Screen Shot of Lambeau Field from Facebook
If the iconic Touchdown Jesus, looming almightily beyond the north end zone of Notre Dame Stadium, blessed anyone with football interests even more secular than those found in South Bend, Indiana, surely such blessings would have been bestowed upon the Green Bay Packers and Lambeau Field. Lambeau has become a shrine to what smaller-town America can do with the National Football League version of the game.
Guess Tom Brady didn’t get the message.
Tampa Bay’s Methuselah-of-a-quarterback tossed up a Hail Mary-lite at the end of the first half to provide just enough points to withstand Green Bay’s second half comeback after Brady began to act his age, which is 43. Brady survived interceptions on three consecutive possessions, and so the Buccaneers not only will be going to the Super Bowl as the National Football Conference to meet defending champion Kansas City but they also will perform a unique double-dip and try to play the (un)gracious game host.
It’s too late for an alternative plan—is it fair for one participant to be playing a home game?—but if it weren’t, Akron, home of the Pros (team name as well as player status), the NFL’s first champion 101 years ago should have been declared de facto host. It would be the perfect moment for it. Akron may not have a stadium up to the usual NFL standards and size but these are unusual times. The crowd of only as many as 22,000 will not be usual size because of COVID-19 limitations, which will make it historic.
With that provision, Akron qualifies to be the game’s substitute host. Goodyear and Bridgestone, I’m sure, having co-authored Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron, would roll out a tire-making demonstrations. (The companies now make only racing tires in the former Rubber Capital of the World.) This moment of enlightenment could be supplemented, for those willing to wear masks and socially distance, with tours of the touchstones of the champion Akron Pros. Improvisation may be required.
As for so many of the other small-town franchises (small being relative), Akron’s proved to be financially unsustainable. Today that might be different. The NFL has the most enlightened philosophy and system for small-market teams in all of professional sports. Besides Green Bay, which also has a unique community-ownership structure, Buffalo is the closest to a small-market team to have survived. (The Decatur Staleys turned into the Chicago Bears, not only proving that owner George Halas was no business fool, but that he also was an early-day version of former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, whose body does not contain a single bone, neuron, and certainly not what passes for his heart, that is not self-interested.) Akron might have made it had co-owners Frank Nied and Art Ranney had deeper pockets.
Ranney managed the team of which he had a piece and Nied owned a cigar store in the Hamilton Building at Mill and Main Street that served as a hangout for any person with an interest in sports. This would especially apply to Fritz Pollard. The Pros owners brought him to Akron after his All-American career at Brown University, a member of the Ivy League when the Ivy was a football powerhouse as much a horticultural façade of the buildings of many great universities.
Pollard was ideal except for a few things: He was short in height, light in weight, dark in complexion. Other than that, Fritz was perfect. Today, he might not be able to be the water boy—unless he told the powers that be that he is a Pro Football Hall of Famer. (I know these things, because I have written a lengthy essay on Pollard after doing extensive research, including at the Hall of Fame. I intended it to be a piece of a book about quarterbacks—Fritz was more of a tailback—who possessed off-the-field qualities as impressive as those they displayed on the field. I won’t tell Pollard’s full story here or my reactions but I could die before writing the book so. . .)
Rule for writers: Do not leave anything in your notebook. (Some carry this to an extreme and dribble out scribbles of little consequence.) I will tell you, briefly, about the Akron to which Pollard came late in 1919. While I am an Akron fan, it was not a pretty place for a Black man in those days. When people address racism in 2021—and how can we still be so obtuse to the needs of so many of people who just want to be treated as we all want to be treated—it can be discouraging, but Fritz Pollard had it as bad as anyone. Years before the recently deceased and wonderous Henry Aaron, Pollard lived and played in the kind of incubator that spawned the hatred Aaron encountered as he chased down and passed Babe Ruth, the great white whale of a home-run hitter.
Akron, during the 1920s, was a Ku Klux Klan hotbed. Pollard, as best I can determine from City Directories did not even live in the city he represented so dramatically. It was safer in Cleveland. Akron Pros officials took precautions to assure his safety. Pollard suited up for games at the cigar store in the heart of downtown and was whisked to Goodrich Field on the edge of the Middlebury neighborhood moments before kickoff. It became Akron League Park but is long gone, unlike Lambeau, the oldest continually operating NFL stadium and one that has experienced multiple updates. But when I look at it now, it has somehow been able to retain its bones and old-time feel. I never had the opportunity to cover a game there, which is one of my career regrets.
After Pollard led the 8-0-3 Pros to the 1920 championship, as voted by team owners over the whining, vociferous objection of Halas who thought his team deserved the title, the championship trophy, the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Cup, mysteriously disappeared. Then, despite multiple successes in a productive life, Pollard was more or less forgotten. Only in 2005 was he finally inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, both for his eight seasons of scintillating play but also for having been the league’s first Black coach. Blacks still have too few opportunities to be head coaches and general managers in the NFL, a league dominated by Black players. This, despite efforts to increase NFL diversity on the sideline and in the front office by the organization that bears his name, the Fritz Pollard Alliance.
Pollard died in 1986 at age 92, his grandsons representing him at his Hall of Fame induction. He deserves more than a bronze bust after running for his life while Black in less-than-welcoming Akron. At least, after even his teammates at first refused to block, Pollard was able to convince them he was worth every block they threw—and much more.
