The Under Review - Issue 4 | Summer 2021

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TH: You mention in the beginning of the documentary that by the time you were born your dad’s football
career was already completely over and that football wasn’t really part of your childhood. My first
question is when did that change and when did the story of your dad’s historic football career get on your
radar as a story you knew you wanted to tell?
MW: I’d say things really shifted for me in 2011. At the end of
2010, my dad retired from the business sector. My dad worked at
3M for most of my life. He was a guy who put on a suit and went
to work everyday. He had this really great retirement party. Some
of his former teammates from the Vikings showed up, like Joe
Kapp, former Justice Alan Page, and I really got to hear a lot of
great stories. Around that time he was also voted one of the 50
Greatest Vikings of All Time. So, this sort of shift in my dad’s life
occurred when I was being introduced to some of his friends and
teammates I never met because their chapter in history occurred
before I was born.
Of course I knew Justice Page from growing up here in
Minnesota, but Joe Kapp was not someone in my memory I had
the opportunity to meet. Things really ramped up in August of
2011 when I had the great fortune to attend Bubba Smith’s
memorial service alongside my dad and many of his (college)
teammates. At that moment, it was the first time I was able to
really hear that it was Bubba Smith who recommended my dad for his opportunity at Michigan State. I’ve
sort of had this fantasy that these magical white men randomly found my dad in Texas, and as someone
who loves history, it never occurred to me to try and piece together how that really happened, why that
happened, knowing that everything was completely segregated in Texas, that a university would find him
and bring him to Michigan State and give him this great opportunity.
So learning about that at a time it was unfortunately too late to thank Bubba Smith really sort of stung in a
very personal way and a realization that every door that opened for my dad could be tied back to the
Smith family. And of course every door that opened for me, tied back to them too. That really put me on
this passionate dive into history.
My dad was voted into the College Football Hall of Fame also in 2011. Bubba Smith, and George Webster
at the time, were two of the total four from that 1967 Draft Class, were already members of the National
College Football Hall of Fame, and later (the fourth member of that draft class) Clinton Jones joined them.
I just thought this was amazing and this important history with Duffy Daugherty, their coach, what sports
historians and journalists called ‘The Underground Railroad of College Football,’ there was so much to
uncover that I felt that film was the right avenue to dive into this history as a documentary from the
perspective of me as my dad’s daughter.
THE UNDER REVIEW