The Magnificent Eight

You cannot watch a college football game today without seeing black athletes well-represented on both sides of the football. 

They make up a large portion of each team.

Most people probably don’t think twice about it, but I’m old enough to remember that it wasn’t always this way.

When I was a student-athlete in the 1960s, it was extremely rare to see more than a few black athletes on a football team.

In 1964, there were eight black players on the University of Nebraska football team, including myself. 

Eight doesn’t sound like a large number, but at the time, it was massive.

Unheard of.

There’s a famous picture of us with our head coach, Bob Devaney, in our uniforms in front of the backdrop of Memorial Stadium. From that picture, and that day forward, we became known as the “Magnificent Eight.”

We were more than a catchy nickname, though. 

We were pioneers that were going to change the game.

We probably didn’t know the historical impact we were making at the time, but we knew what we were doing as eight black teammates at a non-HBCU university in Nebraska was incredibly distinctive.

The Magnificent Eight had a profound impact on my life. 

What we were able to accomplish as eight black teammates together was something that I’ve taken with me for the entirety of my career and journey.

All roads lead to Lincoln

As a high school student, my talents on the football field led to several different universities trying to recruit me.

Looking back on it now, I find it comical that while the University of Nebraska showed heavy interest in me, the feeling wasn’t mutual on my end.

Born and raised in Omaha, I was looking to explore parts of the country I’d never seen before.

At the top of my list was Northwestern University, coached by the legendary Ara Parseghian who would go on to win two national titles for Notre Dame.

When Northwestern offered me a scholarship, I jumped at the opportunity and couldn’t have been more excited. 

Unfortunately, it didn’t exactly go as planned.

Northwestern is a prestigious academic institution. I knew that going in and I thought I was ready.

I was not.

I wasn’t mature enough at the time to balance the load of playing football and keep my architectural engineering grades up.

Nebraska received word that I was struggling at Northwestern and wondered if I was interested in coming back home.

I considered this a second chance for my career as a student-athlete. 

After a brief stint at Norfolk Junior College, I came back to my home state of Nebraska with my head down, ready to go to work. 

It wasn’t the road I thought my career as a student-athlete would go down, but fate intervened.

I was born to wear scarlet and cream.

A unique bond

When I arrived at Nebraska in 1963, I can’t remember the exact number of black football players there were on the team, but it was an astonishing number compared to other Division I programs across the country.

It was somewhere between seven and nine, and it certainly took me by surprise. I can’t emphasize enough how uncommon it was to have that many black football players on a team in those days.

The following year in 1964, I can undoubtedly say there were eight of us because we formed our own fraternity of sorts. 

Growing up as young black men, we witnessed first-hand what made this country spectacular, and where it had a tremendous amount of progress to make as far as equal opportunity and discrimination were concerned.

We quickly formed a bond of shared life experiences. 

Everyone always asks me where the Magnificent Eight name came from, and it’s really not as deep as people might think. The name essentially came arbitrarily. It emanated from the reality we found ourselves in as eight black football players for a Division I university.

We’ve all taken credit for coming up with the name at some point in our lives, but one day, one of us said we’re the Magnificent Eight.

That caught on immediately, and it’s what we’ve been known by ever since.

As I said before, we were too young and naive to understand the significance of our group at the time. But we were cognitive enough to know that what we were doing was special and unlike any other teams in Division I football.

Lifelong pioneer and innovator

What means the most to me about Nebraska and the Magnificent Eight is how I was able to use my experiences as a pioneer and innovator throughout the entirety of my life.

When I started working for IBM, I worked my way up to becoming one of the first handful of African-American marketing executives in the history of the company.

Later, I opened the very first retail computer store to sell Apple microcomputers in Atlanta. I transitioned into politics and worked for one of the greatest civil rights leaders in the history of this country – ambassador Andrew Young, mayor of Atlanta. 

I also served as Jesse Jackson’s campaign manager when he ran for the United States presidency – becoming the first legitimate African-American candidate to run for the country’s office.

The fact of the matter is, I’m not able to accomplish any of these groundbreaking feats without the Magnificent Eight at Nebraska. It’s where it all started for me on my path to living a life of innovation and pioneering.

I didn’t always know the magnitude of my steps, but I just kept moving forward in my life and career. And each step I took traced back to my time at Nebraska.

Winners in life

As we’ve gotten older and have time to reflect, we understand the impact we had as trailblazers.

We helped change the landscape of not only college football, but collegiate sports across the country by bringing awareness to black student-athletes and the equal opportunities they more than deserved.

What I don’t want to get lost, though, is each member of the Magnificent Eight had captivating stories in their own right.

Yes, our story is incredible as a collective unit, but these were young men who grew up to be dedicated husbands, fathers, and outstanding members of their communities. They accomplished an unbelievable amount of success in their lives, and I couldn’t be more proud of them.

I know the rest of the Magnificent Eight would agree with me when I say that of all the success I was able to achieve in my football career, what I remember most is when I didn’t do my best.

It’s not the tackles I made or the touchdowns I scored, but it’s the times when I didn’t give my maximum effort.

This applies both on and off the football field. In all areas of life, when you don’t do your best, those moments will keep you up at night and haunt you forever.

Every play on the field, and every day in life, is more monumental than you know.

If you give everything you have, and your teammates do, too, you’re going to win the game.

More importantly, you’re going to win the game of life.