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.

By 1919, when Fritz Pollard arrived, Akron was gaining a reputation as more than a place where tires and other rubber products were compounded, extruded, and molded. It had a dark side. It was a city that could be inhospitable to African Americans, immigrants, or, for that matter, anyone not a white, Protestant, and native-born. If this sounds like 2016 Make America Great Again, earlier white supremacists who tortured Pollard, on the field and off, set the table.

Akron was a tough town. A couple of years after Pollard joined the Akron Indians, the Ku Klux Klan recognized Akron as fertile for growth. The KKK, which had gained a reputation for violence against Blacks during Reconstruction, had morphed into a 2.0 iteration that wallowed in patriotism, nativism, and anti-Catholicism while at its core remaining prejudiced against Negroes. It would infiltrate the city’s political power structure, controlling the school board and insinuating itself into city government, up to and including the mayor’s office.

Frederick Douglass Pollard, named for the famous abolitionist, knew nothing of this when he stepped off the train. He probably did not realize Akron had been home to controversial and violent John Brown who was willing to take on all comers who would abuse Black people.

The circumstances, though, could have reminded him of the occasion in Chicago when his football coach and teammates at Lane Technical High became complicit in discrimination he so often encountered. Rather than explain to Pollard that a non-league opposing team had refused to play against a Black player, the coach gave Pollard an incorrect time for the game trip so that he would miss the train. Determined to play, Pollard hopped the next train but because it did not stop where the game was to be played, Pollard rode miles beyond his destination, disembarked and walked back, too late to play.

And he never forgot.

If his Akron welcome did not remind Pollard of the incident, it would be surprising. “There wasn’t a damn soul there,” Pollard told Carl Nesfield for a story in December 1971 Black Sports. A cab driver whom Pollard encountered had read that the 1916 Brown University All-American would be arriving to join the Indians for late-season games in the Ohio League, beating heart of the nascent professional game that began in Pennsylvania in the early 1890s. The cabbie drove Pollard to a downtown Akron cigar store owned by Frank Nied, team manager and an Indians owner. The Pollard that Nied saw differed from the player Nied expected. Nied knew Pollard was Black but he did not realize how small he was compared with other players.

Nied’s inflated vision of Pollard came not from an overactive imagination but from the media, almost exclusively print, that had made Pollard larger than life rather the dashing Dickensian waif he was, his height, variously listed between 5 feet 7 inches and 5-feet-9, his weight 145 pounds to 170. If inaccurate adjectives such as “big, burly Black man” did not give rise to heightened expectations, Pollard’s accomplishments did. He became a Walter Camp All-American, the second African American and first in the backfield. Camp called him “the most elusive back of the year or any year.” Even Grantland Rice, best of the Golden Age of Sportswriting’s best, found Pollard worthy to stand alongside taller, stouter legends Jim Thorpe, Red Grange, and Bronko Nagurski in his Dream Backfield.

When Frank Nied saw Pollard in the flesh, what little there was of it, he must have thought his eyes were failing him. “You’re Fritz Pollard?” he wondered. “Oh, no,” he said, answering himself. “Pollard is 6-1 and weighs 190 pounds. You’re not Fritz Pollard.”

Though there are conflicting versions of this encounter and the extent of Pollard’s conversation with Nied, who would befriend him, there is near unanimity regarding the reception his new teammates offered, many of them Southerners like men who labored in Akron’s rubber shops. They gave Pollard the cold shoulder as they dressed to go to the field for a pregame practice. [Sunday practice was the norm when some players did not live in Akron or practice with the team during the week but arrived on game days.] Clair Purdy, Pollard’s former Brown University teammate, pulled Pollard aside and gave him the lay of this new prejudiced land.

Pollard had endured as much and more during his amateur career, from the Chicago-area schools that did not want to compete against a Black to the northern colleges that would allow him to matriculate but did not want him to join their teams even after he was an All-American and famous. Even Brown, where he finally found a home after an odyssey that prompted biographer Carroll to label Pollard a tramp athlete, seemed it could not be bothered with the little back who would put its team on the map.

Over and over, Pollard’s race was the issue until it wasn’t, when he got his chance on the field and proved that, with apologies to his poetic admirer Grantland Rice: “When the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He marks not that you were Black or white or another color—but how you played the game.” Pollard played like no one among my “quarterbacks.” Even so, he had trouble finding his place.

NEXT—FRITZ POLLARD, BLOG POST PART 3: Growing into a Vagabond