ATLANTA, Georgia -- Atlanta’s new Mercedes-Benz Stadium looks futuristic enough that it wouldn’t come as a 100 percent shock if it lifted off and began zipping around the Milky Way. On Saturday around midday, that look will become evocative for anyone who juxtaposes it with what happened 125 years ago.
Three weeks and two days before it stages the College Football Playoff national championship game, the four-month-old wonder with its otherworldly video board and gargantuan windows on the downtown skyline will stage the third Celebration Bowl, which christens the bowl season and throws back all at once. Per custom, it will pit the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference champion (North Carolina A&T) against the Southwestern Athletic Conference champion (Grambling), and it will sort out a national champion among historically black colleges and universities. ABC will air it at noon.
[This being almost 2018, the game will have “high-tech uniforms and cleats and more footballs than you know what to do with,” said John Grant, the bowl’s executive director. It also will come almost precisely 125 years since that game with one waterlogged football, when Biddle University of Charlotte traveled 43 miles to Livingstone College of Salisbury, N.C., when 43 miles was so much longer than today.
That game, in snowfall on Livingstone’s front lawn Dec. 27, 1892, became the first between historically black colleges, and Grant thinks of it repeatedly. He thinks of the “fans who came by wagons, who walked, who came on horseback.” He thinks of the fans who “came and stood around the field in snow to watch this game that they had never seen people like them play.” He said, “They had to be cold and wet.”
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