This feature will be published in the football game-day program for Brown on October 27, 2023.
 
by Joe Juliano
 
On a sunny, warm, early autumn day 50 years ago at Franklin Field, a pair of quarterbacks went through their pre-game warmups for their opening game of the 1973 Ivy League season unaware they were about to enter college football's record books.
 
Neither Penn's Martin Vaughn nor Brown's Dennis Coleman realized there would be anything special about the October 6 game beyond the fact that both were making their first career starts for their respective teams. Coleman was particularly excited about the fact that his grandmother would be attending the game along with about 50 family members and friends from the nearby suburb of Darby, Pa., his hometown.
 
But as the game went on, one that would result in a 28-20 Penn victory, the impact of what was happening became clearer. The players for both teams—especially those on the defensive side of the football—realized that both starting quarterbacks were African American, the first such pairing in Ivy League history.
 
For the stars of the show, however, it took some time.
 
"You've got to remember, there was no texting, no media back then," Vaughn said. "Your basic communication might have been pay phones. Now some of my teammates who were defensive players might have known. They may have known because they posted people's names and stuff up on the (chalk) board, but I didn't know.
 
"I might have heard it before the game, but I can't really remember. But I know when I saw Dennis, I was proud of him. I was proud that he was there getting the same chance that I was getting. After the game, we became friends."
 
Coleman was excited to play so close to his hometown but that didn't make the defeat any less disappointing. He enjoyed meeting Vaughn afterwards but did not dwell on the historic nature of the game until years later.
 
"Somebody may have said something to be about it but I've always been about, 'Who are we playing next and how are we going to win?'" he said. "A few years later, people started talking about it and then I got a call from a friend of mine asking if I had seen my name in some book about the Ivy League. I kept hearing about it. It was nice to be a part of it."
 
Vaughn was briefly lifted from the game after his two turnovers set up Brown touchdowns, but returned to action and passed for 200 yards, 76 of them on six catches by star receiver Don Clune. During the game, Adolph Bellizeare became the 10th Quaker player to rush for 1,000 career yards. For Brown, Coleman scampered 34 yards to lead to one of the Bears' touchdowns and threw a 9-yard pass for another.
 
And yes, the defensive players knew what was going on.
 
"We definitely knew those brothers were going face to face," Penn linebacker Daryl Taylor said. "I didn't know if the greater community knew about it but the guys on the team were saying, 'We've got two brothers going at it today.' We were just proud to know that. We felt good. Little did we think that 50 years later it would be commemorated like this."
 
The game took on a greater meaning as the years went by. The 50th anniversary of the celebrated matchup will be observed Friday night when the Quakers and the Bears meet at Franklin Field with former teammates, family and friends in attendance.
 
The 1973 game was one of the first times that two African American quarterbacks from Division I colleges had started a football game. In 1960, Iowa and Minnesota competed in a Big Ten matchup of ranked teams featuring Black starting quarterbacks— Wilburn Hollis of the No. 1 Hawkeyes and Sandy Stephens of the No. 3 Golden Gophers, acknowledged to be the first time such an occurrence had happened.
 
For both Vaughn and Coleman, playing quarterback in college was a dream come true. Coincidentally, both grew up in Pennsylvania but on opposite sides of the commonwealth. Vaughn hailed from McKeesport, 14 miles south of Pittsburgh, and Coleman lived just a few miles over the Philadelphia city line in the borough of Darby.
 
Both were products of loving families. Vaughn's father served in the U.S. Army so the family traveled all over the world, eventually settling in Germany. The younger Vaughn, who had two brothers and a sister, returned to the United States at age 9 after spending five years overseas and a short time later accompanied his parents to the 1963 March on Washington, the site of Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
 

"I was so blessed to have a mother and father and family that were just the best in the world," Vaughn said. "I used to say, if my parents were somebody else's parents, I would have been jealous, because there were really good people and they exposed us to so much."
 
Coleman was one of eight children–four boys and four girls–in a family where everyone played sports at one time or another, including his oldest brother, Charlie, otherwise known by his nickname of Pete, who played basketball for three seasons at Villanova. His mother was a homemaker and did domestic work. His father was the custodian at Darby-Colwyn High School, where Dennis attended.
 
"We were rich with love and prayer in my house," Coleman said. "We always had enough food to eat but we didn't have enough money. We never for once thought we were poor; poor was a state of mind. My Dad, who used to call me Flash, said, 'Flash, we can't pay but we want you to be happy. If it were my decision, I would go to Brown.'"
 
After starring in football and basketball at Darby-Colwyn, Coleman wanted to attend Southern California but the coaching staff there told him he needed to take better care of his studies and build up his body.
 
"I weighed 149 pounds soaking wet with rocks in my pocket in high school," he said.
 
He enrolled at Arizona Western Junior College, where he led the football team to the 1972 junior college national championship.
 
While in junior college, one of Coleman's professors expressed interest in the fact that he was being recruited by Brown. The quarterback did not have Brown at the very top of his list but that changed as he spoke with the professor.
 
"He said, 'Never mind Southern Cal or Iowa State or any of these other schools,'" Coleman recalled. "If you want to do and be all those things that we talk about in class, this is where you need to go to school. If you go to school (at Brown), you will go to school with the sons and daughters of kings and presidents, and people that will someday run this country, and that's where you belong.' That was powerful."
 
Vaughn, who had an excellent career at McKeesport High School, committed to Penn after visiting the campus with Bellizeare, who would develop into one of the Quakers' great running backs. That night, the two got together on the fire escape at the team's training house.
 
"We ended up sitting and talking all night and we decided to come to Penn," Vaughn said. "I remember Coach Gamble (head coach Harry Gamble) saying to me one time, 'I didn't know if it would be good for you two to be together or not together. Either I would get you both or I would lose you both.' But we ended up at Penn and it was a great experience."
 
Given the times, the desire by African Americans to become a quarterback presented its share of obstacles. Coleman and Vaughn, however, were determined to play quarterback and resisted attempts by coaches to move to other positions.
 
"There wasn't any question that I was going to be anything other than a quarterback," Coleman said. "There wasn't any issue. I just never thought about it, to tell you the truth. I knew they were few and far between, but I was born to be a quarterback, and I say that humbly."
 
Before Coleman enrolled at Brown, the Bears were not a very good football team, compiling a 1-17 record the two seasons prior. His teammate back then, wide receiver Pete Chelovich, figured more recruits to Brown would have accepted a more high-profile opportunity, but not Coleman.
 
"He certainly earned his way the hard way to be a quarterback," Chelovich said. "For him to go to Brown and understand, not to be enamored totally by the football side but actually come to a school where the football program wasn't that great, I think is a real credit to him. Most kids wouldn't have done that. But he was driven, he was special and a great role model."
 
Vaughn said, "If you talked to somebody who was Black, they were told, as I was told, that you had to be twice as good to be able to compete with somebody who was a different color. You had to work twice as hard. I felt like that wasn't going to be an excuse for me not to get this opportunity. If I wasn't good enough, I could live with that. It wasn't going to be because I didn't work my butt off to get here and I wasn't prepared."

 
But there was more to it than football. As Coleman and Vaughn transitioned to college life, life was changing. Ignorance and racism were being called out. College campuses throughout the nation were admitting more and more students of color. Coleman and Vaughn were becoming more aware of the transformation.
 
"It was a different era – Vietnam, Watts, Newark, Detroit, Malcolm X, Martin," Coleman said. "I'm a product of the civil unrest, the Vietnam War, affirmative action, and all of that stuff that went on after the riots when schools decided that we're going to open up our doors. Schools in the Ivy League—Brown and Penn in particular—went into the inner cities like Philly, Chicago, Washington and got the best and the brightest. We were smart enough. We should have been able to go but we didn't. That's what discrimination and segregation is all about."
 
"I lived in foreign countries before," Vaughn said. "I lived on an Army base and knew some kids who were German, knew some kids who were Japanese. When I came to Penn, I was in the mix of all these different kinds of people. There were African people, Asian people, Jewish people, Arab people, Muslim people, and Caucasian and Black people. America was changing. People were opening their eyes to look at somebody and judging them by the kind of person they were and not the kind of person they looked like. I was very comfortable at Penn."
 
And the fact that Black quarterbacks were playing at Ivy League institutions in two major Northeast cities attracted students for those universities as well as neighborhood kids who previously didn't attend football games. That made it that more satisfying for Vaughn and Coleman.
 
Vaughn recalled when he and Bellizeare began student-teaching at West Philadelphia High School. They broke the ice by talking about staying in school and studying hard. Then the class instructor confirmed what an inquisitive student had asked—that Vaughn was indeed a quarterback.
 
"The student said, 'They don't have quarterbacks at Penn that are Black,'" Vaughn remembered. "I said, 'Well, maybe they didn't but they do now.' He said, 'Really?' and I said, 'Yeah!' He said, 'Wow, I'm going to do that.' I told him he needed to get his books together to make the grades to get into college. He said, 'Is it worth it to study hard to get where you are?' And I said, 'It's the best decision that I ever made.'"
 
Coleman would also have some fun when both Black and white kids who lived near campus would come to the game.
 
"There were two young men–one Black and one white–to this day they would tell me, 'I still have your chin strap,'" he said. "The white fellow said he still had my wristbands. I would give them away. Then guys in the community would tell me, 'We could not believe it when they said Brown had a Black quarterback. The only reason we started going to Brown games was because of you.'"
 
That was also true for members of Brown's basketball team. Phil Brown, who holds the Bears' program's career record for rebounding, hosted Coleman's recruiting trip and started a relationship where the two are "dear friends, close friends, almost blood-brother friends since then," he said.

"When Dennis was there, we had our cheering section," Brown said. "There was another quarterback who was kind of in contention, but we'd be cheering on the sidelines to put Dennis in the game. A lot of stuff was happening back then in the schools. It was a sense of pride for us."
 
Vaughn and Coleman became close friends after that 1973 game. Coleman stayed home in the summer of 1974 and would work out frequently with Vaughn and Bellizeare. The two quarterbacks reunited and chatted prior to the start of the 1974 Penn-Brown contest in Providence, R.I.
 
"When we walked onto the field, we hugged each other because we knew each other and we were friends," Vaughn said. "He told me his coach said, 'Why are you hugging those guys? They're the enemy. We're supposed to beat those guys' And Dennis said, 'Don't get me wrong, I want to kick their ass. But we're friends.' That story endeared me more to Dennis all these years after. That's the kind of friendship that we have."
 
Their friendship was on full display last February during the annual Ivy Football Association dinner in New York. ESPN veteran broadcaster Chris Berman, a student broadcaster at Brown when Coleman played, was the host and talked about the upcoming first-time Super Bowl matchup of two African-American quarterbacks, the Chiefs' Patrick Mahomes and the Eagles' Jalen Hurts.
 
"Then Chris got up and announced, 'Look, we had another moment 50 years ago, the first time it's ever happened in history, and the two men are here today,'" Coleman recalled. "Martin and I met in the middle of the auditorium, a thousand people, and we hugged and we cried. It was a three-minute standing ovation. It was special. Martin and I have a forever lifetime relationship as a result of that."
 
Vaughn would end his collegiate career in 1974 among Penn's career leaders in total offense (3,633 yards), passing yards (3,429 yards) and touchdown passes (29). Coleman was a dual-threat quarterback who showed his versatility as a wide receiver and as a return man. He started six games at quarterback in 1973, accounting for 442 yards of total offense and split time under center the following year. He led Brown to its first consecutive winning seasons since the 1940s.
 
 
Today, Coleman, who graduated from Georgetown Law School, is senior counsel at Ropes & Gray, a law firm based in Boston, where he leads its nationwide sports, media and entertainment practice and represents a variety of sports industry clients. He resides in East Greenwich, R.I. Vaughn, a Wharton School graduate who lives in Wynnewood, Pa., started out on Wall Street and worked in investment banking for 30 years. He currently works as a steel broker doing business development consulting.
 
Coleman has two sons and five grandsons. His daughter passed away in 2013. Vaughn has four children–two sons and two daughters–and two grandsons. His daughter, Mikayla, played college basketball at Notre Dame and now plays professionally in Poland.
 

Both men continue to mentor the younger generations. Coleman said that as an attorney he feels he has an obligation to "young men of color and big law." Vaughn said that "my gifts are not my own, so whatever I can give to better someone else, I'm grateful to be able to share it."
 
The two men have strong connections with their teammates in the Class of 1975. Don Clune, a wide receiver who was a year ahead of Vaughn at Penn, said when he meets up with Vaughn and fellow Quakers at get-togethers, "Some of the guys remember every play of every game they ever played in. I wish I could remember all that stuff. Back then, we were just football players playing.
 
"The game was a landmark occasion and I'm proud to have him as my quarterback that played," Clune said. "We worked well together. He was a great quarterback and he's a great guy."
 
As he reflects back on the last 50 years, Coleman likes the fact that the memories of that game, and the history and significance of what transpired, have remained alive.
 
"What started to happen was that every year for the past 20-something years at least, every February, Black History Month, there's an article written somewhere about that game," Coleman said. "It is written in books and everywhere. So Martin and I will get these calls. We generally talk sometime during the summer or I run into him somewhere down in Philly because I still go back to see my people.
 
"We will forever be joined at the hip because of that. We know now and we appreciate now that it was a very, very special time. That is something, at least in the Ivy League, that will never be done first again. We're proud of the Ivy League. You can have the SEC and the Big Ten but we still call ourselves pure football.
 
"Back then, when our country was just coming out of unrest, we were working our way out of Vietnam, trying to deal with Watts and the social unrest, civil unrest, fighting for voter rights and stuff, we did something special."