Post by b***@forpresident.comSo there were African-American NFL players in the 1930s? I didn't know
that. This would have made pro football the only major American sport
at the time to be desegregated. Granted the NFL was pretty small time
pre World War II (and didn't really become the institution we all
recognize
until the mid 50s) but that is rather unusual. Is it possible for the
NFL to
keep signing African American players in the late 30s and early 40s?
One consequence of this: Jackie Robinson (whose talents in football
were considered as great as his baseball talents) as a pro football
star rather than a baseball star. Although, as in OTL, that whole
generation of athletes, black and white, will lose many of their best
playing years due to WW2.
ObWI: integration of pro baseball during the war. ISTR reading that
there was an MLB team that wanted to have black players during
the war, but didn't.
April 15 is Jackie Robinson Day in Major League Baseball, and...
http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-robinson14apr14,0,2895119.story?coll=la-home-sports
April 14, 2005
Legend of the Fall
# Before breaking major league baseball's color barrier, Jackie
Robinson was a superb football player at UCLA
By Shav Glick, Times Staff Writer
Ten years before Martin Luther King founded the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference and became an icon in the civil rights movement,
Jackie Robinson was already a trailblazer, opening doors for black
Americans by integrating major league baseball.
Seven years before that, before he'd taken the field as a Brooklyn
Dodger on April 15, 1947, he was a nationally known football player at
UCLA, electrifying fans at the Coliseum with his spectacular
broken-field running, a star halfback on the school's first undefeated
team.
The Coliseum Commission and UCLA will honor his memory today by placing
a plaque in the Coliseum's Memorial Court of Honor. It will honor his
accomplishments in breaking the racial barrier in baseball, his work as
a civil rights exponent and his days as a Bruin, when he became the
only athlete in the school's history to win letters in football,
baseball, basketball and track in the same year.
He will join a diverse group of 46 others, from President Kennedy, Pope
John Paul II and Billy Graham to Kenneth Hahn, Jim Murray, Jesse Owens
and Kenny Washington, Robinson's teammate at UCLA.
Friday will be the Dodgers' turn to honor one of their greatest players
by wearing Brooklyn uniforms in their game against the San Diego Padres
at Dodger Stadium.
Robinson, who died in 1972 at age 53, earned his greatest fame in
baseball, yet "Jackie Robinson" is the answer to one of baseball's most
amazing trivia questions: What player who batted .097 in college later
became National League most valuable player and was voted into the Hall
of Fame on the first ballot?
That was his conference batting average when he left UCLA after playing
only one season of baseball, although he certainly made a lasting first
impression. In his first game as a Bruin, he had four hits and stole
four bases, including home once.
In football, he had a 12.2-yard-per-play average from scrimmage and set
an NCAA record for punt returns in a season; in basketball he led the
Pacific Coast Conference twice in scoring, and in track he won the NCAA
long jump championship - then called the "running broad jump."
Contrasted with that .097 average at UCLA, he had a lifetime average of
.311 with the Dodgers from 1947 to 1956, was major league rookie of the
year in 1947, National League MVP in 1949 and was elected to the Hall
of Fame in 1962. He never played for the Dodgers in the Coliseum in
1958, having retired after the 1956 season, but it was in the Coliseum
that he first caught the nation's attention.
Football brought him into focus at Pasadena City College. His dazzling
running helped put 30,000-40,000 people in the Rose Bowl on Friday
nights, where before attendance had been more like 5,000-6,000. His two
high-scoring seasons got him a scholarship at UCLA, where he attained
the credentials of "a college man" that Branch Rickey set as one of the
standards for finding the right black player to bring into professional
baseball.
It was inevitable that someday the color barrier would be broken, but
Robinson's background made him the chosen one for Rickey's "Noble
Experiment," as his signing was called at the time.
Robinson was the David Copperfield of football. What you saw was an
illusion, not to be believed. After a night game in the Coliseum
against Washington State in 1939, Bob Ray wrote in The Times:
"I still marvel at the way Jackie Robinson evaded three Cougar tacklers
who apparently had him cornered on his first touchdown run. They all
wound up falling flat on their faces, grabbing nothing but night air.
Jackie has more than a change of pace - it's a change of space."
In that game, a 34-26 Bruin victory, Robinson ran for three touchdowns,
passed for another, set up a fifth with an interception and kicked four
extra points.
Hank Shatford, then sports editor of the Daily Bruin, who became a Los
Angeles Superior Court judge, wrote a column headed, "Jackie Robinson
- Better than Red Grange," comparing him to the legendary Illinois
back of the 1920s who scored five touchdowns against undefeated
Michigan, four of them on runs of more than 40 yards.
When Robinson enrolled at UCLA, the Bruins had never had a season with
fewer than two defeats.
Joining the veteran Washington, in his senior year as the Bruins'
career-leading running back, Robinson played wingback in Babe Horrell's
offense in 1939, giving the Bruins the most feared twosome in college
football at the time.
Looking back, it seems amazing that Robinson, who averaged more than 10
yards on every run, had only 10 carries in the first five games.
Against Oregon, in a 16-6 win in front of 45,000 in the Coliseum,
Robinson caught a 66-yard pass from Washington for one touchdown and
ran 83 yards for the other.
Tex Oliver, Oregon's coach, said, "You need mechanized cavalry to stop
him. He runs as fast at three-quarter speed as the average player does
at top speed, and he still has that extra quarter to draw upon."
Doug Fessenden, Montana's coach, said before the Grizzlies' 20-6 loss,
"Robinson had been built up so high in Montana [players'] minds that
they would not have been surprised to see him come out on the field
riding a bicycle."
The season's final game, between undefeated teams in front of a record
103,352 in the Coliseum, would determine which went to the Rose Bowl
game, UCLA or USC. The Bruins had been tied three times, the Trojans
once, so UCLA needed to win to get the bid. They had never played in
the New Year's Day game.
With the score 0-0 and only a few minutes to play, the Bruins had a
first down on the USC three-yard line. Robinson was not given the ball,
though, nor was he called on to kick a short field goal, even though he
had kicked them at Pasadena and had tied the Stanford game with an
extra point.
The play sequence: Washington over left guard, no gain; fullback Leo
Cantor over center, one yard gain; Cantor, one-yard loss; pass from Ned
Matthews to Don McPherson batted down in end zone by Bob Robertson.
Thus, the game ended 0-0 and USC got the Rose Bowl bid.
Asked after the game why Robinson had not been called upon, Horrell
said, "We were using him as a decoy."
Later, at an alumni gathering, the coach was asked why the Bruins
hadn't kicked a field goal with the Rose Bowl bid at stake, giving
Robinson an opportunity to return to the site of his earlier success.
"The game is over, it makes little difference, don't you think?" he
said nonchalantly.
In the dressing room, when the players realized what they had lost in
not going for the win, Robinson said, "Let's play it off in the Rose
Bowl. Why give that $100,000 to some Eastern team?"
When the 1940 season began, it was with high expectations. Washington
had graduated, but Robinson was back.
"His colossallness is almost universal knowledge among football fans
all over the country," Shatford wrote in the Daily Bruin. "The Bruins
should be the greatest drawing card in the nation."
Things didn't work out that way. In the opener against Southern
Methodist, in front of a Coliseum night-record crowd of 70,000,
Robinson returned a punt 87 yards for a touchdown but SMU won, 9-6.
Robinson sat out two games because of injuries, but returned against
Stanford to score on a 43-yard punt return, then threw a 20-yard
scoring pass to Milt Smith. But the Bruins lost, 20-14, against the
Frankie Albert-led team that finished undefeated.
The Bruins finished 1-9 and the only bright spot was Robinson's 21-yard
punt return average, a national record at the time. Shortly after that,
Robinson left school and not long afterward was drafted into the Army.
After the war, he joined the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro National
League.
It was there that Rickey spotted him. Scouts said he was not the best
player in the league, not even the best of the Monarchs, but had the
ingredient Rickey sought - a college man who had played with and
against integrated teams. Between the 1939 and 1940 football seasons,
Robinson demonstrated the remarkable versatility that prompted many to
call him the greatest all-around athlete in history, including Jim
Thorpe, Bo Jackson, Glenn Davis and Deion Sanders. Busy with baseball,
he did not go out for track until the season was over. With no practice
all season, he won the PCC meet long jump with a then-record jump of 25
feet, and a week later won in the NCAA meet with a 24-10 1/4 leap in
Minneapolis.
Robinson had hoped to compete in the 1940 Olympics in Helsinki, as his
brother Mack had done in 1936 when he was a silver medalist behind
Jesse Owens in the 200 meters at Berlin, but the Games were canceled
after Russia invaded Finland.
Duke Snider, who became a teammate of Robinson with the Dodgers, loves
to tell a story about Jackie when Duke was growing up in Compton.
"Five or six of us kids were watching him play a [junior college]
baseball game when he left in the middle of an inning, trotting over to
compete in the broad jump with his baseball uniform still on, and then
running back and finishing the baseball game as if nothing had
happened."
The Coliseum plaque is the latest in a series of honors being bestowed
belatedly on the young man who grew up on the west side of Pasadena,
where he attended Muir Tech High.
On March 2, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor in a
ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda attended by President Bush. In 1984,
Robinson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President
Reagan. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most important people of
the century in 1999.
Across from the Pasadena City Hall, he and Mack are memorialized with
nine-foot bronze busts in Centennial Square that were dedicated in
1997.
Today's Coliseum ceremony will start at 2 p.m. with speakers including
William Chadwick, Coliseum Commission president; Albert Carnesale, UCLA
chancellor; Zev Yaroslavsky, county supervisor; Dan Guerrero, UCLA
athletic director; Jamie McCourt, Dodger vice chairman; Don Newcombe,
former Dodger pitcher, and Rachel Robinson, Jackie's widow. Dodger
broadcaster Vin Scully will be master of ceremonies.
*
By the numbers
Some notes on Jackie Robinson's football career:
· Robinson led the country in punt returns in his two seasons at
UCLA, averaging 20.1 yards in 1939 and 21.0 in 1940.
· Robinson averaged an eye-popping 12.2 yards in 42 carries in his
first season, but only 3.64 in his second.
· On Aug. 28, 1941, Robinson caught a 36-yard touchdown pass for the
College All-Stars in a 37-13 loss to the NFL champion Chicago Bears.
"The only time we worried," said Bear end Dick Plasman, "was when that
guy Robinson was on the field."
*