By: Garrett Mitchell, Staff Writer
Larry Fryer and Marshall Stephens walked across the parking lot with their teammates and onto Woodruff High School’s football field on a balmy, late August night in 1966. They surveyed the thousands in attendance, who had not only come to see the Woodruff Wolverines take on the Chester Cyclones but also officially acknowledge with their presence an integrated Woodruff football team for the first time.
Far removed the field of lush, green grass from the rough, dusty surface which New Bethel High had played on for many years, and at that moment, the sight was immensely poetic.
For Fryer and Stephens, it was a new beginning. On the other hand, it was also the start of an uncertain future.
The integration of the district’s schools had begun with the commencement of the new school year, and Fryer and Stephens were together breaking down Woodruff’s color barrier as the first two black football players in the school’s history.
Then it was time to spot the ball.
“There was a lot of excitement, and the lights were bright,” recalled Fryer. “I remember everyone cheering, and I think a lot of people wanted to see how (myself and Marshall) were going to do and how we were going to play in that first game.”
Fryer and Stephens certainly made a good impression that night.
Both young men were an immediate force for Coach Varner’s punishing rushing attack, which proved too much for Chester as the Wolverines won 19-13. Fryer scored the game’s first touchdown, followed quickly by a scoring run from Stephens.
Looking back on that night 56 years later, Fryer admits that the gravity of the moment did not resonate with him until much later.
“I don’t think I thought about it at the time,” Fryer said of being the first African American player in Woodruff history to score a varsity touchdown. “It was just another play at the time, and I was trying to help my team win.”
He added, “It was about a year or so later that I started to think about that touchdown as a way of equaling the playing field for all of us (from New Bethel).”
Marshall Stephens remembers the 1966 season vividly. Of many things still etched deeply in his memory was the depth of Coach Varner’s playbook. Stephens said that Varner’s litany of plays and formations was a bit daunting at first read.
“The playbook was much more involved,” Stephens said with a chuckle. “It was a lot more complex than what we had at New Bethel. (At New Bethel) there was counter left, counter right, a pitchout, and the wideouts run down the field. At Woodruff, Coach Varner took us to a football camp in North Carolina. We were out of town for a week being treated to dinner and facilities on the school’s dime and learning the plays before we even got back to Woodruff.”
New Bethel High School had always fostered a caring and supportive environment for its students and athletes, a fact that Stephens makes it a point to state. However, both Larry and Marshall agreed that from an equipment and facilities standpoint, Woodruff High allowed them to excel at a high level as football players.
“I think some of us wished we had the facilities that Woodruff had (at New Bethel),” said Stephens.
And Stephens added that, before integrating schools in Woodruff, an on-field match-up between the Wolverines and Bulldogs would have probably been an impossibility for logistical and fiscal reasons.
“I thought that the football program (at Woodruff) was not anything we could equal in any way,” he said. “It would have been a cross-town rivalry, but they had many more athletes to choose from, and there was no way it could have ever been a home and home. It would have had to be played at Woodruff High every year if it had happened at all. There was no way there was going to be anything like what we could call equality and sharing, and I don’t even know that we would have benefitted financially had we played.”
But if not equal in terms of player numbers, financial, or physical resources, what New Bethel’s students and student-athletes did have plenty of was heart and determination, something Larry and Marshall brought with them to the Wolverines.
“We figured we were just as good of football players as (Woodruff) had, and we wanted everyone to know that,” Fryer said. “We wanted the ball in our hands, and we wanted to run it.”
And run it they did.
Fryer and Stephens anchored a three-headed behemoth out of the Wolverines’ backfield in 1966 with Tommy Granfors. They chewed up yards at will along with fleet-footed sophomore quarterback Deedie Dunaway.
Fryer, Stephens, and in the following seasons with players such as Willie Stevens, Greg Anderson, and Nate Glenn, New Bethel’s former Bulldogs not only leveled their playing field but forever tipped the balance of power in Woodruff’s favor by laying down the framework for a future dynasty.
They showed their new school and their town that not only could an integrated football team play together, but they could win at the highest level, too. The complete version of the Woodruff Wolverines put on a show night after Friday night.
In 1966, Woodruff finished with a record of 8-2-2. In 1967 and 1968, the Wolverines rolled to respective records of 11-1 and 12-1 while competing for the state championship once again in the later.
Fryer, Stephens, and the Wolverines saw their 1966 campaign end just one excruciating game short of the state finals. Fryer made his mark on the semifinal game against Daniel, too, scoring the Wolverines’ only points on a 91-yard kick-off return in a heartbreaking 7-6 defeat at the hands of the Lions. That run stood as a school record for 25 years until it was eclipsed by Derek Jones in 1991.
And while an army of Lions may have played for a state championship that season, the Wolverines won a title much more grandiose and meaningful than a metal trophy; they won the hearts of a town.
Marshall Stephens and Larry Fryer led the way and would be followed by a courageous host of others. Greg Anderson and Nate Glenn joined the varsity team a season later and would go on to become the first black players elected to the Woodruff High School Athletic Hall of Fame.
Fryer and Stephens will undoubtedly join them there one day.
“(The 1966 season) meant a lot more than just that one game,” reasoned Fryer. “I am proud to have been a part of that team, and those two seasons I played for Woodruff. It brought the neighborhood together, and we stopped looking at color and started looking at the team.”
Teenagers inevitably live in the moment. Larry and Marshall may not have realized it at the time, but watching them from the stands was a new generation of Wolverines learning from the examples they set.
Those children would grow up, thanks in large part to New Bethel’s first Bulldogs-turned-Wolverines, that Maroon and Gold, and not the color of one’s skin was all that mattered and that they were all Wolverines.
To be continued….
Author: Tracy Sanders
