Great column by DMN's Kevin Sherrington - must read!

[MrMustang1965]

Robert Thomas spent a lifetime in Dallas schools, and it reaches back most of his 73 years for the last Dallas ISD team to win a recognized state football title.

Remember it? Thomas played against the '50 Sunset team.

Only not in an official capacity. Not a black kid from Lincoln in 1950.

Not in a time and place divided by color.

Barriers don't mean much to athletes, though. Put one up, and their nature is to either scale it or break it down.

Even after Lincoln won a share of the '49 title in the Prairie View Interscholastic League, it still wasn't enough.

Not when you grew up around Oak Cliff's Kidd Springs Park, and you knew the white boys at Sunset not only as friends but maybe something greater:

Equals.

Lincoln won a state title in '49.

Sunset did the same in '50.

Robert Thomas had to know.

"We all wanted to know," he said. "Which was the best team?"

Only one way to find out: Play.

Not that they'd get the opportunity in any official capacity. The only Dallas team Lincoln ever played was Booker T. Washington, Dallas' other black public high school.

Black schools from Corsicana, Tyler, Ennis and maybe Houston filled the rest of the schedule.

The only team to beat Lincoln in '49 was Wheatley. Lincoln ran the single wing with a tailback named Charlie Jones, or "Choo Choo," as his friends called him. Not until he got to Prairie View did he change his last name to match his father's.

Maybe you know that name. In 1955, Choo Choo Brackins of the Green Bay Packers became only the third black man to play quarterback in the NFL.

Choo Choo could play. So could Jack Rutherford and James Robinson and Benny Graham and Harold Smith and Henry "Big Rock" Thomas.

All played college football, as did a dozen more Lincoln players from the '49 team. Robert Thomas played at Wiley College in Marshall before coaching Duane Thomas in junior high and John Jefferson at Roosevelt.

Moved on to become an assistant DISD athletic director and ultimately AD before retiring in 2000.

And in all those years he saw a lot of good teams from the DISD, including the '88 Carter team stripped of its state title.

And it still comes down to his alma mater Saturday with a chance to do what no other Dallas team has done since Sunset in '50, since his own Lincoln team in '49.

Since everyone called him "Rabbit."

"They said I was either pretty fast," Thomas said, "or scared."

Maybe both. But not too scared in 1950 to see what he could do against the city's other state champion.

The rivalry was a natural. Besides titles and proximity, both had the same colors: purple and white. Thomas even heard that their uniforms were Sunset's hand-me-downs.

Sunset probably had something to prove, too. The Bisons' 1950 title came in the last season of the controversial City Conference: a couple of dozen teams from Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Houston. The UIL set urban schools apart because of complaints that one-school districts had unfair advantages, but the concept proved so unpopular that it was abandoned after Sunset's title.

Not that it mattered in 1950. Not to a bunch of kids from Oak Cliff, black or white.

"Those guys would come out and see us play," said Joe Boring, tailback in Sunset's single wing who went on to a long career as a high school coach and Cowboys scout, "and we'd go watch them play."

And they were something to see. "Choo Choo could throw it 80 yards in the air," Boring said, "and Rabbit would jump about six feet to catch it."

Watching each other only made them more determined to play, as taboo as it seemed at the time.

Said Boring: "It was not normal for blacks and whites to get together in anything."

But they did in sandlot football. Every Saturday. First at one Oak Cliff park and then another. They tried to stay ahead of Sunset's coach, Byron Rhome, who'd find out about the games and, afraid someone might get hurt, scuttle them.

And they'd just move the game someplace else.

(continued)

[MrMustang1965]

(continued)

Neither Thomas nor Boring could remember who won the series. Maybe it was out of deference to an old friend, or maybe it doesn't matter anymore.

Maybe it didn't matter then, either. Maybe it only mattered that they played.

"I guess we broke down some barriers," is how Boring put it, and at their best, that's what sports are all about.

[Mustangs35SMU]

I think Kilgore and the rest of East Texas will have something to say about the DISD State Title Streak Ending Go get 'em Bulldogs!