Alan Ameche: The Story of "The Horse"

19. An Unfortunate Situation

 Lenny Moore loves talking about his twelve seasons with the Baltimore Colts, from  through . “Those were some great years, some great teams, Man,” Moore has said on many, many occasions. But he always includes a codicil when talking about those years. His favorite verbal appendage, and he uses it often, is “unfortunately . . .” Unfortunate? Two world championships; a Hall of Fame career; Rookie of the Year in ; Comeback Player of the Year in ; , combined (rushing and receiving) yards;  rushing touchdowns;  receiving touchdowns ; All-Pro five seasons; and an NFL record  consecutive games with a touchdown. Where does “unfortunate” have a place in his vocabulary in the discussion of the spectacular career that Moore fashioned? “Okay, Man, here’s the way it was back then,” Moore said. “On the field, you will never find a closer bunch of guys than the Baltimore Colts were back in those days. “Everybody looked out for everybody else, we all protected each other. We all had the other guy’s back. I actually feel very fortunate to have played for the Colts because not every team in the NFL was as united as we were. “When the game was on, we were brothers to the nth degree.” But this is where the word “unfortunately” first rears its ugly head. “Unfortunately, after the game, they would go their way and we would go our way. That’s just the way it had to be back then. There was no way around it.”  An Unfortunate Situation  The “they” in this case were the Colt players who were Caucasians, and they made up the vast majority of all NFL rosters back in the s and s. The “we” in this case, were the African American players of the Colts and the NFL, who made up perhaps to – percent of most rosters in those days. Obviously things are much different today, with African American players making up as much as – percent of some NFL rosters. But even more profound are the changes in the social climate of this country. As the civil rights era began, positive changes were being felt in sports in general and the NFL in particular. Quotas were outlawed. Restrictions on what position a player could play were abandoned. Jim Crow laws and segregation of teammates on the road were ruled illegal in federal courts. Unfortunately , it was too late for Lenny Moore and many of the other pioneer black players of the NFL. “I consider myself lucky that I played for a team like the Colts, because our guys were pretty close knit,” Moore recalled. “I knew that they were there for me, if some of the guys on the other teams ganged up on us. I knew they were right there. “A lot of teams of that era had a lot of problems with race, but we never had a lot of confrontation because the guys on our team were pretty much together. There may have been a few guys who didn’t buy in completely, but most of our guys were very cool about it. They did what they could.” Moore, who was a first-round draft pick of the Colts out of Penn State in , said one of his biggest regrets was not getting to better know some of his favorite white teammates on offense—men like Alan Ameche, Johnny Unitas, and Raymond Berry. While Moore still has great respect for all of those players, he says he wishes he had known them better. Perhaps his closest friend among the white players was Ameche. “Alan was not only a great football player, but he was a great guy,” Moore said. “Ameche was such a good guy, but we never got a chance to socialize. That’s the bad part of what that does to people. “We wanted to be friends off the field, but society wouldn’t let us. It was a question of well okay, is Alan going to come down to Pennsylvania Avenue, where all the black players had to hang out in Baltimore at that time? Or was I going to go out to Towson, where the white players lived? “See what I mean? Unfortunately . . . “At that time, we couldn’t hang out, black and white together. The black players couldn’t go to downtown [Baltimore], and even where many of the white players lived, I couldn’t go anywhere out there. an unfortunate situation  “If...