Croom Represents First on SEC Football Sideline

The hiring of Sylvester Croom as football coach at Mississippi State Tuesday leads me straight to a brilliant and passionate rant John Thompson once had on the eve of his first NCAA championship game appearance, in 1982, when a reporter asked the Georgetown basketball coach how it felt to be the first black coach to take a team that far.

It was a wonderful answer then and is even more fitting now that it’s 20 years later and we’re still dealing, sadly, with firsts and onlys. Thompson, essentially, said that it’s a shameful mark on any industry to be “the first” black anymore, that his being the first coach to go that far meant qualified and worthy men had been passed over, shamefully, for decades because of race.

Croom isn’t the first black man qualified to coach in the Southeastern Conference, just the first hired. Well into the first decade of the 21st century, the SEC joined the 20th century Tuesday. If you’re expecting me to lavish praise on Mississippi State in this space, you’re going to be disappointed.

It’s certainly a historic day for the SEC as it pertains to football, actually in the entire southeastern part of the United States, where college football sets the cultural and civic agenda in a way it does not in, say, South Bend, Ind., where Tyrone Willingham was hired to coach Notre Dame nearly two years ago.

Remember, in Mississippi State we’re talking about a school that 40 years ago tried to prevent the all-white men’s basketball team from participating in the NCAA basketball tournament because their precious white boys might rub up against some Negroes from Michigan State or St. John’s or someplace in the North like that. We’re talking about a state, Mississippi, that still incorporates the Confederate battle flag in its logo, a state whose Republican senator, Trent Lott, said just a year ago that the world would have been a better place had segregationist senator Strom Thurmond been elected president in 1948.

This hire isn’t symbolic, it’s fundamental. Even though this isn’t Alabama or Ole Miss, it’s still a school in the deepest of the deep south finally entrusting a black man to run the most beloved department on the campus, the football program. The two most important institutions in the South are the church and football, and not always in that order.

And who better to do that than a son of Coach Paul Bryant. That’s right, a son. You like that for irony? For starters, Croom was born 80 miles east of Starkville in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Croom played football at the University of Alabama, for Bear Bryant, was in the third class of black players Bryant ever recruited. Croom graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history from Alabama, got his master’s degree in education from Alabama, was Bryant’s graduate assistant at Alabama, then a valued full-time assistant at Alabama.

Somehow the magic of the name “Shula” impressed Alabama officials more than Croom’s credentials, which include16 years of coaching in the NFL, last year when Alabama needed to hire a head coach. How many of us ever thought that part of Bryant’s legacy would be having one of his boys, a black boy, wind up coaching Mississippi State, where he can now steal all those recruits and take ‘em to Starkville?

Croom’s daddy was the Crimson Tide’s chaplain. Croom’s brother, Kelvin, was in a later Bryant class of recruits. When Kelvin tore up a knee early in his career at Alabama, Bryant told him his playing career was over, but he had to stay and help Coach in any number of ways, including recruiting. If you want to find out why most black men have forgiven Bear Bryant in a way we’ve never forgiven Adolph Rupp, fair or not, take a look at the Croom family, most noticeably Sylvester.

Anyway, another one of Bryant’s early black players was Ozzie Newsome, the Hall of Fame tight end who is now the GM of the Baltimore Ravens. Newsome is one of Croom’s close friends, and he said: “If Coach Bryant was alive, he’d be at the press conference himself. ... Sly deserves this. In my career I’ve been around a lot of great leaders. And he led that huddle, trust me. He was impressive at a lot of things, but mostly a leader.”

I’ve always marveled at Newsome, because he managed to avoid the bitterness so many underemployed black men experience in the coaching ranks in football. He’s been fortunate to have as a mentor owner Art Modell.

There are fewer such mentors at the college level apparently. Remember, Croom is just the fifth black head coach of 117 Division I-A schools. He was qualified and then some to coach in the NFL but never got the call, qualified and then some to coach in the college ranks and reached 49 before getting the call. “The lack of bitterness,” Newsome said, “is from living it. It’s from seeing it, from knowing life was so much better for us than our parents. When you live in it, you know it takes small steps, that you can’t go from A to Z, you have to go from A to D and from D to M. You live it, but you don’t accept it. Look, there is still a lot of that Jim Crow mentality in existence. But you go in understanding that. You don’t think, being in that third class of black players at Alabama, that there weren’t issues in that dorm room with black and white kids living together for the first time?

“You think he doesn’t know, first-hand, the pressure of the situation? Oh, they got the right guy.”

Of course, he could have been gotten long ago, just like teams could have gotten Cincinnati Bengals Coach Marvin Lewis two, three, four years ago. But the reason I’m loathe to spread around credit for this hiring is that in football, schools and teams hire black coaches only when they’re desperate.