Photograph by Ben Rollins
To see Bill Curry is to feel time standing still. He looks decades younger than his age, 81. His face remains vibrant. The same goes for the rest of his frame, which gives you the impression he was somebody’s tight end, and not so long ago. Instead, he was a celebrated NFL center who stood 6 foot 3, weighed 235 pounds (today’s offensive linemen are seldom less than 300 pounds), and played for two different championship franchises.
In addition to his playing days in high school, college, and the NFL, there was his head coaching career, followed by a long stint as a college football analyst for ESPN and his ongoing role as a motivational speaker.
He has more than a few pieces of memorabilia from his career, so much that it overwhelmed the Curry home in Buckhead. “Carolyn [Curry’s wife] kept a lot of it in boxes,” he says. Then Pete Wellborn got involved. He was a U.S. Presidential Scholar at Georgia Tech, where he spent four seasons under Coach Curry as a linebacker and backup quarterback.
Wellborn now has an Atlanta law firm, and he built a locker room inside his offices to display Curry’s jerseys, helmets, and team pictures. “It is a virtual museum,” Curry says. “I had no idea he was doing it.”
Wellborn did it to mark how much Curry did for 55 years.
Those 55 years include Curry’s coaching life as the head football guy at Georgia Tech, Alabama, Kentucky, and Georgia State.
Curry has built a legendary football legacy. But his footprint on the world goes deeper, and into unexpected places. Let’s start with his spiritual vision, which begins with the New International Version of Proverbs 1:8: “Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.”
The father, the mother, and the others in Curry’s young world of growing up in Georgia were products of their time, so they gave their son Bible Belt instruction and teachings influenced by the Jim Crow South. He listened, he obeyed, but he also did something else.
He evolved.
Curry became an unlikely force in the civil rights movement in the ’60s.
Curry has led multiple lives. The first of those lives was as a highly active youth, when he played everything—almost literally—while growing up in College Park. “I remember vividly during my junior year in high school that I spent a day without a practice to go to, and I had no idea what to do,” says Curry, who excelled in football, basketball, and baseball during his high school days. “I don’t know how the coaches screwed up and let that particular day get away from them. I went to the rec center and shot basketball. What else would you do?”
Curry was tall and strapping, a good enough athlete that he received a football scholarship offer to play center for his beloved Bulldogs at the University of Georgia. He turned it down to join the hometown Georgia Tech football program. He wished to stay close to Carolyn Newton, his grammar-school sweetheart, who had decided to attend Agnes Scott College. “I got a map, and I discovered that, unlike Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia is not the closest college to Agnes Scott College,” Curry says. Carolyn became his wife of 62 years and counting.
Photograph by Associated Press
With a master’s and a PhD from Georgia State University, she is an accomplished author, historian, and founder and director of a nonprofit organization called Women Alone Together. It’s designed for women of all ages who are “single for a portion of their adult lives . . . because of divorce, death of spouse, single by choice, or alone in a marriage because of physical separation, disease, or estrangement.”
Curry speaks of his soulmate with joy in his voice and his eyes: “What I do these days is, I help Carolyn with her things, and I travel with her. She’s now working on her third book, and I work with her on the research. When she completes her books, I go with her on the book-selling tour. We have a dog and pony show. You remember the old organ grinder and the monkey with the tin cup? I’m the monkey with the tin cup and the change. She’s the organ grinder. For 55 years, she followed me around, so now I follow her around, and it’s a wonderful chance for me to pay her back a little bit.”
Curry began his nomadic coaching career in 1976 as the offensive line coach for his alma mater. He spent the next three years in that same role for the Green Bay Packers under head coach Bart Starr, the former ace quarterback and teammate of Curry’s with the franchise. Curry then headed back to Georgia Tech before the 1980 season for his first head coaching job.
Photograph by Associated Press
Homer Rice, then the school’s athletics director, was hired barely three weeks after Curry took over one of the worst football programs in the country. Rice walked up to Curry a few days into his tenure. “Homer said, ‘I watched your first spring practice, and I called my wife and told her not to unpack,’” Curry says, laughing. Rice wasn’t exaggerating—Curry opened his head coaching career with a pair of one-win seasons.
Curry built the Georgia Tech football program back to respectability, though it finished with a lackluster 5–5–2 record in 1986. That offseason, Alabama head coach Ray Perkins—after four seasons of thanklessly trying to live up to the legend he’d replaced, Paul “Bear” Bryant—left to become head coach of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Curry was brought in as head coach. He had three seasons of goodness (7–5, 9–3, 10–2) at Alabama and received the Bobby Dodd Coach of the Year Award. But for Alabama, goodness was not good enough. When Curry didn’t like the new low-ball contract Alabama offered, he left.
Photograph by Getty Images
Curry then spent seven seasons as Kentucky’s head football coach. Though he led the team to its first bowl game in nearly a decade, he never had a winning season there. Not that many folks around the commonwealth noticed. Rick Pitino and basketball were the rage during most of that stretch. “Actually, basketball was a positive for us,” Curry says. “For our football program, we got visits from guys only because they were going to get to go to Rupp Arena and watch the Wildcats play basketball. In the end, I got fired simply because we didn’t win enough games.”
Following Curry’s last season at Kentucky, in 1996, he had a 10-season stint at ESPN. “For eight consecutive years, I was forced to go to Maui to cover the Hula Bowl,” Curry says with a chuckle. “Carolyn wasn’t excited about going to any of the other schools I was broadcasting from, but she decided she could make that trip.”
After Curry left ESPN and moved back home to Atlanta, he was offered a job as the first head football coach at Georgia State, which launched its program in 2010. It was an easy sell for his wife. “She loves Georgia State,” Curry says. “When they said they were starting a football program, I told her that I was one of the candidates, and she said, ‘Well, let’s see. It’s my school. I love that school. I don’t have to move. Let’s do it.’ It took about that long.”
Following seasons that ended 6–5, 3–8, and 1–10 with a Georgia State program that lacked a stadium, opponents, and even chinstraps when Curry took over, he retired his whistle to begin yet another one of his lives.
“I still had a desire then, and I still have a desire now, to have an impact on teams, institutions, and leaders, to emphasize the lessons I’ve learned through some of the great men I’ve met in my life: James Harvey and Bart Starr and Vince Lombardi and Don Shula and Johnny Unitas and Willie Davis and John Mackey,” Curry says, rattling off a list of his mentors. “Now I can do those things. I’ve written a couple of books. I can make speeches. I can sit down one on one with leaders, and sometimes I get a call to do that. The Covid years have cut down on the volume and the number of things to do. But I’m 81 years old, so I don’t need a lot of things to do.”
Curry’s playing life was spent snapping footballs between his legs for teams coached by and quarterbacked by bigger-than-life folks. He had three seasons through 1964 excelling as a center under Georgia Tech’s Bobby Dodd, a College Football Hall of Famer who scared Curry into doing the right thing without ever saying a curse word. “I had no idea that he intended for me to go to every single class,” Curry says. “The reason I’m so devoted to Coach Dodd is because I cut one class, and they ran me up and down the west stands until I couldn’t stand up. I decided chemistry at eight in the morning was a terrific thing.”
Then came Curry’s NFL decade. It began with Vince Lombardi, the legendary Green Bay Packers head coach. In contrast to Dodd, the man who had the Super Bowl trophy named after him was noted for uttering a naughty word or three. The same went for Don Shula, who later joined Lombardi in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
After a 1967 trade to the Baltimore Colts, Curry went from sharing a huddle with the Packers’ Bart Starr to sharing one with the Colts’ Johnny Unitas. Curry was a three-time NFL champion, played in three of the first five Super Bowl games (winning two), and was named to the Pro Bowl twice.
Photograph by Associated Press
But Curry played another important role in the NFL, as an activist for change. He became close with his Colts teammate John Mackey, a Hall of Fame tight end. Mackey became the first president of the NFL Players Association (NFLPA), in 1970. Curry succeeded Mackey as the union’s president in 1972.
They both played major roles in smashing the Rozelle Rule, which was named after the league’s most prominent commissioner and enacted to stymie free agency. With Mackey and Curry among the plaintiffs, the federal courts ruled in 1975 that the Rozelle Rule violated antitrust laws.
The Curry–Mackey connection showcased Curry’s contradictory life. Curry was a White Southerner from the Atlanta area when it was mostly a Georgia hick town with a few tall buildings; Mackey was a Black Northerner who grew up on Long Island, near the bright lights of New York City. Yet the two men were nearly inseparable, as were their wives, who kept each other company on road trips during Curry’s six seasons with the Colts.
The couples huddled often throughout those NFLPA days. But decades later, there was big, fast, and mighty Mackey’s stunning new reality after a diagnosis of dementia due to too many blows to the head while wearing a football helmet. That’s when the empathetic and spiritual lives of Curry surfaced in significant ways. He sighs before recalling Mackey on September 17, 2002, at Unitas’s funeral in Baltimore. “So there was John, unable to find his seat after apparently getting up to go to the restroom, and everybody just froze,” says Curry.
Mackey moved up and down the church aisles, in search of nothing in particular, while the priest continued with the eulogy. Curry sighs again. “It was a nightmare,” he says.
Four years later, Sylvia Mackey sent a letter to then NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue about her husband’s condition. With Curry heavily in the mix, Tagliabue urged league officials to collaborate with the players’ union to form the “88 Plan” in honor of Mackey’s jersey number. Through the plan, families of former NFL players suffering from dementia received as much as $88,000 per year for nursing home care. Mackey died at 69, in 2011, but the 88 Plan continued to live, and it was a forerunner to a $1 billion settlement more than a decade later between the league and retired players over NFL-related head injuries.
Before Mackey, in Green Bay, there was Curry’s “encourager.”
In the summer of 1965, Curry drove 14 hours from Georgia to Wisconsin after he was picked in the 20th (and last) round of that year’s NFL draft. He was trying to make the squad of the Packers during training camp, and for a skinny offensive lineman who went from high school through college with only White teammates, the encourager was a shocker because it was Willie Davis, a Black man.
Davis was intimidating, a team captain and future Pro Football Hall of Fame defensive end for that Packers bunch that ranked among the greatest NFL teams ever. Yet one night after practice, Davis called over the White Southern rookie center. He told Curry that he thought Curry had a chance to make the team. But he knew Curry would be getting crushed during practice by all-everything linebacker Ray Nitschke, and having his ears scorched from the flame-throwing tongue of Lombardi. Davis told Curry to find him for inspiration and encouragement whenever that happened. Curry often did, and a deep friendship blossomed.
Curry was an All-Pro for the Baltimore Colts and best friends with Black teammate John Mackey
Photograph by Associated Press
Three years after he accepted Davis as his encourager, in April 1968—against the wishes of some family members and several friends—Bill and Carolyn Curry ignored the threats of violence in their hometown to walk the Atlanta streets during the funeral procession of fellow Atlantan Martin Luther King Jr.
Curry continued as a civil rights advocate during all of his various lives as a player, a coach, a broadcaster, and beyond, but nothing summed up his ability to deliver his views on race in a riveting way more than “The Huddle,” which he wrote and recorded as a three-minute video after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington, DC.
“The huddle is a metaphor for our country,” Curry says in a soft tone, recalling his message in the video. “There are a lot of times when we should be hugging, but we aren’t. That’s what I believe. So that’s what I try to teach a thousand different ways. Suck it up and talk to the guy. He doesn’t look like you, and he doesn’t vote like you, and he doesn’t go to church like you, but that’s your teammate. He’s all you got. After a while, I don’t care how racist you are. Sweat smells the same way on everybody. And in football, you can’t get dressed by yourself. You need a buddy to pull the jersey over your shoulder pads. So we need each other like that in our country, and we have forgotten that lesson.”
Curry was a son of the south, from a time when firehoses, attack dogs, and Bull Connor ruled Dixie, to the delight of anybody as White as a Ku Klux Klan hood. “We were all racists,” says Curry. “I would have told you I wasn’t, but I didn’t know what it meant to not be a racist.”
His parents taught him not to hate, but he was surrounded by the language and culture of the Jim Crow South. “I was in deep trouble when it came to relationships with people who were different than me,” says Curry. “So was virtually everybody else around me. Maybe there were some I didn’t know who were more tolerant and more loving than I was. I hope so, but I didn’t know about that. But it seems like at every turn, somebody showed up and did something that left me no choice but to respond [in a nonracist way].”
The first example of somebody surfacing for Curry was during the late 1950s, when he played American Legion Baseball. His coach was a Delta Airlines pilot, and the coach’s son was one of his best friends. “The coach’s name was Mr. [Bob] Scruggs, and he had some investments in apartments going up off Interstate 85,” says Curry. He was among the coach’s players who agreed to help build the apartments for $1 per hour.
Curry and his teammates were instructed by their coach to follow orders from the foreman. “Mr. Scruggs didn’t tell us anything else about the foreman,” says Curry. The foreman turned out to be James Harvey, who had large overalls, an ill-fitting baseball cap, and the darkest of skin. In Curry’s mind, this couldn’t be the same man that Mr. Scruggs told his players to trust and obey. In the 1950s South, putting a Black man in charge of White workers was simply not done.
Photograph by Getty Images
“At 16 years old, I thought to myself, This can’t be. There’s no way this guy is the boss, but he was,” Curry says. “I called Mr. Scruggs. He said, ‘I already told you. Listen to what James says. You’ll be fine. Pay close attention, and do everything he tells you to do.’ When I asked Mr. Scruggs about it later, he just said he knew that James was a great leader.”
Curry’s voice begins to choke up as he tells a story that he says he’ll remember if he lives to a thousand years old. It again involves James Harvey, and a bunch of “White guys out of central casting,” including a preacher who constantly hurled the N-word while carrying the Bible.
“We’re standing up on the floor where the boards are being hammered into place, and one of the guys is up on a ladder,” says Curry. “James, with these big, powerful forearms, is standing over next to the water bucket, and one of those White guys came up to him and said, ‘Hey, boy. Get me some water.’ There were two actual boys up on the deck—a guy named Bob and me—but he wasn’t talking to us, and everybody knew it.”
Harvey didn’t budge, didn’t smile, didn’t move those “big, powerful forearms” away from the folded position across his chest. Then Curry heard the same White guy say, “Boy, didn’t you hear me?”
In a controlled fashion, Harvey smiled and responded, “How old does a man have to be before he’s not a boy?”
There wasn’t a sound from anybody.
“It was just like out of a Western movie, when the cowboy walks into the saloon and the piano stops playing,” Curry says. “Everybody is staring at this carpenter who made those remarks, and they’re staring at James, who never stopped smiling. I remember the guy looking at his hammer, then at James’s forearms, and then the carpenter said, ‘I’m sorry, James. I’ll get my own water.’”
A shocked Curry started walking with Harvey back across the red, hard-baked clay and asked him if those men were going to hurt him. “James said to me, ‘We don’t worry none about it. We just go ahead on,’” says Curry. “Nobody, nobody called him a boy the rest of the summer.”
Photograph by Ben Rollins
If that wasn’t enough for Curry to become the unlikeliest of leaders for a Black man’s fan club during those times, there was this: After Curry made a mistake on the job, one of the top bosses on the construction site told Harvey that “the Curry kid is worthless.” The top boss, who was White, wanted Curry gone. But Harvey was the foreman, and he disagreed: “Curry is a damn good worker, and we need to keep him around here.”
That’s when Curry learned you have to stand up for folks when they stand up for you.
Curry was changed forever. With his voice cracking nearly seven decades later, he says, “I could not miss that message even if I tried. I went back home and told my parents about what James did for me. They talked about how great James was and how he did the right thing and how I needed to stand up for him, but that never became necessary. In 1959, things could have gone very differently.”
After a pause, Curry says, “I don’t know if I could have responded the way I did to Willie Davis when he offered to help me with the Packers if it hadn’t been for James Harvey six years earlier. It was a gift from God for me.”
This article appears in our November 2024 issue.
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