After a wait of 41 years for a black coach to reach the Super Bowl, suddenly there are two. With their teams’ victories over the New Orleans Saints and New England Patriots, the Chicago Bears’ Lovie Smith and the Indianapolis Colts’ Tony Dungy finally broke through the sport’s last colour barrier.
In a league where about 70% of the players but only six of the 32 coaches are African-American, Smith and Dungy head to the showpiece in Miami on February 4 knowing that one of them will be making even more history that night.
”Being the first black coach to lead this team, of course our players knew about it and they wanted to help us make history,” said Smith, the lowest-paid coach in the National Football League (NFL) at $1,3-million a year. ”So I feel blessed to be in that position. I’ll feel even better to be the first black coach to hold up the world championship trophy.”
It says much for how far the NFL still has to travel that since Art Shell took over the Oakland Raiders in 1989 there have been only eight black head coaches. That a record seven of them held jobs at one point in the season now ending is at least partly down to OJ Simpson’s lawyer, the late Johnnie Cochran. With fellow lawyer Cyrus Mehri, Cochran co-authored a 2002 report damning the sport for failing to promote minorities to management positions.
The central message of the report was that African-Americans were among the last to be hired and the first to be fired. The evidence of talented individuals being overlooked for jobs and scarcely given time to prove themselves was so persuasive and the publicity so potentially damaging that the NFL almost immediately set up a diversity committee and introduced a rule stipulating that at least one minority candidate be interviewed for every available coaching position.
In early 2003 a coalition of black coaches, scouts and front-office personnel then formed the Fritz Pollard Alliance to ensure the NFL’s interest in diversity would not be a passing fad. An African-American pioneer, Pollard coached several NFL teams in the 1920s before the league’s introduction of segregation effectively ended his professional career.
”Everybody knows about Jackie Robinson and what he did in baseball,” said Dungy last week. ”And you hear that Pollard was a great player and a smart player and a smart coach. Not many people relate Pollard to the NFL as they do Robinson to baseball. But most of the guys of my generation know about Pollard and what he meant for African-Americans in football.”
It’s impossible for a black coach to come up through the ranks without knowing of the league’s chequered racial history, and when Dungy took over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1996 he hired Smith as linebackers’ coach.
Back in an era when only two other African-Americans held the top jobs at NFL teams, the two formed a bond that has endured in the years since. Three weeks ago Smith even travelled to Indianapolis to cheer on Dungy’s Colts in their opening play-off game against the Kansas City Chiefs.
”This is a magical day for the sport and it just shows what can be achieved when talent is given a proper opportunity to shine,” Mehri, counsel for the Fritz Pollard Alliance, said this week.
”Success opens more doors and the really great thing here is that by seizing their chances, Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith have opened the doors for so many others. And the one thing we can say for certain is that a black coach will be lifting the Vince Lombardi trophy in Miami.” — Â