There’s a blue suit hanging in Brian Howard’s bedroom closet, but not the one he wants. This suit is merely a fill-in for the one he lost.

The suit he has now is inferior. It is not the suit he first wore before the 1959 season, when Howard walked onto the Syracuse football team.

The suit does not have the same sentimental value. It did not once belong to Ernie Davis, who would hang the original suit in the seven-foot closet they shared on the second floor of Watson Hall. It is not the one that caught the eye of an 18-year-old girl from his hometown in Long Island, who he later married. And it is not the same one he told his three children about, late at night when they asked, ‘What was it like to be a champion?’

The suit that now hangs in Howard’s bedroom closet was not the one Davis lent to him in 1959, the one Davis was asked to give Howard a month before Davis died. But if Howard had it, he would wear it like a crown with all the memories of that sweet 1959 season.

But that old suit is gone. It was buried in Elmira 46 years ago, Howard said.

The 69-year-old forgets.

What was it like, Mr. Howard, to room with Ernie Davis that one season? Was it true head coach Ben Schwartzwalder, 0-3 in bowl games before 1959, garnered a reputation for coming up short in the postseason? What was it like standing in the corridors of Archbold Stadium as you sold programs, as redshirts did?

Do you remember 1959?

He remembers what he wore. How he came to school that year with a sports jacket, a pair of slacks, a white shirt and tie, chinos and a pair of dress shoes and sneakers. He borrowed a suit – blue and wool – the year of the perfect season, of the Cotton Bowl, of his teenage roommate who became legend.

‘Sure, I miss that suit,’ he said. ‘It tells a story that I kind of hold dear.’

So for what he does not have, he keeps a replica in his closet.

‘My husband still puts on a blue suit. It’s not the same, but he always had that custom-made blue suit,’ his wife Pamela Howard said. ‘It helps remind him.’

It begins with a head coach from Muhlenberg College who quit. He took over the vacant position at Syracuse in 1949. And by Jan. 1, 1959, coach Ben Schwartzwalder reached three bowl games and lost them all.

‘We were unbalanced,’ former tackle Bob Yates said. ‘We always lined up to the right of the field because we couldn’t play on the left.’

Schwartzwalder needed answers. His players practiced two-a-days in full pads. They climbed 20 feet of rope as they left the locker room every day. Before the Orange Bowl to conclude the 1958 season, a year before his championship win, Schwartzwalder made his redshirts play as the opposition, as the Oklahoma Sooners. And the coach simulated the bowl game on the practice field two weeks in advance.

But on Jan. 1, 1959, the Orange lost, 21-6.

Maybe his team was flawed. Maybe it wasn’t as worthy as the men of the 507th Parachute Infantry of the 82nd Airborne Division that Schwartzwalder led down upon Normandy in 1944. So he looked elsewhere.

On a refrigerated Saturday afternoon in 1957, former Syracuse assistant coach Bill Bell stood outside a home in the Long Island’s Suffolk County. He knocked and asked for parents.

‘I would like very much for your son to come and see our school,’ Bell said.

This was the recruitment of Brian Howard, a senior from Amity High School in Long Island, whose name had been passed down from his local high school coach to the football staff at Syracuse. Most schools learned of players this way. But only one showed up at Howard’s front door.

‘He was standing in three or four feet of snow,’ Howard recalled.

Syracuse needed Howard. It needed the tight end and offensive lineman and linebacker and defensive guard he would be. And Howard needed Syracuse.

Understand that Howard is the oldest son of a New York Telephone Company sales manager on the outskirts of New York. He had two younger siblings, and to leave Suffolk would be a feat. In his final high school game, his school announced athletic scholars. There were two that year.

‘I happened to be very, very lucky,’ Howard said.

Brian Howard still considers himself blessed.

He was lucky that Bell had approached him at the end of spring practice in 1958, leaned in and asked, ‘Would you consider rooming with Ernie Davis next year?’

He was lucky just to be part of the 1959 Syracuse football team. He thinks about it all the time: How he once borrowed a blue suit from a legend that season.

It was the first weekend of school, when Howard had little to wear for a formal dance that Saturday afternoon. So Howard asked his roommate, and Davis asked him if he needed a dress shirt and tie, too.

‘I have that,’ Howard said. ‘He was always generous, always asking if I needed anything.’

He was lucky just to watch as his roommate ran for yards and touchdowns as he sold programs and flowers in the corridors of Archbold Stadium, as most redshirts did.

Howard noticed how the city adopted a team. The programs he sold at the start of 1959 sold out by midseason. More men and women in parkas filled the stadium – standing in snow to see the Orangemen.

More chants for the man wearing No. 44.

He saw the Orangemen rally back against Kansas with less than a minute in the season-opener. The shutout win against West Virginia. Crawling by rival Penn State when Joe Paterno was still an assistant. All the way up to the Cotton Bowl, when they faced Texas.

He remembers how they won.

Maybe it was the championship that year. Maybe the estimated 2,000 people who gathered outside Syracuse Hancock International Airport after the Orangemen returned from California an undefeated team and national champion. But a year after he left, Ernie Davis came back to college.

In the spring of 1963, Davis took turns at the wheel of teammate John Brown’s new Pontiac Grand Prix. They played together at Syracuse in 1959 and were drafted a year apart by the Cleveland Browns. Together, they drove five hours east of Cleveland to Syracuse for a weekend, as Davis was set to coach his alma mater in the alumni game.

On a Saturday morning, Davis stood on that sideline. On the field, Brian Howard played as a senior on Syracuse’s 1962 team. Howard caught a glimpse of Davis.

‘His neck was swollen, and his skin had turned to gray,’ Howard said.

Davis had been diagnosed with leukemia. But here was the Heisman Trophy winner the spring before his NFL debut. Here was the man who once confided in Brown, a former tackle at SU, how he felt displaced in Syracuse. ‘Man, I wish we had a helicopter so we could fly down to Howard University,’ Brown recalled Davis saying. ‘We could stay there for the weekend.’

But he was at the game until the end.

‘You have something to do tonight?’ Howard asked after time expired.

‘Yes, I have something to do,’ Davis answered.

‘Well come over tomorrow, and Pam and I will cook breakfast,’ Howard said.

‘I want to see you guys,’ Davis said.

Ernie Davis was fed rolls, fried eggs, mushrooms and bacon on Sunday morning, the next day. Howard’s wife, Pamela, cooked. Then Davis, conscious of his symptoms, asked the couple a question.

‘I’m not going to make it,’ he said. ‘Is there anything you want?’

‘No,’ Brian recalled saying.

‘Wait a minute, Ernie, Brian wants your blue suit,’ Pamela said. ‘It fits him beautifully.’

Davis chuckled.

He died on May 18, 1963, at the age of 23.

Brian Howard drove south with his wife to the First Baptist Church in Elmira for Davis’ funeral five days later.

Rev. Horace Walser read the eulogies. Nine thousand mourners listened. And for those who could not enter the full church, six Baptists with battery-operated speakers conveyed the final message of Davis’ death at the park nearby.

And when the time came, Brian and Pamela walked up to Davis’ open casket. Pamela looked down, and it caught her eye.

‘Oh my god, Brian, he’s wearing your blue suit,’ she said.

He saw it, and it was gone.

edpaik@syr.edu

Published on December 7, 2009 at 12:00 pm