1973 Hogs team changed UA for better

FAYETTEVILLE — Thanks to the rollicking recollections of panelists Brison Manor, Johnnie Meadors, Dean Weber and Dennis Winston, their 45-minute program flew by faster than the moderator envisioned Monday night at the Washington County Historical Society’s Razorbacks Symposium.

It left so many subjects still unexplored.

I moderated the portion of the program that dealt with the 1973 University of Arkansas football team greatly enhancing the integration of the Razorbacks, which ultimately enhanced the integration of Arkansas as a state.

Meadors, an All-Southwest Conference defensive end, lettered four years.

Manor, a junior college transfer defensive tackle inducted last year into the UA Sports Hall of Honor after an NFL career that included playing in the Super Bowl for the Denver Broncos, lettered two years for the Razorbacks.

Winston, a linebacker and defensive end has been tabbed for Hall of Honor induction Aug. 31 after a long NFL career that included two Super Bowls as part of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ legendary Steel Curtain, lettered for four years.

All were among 13 black players in Arkansas’ 1973 recruiting class who were added to a team returning only three scholarship black players: Ivan Jordan, Rollen Smith and Marsh White.

Manor, Meadors and Winston emphatically requested that Weber, the Razorbacks’ trainer for 35 years who arrived with them in 1973, be a part of Monday night’s program.

Adding 13 black players in 1973 forever and for the better changed the culture of the Razorbacks and Arkansas.

Finally, the Razorbacks truly united all of Arkansas once their fully integrated teams were established, especially with national defensive player of the week Winston leading the 22-7 upset of UPI national champion Southern California to open the 1974 season.

All four panelists recounted white players, some of whom lost their starting jobs with the influx of black players in 1973 and 1974, arising with the black players on teams that always had each others’ backs. They hung together through 5-5-1 and 6-4-1 growing pains before blossoming into Frank Broyles’ final Southwest Conference championship season that went 10-2 in 1975.

It wasn’t just black and white when it came to changing any preconceived notions of the other.

Some black-on-black stereotyping changed, too.

Ivan Jordan recalled attending a UA class wearing a football T-shirt in 1972 and sitting next to three black students who promptly got up and moved.

Jo Lynn Dennis Charles, the first black woman voted to the UA’s homecoming court, said blacks students who weren’t UA athletes in 1972 and the outset of 1973 sometimes resented the black athletes. They perceived the athletes as getting special privileges, she said.

That changed. By the spring of 1974, the black student newspaper representing the Black Americans for Democracy wrote with pride of Arkansas’ “Razorblacks.”

Better yet, starting with the 1974 victory over USC, all of Arkansas has celebrated the Razorbacks just as Razorbacks, whether they were the nearly all black basketball national champions of 1994 or the just happened to be all-white baseball team that finished third in the country at the 2012 College World Series.

All Hogs in all sports now seem to be viewed as one color: Razorback red.

That is a legacy of which all those 1973 Razorbacks can be proud.