Eddie Robinson
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Even Northerners and those who aren’t football fans can find some inspiration in the story of Eddie Robinson, who amassed a 408-165-15 record as the coach of Grambling State University in Louisiana and who died this week at the age of 88. He symbolizes for us the ladder of upward mobility that obtains in America. He was the son of a sharecropper, yet his obituary made the front page of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times obituary quoted a man who played for Robinson, Doug Williams, a black quarterback who led the Washington Redskins to a Super Bowl victory, as saying, “He never told us life was unfair. He always told us this was America and we could be anything we wanted to be.”
When Robinson started coaching in 1941 at what was then the Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute, football teams at universities like Alabama were still segregated, as were public accommodations throughout the South. The Los Angeles Times obituary noted that once integration began, Robinson did not discourage players he was trying to recruit from attending historically white colleges. “It was very difficult for me, as a coach, to watch Martin Luther King with his marches and what they stood for, then tell a guy don’t go,” the L.A. Times quoted him as saying.
The Washington Post obituary reported that the owner of the Yankees, George Steinbrenner, called Robinson the “greatest American I have ever known.” Mr. Steinbrenner’s reasoning wasn’t explained, but we have our theories. Partly it must be for his winning record — he was the first college football coach to win more than 400 games, and he won more games than Alabama’s Paul “Bear ” Bryant. Partly it was because of the students he coached, 200 went on to play professionally, but more significantly, 80% graduated. And partly it was because, as the L.A. Times obit noted, “Even at the height of civil unrest in the 1960s, Robinson insisted his players stand at attention during the playing of the national anthem.” Said Robinson, “I don’t believe anybody can out-American me.”
