Before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier, threats of violence kept him from playing in Central Florida.

Robinson also starred in one of Orlando’s biggest games ever – a 1949 exhibition that attracted a standing-room-only crowd at Carter Street Park, the home of the city’s Negro Leagues team.

Two generations later, Robinson’s historic achievements and struggles are chronicled in an upcoming exhibit at the University of Central Florida’s main library. The exhibit also features photographs and memorabilia from the Orlando All-Stars, which competed in the Negro Leagues throughout the 1940s and 1950s.

“Pride & Passion: The African American Baseball Experience” tells the story of African-American baseball players in the United States from the Civil War through the present, and it relates their experiences to the struggle for civil rights.

The exhibit will open Friday, March 5, and run through Thursday, April 15. Admission to the exhibit and several related lectures and discussions will be free.

“We had to have a certain amount of self-discipline to survive while traveling around to different cities under the ill winds of racism,” recalled Bob “Peach Head” Mitchell, one of four former Negro Leagues players who will visit UCF on March 19. “It’s very important for kids today to hear those stories.”

The UCF Libraries were selected as one of 50 nationwide sites for the “Pride & Passion” exhibit, which was organized by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the American Library Association and funded through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The traveling exhibit is based on a permanent exhibit at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. A portion of the exhibit is funded through a grant from the UCF Office of Diversity Initiatives.

To tell the story of Central Florida’s rich but often forgotten baseball history, UCF will display collections from partners such as the Sanford Museum, the Wells’Built Museum of African-American History and Orlando resident Carol Mundy.

The Central Florida connections include:

– Before Robinson played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers, threats of violence forced the cancellation of a spring game in Sanford. A day game in DeLand was called off due to “malfunctioning lights.” Robinson was able to take the field in Daytona Beach, the spring home of the Dodgers, and the stadium there was renamed “Jackie Robinson Ballpark” in 1990.

– Sunday afternoon Negro League games were major social gatherings for African-Americans. Fans dressed up for the games, and players drove through the streets to promote the games. The Orlando All-Stars played at Carter Street Park because Tinker Field was reserved for whites.

For more information and a full schedule of events, visit UCF Library.

Come on in. Put down your bags. Make yourself at home for there is plenty of room right here at Orlando’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel of Pro Football.’

The other guests figured you’d be stopping by. We just hope you won’t be staying for too long. You see, they all envy what you attempted to accomplish over Thanksgiving weekend and are just as somber that things didn’t go as planned.

This one must really sting though, huh? Making it all the way to the inaugural United Football League championship game as an undefeated team at 6-0 only to come up short, 20-17, against the hometown Las Vegas Locomotives in overtime.

What makes it worse is the way you dominated the competition throughout the regular season under the leadership of former National Football League player and coach Jim Haslet, and the offensive play calling of former Arena Football League player and coach Jay Gruden.

You led the four-team UFL in total offense, first downs and takeaways while MVP Brooks Bollinger slung the ball around like he was the all-time quarterback in a flag football league.

And how were you rewarded for such a season? By having to travel cross-country to Sin City. The nerve of the UFL. I’m sure the Citrus Bowl had plenty of room for the handful of fans that may have been interested in such a showdown. At least the same 12,000 or so that made it out for each of your two home games downtown.

Not since the Orlando Panthers of the forgotten Continental Football League has a local football team won a league title of the outdoor football variety. And they did it twice between 1966-70.

Which brings us to why you’re here in the first place. Let me start by introducing you to the others.

Down this hall stays the Florida Blazers of the World Football League, who after entering the fourth quarter of the 1974 WFL World Bowl down 22-0 charged all the way back only to lose by one point. Imagine that. Which I’m sure you can. Only the Blazers would never see the start of the following season before vanishing into the history books.

A little further down to your right is where the Orlando Renegades of the battered United States Football League are shacked up. Quite a concept the USFL was, if only the Renegades were half as innovative. They had one 5-13 season in 1985 before “pro football” made yet another quick exit from town, along with the league.

But the sport returned (as it always does) in 1991 when the Orlando Thunder came on the scene as part of the startup World League of American Football. In their second season the Thunder managed to advance to the title game in 1992 only to fall 21-17 in the WLAF World Bowl before suddenly disappearing at its conclusion.

The Thunder are staying a bit further down the hall to your left, where you’ll also find our most recent occupant from the defunct XFL.

For a split second in 2001 it sounded like a good idea – Inviting pro wrestling fans to a football game and catering to their vises. It certainly worked for the Orlando Rage. That year they swept through the regular season with the best record in the league only to lose by a point in the first round of the postseason.

These has-beens have been here sulking and mingling together ever since.

And now it’s the Tuskers who have become another rotten slice of the good football championship-chasing life after falling just short of satisfying the title quench for local fans.

At least there’s a bright side. You have something none of these old washed-up local teams have, and that’s a chance to try it again in a league that is still up and running.

Well, at least for the time being.

– More Florida Tuskers Coverage –

- United Football League info at UFL Access

- Tuskers news and notes at Tusker House

- Video footage at UFL-Football

- Postgame stories at FanHouse

- Box score at UFL-Football

- More at Orlando Sports Central

During halftime of Saturday night’s UCF football game against the University of Buffalo, at Bright House Networks Stadium, the 1958 Bulls football team will be recognized for showing a rare form of unity back in the days of Civil Rights strife. That squad lost out on a chance to compete in the Tangerine Bowl against Florida State 51 years ago because two players on the roster were of African-American decent.

This came 11 years after Jackie Robinson was the first African American to play Major League Baseball and eight years before a Historically Black College would play a game at that same stadium for the first time ever.

Though many might scratch their heads at such an injustice, life in the South in the late-50s was still very much segregated both on and off the field. It would be another 10 years before school kids sat side-by-side in classrooms or even huddled together at sporting events in Orange County.

And another 50 years would go by before Buffalo would earn another bowl bid after winning the Mid-American Conference last year. It wasn’t until 1966 before Buffalo finally played a football game in Florida, or anywhere else in the South for that matter, when they traveled to take on Tampa that season.

In 1958 it wasn’t enough that Tangerine Bowl organizers from the Elks Lodge saw it fit to extend a bowl bid to Buffalo. The rules of the Orlando High School Athletics Association forbid interracial events from taking place at the downtown stadium they governed. That meant Willie Evans and the late Mike Wilson would have to stay home.

But instead, the Bulls banded together and turned down the bid. Then 50 long years unraveled in front of the program without a single chance to play in the postseason.

“A half century later Central Florida is a much different place than it was then,” said Orange County Mayor Richard Crotty, a 1972 UCF graduate. “We are the tourist capital of the world, entertaining people of every color and creed.”

Upon Crotty learning of the story, he got in touch with a member of UCF’s football staff which then set forth a chain of events that included reaching out to both universities, and Florida Citrus Sports, to help make the weekend’s honor possible.

“I think it’s important to acknowledge our past and celebrate the successes we’ve made since then,” said Crotty. “This is kind of a snapshot of where we have come from and the great advances we have made in our community.”

Those advances include the slow but steady crumbling of the walls of segregation, and hatred, based merely on the color of a person’s skin. Reminders of this are still present in the minds of tens of thousands who could attest to such obstacles today.

“From my playing high school and college football in the state of Florida during the 60s and 70s, and now as director of athletics at one of the state’s esteemed universities, I can certainly relate to the adversity these men feared, and appreciate one of the finest acts of unity ever in a sport,” said UCF Director of Athletics Keith Tribble.

“That’s what we teach in athletics. Their decision to not participate was the ultimate definition of ‘team’.”

Rekindling that brotherhood all these years later is perhaps the biggest honor for these former players.

“We appreciate the fact that there is interest in our story and that we are going to be honored at the game,” said Evans. “More importantly, it gives us an opportunity to get together as a team one more time and we are grateful for that.”

Among the 34 players from that squad expected to be on hand is Gerry Gergley, considered an early pioneer of UCF athletics. He had his hands in starting the school’s wrestling, golf and football programs and earned induction into the UCF Athletics Hall of Fame in 2003.

“I worked at UCF since 1970, and there were so many times when we were playing football there (at the downtown stadium), I couldn’t help to think what could have been if we had the chance to play Florida State back in 1958,” said Gergley. “I know our whole team is so thankful to everyone who made this possible. It is unbelievable that this is happening.”

Perhaps what’s most unbelievable, and remarkable, is that a story such as this can survive as long as it has and be in a position to affect many more lives for many more generations to come.

More coverage of the 1958 Buffalo team:

– Eric Neel with Outside the Lines at ESPN

– Mike Bianchi commentary at Orlando Sentinel

– Erik Brady story at USA Today

– Alex Rubin and Stephen Marth at The Spectrum