Syracuse University and the Legend of Number Forty-Four
Near Syracuse, New York
Syracuse University was chartered by New York State in eighteen seventy, and from its first days it did something unusual: it opened its doors to women on equal footing with men, becoming one of the first major research universities in America to do so. The campus climbs a hill above the city with a grandeur that announces its ambitions, and over a century and a half those ambitions have been more than fulfilled.
But if you want to understand what Syracuse means to American sports and culture, you have to understand a single jersey number. The number is forty-four.
It started in nineteen fifty-four, when a running back named Jim Brown wore it on the football field. Brown was perhaps the greatest player in college football history, and he went on to be almost certainly the greatest running back the NFL has ever seen. And then, in nineteen fifty-eight, came Ernie Davis, another extraordinary back who wore forty-four. Floyd Little would carry the number after him, in the mid nineteen sixties.
Davis arrived from Elmira, New York, as the heir to a position and a number that carried impossible weight. He delivered. In nineteen fifty-nine he led Syracuse to an undefeated national championship, capping it with a victory over Texas in the Cotton Bowl. In nineteen sixty-one he became the first African American in history to win the Heisman Trophy, college football's highest individual honor.
The Washington Redskins drafted Davis first overall in nineteen sixty-two, then traded him to the Cleveland Browns, where he would have played alongside his hero Jim Brown. He never played a single professional game. Leukemia took him in May of nineteen sixty-three, at twenty-three years old.
Syracuse retired the number forty-four and never let anyone wear it again for decades. The story of what that number meant, and what Ernie Davis sacrificed, became the film "The Express" decades later. No other number in college football carries quite the same weight of history, heartbreak, and excellence.
