 Walt Frazier, an esteemed high school quarterback who received scholarship offers to play college football, chose to play basketball in college instead, believing he had no future as a black quarterback when his time came to play professionally (the move paid off, as Frazier would have a Hall of Fame basketball career).However, despite the NFL's segregationist policies, after the league merged with the more tolerant AFL in 1970, more than 30% of the merged league's players were African American.The American Football League had the first black placekicker in U.S. professional football, Gene Mingo of the Denver Broncos (Mingo's primary claim to fame, however, was as a running back, and was only secondarily a placekicker); and the first black regular starting quarterback of the modern era, Marlin Briscoe of the Denver Broncos.