A Moral Stance

The University of San Francisco football team went undefeated and untied in 1951. They were considered for a spot playing in the Orange Bowl for the National Championship against Georgia Tech. The invitation came with a caveat that they leave there two African American players at home. Never before or for eight years after, had any University not accepted those terms. The Players from USF stood fir against this discrimination. Eleven members of the team of thirty-seven players were drafted into the National Football League. Three of them made the NFL Hall of Fame. The publicity manager for the team was Pete Rozelle, a grad student at USF at the time. Rozelle went on to become the commissioner of the NFL, expanding the league from twelve teams to twenty-eight and is responsible for the SuperBowl, and Monday Night Football. This is a story of those individuals and what led to the moral stance that has made them legends. Gary (Doc) Nelson was a Division I collegiate athlete, lettering in two sports. He became the University of San Francisco's Men's Golf coach in 2005 and was voted Coach of the Year in the West Coast Conference three years later. He served as Director of golf in charge of both Men's and Woman's Golf in 2009. In 2010 he was asked to become the Director of Athletics at USF, a position he accepted on an interim basis for the following year. During his year as Director of Athletics, he saw the grade point average of the athletes rise from a 2.9 to a 3.20 overall. His men's teams won the Commissioner's cup for the West Coast Conference, and donations increased by seventy percent over the previous year. As Athletic Director, he became intimately familiar with not only the story of the 1951 Don football team, but with many of the individuals that played on that squad. This is his second book. He lives in northern California, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from the University. His four children, all semi-launched, and living close. Most summer days he can be found driving the back roads of Marin County in his 1957 Triumph TR-3