JUST FOLLOW ME

Gossom and Heys offer a biography of James Owens (1951-2016), a trailblazing college football player for Auburn University.

As the authors make clear in their debut collaboration, the history of Southeastern Conference (SEC) football, which was established in 1932, was one in which Black athletes faced constant discrimination. When Owens, the first Black athlete to play for Auburn University’s Tigers, took the field at Cliff Hare Stadium alongside his fellow varsity teammates on September 18, 1970, it was a sign of imminent change: “To see Owens enter the stadium…was a signal moment, hinting at possible equality of the races, visible through the meritocracy of sport.” The authors have consulted a wide variety of primary sources to tell Owens’ story from his youth in Fairfield, Alabama, to his later years of poor health; the highlight and the clear focus of the book, however, is his time at Auburn. The account quotes Owens’ former teammates extensively, such as the placekicker who said, “It was amazing to watch James do what he did week in and week out, the punishment he took.” The reality of his experience also slowly dawned on bystanders and observers of the time. As one young sportswriter grimly wondered in the early ’70s, if Black players in the SEC had “said, ‘I don’t have to put up with this’ and left, how much would integration have been delayed?” The book includes dozens of black-and-white photos capturing various periods of the publicity-shy Owens’ life, as well as a generous section of explanatory endnotes.

Gossom and Heys do a highly effective job of marshaling their sources into an involving narrative. Their focus is, of course, Owens, but they mindfully fill in the picture of the wider world he encountered when he left Fairfield High and dared to dream of playing football instead of getting a dead-end job in the local steel mill. As the first cracks in segregation began to appear, they note, every Black player felt pressure that none of their white teammates would ever feel. As Southern Methodist University coach Hayden Fry told the family of another pioneering Black athlete at the time, he “could not fail.” The authors are repeatedly outspoken about their subject’s courage and his historical importance: “Owens was a hero…from the day he arrived at Auburn,” they write. They also effectively, even jarringly, get across the raw nature of the game, and the physical ordeals endured by Owens and all the other players. Likewise, they skillfully express the disappointments of a career in sports: “Athletes live game to game, always waiting for their ‘next turn at bat,’” they write. “And when they don’t get it, they can lose themselves in the void.” That void often seemed to threaten Owens, whose depression deepened at times when other figures, such as University of Alabama head coach Paul William “Bear” Bryant, gained fame in the history of 1970s sports integration. As the authors wistfully note, “America seems to favor myth over reality.”

A gripping and grounded celebration of a pioneering athlete.