At Maryland, Two Teammates Battling Prejudice Outshine One Finger

Forty-six years and two return engagements later, most people still can't talk about a Maryland-Navy football game without talking about Jerry Fishman and the infamous finger.

"I think it's about time it stopped,'' said Fishman, a former Maryland linebacker whose one-digit salute to the corps of Midshipmen during a 1964 Maryland win at Byrd Stadium was long credited (or blamed) for the four-decade pause to the in-state rivalry.

"But it's a great story, and it sells newspapers. My (10-year-old) son says he wants to carry on the family tradition,'' he added, laughing, "and give Navy the finger.''

Monday's game between Maryland and Navy in Baltimore follows one played in 2005, also in Baltimore. That 2005 game was the first since the teams' contract was allowed to expire in the midst of acrimony in 1965.

Meanwhile, as the legend of Fishman Finger continues to hover like a cloud over every meeting and non-meeting between Maryland and Navy, a far more engaging tale was persistently overshadowed. Fishman, the player portrayed in local lore as the villain who killed the rivalry, was also the personal protector, and later lifelong friend, of the first black football player in the Atlantic Coast Conference, wide receiver Darryl Hill (pictured above) -- who also happened to have been a former Navy player, once poised to be the Jackie Robinson of the service academy teams.

Said Hill, now retired as a businessman and Maryland athletic department fundraiser, and one of 12 players to be honored this season in the ACC Football Legends Class of 2010: "Fishman is not the guy everybody makes him out to be. He's a very good guy.''

In 1963 and '64 -- Hill's only two seasons playing for Maryland, and Fishman's junior and senior seasons -- the two players had each other's backs when each needed someone there desperately, practically with their lives at stake. For every story of an indignity served upon Hill as he integrated one of the two major southern conferences at the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, there was a story of Fishman lashing out at Hill's tormentors, whether on another team, in a hostile stadium or, in one well-known instance, in a dining hall.

Before the Terps played Wake Forest in 1963, the team sat down for a cafeteria-style meal in Winston-Salem, N.C. That is, most of the team sat down. "They had served everybody but me,'' Hill recalled. "They told me, 'We don't serve Negroes here.' Jerry, of course, says to them. 'No problem, we don't have a taste for Negroes today, but can we have some milkshakes?'''

Management threatened to call the police, and the team walked out -- but not before Fishman had walked the length of the counter and swept all the food and dishes onto the floor.

"There are all sorts of things that happened in my career because of my explosiveness,'' Fishman, 66, said, in a calm voice that belies any of the madness that even he describes from his days as an athlete. Those "sorts of things'' included times that Fishman tore up an off-campus bar that had let all the players but Hill enter; a Civil War parade the morning of a game in Richmond at which Fishman set a Confederate flag on fire from the team bus; and several loud, up-close warnings to opposing players to watch their mouths and actions or else.

There was also the time that fans at South Carolina (then in the ACC), angry that Hill was having a huge first half for Maryland, threw food and screamed racist insults at him as the team entered the tunnel to their locker room. Fishman spotted one Gamecock supporter in the act and bashed him with his helmet. Hill was appreciative -- but reminded him afterward, chuckling as he recalled it, "Hey, if anything happens, you're white, you can blend in with the rest of them. I'm the one in trouble. Remember, you ain't wearing a yarmulke.''

That was an integral element in their bond. Fishman was the team's only Jewish player. They were assigned as roommates in Hill's first season, Fishman said: "He was the only black, and I was the only Jew, and they said, 'We can kill two birds with one stone.' You could name every Jewish football player in the world on one hand at the time.''

Hill, now 66, arrived in College Park, Md., fully aware of what he was up against. He grew up in Washington, was the first black player at Gonzaga, the city's prestigious Catholic high school; spent his freshman year at Xavier, then, at his mother's request, accepted an appointment at Navy and played for the plebe team, only the second black to do so. (The first, in 1955, never played varsity; Hill was in line to play on the Roger Staubach-led powers of that era).

Over the years, Hill has had nothing negative to say about Navy and said the reason he had looked to transfer was that he simply did not want a military career. But, Fishman said, "He went through a lot of crap at the Naval Academy, because they didn't like blacks at the Naval Academy.''

There were around a dozen African-Americans enrolled among the 4,000 students at the time. As much as anything else, Fishman added, Hill's switch from Navy to Maryland fueled some of the fire at that 1964 game, and onlookers at the time recall more than a few racial and ethnic remarks before, during and after the Fishman flip-off.

When he decided to transfer, Hill had reminded the coach recruiting him, a Maryland assistant named Lee Corso, that regardless of how good a player he might be, Corso's school was still in the all-white ACC.

Fishman, however, was caught off-guard when he arrived in 1960 from Norwalk, Conn. He'd heard his share of anti-Semitic remarks throughout his life, but had attended integrated schools.

"He was this big, aggressive, ferocious middle linebacker who was Jewish,'' Hill said, "and I was kind of a frail kind of speed merchant, an intellectual kid, who was black.'' He laughed. "Most of the time, it's the other way around. That's how he was. Being from Connecticut and being Jewish, he tends to abhor racism.''

In the first state on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line, Fishman said, "It was a shock, and if you ask the guys who played at Maryland with me, 'Did you know (the state of) Maryland was segregated?,' most of us didn't think about it. Even the school was still pretty segregated.'' On a campus of more than 35,000 undergraduates, Hill was one of 32 African-Americans.

"He said, 'I'll take care of you, and you'll take care of me,'"
-- Darryl Hill on his relationship with Maryland teammate Jerry Fishman Further South was even more of an education. "The amazing thing is, these schools pride themselves on their traditions, their history, their liberalism, the Wake Forests and the Dukes,'' he said, "and I think back to the years when you couldn't get a meal, you couldn't use the bathroom, you couldn't stay at a hotel -- I can't believe these things existed in my lifetime. You'd hear, 'We're gonna shoot you, we're gonna kill you.' They used the N-word all the time; it wasn't done as an insult, it was just how they referred to blacks, just casually.''

There were two notable exceptions from opposing teams. At Wake Forest, the day after the dinner incident, the hooting crowd was silenced when the Demon Deacons' star player -- Brian Piccolo, later immortalized in Brian's Song -- put an arm around Hill's shoulder in front of the stands. At Duke, Hill said, he was reassured that he would face "none of that racial stuff'' by Blue Devils linebacker, and future NFL star, Mike Curtis.

But those were exceptions. With everything that was looming, Hill and Fishman struck up a partnership that, in essence, was never dissolved. Hill needed an ally, and Fishman -- aware of Hill's sparkling academic record -- needed help in an economics class. "He said, 'I'll take care of you, and you'll take care of me,''' Hill remembered.

By that time, Fishman said, he was used to having to straighten out people on race or religious issues -- even Maryland teammates and classmates -- with his fists. "Jews weren't expected, or respected, to play football,'' he said. Early in his Maryland career, he said, he settled a score with a teammate who had insulted his heritage, to the point that "when it was over, he had to go.'' As in withdraw from school -- and without several of his teeth. Hill said he heard that story soon after his arrival, and also said that Fishman routinely stood up for other Jewish athletes and students on campus.

Hill, at about 165 pounds to Fishman's 230, was not one to fight, but also would not back down. Above and beyond the times he heard taunts and felt hatred from fans, players and even coaches on the field, his most nerve-wracking moment happened in 1963 at Clemson. He found out before kickoff that his mother, who had traveled alone from Washington to the game, was not being allowed into the stadium, which had segregated seating. He was determined to skip the game and take his mother back home, until the school president, Robert Edwards, intervened personally and brought his mother into his private box to watch.

Taking his frustration out on the other team was more Hill's style. While those were not Maryland's glory years -- it went 3-7 and 5-5 in Hill's and Fishman's two seasons as teammates -- Hill was among Maryland's career, season and single-game receiving leaders when he finished. To this day, only three players have more touchdown receptions in a season than the seven Hill caught in 1963.

After a brief stint in the pros with the New York Jets, he spent nearly 40 years starting and growing several businesses, rejoined the Maryland athletic department in 2003 -- lured by current coach Ralph Friedgen, who had arrived there as a player a year after Hill graduated -- and retired from that last year after major upgrades on Byrd Stadium were completed.

Fishman, like Hill, graduated in 1965, got his law degree and practiced for some 30 years in, of all places, Annapolis, within sight of the Naval Academy. "That was ironic,'' he said. He retired in 2002 and moved to Boca Raton, Fla.

He did not attend the 2005 Maryland-Navy game, and will not attend this one because it's the same weekend his son plays in a baseball tournament. Hill will be on hand, as he was for the last meeting. Both fervently hope that the hostilities of decades past are over; that Fishman stops being made a scapegoat for the series interruption, and that the two biggest programs in the state resume scheduling each other regularly.

What neither has to hope is that the friendship forged as the two biggest outsiders in the history of one of America's most storied college conferences, will live on.

"When you grow up Jewish,'' Fishman said, "you have that empathy for the underdog.''

"Fishman gets a raw deal on this,'' Hill said. "People just don't know what kind of man he is.''