Football: End of the Dream

"Sometimes when the game is close and the play is roughest," Ernie Davis once said, "you forget the crowd and the noise, and it is just you against somebody else to see who is the better man." Even in grade school, Ernie could always run faster and throw harder and kick farther than anybody else who booted scuffed old footballs around the sooty playgrounds of Uniontown, Pa. He was the product of poverty and a broken home, a shy, sensitive boy who dreamed of playing halfback for Notre Dame. His heroes were men...

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