The years slip away, and so do those special souls who help enrich them. This time it’s Milt Davis. He played defensive back magnificently for the Baltimore Colts’ championship teams half a century ago. But the ballplaying was the least of his gifts.
He was born on an Oklahoma Indian reservation to parents who were African-American and American Indian and raised in a California Jewish orphanage, and he was a healer everywhere he went in spite of the anguish he endured across the years.
He came to Baltimore because the Detroit Lions, who had drafted him, told him they didn’t have a black teammate to room with him on road trips. And he left Baltimore, after four marvelous seasons and two world championships, because he knew there was more to life than football, and he wanted to finish work on a doctorate.
“A remarkable, remarkable guy,” Lenny Moore was saying Monday night, a few nights after Davis died of cancer, at 79, in Oregon. “But, man, our numbers are really starting to dwindle. I don’t think there’s more than about 15 guys left from that ’58 team. I don’t even like to look at the team picture anymore.”
Davis and Moore were teammates for three seasons. Twice, Davis led the league in interceptions. In the famous 1958 sudden death championship game, he played with two broken bones in his foot.
But, off the field, his life counted, too. In a time when black and white athletes were still working out the nuances of bonding, and America itself was just beginning to develop a conscience on race, Davis was a fellow who tried to look beyond skin color.
“Milt and Raymond Berry,” said Moore. “Those two guys did a lot during some tough times.”
Moore, the Hall of Fame halfback, now 74, dredged up the memories as he walked through M&T Bank Stadium Monday night, where the Ravens were staging a nice evening for about 2,500 female fans. He told some of them how the current passion for the Ravens was born in the initial love affair with the Colts — and how it was more than just football.
“The Colts did a lot to bring this town together,” Moore said. “Back then, there was a lot of work to be done. People hadn’t seen blacks and whites together, and here we were playing ball, and hugging in the locker room, and you saw the pictures in the newspapers.”
But there were tough moments along the way. A generation of Baltimoreans remembers the ’58 title game that launched the modern era of pro football — but not so many know about the exhibition game the following August, in segregated Dallas, where the Colts played the New York Giants, and the black players from both teams had to be quartered the night before the game in rundown rooming houses while their white teammates stayed in first-class hotels.
Half a century later, the memory stays with Moore like a wound still healing. In those days, the Colts only had a handful of black players: Moore and Davis, Big Daddy Lipscomb, Jim Parker, Leonard Lyles, Johnny Sample and Sherman Plunkett. They were humiliated — and they were furious.
That night they hooked up with players from the Giants. “We’re all saying, ‘What are we gonna do?’” Moore remembered. First, they decided they would boycott the game. They wouldn’t take this kind of treatment. They would go to the locker room, but they wouldn’t suit up.
Then came cooler heads. One was the Giants’ Emlen Tunnell. Another was Milt Davis. They talked about those who had come before them, like the Cleveland Browns’ Marion Motley, who’d gotten death threats, and baseball’s Jackie Robinson, who had no African-American teammate when he arrived in Brooklyn. They’d gone through this kind of trouble, and worse, and played on.
The ballplayers decided that night on a symbolic gesture of anger: They would show up late, barely in time for dressing and brief pre-game warm-ups.
“Soon as we walked into that locker room,” Moore remembered, “everything stopped. But nobody said anything.”
Then, he recalled, Raymond Berry moved toward Lipscomb. Berry was a Texas native. He whispered a few words to Big Daddy, then moved to Davis and Moore.
He said he was sorry — about the segregation, and the humiliation. “And then,” Moore recalled, he said, ‘I’m with you.’”
In a time when America was still working out its race relations, such a simple statement helped heal difficult moments. Raymond Berry and Milt Davis were healers. Lenny Moore, too.
