The Year's Best Sports Writing 2023 by Richard Deitsch

Author:Richard Deitsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Triumph Books
Published: 2023-08-06T17:42:48+00:00

A Legacy of Exclusion

JERRY BREWER

From The Washington Post • September 21, 2022

Fritz Pollard died waiting for the NFL to change. He lived until he was 92, and that was not long enough. For his last 65 years, he yearned to see another person like him: a Black man, valued and empowered, with the title of head coach.

In 1921, when the star running back also coached the Akron Pros, professional football seemed ahead of the racist times. It chose not to stay that way. Sixty-eight years elapsed before Art Shell became the second African American to hold the position in 1989. Pollard had succumbed to pneumonia three years earlier, in pioneering solitude, never witnessing that dreamy day when Black minds would be as appreciated as Black athleticism.

“He was waiting for the time the NFL became fully racially unbiased,” said his grandson Stephen Towns, a periodontist who lives in Indianapolis. “He was waiting for leadership that reflected what he saw on the field. But it never happened. It was a real sore spot for him.”

He was Coach Pollard 26 years before Jackie Robinson burst through baseball’s color barrier. Yet more than a century later, the NFL has trusted just 26 Black men to direct its teams, a total inflated by five interim coaches. As the 2022 season unfolds, the sport is enmeshed in a racial discrimination lawsuit and fails to meet the most meager standards for coaching diversity.

The NFL never integrated. Not fully, at least. Not properly. Unlike baseball, there is no clear before and after in its history. It took a winding path of organic integration, segregation and reintegration that can be trimmed to a truth: With its actions, the NFL has always placed conditions on inclusion. Exclusion has always been the point.

It is the tormenting legacy of a league that could have set a standard for inclusion. When Pollard joined what was then called the American Professional Football Association in 1920, he endured racist taunts from the crowds and cheap shots from opponents. But he also was the sport’s highest-paid employee, earning $1,500 per game. For a while, his speed and intelligence prevailed over bigotry. Then the fledgling league, which was struggling to compete for relevance with baseball, boxing, college football and horse racing, aspired to become what it is today: a massive and indomitable force, this nation’s greatest sporting addiction.

The NFL kept out African Americans from 1934 to 1946, a capitulation to White players who complained that the handful of Black players in the league were taking away jobs. After World War II, it reintegrated while reinforcing classic, biased beliefs about who could play where on the field and strengthening a Whites-only leadership sentiment, amplifying old prejudices as its profile rose. Those decisions combined with a tradition of inheritance and nepotism to create a caste system that still plagues progress 101 years after Pollard provided a model for equality and meritocracy.

His obituary began exactly how he feared it would: Frederick Douglass Pollard, the only Black head coach of an NFL team … He was a trailblazer who never saw fresh footprints on his path.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.