Memories of ole Blue and Gray will live on forever

Eddie Shannon put his hand on his chin and dropped his head as he sat in his dining room. Then his head popped up quickly.

“We had a lot of great athletes,” said Shannon, now in his mid-80s. Shannon is a legendary coach and trainer in Manatee County who coached a boatload of legendary players at Lincoln Memorial High School from 1955 to 1969.

The all-black high school gave way to integration following the 1969 school year.

Imagine if today, you took every black athlete from grades 7-12 in Manatee County and put them in one school.

They were the Lincoln Memorial Trojans.

Blue and Gray forever.

For five days starting Wednesday, former Trojans students from every class will celebrate the school’s 60th anniversary, reliving the glory days of their cherished school with an all-class reunion.

The talent within the athletic program was ridiculous.

The football team had so much talent, the Trojans could have fielded three or four good teams.

They beat teams by lopsided scores like 89-0. And it could have been 100.

“Raymond Bellamy caught the ball and threw it down, because he said he didn’t want to beat them like that,” Shannon said.

There was Bellamy, who became the first football player to break the color barrier at a university south of the Mason-Dixon Line when he accepted a scholarship to play for the University of Miami in the late 1960s.

There was Henry Lawrence, who became the first player from Manatee County to be selected in the first round of the NFL Draft when the Oakland Raiders took him with the 19th-overall selection in 1974. Lawrence was in awe of some of his teammates while playing for the Trojans, before switching to Manatee High when the schools integrated after the ’69 school year.

“Man, those guys were awesome,” said Lawrence, who played defensive end for Lincoln Memorial. “I played, but those guys were good. Willie Lee Jones was the best linebacker I saw play on any level. That man was bad.”

This coming from a man who blocked many of the greatest linebackers in NFL history and morphed into a two-time Pro Bowl tackle and three-time Super Bowl champion.

As for Jones, it was common for players to quit the team after absorbing a crushing blow during practice from the linebacker, a 1968 graduate of Lincoln Memorial.

After a standout college career at the University of Tampa, Jones was a late-round draft pick of the Miami Dolphins in 1972, but he bolted to the Canadian Football League because “the CFL offered more money,” he said.

“Out of five years of playing varsity football,” said Jones, who became a starter in eighth grade. “I can recall only one or two games that we lost. I attribute that to Coach Shannon. He taught us how to be real men on and off of the field.”

And Neil “Chip” Nelson was a man among boys on the basketball court.

Nelson, all of 6-foot-1, guarded the opposing team’s biggest player. He referred to the tall guys as “trees,” and he held his own while playing center.