Robinson defined respect

• By JOSEPH SCHIEFELBEIN
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Apr 5, 2007

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He took a chance in 1941 at pursuing his childhood dream of coaching, going to a small rural town that had gotten running water and electricity just a few years before.

Grambling State University was called Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute back then. And the Tigers were still nearly two decades from joining the Southwestern Athletic Conference, a league they would come to dominate.

A combination of his team’s success and publicist Collie J. Nicholson’s showmanship turned Grambling into a household name, no matter the demographic, even though the two began at the school in the 1940s, when segregation was still the law.

So it was, when Eddie Robinson became college football’s winningest coach in October 1985, Robinson said “what has happened to me here could only happen in America.”

“He always told us one thing: No man can out-American him,” said Doug Williams, Grambling’s star quarterback in the 1970s who replaced Robinson in 1998 and brought the program back to its heights earlier this decade. “For a man born in 1919, through segregation and all the things facing a black man at that time, I’m sure there were obstacles along the way.

“But you would never know that from him. He made sure you wouldn’t use the idea of being black as an excuse.”

Robinson became the face of all that is good in college football.

“He brought respect for the whole conference and blackness,” said Marino Casem, who coached at Alabama State, Alcorn State and Southern. “There were other great icons of blackness in athletics, but Eddie was our icon.

“Everybody respected him — black, white, Chinese. He did everything the right way. Eddie did it with class. He was always trying to make the conference better, trying to make you better.”

“What he meant to Louisiana goes so much past sports,” said Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame executive director Doug Ireland. “He influenced generations of people, white and black. Everything good about America, he embodied.” Robinson was enshrined in the Louisiana hall in 1983.

Today, Grambling, Robinson and the SWAC are intertwined.

“He’s the one who actually got the SWAC on TV. Grambling was out there carrying the shield of the SWAC,” SWAC Commissioner Robert Vowels Jr. said. “What we’re experiencing right now goes back to what Eddie Rob did.”

Coinciding with Robinson’s impact, Nicholson, a former combat correspondent for the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II, went to Grambling in 1948.

Under Nicholson’s direction, Robinson’s teams — and Grambling’s band — played at Yankee Stadium and elsewhere all across America, banking the games would be an easy sell for blacks who had migrated from the South to cities all over the country, and even ventured to games in Japan.

“There’s such a great following throughout the world. Grambling — the team, the band — can go everywhere,” said Willie Brown, the Oakland Raiders defensive back who is one of four Robinson players to be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame (Buck Buchanan, Willie Davis and Charlie Joiner are the others).

The Bayou Classic in New Orleans, now televised on NBC, became a tradition starting in the mid-1970s.

Robinson died late Tuesday night at the age of 88. Nicholson died in September at 85.

“When you talk about Grambling athletics, most people say coach Eddie,” Williams said in September. “But we all know, especially those that went to Grambling back in the day, that you should say Eddie and Collie. They were the ones that put it out there for the world to see.”

Many on Wednesday credited the pair with creating the tradition of “classics” in black college football, with schools, mostly from the South, routinely traveling across country to play in large stadiums.

Said Otis Washington, who coached Southern in the 1980s, “He and Collie put together this great schedule to play different venues across the country. It put the SWAC on the map.”

Said Jackson state coach Rick Comegy, “Everybody wanted to play at Grambling. He’d done such a fantastic job. He was on national TV, you know, and that was the first time I’d ever seen a black college football team on TV growing up.”

While going to Grambling meant seeing the nation, the reverse was also true, that the nation got to see Grambling — and Robinson’s class.

“Eddie Robinson believed in the American way: If you worked hard, did all the little things, you could be successful,” former Grambling coach Melvin Spears said. “He didn’t see black and white. He saw hard work. He broke down barriers.”

Nearly 10 years have passed since Robinson retired in 1997, and Grambling, with one coach since 1941, is now looking for its third coach. Meanwhile, the world continues to speed.

In the last two seasons, Spears donned a suit on the sideline — no matter the weather — as a touch of respect for Robinson.

“The suit represented what he always thought about American,” Spears said. “It represented professionalism. It represented the greatest profession: coaching, getting young men prepared to go into corporate America, to go to work.”

Spears also would routinely take his players over to the Robinsons’ modest house just outside of the campus to see coach Robinson and sing the alma mater.

“It was significant for our guys to understand who started the process,” Spears said. “Anytime you think about Grambling, you think about Eddie Robinson. Eddie Robinson is Grambling.

“He gave us the opportunity to be where we are.”

Robinson gave Grambling an identity and created a special fraternity among its players, especially those who took the field for him.

“He’s a legend,” Brown said. “He’s not God, but he could stand next to Him. When you mention his name, there are not too many people who don’t know Eddie Robinson.”