Remembering Jack ‘Cy’ McClairen
Bianchi: Bethune-Cookman legend made an impact on thousands.
On the day Jack “Cy” McClairen died, Bethune-Cookman University athletics director Lynn W. Thompson said something very profound.
“His DNA,” Thompson said, “is woven through the history of this great quilt we call Bethune-Cookman.”
This is certainly true, but Cy McClairen isn’t just part of the Bethune-Cookman quilt. He’s one of the colossal figures who sewed it and seamed it and was the binding stitch that has helped hold the fabric together throughout history.
McClairen, the father, the son and the galloping ghost of B-CU athletics, passed away earlier this week at the age of 89.
“Without Coach Cy, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” says Larry Little, the legendary Miami Dolphins Hall of Fame offensive lineman who played for McClairen in the mid-1960s.
Little is just one of thousands whose lives were impacted by McClairen during his seven
decades as a patriarch of the Bethune-Cookman family. McClairen not only played at B-CU as a threesport athlete (football, basketball and track), he served as the head football coach during two different stints, was the head basketball coach for 31 years and was also the school’s athletics director.
As an athlete at B-CU, McClairen even served as a chauffeur, driving a fancy Lincoln Continental for university founder Mary McLeod Bethune and her distinguished guests such as first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
“You don’t think much about it as it happens, but when you look back, it makes you feel good knowing you were a part of it,” McClairen once told the Daytona Beach News-Journal. “It makes me feel older as I reminisce. It’s a good old, though.”
I interviewed McClairen a few times over the years and it was literally like having a conversation with a human history book. He could tell you about the time before integration when the HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) were more talented than the big-time institutions of higher earning in the SEC and the Big Ten.
Back in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, Florida A&M, the state’s most renowned historically Black university, got its pick of the state’s best Black players. Consequently, legendary coach Jake Gaither won seven Black college national titles with future NFL stars such as Bob Hayes and Willie Galimore.
In fact, McClairen himself wanted to attend FAMU when he was a high school senior in Panama City, but Gaither did not offer him a scholarship. So McClairen signed with Bethune-Cookman and got his revenge.
As a senior at B-CU in 1952, McClairen and the Wildcats had never beaten Gaither’s powerhouse FAMU program heading into their homecoming game. McClairen, a 6-foot-4 wide receiver, hauled in the winning pass at the 18-yard line and somehow managed to fight off a swarm of defenders and turn it into a 38-yard touchdown in the closing minutes of the Wildcats’ historic 8-7 victory.
“It seemed like every time someone hit me and I thought I was going to fall, somebody would hit me and lift me back up,” McClairen once said about the play. “All this ducking, diving and getting hit, ricocheting off and all this kind of stuff made it more spectacular.”
Oh, the stories he could tell.
Like the time he was coaching BC-U and cut Willie Gary, who would end up transferring, going to law school and becoming one of the nation’s most influential attorneys. The two ended up laughing over the story once on the “Oprah Winfrey Show.”
Or like the time in the early 1950s when he and John Chaney, who would go on to become a Basketball Hall of Famer as the legendary coach at Temple, would lead B-CU’s basketball team to the conference championship and a berth in the NIT.
Or like when was drafted in the 26th round by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1953 but spent two years in the military before he ever got a chance to play for the Steelers. In 1955, during his first NFL training camp, the Steelers decided to keep McClairen and instead ended up cutting a rookie quarterback by the name of Johnny Unitas.
Or like when he made the NFL All-Pro team in 1957 by finishing third in the league in receptions — one spot behind Hallof-Famer Raymond Berry and one spot ahead of Hallof-Famer Frank Gifford. Or like when he went to the Pro Bowl in 1958 and roomed with a young running back named Jim Brown.
A serious knee injury cut his NFL career short after six years — the only six years of his adult life that McClairen was not playing or working for B-CU in some capacity. It was torrid love affair that started as a teenager and ended as an octogenarian.
“He loved Bethune-Cookman with all his heart and Bethune-Cookman loved him back,” Little says.
Another former player and NFL alumnus, Alvin Wyatt, would end up not only playing for McClairen at B-CU but succeeding him as coach in 1997.
“On his recruiting visit, he promised my mother and I that he would be the father I never had and would let nothing in this world ever keep me from being the student and champion that I am today ... and would never let me go back to where I was yesterday,” Wyatt said in a statement released by the school. “I believed him. Wow, he was so right! Coach Jack ‘Cy’ McClairen was God’s awesome gift to me. I love you, Coach!”
Wyatt’s emotional comment reveals the magic of McClairen, who had a special knack of making those around him believe they could accomplish anything. Even in those dreadful, discriminatory days before integration.
It was Eleanor Roosevelt who once said, “No one can you make you feel inferior without your consent.”
Who knows when exactly she uttered that quote.
Maybe it was when she was sitting in the back seat of a Lincoln Continental while Jack “Cy” McClairen was driving Bethune-Cookman into the future.