It is the rare day indeed, this year, that I get out in front of The Yankee. The closer I got to the end of yesterday’s ride, the more I felt like this:
I just knew she would pip me before the end, and so I pushed and pushed as hard as I could, and somehow I managed to stay away, but only just.
And if you’re here for a different sort of video, this is the funniest one of the weekend:
Da Superfans meet Brett Favre. It's hilarious. https://t.co/gD8qxN2w9t
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) September 7, 2019
And this is a cool little bit of something cool the Indiana athletic department cooked up:
Catch the 2019 #IUFB intro video. pic.twitter.com/jPWoqqpJNF
— Indiana Football (@IndianaFootball) September 7, 2019
But there’s something important in there:
The @IndianaFootball intro video includes the late, great, George Taliaferro, who led the Hoosiers to their only undefeated season, became the first African-American drafted by the NFL, and spent a lifetime lifting up others. That's top class. https://t.co/YIqJQrzhJO pic.twitter.com/ADKZxGp8Jn
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) September 8, 2019
George Taliaferro’s story defies excerpting, but let’s try:
As the first day of school approached, Taliaferro asked the football coaches when he was going to be moved on campus. He was told black students didn’t live in dorms.
“I called my father and told him I didn’t want to be in a place where I couldn’t live on campus, where I couldn’t swim in the pool and where I couldn’t sit in the bottom section of the movie theater,” Taliaferro said. “My father told me there were other reasons I was there, and then he hung up the phone on me. I was never so hurt because I thought the one person who could understand being discriminated against was him.”
That tough love stemmed from two things his parents, neither of whom went past sixth grade, told him every day as he grew up. “They’d say, ‘We love you,'” he recalled. “And, ‘You must be educated.'”
He played seven seasons of pro football, six in the NFL with New York, Dallas, Baltimore and Philadelphia, three times making the Pro Bowl. He became a volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Baltimore, advised prisoners adjusting to society upon their release, got his master’s in social work at Howard University, taught at Maryland, was dean of students at Morgan State, returned to Indiana as a professor and special assistant to IU president John Ryan, and helped start Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Central Indiana in Bloomington.
You can’t put that in a gif or a football video, but you certainly oughta try.
