The first Gophers football game I attended was in November 1954, a month after turning 9. Bob McNamara was the hero of the Gophers' 22-20 victory over Iowa.
That gives me six decades as a Gophers observer, and the greatest player in that time was Bobby Lee Bell of Shelby, N.C. Bell was a star tackle on back-to-back Rose Bowl teams (seasons of 1960 and 1961).
The coverage of Bell's graduation last week from the university — 52 years after he left for his Hall of Fame career with the Kansas City Chiefs — got me thinking:
How great were the '60s for big-time athletes around here?
Tom Brown was the Outland Trophy winner as the nation's outstanding lineman in 1960. Bell was the winner in 1962. Carl Eller was the runner-up in Outland voting to Texas' Scott Appleton in 1963.
There was Sandy Stephens as the pioneering quarterback, and the great two-way back Bill Munsey, and later in the decade, Aaron Brown as a tremendous end and Jim Carter as a Gophers all-timer at fullback.
The last gasps of segregated schools in the South also enabled the Gophers to bring in Lou Hudson (1963-66) from North Carolina as the school's greatest basketball player ever. And his running mate, Archie Clark, belongs on any Gophers' top 10.
The Twins arrived in 1961 and four of the top five players in franchise history played at Met Stadium in that first decade: Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Rod Carew and Jim Kaat. Only Kirby Puckett was missing in the '60s.
