The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

  A few hours later, at the Sugar Bowl banquet, the team gathers in the Roosevelt Hotel, one of the oldest places in town, long a headquarters for Huey Long, and there’s no expense spared. The players stare at ice sculptures on the tables. They’re given Omega watches. A table is filled with glasses of bourbon. Piles of shrimp are everywhere. And more oysters than they’ve ever seen. The Rebels line up two and three deep around the oysters, knocking back dozens. They don’t want this night to end, so many of the players spread out through the French Quarter, most landing at Pat O’Brien’s.

  The drinks keep coming, tall glasses filled with booze you can’t taste, a dangerous combo, and some people will later remember the police bringing a horse inside to calm things down, but it’s all so blurry, so who really knows. A few Rebels end up in the fountain, and Wes Sullivan loses his shoe. Finally, Sullivan and Billy Champion limp back to the hotel just off the French Quarter. The elevator door opens, and there’s one person inside: Vaught. He looks at his ragged and wet players, Wes missing a shoe. “Where you been?” he asks. “Swimming?”

  As soon as they can, Sullivan and Champ get off that damn elevator. The doors shut behind them, leaving Vaught alone. An early-morning flight back to Oxford lies ahead, he’s certain, as do more championships, more big wins, more bowls. He rides the elevator up through the hotel, not knowing all of this will soon disappear, fading to a whisper, a distant memory of a different time.

  III. CATCHING UP

  1. JUNE 12, 1963

  George Wallace is forced to back down and allow two black students to enter the University of Alabama. There will be no repeat of Ole Miss. That night in Jackson, Medgar Evers pulls his powder-blue Oldsmobile into his driveway. His wife, Myrlie, who had found herself singing “Dixie” a year before, waits inside. About 150 feet away, Byron De La Beckwith steadies his .30-06 Enfield, lines Evers up in the crosshairs, and pulls the trigger once.

  The bullet tears through Medgar Evers’s back, crashes through a window, and comes to a rest on the kitchen table. Evers staggers for about 30 feet before collapsing. Myrlie screams, “Oh, my God, my God!” She cradles his head as his kids bend over his dying body and beg, “Daddy, get up!”

  All-white juries trying De La Beckwith twice fail to reach a verdict. He will finally be convicted 31 years later.

  2. AUGUST 13, 1963

  James Meredith and the other soon-to-be graduates march from the library toward the Grove, passing through the Lyceum, where all the violence had taken place just months before. The last few weeks of class, Meredith wears one of Barnett’s Never pins upside down.

  His parents sit in the crowd as he walks across the stage, including his proud father, Moses, the son of a slave. Myrlie Evers is there too. The commencement speaker tells the graduates the South is changing, more every day, and they need to take advantage and not be left behind. Two white women watch the graduates in their hats and gowns.

  “Well, I’m glad he’s gone,” one says.

  “There’ll be others,” her friend replies.

  3. JANUARY 1, 1964

  Another Sugar Bowl, another SEC title. But something seems different. Tailback Mitch Terrell, who’d transferred before the season, realizes that whatever they’d had at Ole Miss is falling apart. He has seen tension on the coaching staff; once, a coach he was close to came into his room and cried, distraught about the infighting. “I could see the house of cards, coach-wise, fixing to fall,” Terrell would say later. “I knew there were strong personality conflicts there and it wasn’t going to last.”

  Ole Miss hasn’t won an SEC title in football since.

  4. DECEMBER 5, 1964

  The final score stuns those in the stadium: Mississippi State 20, Ole Miss 17. For the first time since 1946, State has beaten the Rebels, the final blow to a devastating season. Ole Miss began the season highly ranked but collapsed, losing to Florida, Kentucky, and LSU, finishing the season 5-5-1 after getting beat by lowly Tulsa in the Bluebonnet Bowl.

  Weatherly gets much of the blame for the bad season. Fans lash out at the quarterback’s well-known music career. To them, bad coaching or recruiting didn’t derail the Rebels. Rock ’n’ roll did.

  5. NOVEMBER 6, 1965

  In Texas, they call Houston halfback Warren McVea “Wondrous Warren.” He is the first African American to play against the Ole Miss Rebels, and on this day, he is uncoverable: catching touchdown passes of 80 and 84 yards, leading the Cougars to a 17–3 upset of Ole Miss.

  Robert Khayat, the kicker for the Washington Redskins, is watching the Rebels from afar. Not long ago he was the big man on campus: star of the ’59 football team, elected Colonel Rebel, an honor given to the most popular male student. But he sees the Rebels refusing to recruit African American players and realizes the dynasty is fading. People won’t remember Ole Miss for the dominant teams and the Miss Americas and the Sugar Bowl victories.

  They will remember it for a long night in 1962.

  6. MARCH 18, 1966

  Robert Kennedy walks into the packed basketball arena on the Ole Miss campus. He has been invited to speak, and so many people want to listen that the administration had to move it here. When the crowd of more than 5,000 sees him, they give him a standing ovation.

  During his talk, he makes fun of the bizarre phone conversations he’d had with Barnett. The crowd roars with laughter. Later, the former governor will lash out at Kennedy, claiming he lied about those phone calls. He calls Kennedy “a hypocritical left-wing beatnik without a beard.”

  7. OCTOBER 17, 1970

  The old program has one gasp left. With Archie Manning at quarterback and a return to the Sugar Bowl the year before, Ole Miss is once again highly ranked, fourth in the nation, and undefeated through four games. They’re talking national championship again. They’ve got historically weak Southern Mississippi next. But USM has an African American running back named Willie Heidelberg, who runs wild through the vaunted Rebels defense. Vaught calls the 30–14 loss the worst defeat in Ole Miss football history. He doesn’t sleep that night, watching film of their next opponent instead. On Tuesday night, after three long days, he feels nauseated. “Boys,” he tells his staff, “I’m sick. I’ve got to go home.”

  A few hours later, he turns to his wife in bed. “Something’s wrong with me.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “My arm’s aching, and I have a nauseous feeling in my chest.”

  He is close to a heart attack, and he spends a week in a hospital in Memphis. After he gets out, the chest pains increase, so he goes back in. Except for a brief eight-game return three years later, Vaught’s coaching career is over. The season falls apart, too, with Manning breaking his arm and LSU blowing out the Rebels 61–17 in Baton Rouge. There is no Sugar Bowl bid; Ole Miss has never been to another one. No national championships. Vaught returns to his farm.

  He will never recruit an African American player.

  That year, the Mississippi public school system is integrated.

  8. 1973

  Kenny Dill was the heart and soul of the ’62 Rebels. Many blame the disastrous ’64 season on his graduation; with him gone, there was no fire. No passion. He loved tough, hard-nosed football; he punched a teammate so hard during spring ball in ’62 that he broke the guy’s facemask, the guy’s face, and his own hand.

  Like many students, he learned something the night of the riot, a lesson about what politicians should do. He moved back home to West Point, Mississippi, after leaving Oxford and, in 1973, he runs for mayor. He wins, grabbing a chunk of the black vote—perhaps because black voters believe a young guy might be more willing to listen to their concerns.

  Dill decides to be the mayor of everyone. He opens a dialogue with local NAACP officials, makes sure they know to call him anytime there is a concern. He goes about making West Point one city, not like other places in Mississippi, where integration will kill towns that don’t know how to
turn two communities into one. He restarts the Christmas parade, which had been canceled because whites didn’t want blacks looking at their Santa. He brings basic services, such as roads and electricity, to black neighborhoods that have been left behind.

  9. “MIDNIGHT TRAIN TO GEORGIA”

  After college, Jim Weatherly leaves Oxford and goes out to LA. He takes along a band, and they play all the bars, the Whisky a Go Go and the rest, competing for gigs with bands such as the Doors. He does a USO tour of Vietnam with Nancy Sinatra and appears in a movie. Eventually, the band breaks up, and Weatherly is down to his last seven grand. He feels listless and makes plans, when the money runs out, to go back to Mississippi and become a football coach.

  One day, through connections he made in his weekly flag football game, playing with movie star Lee Majors, Weatherly begins writing hits for Gladys Knight, and on October 20, 1973, one of his originals becomes the No. 1 song in America. He named it “Midnight Plane to Houston,” but Knight wanted a different state and mode of transportation.

  “Midnight Train to Georgia” remains one of the most popular songs of all time.

  Years later, he’ll be sitting in his home studio in Nashville, playing different versions of the song on the big speakers. Behind the keyboard, he takes my notebook and quickly draws the famous busted play from the Mississippi State game. Even now, he can see the look on the defensive end’s face.

  10. APRIL 22, 1982

  John Hawkins is elected the first black cheerleader in school history. In an interview not long afterward, he says he will not carry the Confederate flag onto the field, as all cheerleaders have done before him. “While I’m an Ole Miss cheerleader, I’m still a black man. In my household, I wasn’t told to hate the flag, but I did have history classes and know what my ancestors went through and what the Rebel flag represents. It is my choice and I prefer not to wave one. . . . I am a black man and the same way whites have been taught to wave the flag I have been taught to have nothing to do with it.”

  11. SEPTEMBER 30, 1982

  Twenty years later, Meredith is invited to speak at Fulton Chapel on campus. The atmosphere is tense. During his speech, he says “Dixie” and the Confederate flags must be disassociated from Ole Miss. A large group of white students storms out of the speech and, outside, chants “Hotty Toddy” and sings “Dixie.”

  12. APRIL 18, 1983

  Rumors are flying. The newly released yearbook contains a picture of white-robed Klansmen with Confederate flags. White students hear that black students are going to burn their yearbooks in protest. The yearlong debate about the future of the Confederate flag at Ole Miss, one that brought the Grand Wizard of the Klan to a football game and students collecting signatures on a petition to keep the flag, is coming to a head. That night, about 600 white students march to Hawkins’s fraternity house, waving Confederate flags and yelling racial slurs.

  A bit of 1962 is in the air. The students chant the same words their parents chanted a generation before: “Two, four, six, eight . . . hell, no, we won’t integrate.”

  University security and Oxford police officers break up the crowd before a riot can break out. The next morning, the student leader of the “Save the Flag” movement announces he no longer wants the job. Like many of his generation, he’d grown up believing the flag was a symbol of a great athletic tradition and school spirit. That night outside the Phi Beta Sigma house, he saw something darker, something Mississippians like to believe no longer exists.

  The day after that, the chancellor holds a hastily scheduled news conference, announcing that the University of Mississippi will no longer be associated with the Confederate flag and that no one connected to the university will carry or display it, including cheerleaders. The chancellor receives death threats, and the next fall, it seems as if every fan in the stadium is carrying the Stars and Bars.

  13. JANUARY 12, 1988

  Ray Mabus is inaugurated as the youngest governor in the country and is featured in a New York Times Magazine story about the new guard changing the old Mississippi. He is the kid who wandered on the field after the 1962 Mississippi State game and asked Louis Guy for his chinstrap.

  Afterward, Mabus will serve as ambassador to Saudi Arabia under Bill Clinton, but he never forgot his roots: He keeps an Ackerman, Mississippi, phone book on the coffee table in his office. Later, he will become a senior adviser to Barack Obama’s campaign.

  He still has the chinstrap.

  14. APRIL 17, 2001

  The issue is put to the voters: Keep the Confederate Stars and Bars on the state flag of Mississippi, or eliminate them? The man leading the crusade to eliminate is William Winter, the young politician who’d been so distraught the night Barnett spoke at the Kentucky game. He was governor of the state from 1980 to ’84, when he started the first public kindergarten in Mississippi, fighting for civil rights for all its citizens. Covering the issue for The Boston Globe is veteran correspondent Curtis Wilkie, the Ole Miss student who received the letter from his mother urging him not to fight the Yankees.

  On this night, when the results come in, Mississippi votes to keep the Confederate imagery, 65 percent to 35 percent. Mississippi is 61 percent white and 37 percent black.

  Winter doesn’t give up his dream of creating a Mississippi for everyone. At Ole Miss, the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation does work all over the region, getting white folks and black folks to sit down and talk about the past and about the anger and the guilt that remain. He points to the 2008 presidential debate in Oxford as a sign that Mississippi is climbing out from the shadow of 1962. “We’ve been recovering all these years,” he says.

  The flag vote, though, is a sign of how much those old feelings still exist. In a recent political ad, one candidate for Senate attacked an opponent for supporting the removal of the Stars and Bars. Most Mississippians approve of having the Confederate Stars and Bars on the state flag.

  “That tells you something about how far we still have to go, you know?” Winter says.

  I want to believe we’ll make it.

  “Are we gonna get there?” I ask.

  He smiles.

  “Sure,” he says. “We’ve come an incredibly long way from 1962.”

  TODAY

  1. “WE ARE NOT LEPERS”

  From his luxury box, Sam Owen is thinking about a night many years before, when all this was drenched in tear gas. His iPhone rings—he has ringtones from quacking ducks to the Ole Miss fight song. It’s one of his three sons, Bryan, who played football for the Rebels in the ’80s. The years have been good to Owen: He ran a complicated and large company, married that beautiful girl he went over to check on at the sorority house, took his boys to play the Old Course for Christmas one year, even wrote the poem that described the gift himself. He’s got it in his will that the Ole Miss band will play “Dixie” at his funeral; when you write checks like Owen, you can pretty much get a university to do anything you want. He’s still a funny guy, known for calling a teammate, telling a joke, then hanging up. He still wears that Omega watch team members got after their Sugar Bowl victory—had it sent to Switzerland to be cleaned—and sometimes, he’ll Google “1962” . . . just to reminisce. These buildings, and this field, take him back, to a time when one South was dying and another was being born. Owen doesn’t see that team as the end of an era. He sees it as a beginning.

  “That was the bridge,” he says. “I tell you what I believe. When you think about it, we were all raised under a system that we look back on now and nobody is proud of it. But guess what? Go anywhere else in this country, in any state, and they’ve got the same crap. I look at what Mississippi has done and how far it’s come. Now you think about it. You walk into Oxford, and you’d never know there was ever a tear gas bomb thrown there.”

  About a dozen years ago, on a football Saturday, Owen and a group of guys from that ’62 team stood around in the Grove, wondering why no
body ever seemed to bring up their perfect season, the only one in school history. “This is ridiculous,” Owen remembers saying. “Everybody acts like we’re the lepers. They ought to be talking about how we kept the university from closing. Nobody pays attention. It’s like you didn’t exist.”

  Right then and there, the guys conceived a monument to honor their team. In 1998, it was unveiled: an archway in the Grove that the team walks through every game day, another beloved tradition. It is called the Walk of Champions, and it was paid for by members of the 1962 Ole Miss football team. They are now remembered.

  The players are older now and have drifted apart some. Many of them have new hips, new knees, chronic back pain. Owen recently canceled a vacation to Greece because his back hurt so bad. They’ve had diverse and mostly successful lives. Mayors. CEOs. A bunch of them went to Vietnam. Others became doctors, dentists, lawyers. They are the outgoing generation of power brokers in the South.

  “There is the common thread that runs through here,” Owen says. “These would be guys, if you had these fellows in your unit in the army, you’d take the hill.”

  2. THE LONG GOODBYES