Byron R. White was elected a member of the All American Football Team in 1937 at the University of Colorado and in 1954 was named to the National Football Hall of Fame.

Bill McCartney remembers when he was an assistant football coach at Michigan how honored he, his fellow coaches and the players were when President Gerald Ford visited the team in the 1970s.

They felt privileged and proud knowing that someone who had been in their shoes as a Wolverine player went on to run the most powerful country in the world.

It's partly because of that experience that McCartney, the head coach at the University of Colorado from 1982-1994, is able to put into perspective how special CU sports star turned U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron "Whizzer" White's life was.

"Some guys have played college football and have gone on and been President," McCartney said Monday. "But they weren't All-Americans. (Ford) wasn't the caliber (of football player) as Byron White. Here's an example of a guy who's extremely talented and motivated, and he gave it away to serve his country. It's probably not widely known and it should be."

For those who don't already know White's story, Fox Sports Net's "Spotlight: Whizzer White," which debuts at 9:30 tonight, should offer an interesting peak into the life of the man proclaimed on CU's athleticWeb site as the school's "greatest Buffalo ever" when he died in 2002.

The show, which will be narrated by McCartney, will chronicle White's life and feature interviews with his son Barney and daughter Nancy, former Colorado Congresswoman Pat Schroeder and White's former neighbor and NFL placekicker Nick Lowery, among others. It will be re-aired six times in July.

Aside from leading the nation in rushing and the Buffs to their first bowl game in 1937, White was a .400 hitter on the baseball team and a four-year starter on the basketball team, which earned an NIT berth in 1938. He was also the student body president and a Rhodes Scholar.

Courtesy CU

Justice Byron White was named to the University of Colorado's All Century team honoring the first 100 years of Colorado football on Nov. 4, 1989. Colorado beat Nebraska 27-21. White is pictured with former Assistant Athletic Director Rick George.

"He's an extraordinary example of everything student-athlete should represent," said McCartney, who said he met White while coaching at CU but didn't really know him.

After his time at CU, White, a Wellington native, went on to twice lead the NFL in rushing while working on his law degree at Yale in the offseason. He also earned a Bronze Star as a Naval intelligence officer in World War II and had a career as a corporate lawyer before becoming the youngest Supreme Court nominee ever at age 44.

"He lived a storybook life almost before he was 30 years old," said Dennis Hutchinson, a Fairview High School graduate who was also interviewed for the FSN show.

Hutchinson, a University of Chicago law professor who served as White's law clerk for one year in the 1970s, wrote "The Man Who Once Was Whizzer White: A Portrait of Justice Byron R. White" in 1998.

In one excerpt from the show, Hutchinson explains how White despised the nickname Whizzer, given to him by a Denver sports writer, because he felt it trivialized him.

"He was a man of enormous ability, discipline, integrity," Hutchinson told the Camera. "He could be curt at times, I think in part due to an impatience with those who didn't match him in those qualities. But he was a man of very tender generosity to many, although that story is not often told."