Akron Pros Photo
Fritz Pollard (left) found protection on and off the field from his Akron Pros teammates
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 9 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
The pressure was squarely on Fritz Pollard. Newspaper headlines preceding the Canton game laid it on with thick and tall capital letters: “TWO GREATEST BACKFIELD MEN IN PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL CLASH HERE SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN GRID CLASSIC.”
Pollard and Jim Thorpe were anything but anonymous; the same could not be said for five college stars who joined the Indians for the game, unheard in the modern era but common chicanery that pushed the teams toward the stronger, more formal structure and rules of the American Professional Football Association (APFA) the next year when the Indians became the Pros.
Akron needed more than college mystery meat, and the Thorpe-Pollard showdown amounted to little as Thorpe husbanded himself until the fourth quarter. Even so, the Bulldogs shut out Akron 14-0, ending any pretense of an Indians’ championship. This must have been a blow to owners/managers Frank Nied and Art Ranney. Yet, even with financial backers heading for the exit, they vowed to bring back Pollard and regenerate a better team—the Akron Pros.
They had invested heavily in Pollard and the price kept rising. He told people that after his debut against Massillon he would get $500 a game and that would climb in subsequent seasons, he claimed, to $1,500 per game and expenses, which was more than Thorpe’s $1,000 when he took Canton to the 1919 title. “It had been evident in my first year at Akron back in 1919 that they didn’t want black in there getting that money,” Black writer Carl Nesfield quoted Pollard as saying. “And I was playing and coaching and pulling down the highest salary in pro football.”
There is no doubt Fritz Pollard became the NFL’s first Black coach, whether in Akron, in Milwaukee in 1922, in Hammond, Indiana, during 1923 and 1924, where he coached while also playing for Gilberton, Pennsylvania, in the rough-and-tumble Coal League, or upon his return to Akron in 1925 and 1926. The money he made would not have won the white-hard heart of the Ohio Ku Klux Klan much less those of rubber workers fighting and scraping for a living and to establish a union that would give them the leverage Pollard’s talent and toughness gave him.
When Pollard began his career in Akron, he had to dress for games in Nied’s United Cigar Store, be driven to the field, and join his team at the last second to head off racial incidents. “The fans booed me and called me all kinds of names because they had a lot of Southerners up there working,” Pollard told Al Harvin for a New York Times story in 1978 when he was 84 years old. “Akron was a factory town and they had some prejudiced people there. You couldn’t eat in the restaurants or stay in the hotels. Hammond and Milwaukee were bad then, too, but never as bad as Akron was.”
Though he vacillated concerning the treatment he received, downplaying the abuse and fighting through it as he had learned from his family, Pollard over time made clear the hurt he endured was not simply the result of opponents trying to stop or maim him. “There were a lot of Southerners in the league then, and besides that, a lot of the players were just bullies,” he said in 1970. “They would say, ‘We’re going to get you on that playing field, nigger, and kill you.’” Pollard was quick on his feet in more than one way. “If you can catch me,” he responded. “They didn’t, and after a while they stopped trying to scare me.”
Given their abbreviated encounter in 1919, I consider Pollard’s strange prelude with Thorpe prior to their first meeting in 1920 the truer beginning of their relationship. Not that they didn’t come into contact on that muddy field in Akron in 1919. The Akron Beacon Journal reported that an open-field tackle by Thorpe short-circuited an electric Pollard run. Maybe Pollard had that smash-down in mind when he arrived in Canton on his commute from Lincoln University and encountered Thorpe at the Courtland Hotel. More likely, what set Pollard off were rumors Thorpe had been placing bets that “that nigger’s scared to come and play.”
Though Thorpe had no reputation for prejudice, Pollard unloaded on him: “Oh,” he said, “hello there, black boy”—a comment that made absolutely no sense. Biographer John Carroll explained it may have stemmed from their shared Indian ancestry. In later interviews Pollard explained: “Jim Thorpe was as black as I was.” No one who ever saw them or their photos could agree.
The conflict between Pollard and Thorpe continued on the field when Thorpe entered the game in the second half with Canton trailing 10-0. Delaying his entry as Thorpe often did near the end of his career—he was 31 with a lot of yardage on his legs—proved a miscalculation. Even the great Thorpe, going against a defense Pollard quarterbacked, could not erase the deficit that had come on a field goal by Akron captain Charles Copley and Pike Johnson’s fifty-yard touchdown return of an intercepted pass. The loss was Canton’s first since 1917. Thorpe failed to lay a hand on Pollard though Pollard said he tried mightily “to get me when we had the ball. But I ran offside, twisted and squirmed, and kept out of his way.” Bolstered by Pollard’s defense, the stunning result generated uncommon national attention.
As much difference as Pollard made to Akron’s defense, he practically reinvented its offense, an improvement that may have begun the year before. Pollard always claimed to have been involved coaching the team as early as 1919. “When I got there,” Pollard told The New York Times, “they were using a lot of old-fashioned plays, and I showed them some of the plays we had used at Brown, like the unbalanced line and reverses and all that.” Whatever skepticism or resistance the 1919 Indians and the 1920 renamed Pros may have had listening and taking coaching from their new Black teammate was addressed by owner Nied, whom, according to Pollard, “told everybody that if they didn’t want to listen to me, they could leave right then.”
Pollard was not listed as a coach in 1919, but in NFL reference books such as Pro Football the Early Years: An Encyclopedic History 1895 to 1959, he showed up in 1920 as Elgie Tobin’s co-coach of the NFL’s first champion. [If the Akron newspapers knew of Pollard’s coaching they did not acknowledge it and continued to talk with Tobin as if he were the sole coach; this may have resulted from Pollard’s absence to Lincoln University during the week.]
The 1920 title also became a point of contention because the new league’s founders, including Nied and Ranney, failed to spell out when they organized in Canton the means by which a champion would be determined. By the time Akron and Canton played for a second time, on Thanksgiving Day, a Bulldog victory had become imperative. Canton’s loss and tie did not compare favorably with Akron’s single blemish, a 7-7 tie with Cleveland and the only points Akron allowed all season. Pollard again played well and solidified his standing with not only his teammates but also with Akron’s African-American community.
“Colored people everywhere idolize the Akron star,” Jack Gibbons wrote in the Akron Beacon Journal of a disagreement between two Black bellhops at the Portage Hotel following a game. The young men took up arguing over whether the small Black man with the team could be Pollard. Pollard’s teammates had to settle a bet that sprang from the argument, and the loser paid off. Two days after the Thanksgiving victory, Pollard stopped, on his return to Lincoln University, in Pittsburgh to participate in a benefit game. Many African Americans met him at the train station, and, unlike his welcome to Akron a year earlier, held a parade, put on a banquet, and presented him with honorary memberships in some of their societies.
Pollard’s teammates might have applauded Pittsburgh’s acceptance—at least the Black community’s—of their star who had become not only a football asset but also a friend. The proof, Gibbons reported, was in the pudding at an Akron restaurant.
When Pollard walked into the establishment with Bob Nash and Charley Copley, among other teammates, their waiter took everyone’s order but Pollard’s. Such discrimination occurred often in cities the team visited. But why in Akron? Akron was his home. [There is no proof it was his physical home; no city directory revealed an address for Pollard, even in the years he did not commute between Lincoln University and Akron.] Pollard did not speak of the city, his family said. Could this have been the result of inhospitable treatment in a city flush with KKK members? Whatever the case, team was more important to Pollard than town; the team was his community.
Pollard’s teammates did not tolerate the waiter’s refusal to serve him. They watched the scene unfold and then stood up for Pollard, literally. Gibbons may have overstated it—it sounded like a brief brawl—but they persuaded the waiter to knock off the discriminatory treatment and to serve Pollard. He must have appreciated the interference his teammates ran for him, but on the football field he had tricks of his own to defend himself.
If the defense used the sideline as another tackler, Pollard did not mind; to him the sideline could be a trap door through which he lured tacklers into late hits and penalties. The tactic worked against Cleveland but also backfired when Pollard danced down the sideline, eluding tacklers to score. An official ruled he had stepped out of bounds, negating the winning touchdown in the 7-7 stalemate. It wasn’t the last tie.
FRITZ POLLARD, BLOG POST PART 10: Halas Disputes the Akron Pros’ Championship
