Pro Football Hall of Fame Photo via Brown University

A Note from Steve Love: This serialization comes from a long essay on Pro Football Hall of Famer Fritz Pollard who played for the Akron Pros at the dawn of the NFL. It was  intended as part of a book about quarterbacks I have written about and admired for more than simply their ability to play the game. That book veered into what became Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart. Since this website/blog exists as a result of that book, I have broken the Pollard essay into segments, at least two of which I will publish here each week, along with occasional other writing. It also could still end up in the book originally imagined.

When Fritz Pollard’s train chugged into the Akron station in the early hours of Sunday, November 9, 1919, no one cheered. That was because no one even cared enough to greet him. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Though in a strange place, it all had to feel somehow familiar. Pollard knew the score. Akron was like towns near Pollard’s Chicago home where he first gained fame playing high school football; it was like Providence, Rhode Island, where at Brown University he established his legend; it was like so many places that dotted the American landscape in the first decades of the twentieth century—and still do. Akron did not open its arms and embrace Pollard. When he first tried to convince a cab driver to take him to his new employer, the city’s professional football team, he could not find one willing.

Pollard knew why. He was Black man in a white town.

As always, race hovered over Pollard’s life like a dark cloud, revealing him as stronger and better than those who discriminated against him and wished to harm him.

Was he frightened by what he may have sensed on that train platform? Did the reception raise doubts about continuing his football career in the hardscrabble pro game considered inferior to that of haughty colleges, including Brown, from which he had come? Who knows.

I do know this: Pollard was reared by parents and followed siblings, especially brothers, who had taught him not to back down when his dignity was at stake; still, he choose his fights, given racial realities of the times. Pollard was a good son, brother, and learner, which may explain the contradictions found in the oppression he endured.

I wish I could know the heart and mind of this man I never met, a man from whom I am separated by years and race and countless lesser differences. Yet I include Pollard among quarterbacks who have most affected me. Though he played quarterback on occasion at more than one of his professional stops, Pollard was regarded as a running back—single- or double-wing tailback or wingback.

He described his position simply “a back.” Not a tailback, wingback, or quarterback/blocking back. Just a back who could perform magic with a football. Magic—on either side of the ball. As a defensive back he earned a reputation as a fearsome open-field tackler. Punted ball in hand, he turned into part white lightning bolt, part black wisp of smoke, and all kinds of elusive, countless defenders strewn in his wake. I know how they felt trying to tackle a ghost. So, what would possess me to gauge and judge Pollard, a human video-game? How dare I write about Pollard with the aplomb he carried onto the field when my vision is limited and I am inventing him on the fly. Two reasons: kinship of place, Akron, and shared sense of loss.

I never saw Pollard play. Photos, a couple of film snippets: Sure. But even Pollard’s words came to me second hand—hearsay, as it were. Are they accurate and, if they are, are they reliable evidence of Pollard’s life? When John M. Carroll, a history professor at Lamar University, wrote the definitive biography of Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard, he discovered a subject ripe with contradictions that made him more real but also confounding.

Even more than Carroll, I have had to rely on secondary sources—interviews of Pollard done by others—and an occasional primary source such as Pollard letters. Carroll, the biographer and academic, kept his professional distance from his subject; I observe no such limitation. To explain how and why Pollard so affected me despite the gulfs between us, I must integrate myself into his essay. Such an essay can zig-zag as Pollard did, looking for a sliver of open field on a punt return. He had an uncanny ability to find the end zone, only to have the play negated because an official decided Pollard had violated a rule, stepped out of bounds, or simply—and maybe most often—had been guilty of running while Black.

Every other quarterback about whom I’ve written I played with on a team, watched too many times to count and got to know, if only in the superficial way an athlete permits a writer into his life. He sits for a word portrait—bright and complimentary colors, please; no deep probing allowed—but will stiff-arm his inquisitor when necessary.

These presumptuous essays, or trials, reveal what I don’t know about these quarterbacks as much as what I do. In that sense Fritz Pollard fits in perfectly. What I do know—race in Akron—can add a dimension to Pollard, one that others may not have known first hand or fully explored. I know Akron—past and present, heart and soul, guts and glories, its Achilles heel and warts. I’ve written history that focused on its movers and shakers—a double entendre in Pollard’s game—and blue-collar workers, who, like Pollard, founded an industry.

In Akron’s case, its Rubber Capital of the World identity has faded—rusted in the Rust Belt—while Pollard’s game, football, has ascended and superseded all sports in the American pantheon. And yes, sport has become an industry. Check the line—the bottom line, not offensive or defensive—for verification.

NEXT—FRITZ POLLARD, PART 2: Welcome to Akron, One Tough Town