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NOTE: I am posting a serial about Pro Football Hall of Famer Fritz Pollard, star of the Akron Pros and first Black coach in the NFL. This is Part 7 of 13. Prior posts may be read by visiting my my website blog at https://stevelovewriter.com/blog/ or my public Facebook page Stevelovewriter.com
In October 1917, according to the Akron Beacon Journal, Fritz Pollard and Suey Welch, manager of the Akron Indians professional football team, communicated via telegram and Pollard pledged to join the team. “Tell Akron fans for me to be patient,” Pollard instructed Suey. “Am trying to arrange my affairs to leave Providence for Akron immediately.” In addition to joining the Indians to create what the newspaper anticipated would be “greatest of professional backfield combinations,” Pollard also was to work at a rubber factory. The arrangement never came to fruition, and it was two years before Pollard landed in Akron.
In the meantime, the ineligible Pollard dropped out of Brown and began military service, directing the army’s YMCA unit at Camp Meade, Maryland. The assignment was, at least in part, the result of the government’s effort to address growing racial conflict that had escalated into rioting and deaths. Pollard succeeded, perhaps using his athletic celebrity to fit in with both white and Black officers—he was an enlisted man in a special category—and was reassigned in 1918 to be physical director of the Student Army Training Corps (SATC) at Lincoln University near Philadelphia, one of the older Black colleges in America where his brother Leslie had coached before his death in a 1915 accident. The job offered Pollard his first coaching experience.
He also enrolled as a part-time student at the University of Pennsylvania, leaving his wife and their growing family—daughter Gwendolyn was born in 1918—with friends in New York City. Living in Philadelphia, Pollard took classes at Penn in the morning and then boarded a train for the trip to Lincoln, forty miles away in Oxford. He took over a team run by a student manager.
Cocky as always, Pollard predicted he could make something of this amateurish set-up, even though he had no experience and no intention of becoming a fulltime football coach. Using the double-wing formation he had learned at Brown, Pollard innovated and created a wide-open offense he would later use in Akron with success. He scrimmaged with his players to teach them, hands on, defensive skills. The team finished 1918 unbeaten and unscored upon.
When the war ended, Pollard remained at Lincoln to coach for $50 a month. He needed more income to support his family and attend Penn Dental School. He took advantage of contacts he had made as a summer entrepreneur at Narragansett Pier and of his celebrity in the Black community to secure a bond sales position with a large Black financial institution. He even believed he could join the Penn team. Who wouldn’t want an All-American back? Turned out, Penn didn’t. He could attend dental school but not play football for Penn in racially torn America of 1919. When that hope was dashed, he kept his promise to his then imagined fans in Akron.
Beyond the continued interest in Pollard of those managing Akron’s pro football team, in particular Frank Nied, the insulting way the Penn players treated him prompted the intended response. Pollard quit. Was it the result of racism? Of course. But Pollard also felt entitled. “Here I was, an All-American,” he told Black writer Carl Nesfield, “and these guys were looking for me to kiss their behinds to play football with them. Hell, I was doing them a favor by coming out for the team.” With Lincoln’s season winding down, Pollard became in November 1919 a commuter to Akron for the final games of that postwar season, including those against bitter Ohio League rivals, Massillon and Canton. The pro game may have gotten its start in western Pennsylvania but it was in Northeast Ohio that it took hold for the long haul, helmets and shoulder pads optional.
If Pollard’s Akron welcome felt off-putting, it was nothing compared to what Massillon planned when it learned Pollard would be in the Akron backfield at Goodrich Field. The Akron Evening Times reported Akron expected “to pile up a big score” with Pollard, no matter the low-scoring era as evidenced by Massillon’s 9-6 victory in the teams’ first 1919 meeting. The Akron Beacon Journal noted “dire threats have come from the [Massillon] Tiger camp of just what they are going to do to the little colored chap.” The precise language from the steel-tough town of Massillon was, I suspect, more direct and racist. Pollard did not know what help to expect from teammates who, like their counterparts in the rubber shops, had migrated to Akron from the South for work. Theirs suddenly included blocking for a Black man.
Pollard was the sixth African American to play professionally and the second in Akron, where Charles “Doc” Young, a halfback from the city, played from 1906 to 1908 and in 1911. Young came by his nickname honestly; reared in the Akron Children’s Home, when he wasn’t playing football, Young aided an Akron physician.
When Joe Horrigan wrote a story for the Professional Football Researchers Association publication, The Coffin Corner, titled “Early Black Professionals,” he included Young, but not Pollard, among the pre-NFL African American players. The forerunner five begins with Charles Follis, a halfback with the Shelby, Ohio, Athletic Club from 1902 through 1906 and ends with Gideon “Charlie” Smith, who played one game with the Canton Bulldogs in 1915. Pollard heads the list of thirteen blacks who played in the American Professional Football Association (National Football League, beginning in 1922) between 1920 and 1933, after which the NFL owners excluded men of the race that would dominate the league after it was again allowed to play in 1946. [By 2018, more than 70 percent of NFL players were Black].
Hardly anyone knows more about NFL history than Horrigan, whom I got to know in press boxes during the glory years of the Jim Kelley Buffalo Bills. Horrigan’s father was the longtime public relations director for the Bills, and Joe would drive from Canton to Buffalo for home games to work in the press box. Football winter weather that could turn such a trip into a life-and-death adventure did not stop Horrigan; from the Hall of Fame in my backyard to Super Bowls in far-flung locales, Horrigan was always there, and I gained utmost respect for him.
I would, however, have included Pollard among the pre-NFL pioneers as he joined the Akron Indians late in 1919 when they were in the Ohio League, pre-American Professional Football Association and, of course, before he was the NFL’s premier Black player between 1920 and 1926, the majority of those years in Akron, as all-purpose back and co-coach or coach, a first for Blacks. But Horrigan is the expert. He served the Hall of Fame in multiple capacities over the years before rising to executive director.
In describing the process of ferreting out Follis’ presence on Shelby’s 1902 team to John Seaburn, my colleague at the Akron Beacon Journal, and Milt Roberts, Horrigan referred to a team photo that offered visual and heart-rending evidence. It called to mind Pollard’s isolation when he joined the Akron team. Horrigan described Follis as “offset from the rest” of the team, something to which Pollard could relate. Shelby’s promoter, a man who must have been like Akron’s Frank Nied and Art Ranney, stood behind Follis, supportive white hand on black shoulder. How reassuring that must have felt to Follis.
Pollard needed such support, especially from Nied. When he took the field against Massillon, ambivalence about his presence roiled the team. Should it block for Pollard or stand down and let Massillon carry out its threat against this Black man?
The latter had precedent, though halfback Henry McDonald, who came to Canton in 1917 with an All-Syracuse team, remembered it as the singular racial incident in his seven-year pre-NFL career, which is surprising. On one McDonald carry, Earle “Greasy” Neale, a member of Pro Football Hall of Fame, snatched up McDonald and hurled him out of bounds where Neale shared feelings he had come by in West Virginia. “Black is black and white is white where I come from and the two don’t mix,” Neale warned McDonald.
So many West Virginians came to Akron to work in the rubber shops the joke was that Akron was the capital of West Virginia. McDonald could fight and was ready to mix it up when the leader of Neale’s team, Jim Thorpe, stepped in. “We’re here to play football,” McDonald said Thorpe told Neale, who got the message. “I never had any trouble after that,” McDonald said. “Thorpe’s word was the law on that field.”
Pollard could have used a sheriff as strong as Thorpe to set his new Akron teammates straight. As it turned out, actions had to speak louder than words against Massillon. “True it is that Tigers galore would pile on him every down in which he carried the ball,” the Akron Beacon Journal reported, “but Fritz would always come up smiling.” He was not smiling about the 13-6 loss, however, one that might have been averted had his teammates not become, as Pollard feared, ghost blockers.
“Had Pollard been given a cleared way in his end runs he would have likely turned the tide,” the Beacon Journal concluded. Pollard did score Akron’s only touchdown, after brilliant punt returns, memorable receptions, and runs against all odds. “When the rest of the guys saw I was doing okay without their help, they decided to do their part,” Pollard told Carl Nesfield. “I had few problems with the other players from then on.”
Even with their prejudices his teammates recognized and respected the ability to put customers in the seats (8,500 for Pollard’s first game) and points on the scoreboard. They would need more than six of them against Thorpe and the Canton Bulldogs in Pollard’s third professional game. As a warm-up the Indians had beaten the Wheeling (West Virginia) 20-3 before the 1919 smallest home crowd. The discerning early Akron sports fan could not be cajoled into throwing hard-earned money at a second-rate foe. They wanted the Canton Bulldogs.
NEXT—FRITZ POLLARD BLOG POST PART 9: Mr. Pollard meets Mr. Thorpe
