WFUWaldo
Steve Lepore
Good article posted last week in The Athletic about former Wake QB Freddie Summers. Thought I'd share for those not as familiar with Summers' story, which I hadn't been:
https://theathletic.com/830359/2019/02/22/wake-forest-freddie-summers-quarterback-roger-harris-boston/
Freddie Summers was a ground-breaking star on the field, and he made a lasting impact off it
Roger Harris had already decided he was OK with dying when he picked up the military newspaper that Tuesday morning.
He had been stationed in Vietnam for almost a year at this point, with his unit — the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment of the 3rd Marine Division — patrolling the DMZ.
He knew there were only two ways out of this war — live and return to the states, where he’d hopefully be given a job and respect as a veteran, or die and his mother would receive $10,000 from his life insurance policy. With that money, she’d be able to buy a house and live comfortably.
And both of those endings were fine by him.
So he was surprised on that Tuesday when he started reading the sports page of Stars and Stripes, and came across this sentence: “The Deacons broke out of a 21-21 tie when Negro quarterback Fred Summers rolled to his right, found daylight and shot through for 17 yards and the go-ahead touchdown with 2:25 left.”
He stopped reading. Could this “Fred Summers” be the same Freddie Summers — Sperky, as everyone in their neighborhood had called him as a kid? Had the little boy who Harris had grown up with in the Williams School schoolyard — playing basketball and football, racing one another — really be the starting quarterback at a southern school like Wake Forest?
The two had grown up two streets apart in Boston, but lost touch when Summers attended Dorchester High, the neighborhood’s co-ed school, and Harris had gone to Boston English, a city-wide, all-boys school. But Harris had still watched Summers quarterback the Dorchester team as the high school’s first black quarterback. And now he wondered, was he now doing the same at the college level?
So he wrote a letter addressed to Fred Summers, Wake Forest University, and asked if quarterback Fred Summers and Freddie “Sperky” Summers were the same person.
A month later he got a response.
“I got a letter back from him saying, ‘Yes, it’s me. They think I’m a superstar. And you should be here, too, because if you were here, you’d be a starting running back,’” Harris remembered.
What Harris didn’t know was that while he had been in boot camp and specialized training with the Marine Corps, Summers had started breaking down racial barriers in college football. After he didn’t receive any looks out of high school, Summers had decided to go the junior college route after another Boston friend and high school classmate of Harris’, Bill Overton, had talked up Summers’ ability to the McCook Junior College (Nebraska) staff. After two years in Nebraska, Summers followed Overton — who was a year ahead of him — to Wake Forest, where, in 1966, Overton had already been one of the first black players on the roster and one of the first black players to play in several southern stadiums at schools such as Auburn and South Carolina.
In Summers’ first season on the Wake Forest team in 1967 — eight months before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated — Summers became the first black starting quarterback for a major college program in the South.
Holding that response from his childhood friend, Harris no longer wanted his mom to receive his $10,000 life insurance policy, no longer felt as if he were fine with any outcome. In an instant, he became inspired by his friend’s words, “if you were here, you’d be a starting running back.”
He wanted to be there.
“Because of Freddie, my attitude changed. I didn’t want to die,” Harris said. “All I wanted to do was come home and play college football.”
Harris began thinking not about his mom buying a house, but about what he would do when he returned home. He said he promised God that if he had the fortune to return home he would do what Summers said he could — go to college on a football scholarship — and then return home and be a positive force for kids in his hometown.
Harris finally returned to Boston during the early spring of 1969. Summers had just signed a contract with the Cleveland Browns after leaving Wake Forest a semester early and being selected with the 98th overall pick of the 1969 NFL draft. But the Browns had drafted him as a defensive back, not a quarterback.
A year before, Marlin Briscoe — a black quarterback who had played college football at Nebraska-Omaha — had been drafted by the Denver Broncos as a defensive back. When Briscoe arrived in Denver, he refused to switch positions and ultimately became the starting quarterback for the Broncos that season (but not until he had an “audition” for the spot, according to the AP).
Summers thought that after proving a black quarterback could succeed at a southern school, that a black quarterback could be an All-ACC performer, that maybe he had done enough to earn him at least the same opportunity (if not a guarantee) as Briscoe.
“He thought he had done all the right things — going to a white school in the South, you can’t tell me they can’t accept him because he played college football at a black school. He went to a white school. The ACC in the 1960s, are you kidding me?” Summers’ brother DeWitt said.
Ultimately, the Browns decided against giving Summers a chance at quarterback.
But when Summers stopped by to see Harris after his return from the war, Summers was less worried about his NFL prospects and more interested in what his childhood friend was going to do with his future and how he could help.
Harris mentioned that he, inspired by the letter he received from Summers, wanted to try to play college football. But his high school transcripts weren’t overly impressive. Harris had repeated his junior year and he still remembered how multiple teachers had told him that college wasn’t for him and he should instead consider a trade school.
But Summers got on the phone, like Overton had done for him, and called McCook Junior College coach Larry Kramer from Harris’ house. After a short conversation, he pulled Harris over and said Kramer wanted to speak with him.
Harris remembered the conversation as a very straightforward one.
“Listen, Freddie speaks very highly of you and if you’re half the player that he thinks you are, we’d like to have you on our team. But I have no scholarships. If you come out here and make the team, the most I can give you is two meals a day,” Harris said. “I said, ‘Sir, when do I report?’”
Harris spent two seasons at McCook as a defensive back while Summers played on defense and special teams for the Browns. In 1971, Harris transferred to Boston University, and during his senior season at BU, Summers was traded to the Giants before heading to Canada to play in the early years of the CFL.
Through all of this, the two kept in close touch. When Harris’ eligibility had run out BU, his coach told him he could arrange a tryout with the Dallas Cowboys, but it would mean he’d need to leave school early and not receive his degree. Harris declined and when Summers heard the news, he tried to recruit him to come up to Canada to play. Again, Harris declined.
Two months after Harris graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in kinesiology, Summers landed on the front page of The Boston Globe.
“Freddie Summers — A case of true grid grit” the headline read on 1A. Flip to page 22 of the paper and there was a photo of Summers, staring at the hospital ceiling, with the headline “A broken back, a broken neck, but not a broken man.” The piece went on to outline a terrible injury Summers had suffered during a CFL game. What had initially been misdiagnosed as a pinched nerve was actually a broken neck and back suffered when he tackled another player. It was career-ending and would require major, specialized surgery.
Summers had been a player who never loved contact. Those around him joked that the reason he was so speedy as a quarterback was because he knew that as long as he was faster than everyone else, he would never be tackled.
For years after the injury, Summers was frustrated with his predicament, knowing that this type of injury would’ve never happened to a quarterback. Knowing that had he been given the opportunity to play the position he had played so well in college, his situation could’ve been different.
The surgery was successful in that Summers didn’t completely lose his ability to walk. But for the rest of his life, he would be on a regimen of pain medication. Without an NFL pension, he spent part of his savings on a malpractice lawsuit against the CFL that ultimately went nowhere.
In the late 1970s, Harris was working as a teacher and coach at West Roxbury High School when he convinced the school’s principal to hire Summers to work as a hallway monitor in his school. Since Summers didn’t have a college degree and continued to be in constant physical pain, his options were limited.
“If Freddie had had his college degree he probably would’ve been the first black high school coach in the city of Boston,” Harris said. “The fact that he didn’t have a degree was tough. He was a black man without a degree, what can you do?”
The stark contrast wasn’t lost on Harris — they were two kids from the same neighborhood, raised the same way, same athletic ability, same intelligence, same drive, both first-generation college students. But Harris was a teacher and Summers was a hallway monitor.
As Harris progressed professionally, he became a go-to source and speaker for what the districts considered “troubled” students.
“I was the ‘turnaround guy,’ the guy they’d send into difficult schools to turn them around,” Harris said. “I’d tell them the Freddie Summers and Roger Harris story. The only difference between Freddie and myself is that I got a degree. When you look at a basketball or a football, look at those as a means to an end. The end is the college degree.”
Those within Boston, many of whom had been familiar with Summers’ athletic accomplishments, then became aware of what Summers had meant to Harris outside of sports, and how Harris had turned that relationship and the influence Summers had in his life into the foundation of how Harris approached education.
“It’s like a tree,” said Martin Somers, a 25-year teaching veteran in the Boston Public Schools system. “Freddie helped Roger out and then Roger helped many other people out. … If you look at the number of students, you’re talking thousands of kids.”
And that was because of the impact Summers had made on Harris.
In 1994, Summers succumbed to the complications of his addiction to pain killers. By then, Harris had become a principal in the Boston Public School system, having earned a Master’s Degree at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. Six years later, he’d also earn a Doctorate from Boston College.
Summers’ mother, Herticine Jackson, asked Harris to speak at the funeral and when he did, he decided the most important remarks he could give were of gratitude to Summers’ mother, words that he keeps with him to this day. He credits the impact he’s made to Summers’, and roots his accomplishments in a tiny seed of belief that Summers had in him five decades ago.
Without that copy of the sports story, without that letter of response from “Sperky,” Harris has no idea where he’d be today.
“Mrs. Jackson, I want to thank you for your son,” Harris remembers saying at Summers’ funeral. “Anything that I have and anything I have achieved, I owe to him. He came into my life and he changed my life, and everything I’ve accomplished is because of Freddie.”
https://theathletic.com/830359/2019/02/22/wake-forest-freddie-summers-quarterback-roger-harris-boston/
