Feb 6, 2022 By Richard Robbins 5 min read

Tom Brady is retiring. Hooray for Tom Brady and for the other NFL greats such as Ben Roethlisberger – wondrous Ben. They persevered in a game of hard knocks and concussions. Here’s hoping they lead long active post-NFL lives. Here’s hoping they can get out of bed in the morning when they’re 60.

Ernie Davis never got the chance to experience what Brady and the others experienced. A college great, he may have failed at the pro level. Who knows?

Chances are you’ve never heard of Ernie Davis. He died in 1963. He was a young Black man, 23 years old. He was from Uniontown.

But maybe you have heard of him. They made a movie of Davis’s life in 2008 called “The Express.” It was a very bad movie. Well, maybe not bad. Just inaccurate. At least that’s what some of his teammates from Syracuse University said. They especially didn’t like how the movie portrayed their coach Ben Schwarzwalder.

If you’re from Uniontown maybe you didn’t like it either. The movie opens with Davis, at the age of 10 or so, confronted by some white punks who hassle him, using the n-word. They mean to beat him up, if they can catch him. Of course, Ernie outruns them. He’s a future All American and a Heisman Trophy winner running back, after all.

Whether the incident is true or not or just some Hollywood make-believe is hard to say. The year depicted is 1949. In those days, the State Theater in Uniontown was segregated – Blacks were relegated to the balcony – and Shady Grove swimming pool was completely off limits. Changes wouldn’t occur until the 1960s, during the civil rights era.

(As a child of the 1950s, my hazy recollection is that Black people in Uniontown worked one of two jobs. Men picked up the garbage and women operated the elevators in the downtown department stores. As for the State Theater, I was vaguely aware that “peanut heaven” was where the Black kids sat. I must report that I was oblivious to the fact that Blacks were barred from the “public” swimming pools of my youth, until the protests that ended the practice began.)

Ernie lived in Uniontown with his grandparents until he was 11, when he moved to Elmira, N.Y., to be with his mother. He was nicknamed the “Elmira Express” in college. He’s buried in Elmira.

Two months before his death from leukemia, an article appeared under his name in The Saturday Evening Post, one of several mass circulation magazines of the day.

The title of the article is “I’m not Unlucky.” In it, Davis tells of his “first big disappointment”: seeing his Midget League baseball team in Uniontown marching on Opening Day without him. “There was a mix up in passing out the uniforms.” He didn’t get one. He tried not to cry. “I can still remember how I felt. Nothing seemed as important to us as succeeding in athletics.”

As the article opens, Davis is asked by a stranger if he is indeed Ernie Davis. Not wanting the fuss, he answers that he isn’t. The stranger then says, “You’re lucky…. Ernie Davis has leukemia. He won’t live six months.”

In New York to receive the Heisman Trophy as the best collegiate football player in the country for 1961, he met President Kennedy, at Kennedy’s request. Ernie Davis was a national celebrity. At his funeral in May 1963 a telegram from the president was read in which Kennedy expressed the hope that Davis would continue to inspire Americans in death as he had in life.

Drafted out of college by Washington, Davis was traded to the Cleveland Browns, where he scored a big contract and where he was expected to play alongside another Syracuse backfield great, Jim Brown. That never happened. Davis fell ill several weeks before what would have been his first NFL game.

He never played a minute of professional football. Nevertheless, the Browns retired his number 45.

“Some people say I’m unlucky,” Davis wrote in The Saturday Evening Post in the spring of 1963. “I don’t believe it…. I have had more (fame and good fortune) than most people get in a lifetime.”

“There has been so much for me. I was the first Negro to win the Heisman Trophy…. I led the graduation parade last June at Syracuse University, as the senior who contributed most to the university…. From the time I started in sports, I always was the player who got the limelight, who had the nice stories written about him.”

Jim Brown spoke to Sports Illustrated in the 1980s about Davis. “I thought of him as a … true kind of spirit,” Brown said, “who had the ability to rise above things. Ernie Davis transcended racism. That was his essence, his greatness.”

The good, it’s said, die young. Ernie Davis died without complaint. “He was always upbeat,” recalled his college girlfriend Helen Gott.

Davis’s favorite song, Gott said, was “Our Day Will Come,” by Ruby and the Romantics. “Our day will come and we’ll have everything….”

Ernie Davis had everything going for him. Then, inexplicably, he was gone.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.