World News – USA – How Gary Steele Changed West Point Football forever

Tight End Gary Steele became the first black player for the United State Military Academy’s Black Knights football team in 1966 and turned 23 -year Army career upon graduation.

His daughter Sage Steele has become a successful sports caster at ESPN and is currently anchoring the 6 p. m. ET edition of the network’s flagship show « SportsCenter. « 

Sage is partnering with USAA for the Army-Navy House Sweepstakes so fans of each team can celebrate their fandom as they cannot attend this year’s game in person.

Visit www. ArmyNavyHouse. com and upload a photo showing your fandom. You are entering a sweepstakes to win a fully paid trip to the 2021 Army Navy game in New York City with flights, hotels and playing cards. There’s a winner from the Army and one from the Navy fan base. In addition, 2. 000 souvenir commemorative cards given to participants.

Gary Steele’s first season in Army football uniform in 1966 also marked President Donald Trump’s first year as a student at the Wharton School of Business and the second year of President-elect Joe Biden’s law school in Syracuse.

The first black Navy soccer player was Calvin Huey, who had gotten fit two years earlier in 1964. It is sometimes easy to forget how much America has changed in the past few decades, and how our leaders have grown up in a time of so much resistance and turmoil.

Huey and Steele’s careers coincided with the most tumultuous years of the civil rights movement, and the very fact that they were in the field was a force for change in a divided country.

Steele realized the influence when she saw pictures of her father’s career. “If you look at this black and white team photo from 1966, it’s pretty easy to spot my father in the middle of this sea of ​​white teammates, and it’s just crazy. Football teams no longer look like this on any level. « 

Sage says her father always downplayed the importance of his role. « My father never really talked about it. It didn’t matter to him. And his answer was always, “Well, someone has to be first. It turned out that it was me. “He just wanted to play soccer and specifically play at the United States Military Academy. He was heavily recruited by Joe Paterno at Penn State, which was obviously an incredible program at the time. He chose to choose the right program for him and represent the Steele and West Point families and then represent his country. « 

Gary Steele graduated from West Point in 1970, married in 1971, and Sage was born in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas in 1972. Steele retired as a colonel in 1993, but before that the family lived the peripatetic military life. At the age of eleven, Sage lived in four different countries and spoke several languages.

She loved that military childhood. « It was the best possible upbringing, » she recalls. « The hardest part came after I left this sheltered world. I call the military the most diverse and yet most protected education possible. v It doesn’t matter what you look like. My parents are in an interracial marriage. My father is black, my mother is Irish and Italian and nobody cared about it. « 

« The military was diverse, but everyone accepted and cared for one another. When I got out in the civilian population, I got to know a lot of problems because I was biracial or, for some people, not black enough or white enough. So it was scary going where people weren’t as accepting and tolerant as the US military. « 

Steele believes part of the reason her father underestimated his pioneering role was because he grew up an army brat too. « My father’s father was a Buffalo Soldier. He knew about the racial problems in the 1930s and 40s and during World War II, « she said.

« Dad thought others had been through so much more than him. As he got older, so many people contacted him to thank him for the brave face of change. But he raised us in the spirit of the West Point Cadet Prayer: “Help me choose the harder right instead of the lighter wrong, and never tell half a truth when the whole thing can be won. ‘ »

We’re lucky that Gary Steele is still with us and that he has a daughter who is so determined to stand up for the values ​​that made him. We hope that next year we will all be back to normal and that the Army Navy game will be played in front of a crowded New York City house.

If you see Steele at the game, you should thank him for his service to the U.. S.. . Army and its contribution to all the advances we have made over the past 50 years.

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Gary Steele, United States Military Academy, American Football, Navy Midshipmen Football, Army Black Knights