t was 1968 and the fall and Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis. The details after that get foggy for Dave Meggyesy, who, though ever a storyteller, is now 79 and recovering from a stroke. He can’t recall who the Cardinals played that day, whether it was a win or a loss, what the weather was like. The written record of events is a bit blurry there, too — some contradictory accounts have surfaced over the years and archival sources are suspect. Suffice it to say, St.
Back in the late autumn of ’68, the St. Louis lineup featured three future Hall of Famers: tight end Jackie Smith, cornerback Roger Wehrli and safety Larry Wilson, a first-ballot honouree and a member of the NFL’s 100th anniversary team. No matter, Meggyesy was about to become more famous than all of them, briefly at least, and more infamous than any erstwhile villain in the league’s history to that point. “What I was protesting then is even worse now,” Meggyesy says.
True at the time and eerily prescient of the past couple of years, when a tragic succession of assaults and homicides of Black Americans, a slow-motion genocide often captured on video, became a fixture in the daily news-cycle, trending but never-ending. And though Kaepernick’s protest seemed directed at social justice in the U.S., it reverberated around the world.
Meggyesy seemingly has little in common with Kaepernick — different players, different men, different eras. And yet both spoke truth to power and paid a price, and their stories share important threads that come into sharper focus in hindsight.ave Meggyesy walked away from the game after the 1969 season at age 29. He was done, he told the team. He didn’t explain his rationale in his farewell to the Cards but he did in his autobiography,, which was published in the fall of 1970.
At Syracuse, Meggyesy had if not his best season as a sophomore, then the one he looks back on most fondly. Thereafter his idealism about football started to erode. It began with the corruption within the football program: under-the-table payments; academic corners cut; covering up behaviour that would lead to other students being expelled or even criminally charged.
The sports media also wrapped themselves up in the flag and not subtly. Bob Burnes, a columnist with the, impugned the leadership of Cardinals coach Charley Winner and suggested that the local heroes lacked the discipline that the Vikings demonstrated — wait for it — by their expression of patriotism during the anthem. The Cardinals front office caught wind of not just the hare-brained column but its largely positive reception from readers.
GareJoyceNHL I can understand a protest against a war much more than I can understand imaginary racism. I can understand someone using their privilege protesting on behalf of the poor who made up the majority of those drafted. I don’t understand the privileged claiming to be victims.
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