Hard to understand your cryptic message.
So, he's not Leon?
That would be logical conjecture given that we have not had a lot of players from Brooklyn and I can only think of one LB from the Butch era who had a Brooklyn connection. As a matter of fact, I don't remember if Leon was recruited by Butch or came in after Butch left. Poor Leon was subject to ongoing abuse from our fans on Grassy for quite some time. Despite the fact he was perhaps the highest rated HS LB when we recruited him he never seemed to measure up to his predecessor, who i guess was Vilma. It got so bad that even Leon's mom was posting defending her son on that board. I felt sorry for him. I'm glad he seemed to have a decent NFL career that lasted longer than most.
By the way, I saw somewhere that you said you grew up with the sons of the owner of Lum's. What part of Miami were you from and when did you go to high school? I'm probably an old timer. Started following the Canes as a small kid in the mid-50's and left south Florida in '63, while I was still in HS. To say that things have changed is an understatement. It seems 3/4 of the major HS football programs did not even exist when I left. Schools were just on the verge of integrating. Most top athletes were white, at least as far the media and attention. A while back I think I posted a link to a website with some Orange Bowl history. It had a copy of the All-City team from the mid-60's. One of the top DL's was Willis McGahee's father. There were a few African-American players scattered among the players honored, but it was mostly white.
Since your an old school fan I'll give you a caveat I don't give others.
#1 everyone simply assumes when I was coming out of high school that it was from Brooklyn.
#2 my father started on the same team as Burgess Owens. That's the last time I'm gonna talk bout this stuff. That's probably too much. I get my amusement from watching everyone guess who I am. Out of all this time I've only seen 2 people get it right.
That's OK, BrooklynDee. So you're not Leon Williams, who is now a photographer and it was weird when I found his website and saw a room with walls plastered with the weekly ads from a grocery chain. Now, it so happens that as a retiree on a fixed income who pores over the grocery ads every week for deals, I recognized that those were the ads from the Giant Food chain, which is a major chain in the mid-Atlantic, especially, the Washington, D.C. area:
http://http://leonwilliams.nyc/
I hope Leon is doing well. He was a highly coveted recruit coming out of Brooklyn and we had to beat out Penn State for his services. He might have had some limitations in his play that led to a lot of nastiness from fans on Grassy's site. It really bothered me--these are still college kids, after all. We got spoiled after having the teams we did from '80-'82. I was glad that Leon was able to establish himself as a solid NFL player long enough, I hope, to get a pension. In his rookie year he had 17 tackles against the Bucs while playing for the Browns. He was a 4th round pick--obviously the Browns thought more highly of him as a football player than did a lot of the anonymous people who used to trash him on Grassy. It was so bad his mom got on the board to challenge some of the haters.
I'm just ranting a bit because I realize these are kids and they most often are doing their best and we were fortunate that he chose us when he could have gone anywhere.
Moving on. I find that fascinating that your father played with Burgess Owens. A couple of months ago I posted something here about Burgess. He's a very intelligent guy who thinks very independently and recently published a book on his conservative views. His views are, to say the least, not typical of most in the African-American community. I've heard him on the radio and did see an interview on TV, I think. Burgess came to us from Tallahassee, spurning the hometown team, and became an All-American. That was the early '70s, when our program began a period of decline after some pretty decent success in the '60's. Our '66 and '67 teams were pretty good. I think we beat USC in '66 or '67. That '67 defense was awesome, led by Ted Hendricks, had some other studs, including Bob Tatarek, Tony Cline, etc. My friend **** Sorensen was Harding Award winner in '69, I think; his roommate Ted Hendricks won it in '68.
The program started to decline in '68 or '69. I looked back at some of the freshman teams (freshman played other freshman teams, they were not eligible back then for varsity play) and noticed that one reason for our decline were the small classes. We couldn't recruit the very large classes that our competition, the state schools, could. We also played a lot of national powers regularly, like Notre Dame, and a lot of SEC teams. In the early '70's, we had some terrific players, like Burgess, Chuck Foreman, and Rubin Carter. Still, just not enough talent. I'm not sure we had the greatest coaching staffs, either. Fran Curci's period was controversial. As I recall he dumped us to take a job at Kentucky and tried to take the recruits with him.
The '70's were like the dark ages. I was out of the area and couldn't ever see the team. No internet, no cable, etc. Technology had not yet been invented. A decade of mediocrity and trying to play a suicide schedule for which we didn't have the talent. We had some great individual talent, but not throughout the roster.
I guess Burgess and Rubin Carter overlapped. I talked to Rubin in the late '80's while he was an assistant with Howard Univ. Steve Wilson took over Howard and some staff had been let go from the Broncos and followed him. I'm fascinated by the fact, BrooklynDee, your father played with Burgess. I had trouble getting those links to work--I'll try later to see if I can get them working.
Here's some current stuff on Burgess, who was an all-time great at the U:
BURGESS OWENS
[video]http://video.foxnews.com/v/5103257431001/?#sp=show-clips[/video]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgess_Owens
Burgess is a Mormon. He criticizes Kaepernick who repeats a lot of the criticisms I used to hear about our society in the '60's and '70's. Things were a lot worse back then. I would think that Burgess would have experienced a lot more discrimination and prejufice growing up when he did, especially in the deep South, as Tallahassee was. I'm not trying to get on soapbox, but I respect Burgess not so much for his views, but his willingness to listen to have and espouse views that are at odds with many others.
Anyway, sorry for writing such a long post. I really get very absorbed in thinking about and discussing UM football history. It's been a passion for so long. I can't imagine what my life would have been like without UM football in my life. Especially since I never attended the school.
Thanks BrooklynDee for the information, and thanks for your very interesting observations and posts about recruiting. It's just fascinating and I always love reading your posts.
