend that the past had passed. He ran like he had a cross on his back. And maybe the way he got treated at Oklahoma, made that cross just a little too heavy to bear. Unlike Jesus, Marcus didn't die young. You can track his ups, downs and ups all over the web. But what he did in 1982 did help redeem us all. You couldn't miss that handsome sailor, even if with a little touch of Fredrick Douglass in his crazy-assed jheri-curl, he may have just been pretending to be a football player.