McAshan’s spot in football history secure

Father Time has tried hard to test Eddie McAshan.

Father Time has mostly failed.

Judging from McAshan’s still youthful, smile-plastered face and current-day slender frame, very little has changed about the former All-America two-sport athlete’s appearance in 40 years.

But where the days, months and decades were unable to slow him down, “Ma Tech” almost did.

And she nearly succeeded.

On Sept. 12, 1970, exactly 40 years ago this fall, McAshan, a tall, slim, gunslinger-style quarterback, started under center for Georgia Tech in a game that would be etched in ink in the school’s history books.

Before that day, no other African-American had started as a quarterback for a major Southern institution.

Six years after the United States Congress passed landmark Civil Rights legislation reaffirming key rights for disenfranchised Americans, 16 years after the Supreme Court deemed “separate but equal” public spaces illegal and 23 years after Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color line, McAshan became that quarterback.

“God’s got his blazers,” McAshan said recently, his voice trailing off.

Although he knew the gravity of that September afternoon and its historical significance, he had no idea at the time just where his journey would take him.

He also had no idea that by preparing for a final trip to Sanford Stadium, his trek could come to an abrupt end.

Life, as the reluctant trailblazer knew it, was no longer ordinary. It soon became disturbing, hate-filled, confusing, difficult, grand, peaceful and edifying all at once.

It was the type of experience that shaped McAshan in a way that he wishes a present-day generation of gridiron stars could comprehend.

Through brotherhood and sacrifice he arrived where he is now, where he can gladly cheer for Georgia Tech and all her successes.

It wasn’t always that way.

@BR Body Subhed:Long a pioneer

Born in the early, predawn shadows of the Cold War, McAshan was a child of 1950s and ‘60s America, a card-carrying member of the baby-booming South.

While politicians in Washington and abroad waged wars with their words, McAshan came of age on a battlefield of a different kind, fighting a far different enemy.

His adversary’s name was Jim Crow.

As a teenager, McAshan routinely was among the first young blacks in his Gainesville, Fla., community to integrate the schools there.

He never objected to the experiences, but he always wondered, “Why?”

“That’s the thing that I kind of hated,” McAshan said. “Every time I looked around, I was the first. People said, ‘You’re going to be the first this, first that.’

“Well I don’t really care about that.”

All he wanted to do was play football and basketball, and it didn’t matter with whom.

At Gainesville High School, where he was among the first group of black students to enroll, McAshan built a reputation for being one of Florida’s best young quarterbacks.

“He had good speed, a great throwing arm, and he was a great leader,” Jack Thompson, Georgia Tech’s recruiting director in 1968, said earlier this fall.

Thompson was charged that season with coordinating recruiting visits and spending, in some cases, several days at a time with potential recruits. That, of course, was long before the NCAA began clamping down on recruiting and occurrences that would be deemed today as violations.

“We spent a lot of time in Gainesville. We had somebody in Gainesville almost constantly,” Thompson said. “I was there probably four or five times, and you had other coaches that were there as often or more.”

Thompson now serves as associate director of athletics in charge of development at Georgia Tech. Specifically, he coordinates the Alexander-Tharpe Fund.

When it came to race, and knowing that McAshan would be the Yellow Jackets’ first black player, Georgia Tech coaches did not worry.

According to Thompson, they were more concerned about his ability to launch a perfect spiral instead of his skin color and any fallout fans and players might have about his addition to the team.

“We looked at Eddie as a quarterback,” Thompson said. “Rather than just a black quarterback, he was very talented and a bright young man. That was what went into play when recruiting him.”

@BR Body Subhed:Time to play

In addition to Georgia Tech, McAshan’s hometown Florida Gators and home state Miami Hurricanes were hot after him, too.

Florida was home to his then-girlfriend, a journalism student. Aside from wooing him toward her, the Gators really wanted him to be a backup that may eventually become groomed into a starter.

But, in McAshan’s words, he didn’t want to “go to school just to be a backup.” It wasn’t him being cocky, but it was a case of an ordinary confident, competitive player who believed he was good enough to lead a serious program right away.

As far as the Hurricanes were concerned, he saw the writing of a different kind smeared on the wall. Miami wanted him to be part of its run-first, tailback-infused scheme.

McAshan wanted to be the star. He wanted to pass. He wanted to be the one who ran.

Yellow Jackets head coach Bud Carson told him he could if he came to the Flats. Mix Carson’s words with Georgia Tech’s proximity in Atlanta, a city long regarded as a mecca for black professionals, and it appeared McAshan found his best suitor.

“My thinking, as a young guy, was what better place if something (racially motivated) was to happen than (Atlanta) instead of being in some college town where they could really do anything?” McAshan said. “I figured the media here would be more pro-integration and pro-African American because of all the ‘firsts’ that were here. The largest (black) contractor in America was here: Herman Russell. The largest (black-owned) insurance company was here with Jesse Hill and Atlanta Life.”

So he came, and after sitting out all of his freshman season -- as was customary for freshmen at most schools at the time -- in 1969, McAshan suited up against South Carolina the next fall, beginning the 1970 season.

A month into the year, McAshan was contacted by Jet magazine, one of the leading black periodicals of his time. A photographer was dispatched to Georgia Tech before an upcoming game and followed McAshan’s every pregame move.

By Oct. 22 of the year, his face, shrouded slightly by a one-bar gold helmet, looked up from coffee tables around the country, as he graced the cover of that day’s Jet issue. He was heralded by the magazine as one of the few “black quarterbacks of ‘white’ college teams.”

Success for McAshan was immediate. The Yellow Jackets went 9-3 during McAshan’s sophomore season and ripped off a Sun Bowl victory.

Perhaps most importantly, the grand experiment proved a success, and it cracked open the door for opportunities for other black players. Across the next two seasons, players Greg Horne, Cleo Johnson and walk-on Karl Barnes were added to the team. Linebacker Joe Harris, an eventual captain, came in 1973, and, two years later, with the arrival of head coach Pepper Rodgers, a group of 13 came at once.

“I remember when Pepper Rodgers was recruiting me, he said something like, ‘I don’t care if you’re a yellow, purple, black, green or blue linebacker, if the purple guy’s the best, he’ll play. Or if the green guy is better than him, he’ll play,’ ” said Lucius Sanford, one of the 13 who went on to enjoy a career with the Buffalo Bills before eventually returning to Tech and working for the athletics association.

@BR Body Subhed:‘That was ridiculous’

As he wrapped up a banner career that saw him break 17 Georgia Tech records, McAshan felt as if he were living a dream. Nothing, it seemed, could bring him off the cloud he had been living on for three seasons.

Little did he know a nightmare was looming.

With the 1972 season and his career nearing conclusion, McAshan tried to get extra family members to make the trek from Florida to see his final regular season game. So he asked a Georgia Tech secretary if he could receive additional tickets for the upcoming game in Athens against rival Georgia.

He was denied.

Given no real explanation, he got upset with the team, stormed away and skipped the week’s Thursday practice without informing anyone about where he was. Even his mother didn’t know, and frantically called Georgia Tech coaches to track him down.

A day later, he resurfaced at the team hotel in Commerce.

“That whole thing was kind of strange,” Harris later said.

When he met with head coach Bill Fulcher, a Georgia Tech alum who replaced Carson following Carson’s departure for the Pittsburgh Steelers the previous offseason, McAshan learned that Friday that he was suspended for the Georgia game for walking out on his teammates.

To this day, he says that was all he was told by the head coach whom he still believes he had “a missed connection” with. The young Fulcher operated in a more hands-off style than Carson, McAshan said.

“He was always up in the tower,” McAshan said, referring to Fulcher’s practice location.

Following the Yellow Jackets’ 27-7 loss that year, McAshan began preparing to start in the Liberty Bowl at the end of that season. He learned from a newspaper article, however, that Fulcher had decreed that he was benched for the bowl, too.

As part of The Macon News’ Sunday coverage of the game, former Telegraph sports editor Harley Bowers wrote about the ticket flap, citing Fulcher as saying McAshan would be suspended for just the one game.

McAshan later charged that Fulcher, in concert with others around the Institute, colluded to make the suspension an extra game. An NCAA investigation ensued, but the investigation found nothing.

And thus ended McAshan’s career; two games short of further stamping his legacy on Georgia Tech’s record books.

“(My career) was kind of what I thought it would be,” McAshan said. “Except for the ticket thing at the end. That was ridiculous.”

In the wake of the news that McAshan wouldn’t start the bowl game, civil rights activist Jesse Jackson took McAshan’s side, organizing pickets outside the Liberty Bowl. Jackson’s charge: Race was the root of McAshan’s ouster.

McAshan’s black teammates were unsure what all to believe, Harris said, but they were in his corner. Although threatened with a loss of scholarships if they joined the picket, Harris and the other black players decided to don black armbands during the game as a show of solidarity.

“It wasn’t like I broke some major NCAA rule, that kind of thing happens all the time. A matter of fact, one of the big recruiting points for all schools then were tickets,” McAshan said. “They could give you tickets and then alumni buy it from you. So you could get as many you could get. It was no big deal back then.”

The protesting and boycotting did nothing to get McAshan reinstated, and he sat, marking the beginning of a 20-year estrangement from “Ma Tech.”

@BR Body Subhed:Knowing their past

“All the black quarterbacks of today are riding in the jetstream of Eddie McAshan. In many ways, he was the Jackie Robinson of Southern college football.” -- Jesse Jackson

After years of bitterness and anger toward Georgia Tech, McAshan reconnected with the program in 1995, when, thanks to work of his former teammates and other former Yellow Jackets, he was finally inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame.

Then-U.S. President Bill Clinton sent him a citation commending him on his “hard work and commitment,” and called him “an inspiration for others.”

While black players have roamed Georgia Tech’s sidelines with greater frequency following McAshan’s departure, the school would not have another black starting quarterback for nearly 20 years.

In 1990, the year Georgia Tech won its most recent of four national championships, Shawn Jones -- a quick, strong-armed signal-caller patterned in a shorter mold of McAshan -- commanded the team. When his career ended, Donnie Davis took the reins from him, and Davis later handed them to former Heisman hopeful Joe Hamilton. After a three-year gap, Reggie Ball was next, before a two-year window separated him from current starter Joshua Nesbitt.

“That would be good for Josh if the team could do well,” McAshan said of Georgia Tech’s latest All-ACC quarterback. “I like to see him get accolades. Because, if you play good and then your last year you”

He trailed off.

Nesbitt, albeit by a much different twist of fate, is in position to miss the final games of his senior year, too. The Greene County native is hopeful a broken arm will be healthy in time for the Yellow Jackets’ bowl game. Regardless, he will still miss Saturday’s contest at Georgia because of the injury.

Earlier this season, McAshan, Harris, Sanford and several other early black athletes returned to Georgia Tech to be honored for their accomplishments.

“I didn’t get a chance to speak with them before the game, but I really wanted to,” current Yellow Jackets slot back Roddy Jones said. “It really humbles us to see them and what they went through. We really kind of take it for granted now, I’d say. If you look across the nation, you see black players all over the place. But to know that once, that wasn’t true, it’s something you don’t think about a lot. So any time it’s brought up, it really makes me appreciate what they did and what they went through to get us here.”

McAshan, who now works with the Life Foundation, an organization affiliated with Marietta’s Life University, agreed with Jones’ sentiments.

“I’ve had guys say, ‘Man, you had to go through all that? And then others that used to say, I’m glad I wasn’t you,’ ” McAshan said. “I understand what they’re saying.

“But you know, God’s got his blazers; His people that He wants to go through years and set as an example. We just all have a purpose. I always kept that in mind.”

This story was originally published November 25, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "McAshan’s spot in football history secure."