Football: End of the Dream

"Sometimes when the game is close and the play is roughest," Ernie Davis once said, "you forget the crowd and the noise, and it is just you against somebody else to see who is the better man." Even in grade school, Ernie could always run faster and throw harder and kick farther than anybody else who booted scuffed old footballs around the sooty playgrounds of Uniontown, Pa. He was the product of poverty and a broken home, a shy, sensitive boy who dreamed of playing halfback for Notre Dame. His heroes were men like Stan Musial and Johnny Lujack, whose special skills at swinging a bat or throwing a ball had rescued them from the steel mills and coal mines of western Pennsylvania.

"Imagine, a President." By the time he was 15, Ernie Davis stood 6 ft. tall and weighed 175 Ibs. He was living in Elmira, N.Y., with his mother, and he won eleven letters at Elmira Free Academy. "About 30" colleges offered him football scholarships. But he chose Syracuse—just 90 miles from home. In 1959, as a sophomore, 205-lb. Halfback Davis gained 686 yds., scored 64 points—more than all ten of Syracuse's opponents combined—and led the Orangemen to an undefeated season, the No. 1 ranking, and a 23-14 victory over Texas in the Cotton Bowl.

In his three seasons, Ernie Davis gained 2,386 yds. (averaging 6.6 yds. per carry) and scored 220 points—breaking alltime Syracuse records that had been set by the Cleveland Browns' great Jimmy Brown. He was the first Negro ever to win the Heisman Trophy as the best college football player in the U.S. President Kennedy personally congratulated him ("Imagine," said Ernie, "a President wanting to shake hands with me!"), and pro teams battled bitterly to outbid each other for his services. The Cleveland Browns won, and Davis signed a threeyear, $80,000 contract. "I love to play football," said Ernie, happily. "And I can't think of anything better than getting paid for it."

"I Would Lie There." One day last July Davis woke up with swollen glands in his neck and was ordered to an Evanston, Ill., hospital for a checkup. He had leukemia (cancer of the blood), but doctors did not tell him until October. The disease was then in a "perfect state of remission"—his blood count was normal—and Davis insisted that he was strong enough to play football. "I was never in pain," he complained. "I would lie there feeling good and strong, as if I should be able to leave and do what I wanted to, which was play football for the Cleveland Browns."

The perfect remission was only temporary—as doctors well knew and Davis apparently never suspected. To get himself in shape, Ernie ran plays in practice with the Browns last fall and played winter basketball with the Browns' team. Then one day last week, he noticed new glandular swelling and quietly checked into Cleveland's Lakeside Hospital. Just 36 hours later, Ernie Davis, 23, was dead.