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The 1915 Brown University team led by Fritz Pollard received a surprise Rose Bowl invite
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 6 of 13. Prior posts may be found by visiting my public Facebook page Stevelovewriter.com or my website blog at https://stevelovewriter.com/blog/
Opportunity and success seldom converged for Brown before Fritz Pollard brightened the stadia the Bruins frequented, often those away from Providence because the best teams refused to play at Brown. In sixty games since 1878 against those exalted teams, Brown had won only four—never against Harvard and only once against Yale.
Beyond Pollard’s presence, hope prevailed when Brown ventured in 1915 to New Haven to meet a 3-3 Yale team diminished by injuries and academic deficiencies. In an age when defenses dominated and bloated footballs and unfriendly rules made throwing next to impossible, scores often were low. Yet even when he failed to score, Pollard dazzled with clever runs from scrimmage and breathtaking punt returns.
In the new Yale Bowl in 1915 Pollard discovered he had more support than expected. Yale deigned to admit a few African Americans to its prestigious School of Religion but would not allow any onto its football team. One of the divinity students, William M. Ashby, wrote in “Black Yale, Circa 1915,” that Black students went to the Brown team dressing room to glimpse Pollard.
Discovering he was not the physical brute they had expected, they feared the Yale defensive line “would murder this little man.” Both to support Pollard and to avoid the racial abuse they would experience if they sat on the Yale side of the field, Ashby and other Black students sided with Brown. The screams from the Yale supporters were audible when Pollard got the ball for a punt return: “Catch that nigger. Kill that nigger.” Heatedly, Ashby answered: “Run, nigger, run. Go, Fritz, go.”
And go Pollard did.
His returns contributed field position for a field goal that provided the game’s only points, and his punting kept the Yale offense at bay. After the game Jim Sheldon, a Yale player, visited the Brown locker room and demanded to see Pollard, whose fancy footwork had caused him to collide with a Yale teammate and got both carted off the field.
In Ashby’s recounting, Sheldon, another Southerner, stuck his hand out and said to Pollard: “You’re a nigger, but you’re the best goddamn football player I ever saw.” Pollard may have tolerated such double-edged “compliments,” but he revealed in the final years of his life that they left deep scars. Pollard “complained bitterly that he had been ‘niggerized’ by Yale and Harvard” but that “to have made an issue of racism at the time would have raised the specter of Jack Johnson.” Only later did his family acknowledge how deeply this hurt Pollard, as well as the Elis singing “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” to him on the opening kickoff in 1916. The song echoed in his memory.
If Frank A. Young’s “exaggerated account” decades later of Brown’s 16-7 loss at Harvard, it nevertheless contained a proper understanding of what happened to young Black players when they went against whites. It offers new meaning to Pollard’s reference to being “niggerized.” A respected African-American sportswriter, Young maintained that other Blacks, full of pride and hope for players like them, caused the athletes to feel they and they alone could lift up their race by what they did on the field.
Such pressure could lead to mistakes such as Pollard made against Harvard. He led all rushers but committed two of the Bruins’ three turnovers. His fumbles and one by Purdy, which Pollard could not prevent a defender from returning fifty-five yards for a touchdown, may not have ruined the season but, even with Pollard’s three-touchdown spree in a 39-3 victory over Carlisle a week later, it felt like it.
Then, the surprise!
Usually teams with Brown’s reputation and a 4-2-1 record two weeks before Thanksgiving, do not merit postseason consideration; yet when the president of the board of directors of the Pasadena Tournament of Roses visited Providence he issued Brown an invitation that, according to athletic director Frederick W. “Doc” Marvel came as “something of a bolt out of the blue.”
The Tournament of Roses Association had created, in 1901, an East-West football game but discontinued it after Michigan embarrassed Stanford, and Pacific Coast football, 49-0.
At a 1915 Pasadena Chamber of Commerce dinner attended by Brown alumnus A. Manton Chase, reinstating the game came up and Chase and another Brown alumnus hard-sold the selection committee on their alma mater. Committee members had never heard of the institution and probably thought it was nothing but a dull color. It makes no sense that Brown was chosen after first-choice Syracuse rejected an invitation. Several teams—Cornell, Michigan, Notre Dame, and Pittsburgh—were unbeaten but brazen salesmanship won the day, even if it came with a price.
Pollard and his teammates should have recognized the trap of believing Eastern football so superior to that on the West Coast. Little knowledge of their opponent, Washington State, 6-0 while outscoring opponents 145-12, failed to staunch Brown overconfidence. As it turned out, the game, played in inclement weather with the Bruins slip-sliding to a 14-0 loss proved less consequential than the bonding that occurred on Brown’s cross-country train trip.
Much had happened on the field and off since Pollard’s teammates welcomed him and his blackness with verbal and physical abuse that foes and fans doubled and redoubled. On the three-thousand-mile trip there was no escaping for Pollard. Trapped in close quarters, he couldn’t seek solitude by running to daylight. With the pressure on and the train’s walls closing in, a memorable change occurred that would become a pattern during Pollard’s professional life. Teammates, who rejected him without knowing Pollard, turned into his defenders, and a true team emerged.
When trouble occurred first on the train and at the team’s hotel in Pasadena, teammates and coaches interceded on Pollard’s behalf. Dining proved a problem on the train. The Black sleeping car porters hassled Pollard, and the dining-car waiters refused service.
They may have been following orders or protocol. If Pollard arrived alone, he would wait for teammates, and they formed a united front and demanded Fritz be served. With some exceptions, this worked. Because Brown had never made such a trip, team and athletic officials may not have anticipated the extent of the discrimination. Preemptive measures should have been taken; Pollard could not be consigned to a nonexistent Blacks-only railroad car but hotels tried to send him elsewhere.
At the Hotel Raymond, whose owner was a Harvard graduate and relished having the Brown team as guests, Pollard was nonetheless turned away. His teammates responded furiously. Assistant Coach William E. Sprackling intervened, indicating there may have been prearranged approval for accommodating Pollard, though it was not the hotel’s policy to accept African Americans.
Pollard never knew the details that allowed him a room overlooking Pasadena Boulevard. It became one of the brighter moments of the trip and generated a new feeling that would carry over to the next season. The more equitable treatment did not change the outcome against Washington State, for which Brown prepared poorly, displaying, as Pollard biographer John Carroll suggested, a “holiday attitude.” The same casual approach can still undo a bowl team. Brown came for the parade and it rained on it and the Bruins’ double-wing offense. It was, according to weather records, the first rainy New Year’s Day in Pasadena in twenty-five years. Pollard, who almost drowned in a puddle on the field, had no rain cleats, spun his wheels, and when a locker-room attendant found a pair for him they fit like boats.
During a stopover in San Francisco on the return trip East, Pollard received a reminder he was a Black man in America in 1915-1916. A century later, too little has changed, the president calling out successful Black athletes and spewing vulgarities at them. Brown’s hotel barred Pollard and could not be dissuaded. Two teammates accompanied him to the city’s Black section where he found a room. When Pollard rejoined the team, he reported knife fights and having barricaded his room door for protection and sleep.
Other than that, how was the night, Fritz?
NEXT FRITZ POLLARD, BLOG POST 7: “Wrigglesomeness” and then Some
