Not Going Quietly

The coach who has won 408 football games is trying like hell to win No. 409, but his kids just don’t get it.

A full-pads practice the night before Eddie Robinson’s last home game ends in pitch darkness. A light bulb from the Grambling Credit Union across the street illuminates the chewed-up field as the Tigers gather around their legendary coach.

“I don’t think you’ve given everything you have,” Robinson says, his 78-year-old breath rising into the night air. “You’re losing a little bit of what Grambling was.”

Grambling was for 57 years the eminent domain of Edward Gay Robinson, the football program’s backbone and curator. Yet, the last few years have been relatively horrific ones, the Tigers guaranteed a third consecutive losing season for the first time in Robinson’s era. An NCAA probe and rape charges against four players have tainted the last mile of a glorious coaching run. Robinson is being forced out, make no mistake about that, the school president saying as much last year before relenting under pressure to allow Robinson a farewell season.

They say Robinson has lost his coaching fastball, but on this post-practice eve of his final home game--to be played in the stadium erected and named in his honor--Robinson is backing batters off the plate, imploring his players not to give up on the season.

It is a pure sporting moment, a coach and his team huddled together on a dank night. No cameras, no makeup, no retakes, only a couple of out-of-town reporters hiding in the backdrop--two flies on the wall of history thinking this is what it must have felt like to have eavesdropped on Knute Rockne.

“If I was a math teacher, I’d teach math,” Robinson exhorts. “If I was an English teacher, I’d teach English. But I’m a football coach. All I ever wanted to be was a football coach.”

You could have heard a tee drop.

“Do you realize that the last two years we’ve lost more games than we have in just about any 20-year period we’ve ever had?” Robinson asks. “Winning is all I’ve done my whole life. I want to tell you what you do here matters. I wish I could say something that could move you. I wish I could say something that could change you.”

A hush overcomes the field adjacent the “old stadium,” a steel-bleachered edifice in which Grambling ghosts Tank Younger, Willie Davis, Willie Brown, Buck Buchanan, Charlie Joiner, James Harris and scores of others rose from obscurity to stardom at the all-black state university 60 miles east of Shreveport--as unlikely a hideout for a sporting dynasty as one could imagine.

“If you can run, run,” Robinson says, his voice raising in timbre. “If you can catch, catch. If you can block, block. This is what it takes. Just come out tomorrow and win.”

Robinson ended his talk and started to walk away. The players called him back.

“Coach Rob,” one said. “Get in the middle.”

Robinson returned to the pack; the players closed in around him, raising their arms before breaking into song.

“Oh Grambling, Dear Grambling,” the alma mater began.

Robinson walked off into the night.

“I’m worried about the program,” he would say.

*

North Carolina A&T; defeated Grambling on Saturday, 37-35, Robinson’s Tigers falling to 3-7 as they failed to recover an onside kick with 57 seconds left, foiling a last chance to send Robinson away a winner.

Before the game, Robinson had emerged from a white stretch limousine to greet former players, including Gary “Big Hands,” Johnson, who had come to honor him.

Robinson stood before a Robinson Stadium crowd of only 4,037 on a cold day, Grambling officials explaining that the full-fledged gala won’t take place until Robinson’s last game, the Bayou Classic, in New Orleans on Nov. 28.

“I would have liked for them to have been here,” Robinson said afterward of the crowd. “But they have been here.”

Robinson credited his team for scoring 28 second-half points to make the game close. For decades, it was Grambling opponents that scrambled from behind.

“It’s not like that now,” Robinson said.

No one is taking Robinson’s retirement well. Robinson was against it from the beginning. Robert L. Piper, the athletic director whose job it is to hire a successor, does not cherish his assignment.

“You’ve got to understand,” he says. “We’re still in denial here. We’re fighting this thing as long as we can.”

A recruiting season may have been lost because Piper has refused to allow the hiring process to impede on Robinson’s parade. The school has interviewed three candidates.

“All three were bold enough to apply,” he says.

Doug Williams, the former Grambling and NFL quarterback currently the head coach at Morehouse College in Atlanta, interviewed for Robinson’s job Wednesday.

“It will never happen again in life,” Williams says of Robinson’s run.

Williams has tried to keep Robinson’s retirement in perspective.

“It’s kind of like when we hear people pass away,” says Williams, a Super Bowl MVP with the Washington Redskins. “Someone tells me their grandmother, father, auntie died. I want to know, how old are they? You tell me they were 89? I tell them, ‘Don’t cry, we need to be smiling.’ It’s kind of like same thing when you’re talking about Coach Robinson. You should make it as happy as you possibly can. You’re talking about 57 years in one sport, at one institution. Think of how many lives Coach Robinson touched.”

How do you tell a legend it’s time to go? It is a most painful question when asked of Robinson, whose adult life has been consumed by one school and one sport.

“He does not want to leave, absolutely,” says Collie J. Nicholson, Robinson’s former publicist of 31 years. “I think, in a sense, Eddie is afraid to leave because of what happened to [Alabama Coach] Bear Bryant. He didn’t live long after he left.”

Grambling followers vilified school President Raymond Hicks last fall when news leaked that he was forcing Robinson to quit after the 1996 season. Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster stepped in and said Robinson was an icon who deserved one more year.

But some of Robinson’s friends saw a program and a man slipping into the twilight.

“When he won his 400th game, I would have loved for him to say, ‘This is it,’ ” Williams concedes. “He had to make that decision.”

Robinson had nothing left to prove. On Oct. 5, 1985, he won his 324th game, surpassing Bryant to become the winningest coach in college football history.

A decade later, almost to the day, Robinson notched career win No. 400, a 42-6 victory against Mississippi Valley State.

But the Tigers finished 5-6 that season and were 3-8 in 1996, the first consecutive losing seasons in Robinson’s career.

More troubles ensued. An NCAA probe cleared Robinson of wrongdoing last July, but the program was cited for minor infractions. Rape charges were dropped against four Grambling players, but they were expelled from the team.

Some thought Robinson was losing control.

“The man on the field now is not the Eddie Robinson all of us want to remember,” says Nicholson, who remains one of the coach’s closet friends. “Eddie is one of the greatest coaches of all time. But it’s like a prizefighter. Once he’s past his peak, it’s nothing but downhill. This is what happened.”

Nicholson says Robinson’s one-time strengths have become weaknesses.

“Eddie has always been hands on,” Nicholson says. “Still is. But at this point it might be more of a liability than an asset.”

But how do you nudge a legend out the door?

What coach has done more for any institution?

Robinson put Grambling on the map when he arrived in 1941 from Baton Rouge, where he had worked in a feed mill and driven a wagon. The school was then known as Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute. Robinson not only ran the football team, he coached basketball and baseball, lined the fields, taped the players and led the drill squad at halftime.

All for $63.75 a month.

He brought discipline and class to the program, averaging 7.5 victories a season for 56 years. Robinson had impeccable taste and wore spotless white shoes. He taught his players courses in etiquette, instructed them on how to properly use a fork and knife. Grambling players always traveled in suits and ties.

Robinson wanted to make Grambling the Notre Dame of black colleges. He took his teams on barnstorming tours, once selling out Yankee Stadium four consecutive years.

Under Robinson, Grambling has won nine National Black College Championships and 17 Southwestern Athletic Conference titles. More than 200 of Robinson’s players have played pro football. Eighty-five have been All Americans. Four--Buchanan, Davis, Brown and Joiner--are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. One year in the 1960s, Nicholson says, Grambling had 43 players on professional football rosters.

You can understand why Robinson wants to keep coaching.

You can understand why friends want him to stop.

“A lot of friends feel strongly that Eddie has not been fair to himself,” Nicholson says, “that his record is being tarnished for the wrong reasons.”

Nicholson doesn’t know what will happen to Robinson without football.

“It isn’t the roar of the crowd with Eddie,” he says, “it’s being in the arena itself.”

Sometimes the arena is a darkened patch of field, a group of players surrounding him on a November night, a time when Robinson can turn back the clock and deliver a lucid and searing oratory.

“It’s just been a wonderful time,” he says. “I would like for it to be better. I realize I’ve slowed down a couple of steps. If I hadn’t, I would have turned it around by myself.”

Someone asked Robinson what he said to his team as it trailed North Carolina A&T; at the half, 23-7.

“I said ‘You’ve got to remember who you are,’ ” Robinson said. “You’re Grambling.”

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CAREER COACHING WINS

*--*

Coach Last College Wins Eddie Robinson* Grambling 408 John Gagliardi* St. John’s (Minn.) 338 Bear Bryant Alabama, ’82 323 Pop Warner Temple, ’38 319 Amos Alonzo Stagg Pacific, ’46 314

*--*

*Active

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Robinson File

* AGE: 78

* BORN: Feb. 13, 1919, in Jackson, La.

* EDUCATION: McKinley High, Baton Rouge, La.; bachelor’s degree from Leland College (now defunct) in Baker, La.; master’s degree, University of Iowa.

* COACHING RECORD: 408-165-15.

MILESTONES, KEY DATES

* 1941: 1st win, 37-6 over Tillotson.

* 1949: 50th win, 14-13 over Prairie View: Grambling fullback Paul “Tank” Younger signs with Los Angeles Rams, becoming the first player from a historically black college to play for an NFL team.

* 1957: 100th win, 20-12 over Bethune-Cookman

* 1963: Grambling tackle Buck Buchanan becomes the first player from a black college to be chosen No. 1 in the NFL draft.

* 1971: 200th win, 25-15 over Mississippi Valley State

* 1982: 300th win, 43-21 over Florida A&M.;

* 1985: Robinson ties, then breaks record for victories held by Alabama’s Bear Bryant, with his 323rd win (23-6 over Oregon State) and 324th win (27-7 over Prairie View). * 1992: Robinson becomes first black coach to win Bobby Dodd National Coach of the Year award.

* 1995: Robinson is first coach to win 400 games; 42-6, over Mississippi Valley State.

* 1997: Coached final home game Saturday, a 37-35 loss to North Carolina AT&T.;

BY THE NUMBERS

* 17: Conference crowns Robinson’s teams have won or shared since Grambling joined the Southwestern Athletic Conference in 1959.

* 27: Consecutive winning seasons by the Tigers from 1960-1986.

* 22: Age of Robinson when he became coach of the first Grambling football team in 1941.

* 7: First-round NFL draft choices Robinson has coached at Grambling.