Lenny Lyles is not a bitter man. In fact, it pains him to tell this story. He hesitates, knowing how it will sound. He was a different man in 1960, frustrated and angry, and it was a very different time in America. But the guilt hasn't totally faded.
It almost doesn't matter to him that, in the end, nothing happened. For a moment, he wanted it to happen.
He wanted to break the leg of Baltimore Colts center Dick Szymanski, his former teammate on the 1958 NFL championship team.
"I was with San Francisco at the time, playing defense, and we were tangled up in a big pile," Lyles said, adding that it wasn't personal; he just wanted to hurt the franchise that he felt had never given him a fair shot. "His leg was caught underneath someone. I had a chance to break his leg, and I got up off it. I'm thankful and happy now I didn't do that. But I was angry. I couldn't forget [the year before] that they kept a guy with a broken arm and let me go."
Fifty years ago Sunday, the Colts and the New York Giants played what is widely considered to be the greatest game in NFL history. The iconic black-and-white footage of Colts fullback Alan Ameche stumbling across the goal line for the winning score - his head down, the football tucked tightly in his right arm - will be replayed hundreds of times in the coming days. It capped off a contest that has been celebrated by historians as the genesis of the modern NFL and the moment when pro football wedged itself permanently into our culture and our living rooms.
But 1958 was hardly an idyllic time in America if you were one of the six African-American players on the Colts. The country was only four years removed from the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in schools, and Baltimore, like much of the South, was slow to adjust.
Most of the time, Lyles, Lenny Moore, Milt Davis, Jim Parker, Johnny Sample and Eugene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb weren't allowed to stay in the same hotels as their white teammates on road trips. They rarely, if ever, socialized with the white players, in part because they couldn't enter the same restaurants, bars and movie theaters. In Westminster, where the team held its annual training camp, the African-American players encountered so much blatant racism on a daily basis, they decided one year to boycott the welcome banquet being thrown for the Colts by the city.
