Photo provided by library.brown.edu

Brown University 1916 captain Mark Farnum leads Fritz Pollard (circled) toward Harvard goal line

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

How Fritz Pollard and his teammates got back to Providence was well chronicled, whereas how he made it to his second season at Brown is a mystery given his inattention to studies, his poor grades, and a propensity for making himself the center of attention.

The summer of 1916 he spent time in Chicago and at Narragansett Pier operating his tailor shop and reuniting with fellow player and future pro teammate Paul Robeson—and partying. Pollard may have stepped across the line of propriety back in Providence. In addition to operating his pressing shop out of a suite of rooms—thanks to the Rockefeller generosity—Pollard, as an unverifiable story that William Sprackling, the Brown assistant coach, told Jay Barry, also solicited Providence businessmen with tales of financial shortfall that could sideline him. Sprackling said Pollard was a “quite successful” panhandler. Even son Fritz Jr, described his father as an “operator.” Fritz proved adept at multiple businesses after football.

It was football, however, that opened the other doors.

Against an inferior Rhode Island State team, Pollard, more confident than ever, began the 1916 season where he had left off in 1915. He scored two of Brown’s three touchdowns in an 18-0 victory and did not even play the fourth quarter.

The Brown Daily Herald was struck by his continued “wrigglesomeness” in the second of a series of early-season mismatches, this a 42-0 victory over Trinity. Against Amherst College, it was worse, with Pollard scoring on runs of 18 to 32 yards the first three times he touched the ball in a 69-0 laugher. Notice the trend? Opponents could not score, an outcome not unrelated to Pollard’s defensive play.

The shutouts continued against a stronger Williams College (20-0) that Pollard helped to wear down in the second half with dazzling runs. Two fumbles, a propensity for which his coaches criticized him, detracted. Coach Edward Robinson blamed his fumbling on flamboyance; his cross-step broke tackles and generated momentum that impressed teammate Wally Wade, who became a memorable Southern coach. Wade told Carroll that Pollard “was one of the good runners that I’ve known in all my football experience. Grange and all those fellows. I’ve studied Grange. Seen Grange play. He was a great runner. Fritz could go up with any of them.”

On October 28, 1916, at Brown’s Andrews Field, Pollard met his friend Robeson, an offensive tackle and linebacker for strong and violent Rutgers. “Rutgers, to me,” Pollard told Jay Barry, “was the roughest school in the country at that time.” Taking a 3-0 halftime lead, Rutgers sent Brown players to the hospital. In the second half of Brown’s 21-3 victory, Pollard scored after Rutgers fumbled on its one-yard line and then went forty yards for a touchdown, his speed against Robeson, who couldn’t “cross those big feet fast enough to catch” his friend.

Battered but still unbeaten, Brown added a 42-0 victory over Vermont before back-to-back showdown games at Yale and Harvard. Yale had a new coach and stronger team than the one Brown uncharacteristically defeated in 1915, setting the stage for Pollard’s ascendance to national prominence. Yale matched Brown’s 6-0 record, if not its 211-3 scoring dominance.

Yale pinned down the Brown offense during the first half, but Pollard answered with a touchdown-saving tackle and an interception to limit Yale to a 6-0 lead. Pecking away with short runs, Brown took a 7-6 lead, a memorable Pollard reception setting up the touchdown. Then Yale made a fatal mistake. It punted to Pollard on the second play of the fourth quarter. Could Yale have thought Pollard’s reputation as a punt returner overblown?

When Yale challenged him, he answered, taking the ball at Brown’s forty-yard-line. He maneuvered toward the right sideline, shedding outside tacklers and luring others into his trap. “Then,” according to The New York Times, “using a puzzling side step, [he] switched to the left, where he outstripped every Yale pursuer in a desperate sprint for the Yale goal line, sailing across for the second touchdown” and assured victory. I like to believe no Eli was again singing “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” as Pollard disappeared into the end zone. For good measure, reeling off two long, decisive runs, he led a thirteen-play coup de grace for the 21-6 finale.

Though to The New York Times Pollard appeared larger than life at Yale and Walter Camp lauded him as “one of the greatest runners I have ever seen,” Harvard’s coaches were not shaking in their cleats. They believed Pollard could not dance around and through the 7-1 Crimson and leave them red-faced. As if to convince themselves, they scrimmaged against a halfback in blackface. It might have helped if the pseudo-Pollard had been half as fast and shifty as the real one. So great was Harvard’s history of success against Brown (23-0) that it inflated the Crimson ego to the point Coach Percy Haughton, assistant Reginald Brown and a half dozen starters decided to scout Yale-Princeton rather than bothering with the Bruins. That arrogance proved Harvard’s undoing, with Pollard the difference-maker on both sides of the ball.

To gain a 7-0 lead and keep it, Pollard returned a punt twenty-five yards to the Harvard thirty-eight and then ran outside and inside, scoring from the four as he burst over right guard. Not finished, Pollard, on defense, outsmarted two lead blockers bearing down on him, the final obstacle to the goal line. The blockers committed a cardinal sin, leaving their feet to fly at Pollard. Oops. Where is he? Side-stepping, Pollard launched himself into the runner’s knees and, “both runner and tackler went down with terrible force.” Harvard’s thud was worse.

It did not get better for Harvard. From the forty-six-yard line in the third quarter, Pollard confounded the defense, running not outside but off-tackle and away from three defenders. Changing up in the fourth period, Pollard caught a pass in the flat at the Harvard forty-five and again baffled three potential tacklers on his way to the three, setting up the final score of a 21-0 victory. The Times concluded the game was “all Pollard” and rejected the notion that the missing Harvard first-teamers would have made a difference: “It is doubtful, even, if all the Harvard regulars could have defeated Brown today” or “stopped the dusky streak in his sensational runs.” Racism infected the newspaper reporting even when complimentary.

Afflicted with self-satisfaction, Brown prepared for Colgate, its final foe, with the same attitude Harvard brought to its game against the Bruins, an attitude derided by the Harvard Crimson in a postgame editorial. Pollard, in interviews, did not recall the overconfidence others conceded existed but he did acknowledge thinking in 1916 if “you could defeat Yale and Harvard, you were it.” Brown was not it for long. Cold rain the morning of the Thanksgiving game turned Andrews Field, which had been covered with straw, into a barnyard pigpen, and Brown seemed to have forgotten Colgate had three All-Americans. It shut down the Brown offense and Pollard, and had he not again been omnipresent on defense, stopping one breakaway runner after another, the 28-0 shutout could have been more embarrassing.

The team failure did not dim the spotlight on Pollard. The New York Times named him to its prestigious All-Eastern team when the only football that mattered was played there, and Walter Camp followed with the life-changing announcement that Pollard was a first team All-America halfback.

Camp concluded the only flaw in Pollard’s offense was the fact it was so scintillating it “obscured his sterling defense.” Camp saw and appreciated enough of both to make Pollard his second Black All-American and the first back. To place this achievement in context, consider the racial tension in 1915 from the lynching of eighty African Americans, a twentieth-century record number. Meanwhile, the revitalized Ku Klux Klan was growing and spreading, including to Akron, where it had never before been a force.

Even as Pollard began to spread his wings athletically playing club basketball— some considered it professional—and showing off his track skills in New York, the United States entered World War I. His celebrity and off-campus activity took a toll on his already unsteady academic performance and Pollard was declared ineligible in the spring of 1917.

Though later reinstated, he failed three of five classes and his eligibility for the football season was in doubt. Military service decimated the Brown squad but, unlike some schools, Brown played the 1917 season—though without the ineligible Pollard who became an even more indifferent student.

NEXT—FRITZ POLLARD, BLOG POST PART 8: Pre-Akron Interlude Readied Future Coach