Grumbling at Grambling

Eddie Robinson’s face is painted on the sign that greets visitors to the school.

“Grambling State University,” the sign reads. “Home of ‘Coach’ Eddie Robinson.”

Eddie Robinson is in the drum beats bouncing off the dormitories and echoing around campus, beats produced by a school marching band that became famous playing at Grambling games around the country and the world.

His name is on a street and the school’s football stadium.

Eddie Robinson is everywhere at Grambling except the one place he always stood, in the middle of the football team. For the first time since 1941, there’s a new football coach on campus. It’s former Grambling and NFL quarterback Doug Williams, who is taking over for the winningest coach in college football history.

And as Williams has quickly discovered, the hardest thing isn’t replacing a legend. It’s coexisting with one.

Friends of Robinson say he associates Williams with the struggle to oust him that took place in the two seasons before he retired last year, and it has damaged their relationship.

“We haven’t talked that much,” Williams said. “We’ve basically just been cordial to each other. Speak-and-keep-going type of thing.

“Without a doubt, it’s been a strained relationship probably for the last couple of years, since the name Doug Williams popped up as a possible replacement.

“We had a super relationship. I guess you could say it just mellowed out. Or petered out.”

Robinson didn’t make the transition easy for the new coach. He remained in his large office at the end of the one-story Grambling athletic department after Williams took over in January, forcing Williams to work out of a trailer for most of the year. Williams finally took over Robinson’s office two weeks ago.

“This is sad,” said Collie Nicholson, a good friend of Robinson’s who handled Grambling’s public relations for 32 years. “But it’s not as sad as it is unnecessary.”Coach [Robinson] doesn’t realize that he has created this rift. I don’t want to think that it’s done deliberately. I don’t want to think that. But I do know there’s some hard feelings.”

The last few years weren’t kind to Robinson. Robinson became the first coach to win 400 games on Oct. 7, 1995, but it was the only recent highlight in his glorious 57-year tenure. His teams finished with losing records for three straight seasons for the first time in his career. He fought an attempt to force him out after his team went 3-8 in 1996--and Williams’ name began to be mentioned as a successor. Robinson survived, buying himself one more season, a chance to leave on his terms and a chance to go out a winner. Instead, 1997 brought another 3-8 record.

Robinson says he wanted Williams to get the job and that “I’m not bitter with anybody.” He explains their lack of communication by saying, “Since he got the job, I’ve been on the run and he’s been on the run.”

That’s the classy side of Robinson speaking. But it’s worth noting that he went through a good portion of an interview without referring to Williams by name, and he might not attend the first game of the season Saturday against Alcorn State.

“I haven’t decided,” Robinson said Wednesday, “because I just don’t want to do anything that might interfere with the new coach making a good start. Everybody would feel that I’m second-guessing him, and I don’t need to second-guess him. He’s had enough experience to do a good job.”

Maybe Robinson has taken some of Nicholson’s advice to heart and moved on.

“I tell him constantly,” Nicholson said, “it’s time for him and the rest of us to look forward, to understand what he can do to help bring the program back to its peak.”

After so many years of success, the Robinson way wasn’t working anymore. Recruiting was falling off. His wing-T offense was outdated and predictable. “Teams sometimes would call out our plays before we would run them,” senior linebacker Claudell Sanford said.

The common theme from players: It was time for a change.

So Williams made several changes. He instituted pro-style offenses and defenses. He cut 31 players in the spring. He replaced all but two assistant coaches. He visited some of the forgotten recruiting stops. He even switched the team’s athletic wear supplier from Nike to Adidas.

“It’s just like our slogan, ‘Dawn of a New Era,’ ” Williams said. “If I had come in here and kept everything intact, where was the new era? It was a coaching change. But I think because we have changed a lot, coaching staff, philosophies, a whole lot of things, it is a new era.

“I might look at it a little differently than most people do,” said Williams, who still holds most of Grambling’s passing records. “A lot of people put a lot of hype on replacing coach or whatever. Whoever would have replaced coach would have had to deal with the fact that he still had two back-to-back 3-8 seasons. I’m a realist.”

Amid all the change, Williams is adamant about tradition. He wants to return the uniforms to their old, pure, black and gold look and minimize the red that became prominent in recent years. Most of all, he wants to return the team to its winning ways.

Nicholson thinks that some people at Grambling don’t want Williams to succeed because it would in some way diminish Robinson’s accomplishments.

They don’t realize that Williams, like so many other Grambling graduates, owes a good deal of his success to Robinson. Any future accomplishments are, to some extent, Robinson’s as well.

Bet on Williams, 42, to turn things around. He was drafted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the NFL’s definition of hapless in the 1970s, and took the team to the NFC championship game within two years. In 1988, under immense pressure as the first black quarterback to start a Super Bowl, he threw four touchdown passes, led the Washington Redskins to a 42-10 victory over the Denver Broncos and won the game’s most valuable player award.

Williams knew that some white people were rooting against him, just as so many black people were rooting for him. He recently received a letter from a white Washington fan who described how much it hurt her when her cousin told her he was rooting for Denver because he couldn’t root for a black quarterback.

“I didn’t let that part bother me, of who was pulling, who wasn’t pulling,” Williams said. “Because the bottom line was, I was pulling for Doug Williams. I think as long as I was pulling for myself, I had a chance, along with the teammates I was playing with.”

I’m pulling for Doug Williams this time too. Not just to do well at Grambling, but to somehow find a way to patch things up with Robinson. Robinson is too valuable an asset to not be utilized fully.

No one I’ve ever come across in the world of sports--not even Muhammad Ali or Michael Jordan--ever inspired a sense of awe the way Robinson did the first time I met him six years ago. Not only has he achieved greatness, he has influenced so many lives.

There’s an aura about Robinson. It made perfect sense to me when Grambling offensive lineman Toriano Young said: “Sometimes when it’s raining out here it seems like God is looking at him. He’ll come out here and all of a sudden it’ll stop raining and the sun will come out.”

It was a little sad to see the 79-year-old Robinson, now serving as a senior advisor to school President Steve Favors, in his current office. He’s by himself in a room inside a converted house. His furnishings are a cheap paperboard desk, a phone and a box that serves as a filing cabinet. No secretary or anyone else to keep him company.

A lost student walked in and asked if this is the place where they loan out books. Robinson looked at her, smiled, and pointed to his left.

“Next building,” he said.

He still likes helping people, even if they have nothing better to ask the winningest coach in college football history than where to get books. There has to be a way he can help Williams, or Williams can help him. Think of what the combination of the school’s most famous person and one of its best success stories could do for recruiting and fund-raising.

After the formal part of our interview ended, Robinson started romping down memory lane, traversing the past 70 years for stories about disciplinary lessons from his father, football coaching clinics in Chicago, and whipping the Southwestern Athletic Conference teams after they finally let Grambling join the league in 1960. The effects of a nagging cold were suddenly gone. His eyes lit up.

I asked again if he was going to make it to the game Saturday.

“Oh, I’ll be out there,” he said. “I’ll be out there.”

It would be a good start.