Greg Page is his name. Why he never played is more than a football story. It’s a story about America.
Sports and society intersect. They always have. They always will. And this story is about one of those intersections. It’s about how access and opportunity were sidelined by the prevailing norm of exclusion.
For most of the 20th century, black athletes couldn’t play college football in the South. Segregation made it so. Promising collegians, like Bubba Smith, couldn’t play for major college teams in their home states.
The situation finally began changing in the early ’60s largely because students of color were breaking the color line at universities across the south. Athletic integration was on the horizon. But….
Social change wouldn’t come easily. Racism was real. Jim Crow was alive. And danger lurked. Civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi (1964) and Alabama (1965).
There was even a sporting event called “a segregated game.” It didn’t happen often because all-white schools mostly refrained from playing against integrated squads. But there was one segregated game of national note. It happened in 1970 when Bear Bryant’s all-white Alabama Crimson Tide played the integrated USC Trojans.
Bryant’s Tide was struggling at the time, while USC was a gridiron juggernaut. The game was a mismatch on paper and lots of folks wondered why Bryant, who very much wanted to play the game, would schedule such a powerful foe.
Well, legend has it that Bryant wanted to integrate the Tide despite negative statewide public opinion and strong opposition from Alabama’s then-Governor George Wallace. Bryant wanted to show the people of Alabama that the Tide needed to recruit black players. So–as the story goes–Bryant arranged a home game with USC. USC blasted ‘Bama that day, 42-21.
The situation at ‘Bama showed that integrating college football in the South wouldn’t “just happen.” Leadership was required. And, very importantly, somebody had to be first.
That turned out to be the University of Kentucky, the SEC’s northernmost school. The university’s president and the state’s governor collaborated to make it happen.
Breathitt (left) and Oswald in 1965 (photo, Kentucky Digital Library)
Then-president, John W. Oswald, offered an incentive to UK’s football coach. He promised him “a UK position for life” if he would recruit black players. The coach, Charlie Bradshaw, who wasn’t winning many games in Lexington (only 17 wins in his first four years at the helm) accepted the offer.
The issue then became finding just the right players to break the color line. Oswald was assisted in that quest by then-governor Ned Breathitt. The governor helped UK recruit Louisville’s Nate Northington, a star running back.
That’s when Greg Page came into the picture. Like Northington, Page was homegrown–from Bell County, KY, in his case, in far southeastern Kentucky. The largest city there is Middlesboro (pop. 13k then, 10k today) and that’s where Page played–at a school that wasn’t integrated until 1964.
Page, a dynamite defensive end with D-1 talent, signed with the Wildcats.
The historic script was now set: these two would be the first African Americans to play football for UK and in the SEC. The year was 1966.
Freshmen were excluded from playing varsity ball back then, so Page and Northington were assigned to UK’s freshman team. Page stood out, leading the team in tackles.
Greg Page (photo, Originalpeople.com)
So, if Page had the talent, why didn’t he play?
A month before the 1967 season began–on August 22, 1967, to be specific–Page was critically hurt during football practice. The injury caused paralysis. His condition deteriorated. Page died on September 29–less than a week after UK opened the season at Indiana … in a game where Page was supposed to make UK history.
The day after Page died, Nate Northington did just that, On Saturday September 30, Northington played against Ole’ Miss, making him the first black football player to participate in a game for UK and in the SEC.
But it was a star-crossed experience. Northington suffered a season-ending shoulder injury that day. Injured and grief-stricken over the loss of his friend, Northington transferred to Western Kentucky University where he completed his college career.
But there’s more to the story. Sarah Kazadi told it in a feature article published a few years ago by CBSSports.com. It’s a story that shouldn’t surprise anybody: it’s about how hard it was for these two players to break the color line.
To get a better sense of the circumstances, let’s fill in some blanks.
Northington signed with UK before Page was a commit. “They (UK) said that they would recruit someone that would share the load, someone I could confide in and we’d support each other. That was very critical to me making the decision to go down there,” Kazadi quotes Northington.
Charlie Bradshaw (photo, Ed Weddle Collection, UK Special Collections)
Both players were assured by the football staff that UK would recruit more in-state African-American players. But that “promise was unfulfilled,” says Northington. So Page and Northington, now sophomores, left the team in protest. They returned only after Coach Bradshaw recommitted to his original promise.
Northington says that experience was “just one more thing” about Bradshaw. The coach had been investigated by the NCAA in 1963 for abusing players verbally and physically. Northington experienced that personally. Although his shoulder was injured well before the Ole’ Miss game, the coaches told him to gut it up. Northington had to play through what he called “excruciating pain.”
After Page passed away, the coaches canceled Northington’s meal ticket, claiming that it was punishment for Northington having missed classes during Page’s hospitalization. And with no other black player on the team, Northington was never assigned a new roommate after Page passed. “Jim Crow” is Northington’s claim.
It was unnerving, some thought, that the only two black players on the squad were gone from the team before the season was even two weeks old.
It meant that UK failed in an effort to integrate the football team. The school needed to go back to square one. It did. Wilbur Hackett, who went on to become UK’s first black captain, and Houston Hogg, were the targets. Those two–not Page and Northington–became the first fully engaged black football players in the SEC and at UK.
All of this happened 50 years ago. The outcome–the integration of UK and SEC football–is a point of celebration today. A statue to honor these four trailblazers stands on the UK campus.
Statue of Northington, Page, Hackett, and Hogg, located outside of UK’s Football Training Facility (photo by Addison Coffey, Kentucky Kernel)
Last fall, the SEC celebrated 50 years of integrated football.
Both testimonies make sense if you frame what happened as a football story. It’s a very different story if you frame it as an American story. These four men paid a steep, personal price to break the color line. That pain comes through when you watch the CBS Sports documentary, Forward Progress, or read Nate Northington’s autobiography, Still Running.
Here’s an alternative, UK and the SEC. Apologize for decades upon decades of racism and exclusion. Talk about it openly and expressively. Make it an open conversation. Continue it over time. Express regret. Say you’re sorry. Make changes, real changes in how you operate.
None of that will happen, of course. Ever. That’s because it’s a football story–a story about how UK and SEC football needed black athletes to be competitive.
