BYU football: Black 14 game lives in BYU memories

Forty years ago, BYU and Wyoming met at War Memorial Stadium in Laramie, Wyo., for a football game that turned out to be much more than a game.

It was October, 1969 — a turbulent time in American history, with demonstrations and protests abounding around the country, sparked by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.

So when 14 black Wyoming football players decided to wear black armbands for the game against BYU — to protest what they considered to be "racist practices" of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which owns and operates BYU — and when then-Cowboys coach Lloyd Eaton decided to boot those 14 players, which included seven starters, from the team for that decision, it touched off a maelstrom of controversy and it immediately became a national story. The following week, reporters from media outlets like the New York Times and Sports Illustrated descended upon Laramie to chronicle the episode.

And the ramifications of the "Black 14" incident have since resonated for decades.

During the week of the 1969 BYU-Wyoming game, the Black Student Alliance at Wyoming announced it was planning to stage a demonstration outside the stadium against the LDS Church because it did not allow blacks to hold the priesthood (it wasn't until 1978 that blacks were granted that opportunity). The Black 14 insisted on being part of that protest by wearing black armbands as a symbolic gesture, but Eaton rejected that plan and meted out a severe punishment against those players for violating team rules prohibiting players' involvement in protests.

Marc Lyons, who was BYU's starting quarterback in 1969, remembers staying at the Holiday Inn in Laramie the night before the game and hearing people throw bottles at the hotel. On game day, the Cougars encountered protestors as they arrived at War Memorial Stadium.

"It was definitely a strange atmosphere," said Lyons, a longtime color analyst for KSL Radio who will be in Laramie when BYU visits Wyoming on Saturday (noon, The mtn.). "It was hard to understand. A lot of our players weren't LDS. It was odd that this was happening at a football game.

"We were the news. ... It was the first time we encountered protesters. People were holding signs as we got to the stadium to play. We walked through those people and they were badgering us a little bit.

"There was a girl who had a sign, something about the Mormons, and she misspelled the word 'Mormon.' It was a little bit unnerving, a little bit comical," Lyons said. "The strangest part was that it didn't seem at all like a game that day. There was a lot of other stuff going on. It was a different atmosphere, that's for sure."