True Pioneer Gets His Due

A private dressing room. A personal police escort to every game. The unwavering attention of thousands.

Fritz Pollard had it all.

Then again, he needed his own dressing room, a cigar shop near the stadium, because he wasn’t allowed to suit up with his white teammates. The police escort was for his own protection, even at home games. And the attention of thousands often came in the form of rocks, bottles and insults thrown his way.

“My father was a pioneer,” said Eleanor Towns, 83, the youngest of Pollard’s four children. “They didn’t use steroids back in those days, everything was raw talent. They didn’t make much money. They did it for the love of the game.”

Pollard, who died in 1986 at age 92, will be enshrined today in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The former Brown University All-American -- a feisty 5-foot-9 running back who habitually rolled onto his back after being tackled so he could gouge his cleats into anyone who tried to deliver an illegal late hit -- was among the NFL’s only African American players in the early 1920s, and became the league’s first black coach. He helped pave the way for integration in the professional ranks, even though the boycott of minority players, one that began after he retired in 1926, lasted from 1933 to ’46.

His biographer said Pollard did for football what Jackie Robinson did for baseball.

“If he had been in a sport like boxing or horse racing, the focus would have been there,” said John Carroll, author of “Fritz Pollard: Pioneer in Racial Advancement.” “But pro football was still suspect, still a small-market sport. College football was constantly trying to undermine it.”

Pollard was the first African American to play in the Rose Bowl, the first to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame and the first to coach an NFL team. Later, he founded a black investment firm in New York, established a weekly newspaper -- the New York Independent News, believed to be the first black-owned tabloid -- managed a movie studio in Harlem and ran a coal-delivery company.

“Every player ought to be aware of Fritz Pollard and what he went through, especially every black player,” said Calvin Hill, a former Dallas Cowboy standout who now works as a team consultant. “There were a lot of people who stood up and fought, setting the stage for blacks and for whites, good people to stand up and say, ‘This is nonsense.’

“Today’s players need to understand whose shoulders they’re standing on, appreciate who helped them get where they are. Fritz Pollard helped get them where they are.”

In 1920, four years after helping Brown reach the Rose Bowl as a freshman, Pollard was one of two black players in the league that would become the NFL. He played for the Akron Pros and as a rookie led the team in rushing, receiving, scoring and returning punts. Akron went 8-0-3 and won the league championship.

A year later, Pollard was named Akron’s co-coach, the first African American to achieve that title.

During his eight-year career, he coached three other teams -- Milwaukee, Hammond (Ind.) and Providence -- and played quarterback for Hammond, another first for a black player in the league.

Through it all, he endured racism on and off the field. When he played for Akron, he dressed in a cigar shop that belonged to the team owner, then would be escorted to the game by police. He would arrive just before kickoff so he could minimize his interaction with the crowd.

According to his grandson, Fritz Pollard III, some of his Brown teammates would wear their uniforms baggy -- the way Pollard did -- and paint their faces black so fans would have a difficult time identifying him from a distance.

“Soon as he got the ball,” his grandson said, “you knew who he was.”

When Brown played at Yale things got especially ugly.

“He used to tell me you could see the hate in those people’s faces,” his daughter said. “They’d say, ‘Bye bye, Blackbird!’ I guess it was kind of their little theme song.”

As a pro, it wasn’t uncommon for spectators to throw rocks and bottles at him, his daughter said.

“He wouldn’t let those people get the best of him,” she said. “When people can’t get your goat, they finally give in most of the time.”

After retiring from playing, Pollard coached an independent black team in Pennsylvania, then helped form and coach another black team, the Chicago Black Hawks, with the expressed intent of showing that interracial games could take place without incident.

From 1933 to ‘46, there were no blacks in the NFL, a decision spearheaded by Boston Brave (later Washington Redskin) owner George Preston Marshall. Rationalizing that he was protecting blacks, Marshall struck a “gentlemen’s agreement” that they should be kept out, allegedly to make the game more appealing to a white audience.

Pollard, an outspoken critic of the ban, accepted an offer in 1935 to coach the Brown Bombers, a Harlem-based team named in honor of boxer Joe Louis that barnstormed the country playing white teams. By the time the ban was lifted, however, Pollard had left coaching and was well into his career as a businessman.

Eventually, his legacy as a pioneering coach resurfaced. In 2002, former Cleveland lineman John Wooten established the Fritz Pollard Alliance, an advocacy group that induced NFL teams to interview at least one black candidate for head-coaching and executive openings.

In February, 79 years after Pollard retired as a player, the Seniors Committee voted him into the Hall of Fame.

“That was the one honor he didn’t have,” Towns said. “He would be very, very happy.

“I think he might say, ‘Well, at last.’ ”

*

CLASS OF 2005

* BENNY FRIEDMAN,

Quarterback

* DAN MARINO,

Quarterback

* FRITZ POLLARD,

NFL pioneer

* STEVE YOUNG,

Quarterback