Overview:
A.C. Cunningham passes away barely a year after his famous brother, Sam
The shadow cast by an older brother can reach as far back as biblical times.
Abel, the second son of Adam and Eve, felt the world’s first big chill within the shade of first-born Cain.
Anthony Cunningham was as able as his own older brother, Sam, an All-America fullback at USC and the all-time leading rusher of the NFL’s New England Patriots.
A.C., as he was best known, was as fast and strong and dynamic as any linebacker who ever played football at Santa Barbara High School and Santa Barbara City College.
Receivers shuddered whenever Cunningham’s coaches moved him back into pass coverage. He was the 6-foot-1, 220-pound steel girder of his team’s nickel defense.
“A.C. was literally scary as a safety,” said Scott Cathcart, a teammate in high school and junior college who would later play tight end at Fresno State. “I never saw anybody at Fresno or San José or San Diego State or anywhere close to what he was in that position: big, fast — I mean, like NFL-level fast — and nightmare vicious in a game with no contact restrictions.
“Put it this way: Any receiver who ever played against him and said he wasn’t intimidated to some degree is a liar.”
A.C.’s star also shined on the track oval and baseball diamond. He had earned the respect of every Dons’ athlete and coach by the time he made the Walk of the Dons at Peabody Stadium on graduation day in 1973.
But somewhere along the line — a family line that included another NFL star in youngest brother Randall — A.C.’s legacy never spread beyond the South Coast.
He made 27 tackles for Boise State during the fall of 1976 and was then sent home before the start of the 1977 season by old-school coaches who bristled when he asserted his independence.
A.C. Cunningham returned to Santa Barbara and settled into 45 years of relative obscurity as a diesel mechanic. His death on New Year’s Day — coming just 19 days before his 68th birthday — drew none of the national attention that Sam’s passing had stirred just a year earlier last September.
His loss, however, was felt just as deeply by those who knew him, especially his wife Melinda; his children (Anthony Lewis, Natasha, Shakari, Maryeia, Cheroke, Elijah and Kianna), and his grandchildren (Judah Melinda, Kace Anthony and Solomon Cunningham).
A.C. became better known as “Pops” to the family and neighborhood kids who loved him.
“He touched so many lives and supported so many kids who needed guidance and advice in our neighborhood during adolescence and adulthood,” said Natasha, his oldest daughter. “My dad always told the truth even if you didn’t want to hear it.
“What an exceptional man, husband, father and grandfather!”
Big Footsteps to Follow
Older brother Sam had been known as the gregarious Cunningham. He’d run you over and then ask how your mom was doing as he helped you up and dusted off your shoulder pads.
“I don’t know anybody who didn’t absolutely love Sam,” said Mike Moropoulos, his defensive coach at Santa Barbara High.
Sam Cathcart — Scott’s dad and the Dons’ head coach — once told me that Sam Cunningham “had the best attitude of any kid you could imagine.”
But brother A.C. appeared to be as brooding as he was bruising. He’d knock you down and then warn you about running another pattern his way.
We were teammates on the club’s traveling, tackle football team. I was a skinny, ninth-grade slotback, although I looked more like the cartoon character in that old Charles Atlas ad who gets sand kicked into his face.
A.C. was one of the eighth-graders on our team — a linebacker who looked more like … well, Charles Atlas.
He didn’t actually kick sand in my face the first time I ran a slant into his area during an intrasquad scrimmage. It was more like he fed it to me as he plowed me into the barren dirt.
His brother, Sam, was a senior at Santa Barbara High that fall, setting a school record with 19 touchdowns. I learned all about him from newspaper articles and television highlights.
But I really didn’t get to know A.C. much at all that season. He stuck with his circle of friends and I clung to mine.
I was a blond Mesa Rat who lived a block from the blue Pacific. He was black and lived with his brothers and parents, Mabel and Sam Sr., on Cacique Street near the railroad tracks. His dad had just a short walk to his job as a redcap and porter for the then-Southern Pacific Railroad.
The Son Also Rises
Our paths parted after that season, with A.C. following his brother’s mighty cleat-steps to Santa Barbara High and I taking my own brother’s route to Bishop Diego.
It took another 43 years for us to have our first real conversation.
I approached him during the fall of 2011 after interviewing his son, Cheroke, following the 52nd Annual Big Game between Santa Barbara and San Marcos high schools.
Cheroke, a sophomore running back, had been presented with the Gary Blades Memorial Trophy after being named as the player of the game. Two years later, he would become the first Don to ever win the award twice.
A.C. smiled softly behind a bushy, gray beard when I said my headline should read something like, “Star Trek, the Next Generation.”
“He doesn’t need that put upon him,” he replied. “I don’t want him to struggle with that the way I did at his age. I was always being compared to Sam.
“I was always being told how I wasn’t doing something the way Sam would do it.”
Randall had the same cautionary tale for his children, Randall II and Vashti, both of whom grew up to become world-class high jumpers.
“There’s pressure on my kids, and there was pressure on us as kids after Sam,” he said.
Randall, a quarterback who played in four Pro Bowls during his 16-year career in the NFL, was just two years younger than his other brother, Bruce. They even played football together at UNLV.
Bruce, a defensive back, took it personally whenever Randall was booed by the fickle fans of Philadelphia or criticized by a know-it-all media.
“All the warnings my father gave us — about developing a skill and not waiting for people to give you a break or to like you, because they wouldn’t — were over our heads,” Bruce told Sports Illustrated in a 1983 cover story.
“We didn’t understand. It’s all clear now.”
Turning the Tide in the South
Sam had become bigger than life when he was inadvertently thrust into the civil rights movement on Sept. 12, 1970 — just as A.C. was starting his football career at Santa Barbara High.
Making his own varsity debut at USC, Sam rushed for 135 yards and two touchdowns to lead the Trojans to a 42-21 victory over an all-white Alabama team at Birmingham’s Legion Field.
Crimson Tide coach Bear Bryant held up Cunningham as an example to the people of Alabama of why blacks should no longer be excluded from playing on his team.
The next season, running back Wilbur Jackson and defensive end John Mitchell became the first blacks to suit up for Bryant.
His assistant coach, Jerry Claiborne, was widely quoted as saying, “Sam Cunningham did more to integrate Alabama in 60 minutes than Martin Luther King did in 20 years.”
Cunningham said Bryant told him something similar — “That I changed the way of thinking down there” — when they bumped into each other at a celebrity golf tournament a decade later.
That would serve as the ultimate irony for A.C. He said his relationship with the coaches at Boise State soured when he began asserting his ethnicity by growing dreadlocks.
The straw that broke the camel’s back, A.C. said, was actually the horse he rode onto the practice field.
I joked that if he had just gone to USC like Sam, the Trojans would’ve saddled him up on their mascot Traveler and sent him on a few victory laps around the Los Angeles Coliseum.
“Aww,” A.C. replied, “they just wanted to send me home.”
But Santa Barbara wasn’t such a bad landing place. He was proud to show up to the newly renovated Peabody Stadium on a sunny day in July 2021 for the dedication of a track that was being named for all four Cunningham brothers.
Sam was seriously ill and unable to join his three brothers. He died just two months later.
A.C. returned to Peabody Stadium for the memorial service just two months after that and yanked on a shirt with his brother’s likeness on the front. He said he was proud to wear his brother’s colors.
The shadow was long gone at the old playing field. A.C. had let the sun shine in.
