"It never crossed my mind," he said. "I assumed I was going to play at a northern college that was accepting. Nobody talked about anything else. It was an accepted way of life, and it didn't bother me."
The great black players of the day either went north or played for traditionally black colleges. Hill signed with Xavier in Cincinnati, where he starred on the freshman team.
He thought his life was going just fine when his mother asked him to fulfill a longtime dream of hers. Without his knowledge, she had spent the year finagling an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. She wanted her son to help integrate one of the nation's most prestigious institutions. If the appointment came through, she asked, would he take it?
Sure, he said, though not without reservations. As he sorted the mail in his dorm one day, he found the letter from President John F. Kennedy. Report to Annapolis at 8 a.m. on June 28, 1961, it said.
When he arrived, he was one of 12 blacks among 4,000 midshipmen. Hill encountered rampant institutional racism at the Academy. All the cooks were black, all the stewards Filipino. Nowhere did he glimpse any sign that a black man could achieve great success. Hill didn't say much about it then but it unsettled him: "That's part of the reason I left."
Football offered a respite. Hill went out for the freshman team along with about 400 other plebes. The coaches handed helmets and pads to about 350 and sent the others, including Hill, off to the side. Among the padless hopefuls was a tall string bean who could whip passes accurately on a dead run. "Hi," he said to Hill. "My name is Roger Staubach."
"Well, Roger," Hill recalls saying, "you ain't bad."
The budding superstar quarterback was ahead of his time on equality. "Roger never understood what the problem was," Hill said. "To him it was, 'Why is this an issue?' "
No one from the Academy had contacted Hill about playing football. No one had said a word about his becoming the school's first black player. But the coaches knew about him and expected great things.
Former Heisman Trophy winner Joe Bellino was the coach of a powerhouse freshman squad, and Staubach and Hill proved to be his greatest weapons. The football world, at least, felt like a meritocracy in which speed and shiftiness were all Hill needed. And boy, did he have those.
"He was playing with a future Hall-of-Famer," ex-teammate Fishman said. "And he was the big deal."
