Success Hasn’t Changed Eddie Robinson

He tended the football field, wrote his own press releases and fixed sandwiches for road trips because he and his players couldn’t eat in segregated restaurants.

Times have changed, but not the man.

After 44 years at Grambling, 65-year-old Eddie Robinson is still called “a hustling coach.”

“He could always reach the kids. He could always talk to them. He’s always been fair, honest, sincere,” said Dan Washington, the team’s trainer since 1945 after playing for Robinson for two years.

“He didn’t have any assistants when he got here,” Washington said. “We had a night watchman --a campus security officer--who helped him part-time. Eddie was athletic director, basketball coach, football coach, all of it.

“What some people don’t understand is that Rob’s been under some of the best minds in football--Coach (Julius) Kraft at McKinley . . . and Ruben Turner at Leland College.

“It was Coach Turner who told him to get a piece of paper and a pencil and go to the coaching clinics. He met some of the greatest minds in football--Dana X. Bible, Clark Shaughnessy--all of them. And he learned from all of them.” Washington said.

Little did Robinson know his name would some day be mentioned in the same breath as Paul (Bear) Bryant, Amos Alonzo Stagg and Pop Warner--all of whom made college football history as winningest coaches.

“If somebody had told me back then that this would happen, I would have just laughed,” Robinson said. “We weren’t counting, we were just trying to win a football game.” He won three that first year, one of only three losing seasons in his four decades at Grambling.

“If you’re waiting for me to brag about how great a coach I am or how much I’ve accomplished, you’ve come to the wrong person,” he said. “This record is everybody’s at Grambling.”

The attention, he said, has been embarrassing.

“I just wish more of the attention could be directed toward the team. I don’t like it from the standpoint of a coach, being in the limelight so much.

“It kind of throws me off when the media wants to talk only to me. I can appreciate the job they have to do, but I don’t want to have them tied up so much with me as to where the players don’t get any attention,” he said. “They’re the ones who are really doing it.”

As he began closing in on Bryant’s coaching record of 323 victories, and as the spotlight grew even brighter, Robinson said he realized how much he missed the Bear.

“It hasn’t been fun since the Bear died,” he said. “The game lost a great person and a great personality, and I have an empty feeling knowing he’s not around with his other fellow coaches.

“We appreciate what he did for the game, as well as the other coaches who came before him--Amos Alonzo Stagg and Pop Warner and the rest.

“When I see my name with this group of legends, I have to pinch myself. I really don’t believe it happened.”

It wasn’t until 1948, seven years after he arrived at Grambling, that professional football discovered how well Robinson had learned the lessons of recruiting and coaching.

That was the year Grambling’s Paul (Tank) Younger became the first player from a predominantly black school to go to the National Football League.

Pro scouts learned how to find the little school up near the Arkansas border, and that led them to the other little crossroad campuses of the Southwestern Athletic Conference.

It was another 20 years, however, before Grambling began to attract much attention from other sources.

In 1968, Robinson decided to put Grambling’s show on the road, a decision that would eventually have his team playing in the nation’s big stadiums, anywhere it could draw a crowd.

That year, sportscaster Howard Cosell and sports writer Jerry Izenberg produced the documentary “100 Yards to Glory,” and Robinson was made a vice president of the National Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics. Also in 1968, the three major television networks carried special programs or features on Grambling football.

In 1969, Grambling played before 277,209 fans in 11 games, despite a home field that seated about 13,000. A Grambling-Alcorn game drew 60,118 in Los Angeles, and a Grambling-Morgan State game drew 62,294 at Yankee Stadium.

In 1971, the Grambling-Morgan State game became the first college division game ever telecast nationally, and it beat Stanford-Arkansas and Ole Miss-Alabama in the ratings that weekend.

About that time, traditionally white schools began recruiting black players, and Grambling no longer had first crack at athletes the caliber of Younger, Ernie Ladd, James Harris, Buck Buchanan, Willie Davis, Doug Williams and more than 200 others who went to the NFL.

Robinson never once voiced resentment at having his program ignored by youngsters who would have been unwelcome at big-time campuses a few years earlier. “I watched black kids risk their lives to integrate society,” he said. “We just have to work a little harder.”

As for the years of road trips when he and his team were barred from restaurants because they were black, Robinson said there is no lingering bitterness.

“The best way to enjoy life in America is to first be an American,” he said. “And I don’t think you have to be white to do that.”

Washington said there’s no secret about how Robinson has managed to communicate with his players through the social, political and economic changes of the past 44 years.

“He tells the truth. You can go out and filibuster, and they know it right off. You’ve got to talk truth to them, be sincere,” he said.

“You know, Eddie was an English major at Leland (a now-defunct Baptist school.) And every one of them had to get up and talk at chapel. He learned to communicate, and he tells it like it is.”