By Woodrow Carroll
The college football Insight Bowl Game played Dec. 26, 2003 in Phoenix, Ariz. was a classic. It provided yours truly the opportunity to meet three generations of a legendary family, the Tolers.
The game was held where Major League Baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks play. The venue was called Bank One Ballpark. Turf was brought in and the football game came off smoothly.
The foes for the day after Christmas match were Virginia Tech and California. And, if you are looking for a name player in the game let’s toss out the name of Aaron Rodgers.
Rodgers, longtime current Green Bay Packers quarterback, was just a sophomore that evening for the California Golden Bears. The game showed what the future had in store for Rodgers.
California emerged victorious, 52-49, thanks to a field goal when time expired. Rodgers did his part by completing 27 of 35 passes for 394 yards and two touchdowns. Still, Rodgers was not the story!
Pregame in the media room, I talked with Burl Toler, Jr. who is both the front and back of this story.
Toler, Jr. was the son of Burl Toler who ended up the first African American to be a game official in the National Football League (NFL). Toler, Jr. was the father of Burl the Third who played wide receiver for California that evening. Burl III hauled in six of Rodgers’ passes for 84 yards.
Burl Toler attended the University of San Francisco where he was used mostly as a linebacker. Toler’s 1951 San Francisco Dons were the stuff of legends!
Toler played on a 9-0 USF team that produced three professional Hall of Famers in Gino Marchetti, Ollie Matson, and Bob St. Clair, but, it didn’t end there!
Head coach for the Dons was Joe Kuharich, who later coached in the NFL and at Notre Dame. Sports information for the Dons in 1951 emanated from the work of Pete Rozelle who later became NFL commissioner.
The team became an item when the season moved along. It looked as though the Dons might be invited to the Orange Bowl in Miami, Fla., invited on condition that Toler and Matson, the team’s two black players, be left off the squad. No thank you was the response.
Twelve years later Mississippi State had to sneak out of the state in order to play Loyola University Chicago in the 1963 NCAA Basketball Tournament because of the school’s ban on playing against black players.
In talking with Toler the Elder, I mentioned that I was at the 1952 College All-Star game (see The Voice, April 16) in which he was injured.
“It was late in the game (against the Los Angeles Rams) and I was hit in the knee,” said Toler. To be honest, Toler offered comments on a number of other subjects that I can’t accurately recall.
Toler Sr. passed away in 2009. USF dropped football after the 1951 season and, after a brief attempt to resurrect football in the 1980s, the school dropped the sport again. In the mid-1950s, the Dons turned into a basketball power with legendary Bill Russell and K.C. Jones, both later part of the Boston Celtics dynasty, and the San Francisco’s football exploits faded.
Toler, Jr, a California graduate, became one of the San Francisco Bay area’s leading architects.
Postgame in 2003, I talked with Toler III about his game against Virginia Tech. It was not an earth-shaking conversation, just a perspective of a player on the winning team.
Today, Toler III is California’s Wide receivers coach, and, he has a son, Burl IV, so look out!