Alston's story at Penn State is worth remembering

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No one can explain with full authority why "The Express," the new biopic of doomed Syracuse football legend Ernie Davis, underperformed so badly at American box offices on the weekend.Whether film-goers who like football simply went to football games instead, whether Davis' tragic story is just too retro to resonate with young film audiences, or whether more esoteric market forces were at work, there is no escaping this: At $4.7 million in receipts, "The Express" gained barely a quarter of the financial yardage of "Beverly Hills Chihuahua."Storytellers and studio presidents have brainstormed to understand definitively what works on the big screen since before the invention of the screen pass, but the Davis narrative certainly had the look of a winner. A poor kid whose mom moved to Elmira, N.Y., in the late 1950s, Davis' singular running abilities led Syracuse to its only national championship in 1959 and made him the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy and the first to be the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft. Having transcended the endemic racism of his era with a cool dignity, he died from leukemia before playing a down as a professional.There is no evident dramatic flaw in that intensely compelling arc, so I don't know if "The Dave Alston Story" would have fared any better. Nobody's making a movie about Alston mind you, mostly because if Davis was often described as "forgotten" even before this weekend, Alston's story remains vastly unknown.The son of a Midland, Pa. minister, Alston enrolled at Penn State nine years before Joe Paterno got there, so yes, apparently, such a thing is possible.A premed major, the valedictorian of his high school class, and a tailback on Penn State's unbeaten freshman team, Alston's athleticism and quiet confidence moved even the encrusted football students of the day into spasms of hyperbole. Bob Higgins, Penn State's head coach, compared him to Jim Thorpe and Paul Robeson. That fall -- still some 30 years before freshmen were allowed to play varsity ball -- Alston ran for eight touchdowns, threw for four more, drop-kicked all of the extra points, and was said to run 100 yards in 10 seconds. Magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers put his name in sentences adjacent to Red Grange.That it was all based on just a few afternoons of freshmen football did not discourage Esquire from projecting Alston as the nation's top sophomore of 1942 in its August editions, and there was nothing to stop him from becoming the first African American to play varsity football at Penn State.Except his tonsils.On the morning of Aug. 15, a Saturday, Alston walked into Centre County Hospital for a long-arranged tonsillectomy at 9 a.m. By 9:30, he was resting comfortably after what is perhaps civilization's most routine operation, dating to 1,000 B.C. in India. But at 10 o'clock, a blood clot formed, blocking circulation to his lungs and collapsing them.At 11:45, he was dead."The passing of Dave Alston was an unspeakable loss," Higgins said. "Penn State has lost a student in whom it was very proud."In photos of the day, Alston's gentle face seems at odds with his sleek and muscled 6-foot-1, 200-pound anatomy. He's wearing No. 13.Curiously, Penn State's coaches told the student newspaper at the time that Alston was not having any difficulty with his tonsils. You might speculate that Alston was so interested in medicine -- he told friends what he wanted most was to be "a good doctor" -- that he was almost on a kind of field trip into a contemporary medical ethos in which tonsillectomies were about as threatening as a shampoo and nearly as common. In the middle of the previous century, nearly 2 million tonsillectomies were performed on children and young adults in the United States. By 1987, that figure had declined to 260,000.In the sketchy Alston history, another explanation posits that in a spring scrimmage against Navy his freshman year, he suffered internal injuries. Teammates remember Alston leaving the scrimmage with an eye injury, but other accounts have him being punished by "a swarm of Navy tacklers." Prior internal injuries were mentioned in the heartbreaking search for answers to why a 20-year-old Adonis could be felled by tonsillectomy, but nothing definitive was given to history.Four years later, Wally Triplett of suburban Philadelphia became the first African American to play varsity football and to earn a letter at Penn State. Like Davis, Triplett handled the fractious racial politics of the day with immense dignity.The people who knew Alston would tell you he would have done the same, and who knows what else?E-mail Gene Collier at gcollier(at)post-gazette.com. (Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)