Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
When Fritz Pollard became Brown University’s greatest player, he sometimes felt as if he were all alone
NOTE: I am posting a serial concerning Pro Football Hall of Famer Fritz Pollard, star of the Akron Pros and first Black coach in the NFL. This is Part 5 of 13. Prior posts may be found by visiting my public Facebook page Stevelovewriter.com or on my website blog at https://stevelovewriter.com/blog/
Last of more than fifty players to report to the Brown team, Fritz Pollard received a hodgepodge of oversized, worn-out equipment that would have been more appropriate for the lowliest scrub. He soon came to understand that to Coach Edward N. Robinson, who had been a decorated Brown player, he was less than that.
The team, a month into practice, had bonded and Robinson was loath to allow a little, cocky, Black newcomer to wreck this chemistry. Robinson not only did not include him among the varsity starters or substitutes for scrimmages but he also relegated him to the far end of the field to practice punting. Not exactly how a player who saw himself as “maybe the best darn halfback ever to come out of Chicago” expected to be treated.
Pollard’s self-assured style turned off teammates. When he went to the showers, others scurried out. When he boarded the trolley that transported the team back to campus, the white players jumped off, preferring to walk to riding with a Black. With his cockiness, Pollard may have reminded teammates of the most famous Black athlete of the day.
The year 1915 ended Jack Johnson’s reign as first Black heavyweight boxing champion. He offended white America by being as great with his fists as Pollard was on his feet.
In 1908 Johnson took the title from Tommy Burns, who reluctantly accepted a fight with the man who famously became known as the “black menace.” Former champion John L. Sullivan criticized Burns for succumbing to a $30,000 win-or-lose offer, largest prize ever for a fight. It ended segregation of the ring and risked a Black man proving his superiority to a white inside the ropes. “Shame on the money-mad champion!” Sullivan said. The attitude, reflective of the time’s racial enmity, sparked a search for a “Great White Hope” to regain the title.
Former champion James L. Jeffries ended a six-year retirement in 1910 to defend in a most symbolic manner the superiority of the white race. He earned a big payday but said: “I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving a white man is better than a Negro.”
He had bought into his role against a Black who taunted whites in the ring and at ringside, no doubt as he was taunted. Johnson knocked Jeffries out in the fifteenth round of “The Fight of the Century” and racial strife ensued leading to at least eight deaths.
Benjamin G. Rader’s conclusion in American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports, was: “To many whites, Johnson represented an enormous threat to the entire superstructure of racial segregation.” The threat extended beyond the violence of the ring and included sex.
Johnson had dared marry three white women, the mother of one, Lucille Cameron, accusing him of kidnapping her daughter and taking her to another state for immoral purposes, a violation of the federal Mann Act. After Lucille refused to cooperate, authorities charged Johnson with another Mann Act violation from a prior involvement.
An all-white jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to a year and a day in prison. It did not matter the incident occurred before the Mann Act became law. Johnson fled with Lucille, first to Canada and then on to France. He returned to serve his sentence only after losing his heavyweight title to Jess Willard, a white Kansas cowboy who required 26 rounds to knock out Johnson.
More than 70 years after his death in 1946 and following failed attempts to gain a posthumous pardon for Johnson during from presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Donald Trump granted the pardon on May 24, 2018.
Obama backed away, in no small part because of evidence of Johnson’s violence toward women, including first wife Etta, who killed herself in 1912. It took a make-believe white champion, Sylvester Stallone, to convince Trump to address a racial injustice. The irony besides “Rocky”? Trump had damned and cursed mostly Black NFL players for their pre-game acts of protest against racial/social injustice and police violence. Instead of addressing these issues, Trump shifted the focus to the fact the protests—taking a knee, raising a clenched fist—that occurred during the National Anthem, a red herring the president appeared to believe gave license to a divisive and racist response.
Akron has long been a community with an ability to identify racism and respond to it, if in starts and fits. When in the same summer week of 2018 the city’s greatest athletic hero, National Basketball Association legend LeBron James, took center stage to open, with Akron Public Schools, the I Promise School that he inspired and helped to launch and pay for, Trump publicly attacked James on Twitter. The response was swift and far-reaching.
James had criticized Trump for using sports to divide America, and Trump returned fire. He questioned James intelligence, claiming only his CNN interviewer, Don Lemon, the “dumbest man on television,” could make “LeBron look smart, which isn’t easy to do.”
Both Lemon and James are African Americans. Trump threw another burning effigy on the fire when he added, “I like Mike!” referring to Michael Jordan, former NBA great and latter-day owner of Charlotte’s team, with whom James is often compared. Jordan stood with James: “I support L.J. He’s doing a great job for his community.” Dan Rather, former CBS News anchor, concurred: “It’s a disgrace. It’s racist,” Rather wrote. “And it’s the product of petty but dangerous hatreds.”
Even the president’s wife Melania supported what James is doing for Akron children who have difficult childhoods, as James had, and need extra support to reach the educational level of which they are capable. Melania Trump said: “It looks like LeBron James is working to do good things on behalf of our next generation…” The first lady even offered to visit the school.
Akron observers blanched at Trump’s racism. “I think there is no question, it’s a racist tweet … and he did it on purpose … because he knows it riles up a segment of his most rabid followers who are racist,” David B. Cohen told the Akron Beacon Journal.
Cohen teaches political science at the University of Akron’s Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics. John Kasich, then Republican governor of Ohio and no fan of Trump, tweeted: “Rather than criticizing @KingJames, we should be celebrating him for his charity work and efforts to help kids.” Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan, from the other side of the aisle and closer to home, concluded: “He is more than ‘just a kid from Akron’ [as James famously wrote in an essay announcing his return to the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2014], he is a role model and an inspiration for our young people looking for hope and a brighter future. LeBron knows who he is and where he comes from. Respect is earned and LeBron has certainly earned it from me.”
Fritz Pollard was likewise degraded, called names and knew more than his share of injustice, both racial and sporting, during his days at Brown and then in Akron and other pro football cities. His mistreatment sent a message he answered in the most effective way a player can: He did not try to win hearts so much as win games, a shared goal of his teammates.
As an athlete who was a part of a team, Pollard had a unique advantage over Jack Johnson and anyone in an individual sport. His performance could enhance that of his teammates and help to produce victory, the shared goal.
Of course, disadvantages also existed: Pollard had to depend on the support—blocking—of teammates and convince coaches to give him an opportunity. Even when he proved himself in the toughest of circumstances some of his Brown teammates, including those made to look silly as they tried to tackle him, threatened to kill Pollard on the practice field. They continued to assault him with the N-word. And his coach held him out of the first game he could have played, using the eligibility questions to cloak what looked like the racism that later in his life Pollard acknowledged had affected him.
He was prepared to return home to Chicago when he got his chance, along with another freshman, quarterback Clair Purdy. Purdy believed, like Pollard, that he had not been playing due to discrimination, in his case because he was Catholic. Pollard told Jay Barry that Purdy claimed, “they don’t want Catholics and niggers on this team.”
In the end coaches who did not want to lose their jobs turned to Purdy and Pollard when it became apparent that even against a weak Williams College team the Brown offense lacked firepower. Purdy had promised that if they got into a game, no one else would run the ball but them. Pollard scored three of Brown’s five touchdowns and had another cancelled by penalty in a 33-0 victory that established Purdy and him as starters, regardless of race or religion.
That status, according to biographer John Carroll, was soon threatened by the father of starting left guard Wallace Wade, another son of the South. His father visited Providence intent on taking his son home rather than allow him to play with a Black.
Pollard did not know whether Wade’s father changed his mind after talking to Coach Robinson or Wallace simply refused to leave, a stance that would have been so brave I want to believe it happened that way. With both Wade and Pollard in the lineup, and of course, Purdy, the scene was set for Pollard to establish a nonpareil reputation against Eastern football powerhouses—Yale, Harvard, and Princeton.
FRITZ POLLARD, BLOG POST PART 6: A Rose-Bowling Brown Did Go
