Bill Henneberry and his '51 Dons: A Leap of Faith | "Action in the Face of Discrimination"

In a 1990 Sports Illustrated article, Ron Fimrite called the 1951 9-0 University of San Francisco Dons the “best football team you never heard of – unbeaten and unsung.”

This echoed an appraisal I heard personally a few years before that from Bill Henneberry, the 1951 Dons’ back-up quarterback and spiritual leader who also served that year as USF’s Student Body President.

The Dons, with a student body of 1276, ranked 14th in 1951’s final AP national gridiron poll, outscoring opponents 338-86.

 Whether a regional bias, or a racial bias (Ollie Matson and Burl Toler, two stars, were African-American), 14th seemed a low ranking. The team’s greatness, however, could be properly appreciated as the 1950s played out. USF’s players might have formed the nucleus, if not the entirety, of a championship N.F.L. team if they could have stayed together professionally.

Four players associated with the 1951 USF team are enshrined in Pro Football’s Hall of Fame: Ollie Matson, Gino Marchetti, Bob St. Clair, and Dick Stanfel.

 The team’s fifth future member of the Hall? Young flack Pete Rozelle, the eventual NFL Commissioner, credited with making the NFL one of the world’s premier sports leagues during his nearly thirty-year term of office.

 For the ’51 Dons, Rozelle publicized Matson who led the nation in rushing. Matson would be drafted third by the Chicago Cardinals, six and eight spots before two other legendary West Coast running backs, Hugh McElhenny and Frank Gifford.

Matson subsequently got traded to L.A., with Rozelle then in the Rams’ front office, for NINE players during a pro career that saw him make the pro bowl six times. And that was after a stint in the army and a stopover to win bronze and silver medals at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.

Eight players from the 1951 USF team got drafted by and played in the NFL Another, drafted with Stanfel and center Art Alois as juniors, never appeared in an NFL game, though he might have been another Hall of Famer according to Marchetti.

Starring in the 1952 College All-Star game, an annual exhibition pitting the best graduating collegians against the previous year’s NFL champion, Burl Toler suffered a debilitating 4th quarter knee injury.

Toler, however, became another NFL legend, the first African American field official in a major professional sports league. During his 25-year NFL officiating career, Toler also became the first African American Super Bowl referee, officiating three.

Ed Brown quarterbacked the Bears, Steelers, and Browns, finishing his pro career in 1964 with over 100 touchdown passes. Mike Mergen played one year for the Chicago Cardinals, and Louis “Red” Stephens started at guard for the Redskins from 1954-60, earning All Pro honors in 1956. 

Two undrafted players enjoyed NFL success: Joe “Scooter” Scudero played six years in the NFL, earning a defensive back slot on the 1956 Pro Bowl team. Ralph Thomas played for the Washington Redskins and Chicago Cardinals. 

Reminiscing years later, Thomas, as quoted in “The Team that Stood Tall” by NFL.com’s Jeff Chadiha in 2016, put the team’s greatness into perspective: "If you look at the talent we had, you'd be hard-pressed to find another school in the country who could match it. Nowadays, you see college teams with 100 players. We had 33 players. To have that percentage go to the N.F.L. really is amazing." The twelve NFL teams then typically carried only 30 players.

USF’s head coach, Joe Kuharich, also enjoyed future success. He would coach the Washington Redskins and Philadelphia Eagles, as well as Notre Dame. His two sons also coached or managed pro football teams.

USF had quite a ’51 team, but ultimately stats or professional greatness doesn’t define its ultimate mark on the world, which I came to understand through stories from my dad and later another father-figure of sorts.

USF athletics commanded my attention and affection early in life. Though I would root against the Dons as an adult whenever they played their rival and my undergrad alma mater, St. Mary’s, I had been thrilled as a youngster with my father watching the Green-and-Gold play basketball at cozy Kezar Pavilion during the mid-fifties.

That was five years after USF, Santa Clara, and St. Mary’s, the three small, Catholic Bay Area schools that before World War II had routinely played in front of pre-49er Sunday crowds of up to 60,000 at Kezar Stadium, had dropped football or relegated it to being a minor sport.

USF’s Bill Russell and K.C. Jones, with one other African American starter, won 55 straight games (stretched to 60 after they graduated) and two national championships. That USF basketball team defied unwritten “rules” of the time which held that big-time NCAA teams should never have more African Americans on the court than white hoopsters.

While soaking up the family atmosphere at USF basketball games, my dad told me what I was witnessing reflected the same values modeled by the ’51 USF football team he remembered fondly.

I vividly recall Black and white team relatives sitting together, babies in arms in some cases, on USF’s senior night as I bemoaned the fact that my heroes would be moving elsewhere to a professional success I could then only dream about.

I also jumped for joy, incredulous at watching K.C. Jones or Hal Perry periodically lob high passes to the iconic Bill Russell who would slam down a dunk, the original alley-oop. Across the alley the next year in 1957, I watched Y.A. Tittle throw similar endzone passes to the pogo-sticking R.C. Owens as the 49ers unveiled their own version of the alley-oop at Kezar Stadium.

 In high school, I met a man who himself garnered national attention literally jumping with joy.

 Though I didn’t play for him, Bill Henneberry, our school’s football coach, commanded respect among all in our then all-male student body of 900. Bill, born and raised at the parish next to mine in San Francisco 's Mission District, had served as Sacred Heart’s Student Body President in 1948, the year I was born.

I often stared at a blown-up picture in our high school’s trophy case which featured Henneberry doing his own version of the alley-oop.

In 1955, Bill, who had filled in as a linebacker on the ’51 Dons and who had engineered a victory in the one game he started at quarterback for an injured Ed Brown, had just been hired as an assistant Sacred Heart coach by then head coach Doug Scovil. Scovil himself would later be a college head coach and NFL assistant, mentoring Roger Staubach, Jim McMahon, and Randall Cunningham along the way.

Free-lancer Mike Ciremele photographed Henneberry jumping for joy on the sideline against Polytechnic High School. The full-page spread, the image I saw memorialized in our 1960’s trophy case, had run in Life Magazine’s October 10, 1955, edition.

Playing in Kezar Stadium right across Frederick Street from Poly, Henneberry’s charges blocked an extra point. The iconic photograph – Life’s back page, full-length photos encapsulated the times – titled “Coach’s High Point” captured a jubilant coach springing high, a secular Kierkegaardian “leap of faith.”

The depiction speaks volumes about the joy and camaraderie for which Henneberry stood – or leaped.

Though my Fighting Irish have rarely been a football power – maybe understandable since around my senior year we faced opponents fielding the likes of O.J. Simpson, Mike Holmgren, and Dan Fouts -- Bill, who replaced Scovil to serve as head coach for eleven years, did win one city championship and always fielded competitive teams.

Bill’s 1955 team, however, had been seeking only its third win in three years. No wonder the irrepressible, new assistant leaped for joy when his charges blocked a punt and took a one-point lead. They, however, eventually fell 39-7.

Teaching at my alma mater in the mid-1980s, while on the USF campus to get my Ed.D., I interacted more personally with Bill, who regaled me with stories about his ’51 teammates while boasting of others’ accomplishments but rarely his own.

 I rekindled our relationship again most recently in the middle of the last decade. By then I was principal of Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep, now a coed school of 1300 which sends almost all graduates to four-year colleges.

As principal, I heard countless testimonies about Bill’s character from a myriad of individuals. He was enshrined into our high school’s Hall-of-Fame and also inducted into the U.S.F. and Bay Area Prep Halls of Fame.

On those occasions, Bill, who had served as a Korean War Army Lieutenant, was lauded by family (he was married to his beloved Jeanie for 68 years), neighbors, friends, educational colleagues, community organizations and fellow high school, college and parish alums. He clearly led an exemplary life I got updated about periodically from his three daughters’ husbands I knew from school connections.

I also interacted with Bill when he came to watch our alma mater play football on Friday nights at Kezar. After the 49ers departed for Candlestick, Kezar, that early 1920’s gift to the city, had been refashioned into a gem of a 10,000-seat stadium dedicated to use by SF’s youth.

 I had remembered when I met up with Bill at USF in the ‘80s that back in the day he had taught in the public school system while coaching at Sacred Heart. Always a natural leader, he had been moving toward a distinguished public school administrative career when his other alma mater, USF, came calling, the impetus to the two of us running into each other on USF’s hilltop campus.

I started taking classes to get my doctorate at USF just a few years after Father John Lo Schiavo, S.J., the same President who provided me a Presidential scholarship, issued a self-imposed death sentence on the then highly regarded USF basketball program on July 29, 1982. After warnings, Lo Schiavo shut the program down, the first time a D-I university voluntarily dropped a major sport under such circumstances. 

His brave moral stance stands in stark contrast to collegiate presidents today who sell their souls and integrity to booster groups while operating their institution’s athletic programs within a “follow the money” ethos manifested in the naked power-grasping seen in conference realignments, the outbidding of rivals for star athletes, and the total mockery of the ideal that once trumpeted student-athletes.

In 1984, Father Lo Schiavo lured Bill Henneberry away from the San Francisco Unified School District to be USF’s Director of Athletic Development. Who better to hold the school’s moral compass, overseeing alums and boosters as the university reinstated D-1 basketball than the spiritual leader of the 1951 USF football team?

As my dad told the story, Henneberry’s team had paved the way for the school’s basketball team that taught me personally what real San Francisco values were about in the context of integration and social justice. 

The moral lesson Bill Henneberry’s 1951 football team taught dwarfed the magnitude of the team’s unbeaten record and extraordinary individual future accomplishments, as great as both were.

Henneberry was instrumental in the decision the Dons made at the end of its remarkable ’51 season that still resonates, though in conversation he downplayed the stand he and his USF brethren took. He did, however, admit, “We really were a team way ahead of our time.”

 Henneberry’s team, expecting and eagerly anticipating a New Year’s Day bowl bid, turned down an invite from one of the four most prestigious post-season bowl games, the Orange Bowl. It was issued under condition that USF participate without the team’s two African American players, Ollie Matson and Burl Toler.

The Dons refused.

“Action in the face of discrimination,” Henneberry accurately termed it. He cryptically captured the team’s response: “We told them to go to hell. If Ollie and Burl didn’t go, none of us were going.” 

USF’s Board of Regents shut down the Dons’ football program before the year ended. The Orange Bowl payoff, $50,000 according to Chadiha, might have been enough to save the program.

Fimrite explained, “In 1951, the sport was losing approximately $70,000 a year. Football had already become much too expensive a luxury at another Bay Area Catholic college. Saint Mary's, whose teams had long been nationally famous, shocked the community by dropping football after the 1950 season. Attendance at its games in Kezar Stadium had declined by nearly 80% since the arrival there of the professional 49ers.”

Dwight Chapin, in a 2002 S.F. Chronicle article, quoted U.S.F. President Father Stephen A. Privett, S.J., during a 50th anniversary celebration of the ’51 team: "The men we celebrate this evening paid a price for their integrity. They refused a bowl bid rather than compromise their values. They sacrificed glory for honor and character."

On campus in the ‘80s, I had suggested Bill write a book about his ’51 team. Though he didn’t, he later arranged meetings with former teammates for Kristine Setting Clark, a graduate student who undertook the authorship that in retrospect I wish I had had the time to write. She wrote Undefeated, Untied and Uninvited, published in 2002 about Henneberry's 1951 USF team.

In 2006 and 2008, the Emerald and Fiesta Bowls honored team members. Henneberry also contributed behind-the-scenes help as ESPN fashioned a 2014 one-hour documentary (’51 Dons) about his team, narrated by Johnny Mathis.

Periodically, the story of Henneberry’s team gets retold. Nearing its 75th anniversary and with the relevancy of its decision to the present, it’s a perfect time once again to rekindle the team’s story, always a story worth retelling. 

More relevant today than ever, the team’s accomplishments, values, and sacrifices speak to refocusing the nation’s attention on the unfinished civil rights movement, barely nascent a little over 70 years ago, and the continuing necessity of “doing the right thing.”

Bill Henneberry passed away in 2020, two years before Bill Russell. In response to Henneberry’s passing and while praising the team that had been celebrated in 2006 with honorary Doctors of Humane Letters degrees from the University, USF’s Director of Athletics Joan McDermott called Bill, “the total embodiment of everything we strive to be as an athletics department and institution.”

Henneberry’s Catholic belief system anticipated angels greeting him in the afterlife. Harking back to my childhood, I can almost imagine R.C. Owens and Bill Russell as giant-wing-spanned angels with great hops jumping for joy with Bill Henneberry in heaven, all leaping above the prejudice of their times.

KEN HOGARTY, who lives in SF’s East Bay with his wife Sally, retired after a 46-year career as a high school teacher and principal. Since, he has had stories, essays, memoirs, and comedy pieces published in Underwood, Sport Literate, Sequoia Speaks, Hobart's, Woman’s Way, Purpled Nails, the S.F. Chronicle, MacQueen’s, Bridge Eight, the Under Review, Points in Case, and many others.  His novel, ‘Recruiting Blue Chip Prospects’ recently launched to good reviews. You can preview the novel or check out other works at Kenhogarty.net.