"Some People Build the Roads"

By Tom Callahan

Grambling's football pioneer, Eddie Robinson, gets 300 wins

Before the cheerleaders could say '"Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute, hold that line!" the other team had usually scored. So in the 1940s, 300 victories ago, they renamed the place Grambling, and Eddie Robinson was already the football coach. He was the only coach then. The night watchman, Jesse Applewhite, helped.

Eddie appreciated the help since he also coached girls' and boys' basketball (high school and college) and baseball. Otherwise, he lined the field, directed the girls' drill team at halftime and drove the injured players to the doctor after the game. Then he would sit down and write the story of the game for small newspapers that generally neglected to run it, copying his leads from the big papers. "One of them," he recalls, "went: 'Outlined against a blue-gray October sky . . .' " After Tank Younger arrived in 1945, it was the other teams' coaches who drove the ambulances.

The great fullback Younger began the legend, the first player from a black college to make it to the National Football League. Tank returned to the rural school of 4,000 in north Louisiana and helped Willie Davis get to the N.F.L. Davis came back and helped Ernie Ladd and Buck Buchanan. Rosey Taylor helped Willie Brown. Charlie Joiner helped Sammie White. Now White has been coming back to help a receiver named Trumaine Johnson, who should be a No. 1 draft choice next year and the 206th Grambling Tiger to play professional football.

In 1981, when former 15th-round draft pick Willie Davis was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Green Bay wing, he chose Eddie Robinson to introduce him at the ceremonies. Davis had a sense that his Packer coach, the late Vince Lombardi, was present too in Robinson. "They were both tough disciplinarians," he says, "with soft human sides. They made football a lesson of life. Maybe some of the problems in the game now--you know, drugs--are rooted in the fact that you don't hear coaches described that way much any more."

Robinson never actually set out to win 300 games. "I don't think of it even now," he said before the 43-21 victory over Florida A. & M. that made 300. "That just was never part of it: counting the games." Still, his eyes shine proudly at the mention of Pop Warner, Amos Alonzo Stagg and Bear Bryant, the only other college football coaches who have done it. "I knew Warner as a formation in high school around Baton Rouge," he lightly laughs. " 'Warner Left,' 'Warner Right.' I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Stagg at a coaches' clinic in California in 1955. I love Bear. Every profession needs a superstar, you know. He's the coaches' superstar."

Robinson talks a lot of love and with love. "Coaching is a profession of love," he says. "You can't coach people unless you love them." For an old quarterback (a little church school, Leland College) who has seen so many black quarterbacks automatically converted to defensive backs, Robinson makes little issue of race and expresses no bitterness. In the early '60s, the Grambling quarterback Mike Howell wanted to play defensive back as well. At first Robinson said no. Gently Howell told him, and Robinson recounted it gentler still, "I'll play quarterback for you, but you got to let me play defensive back for Mike Howell." The coach nodded sadly. Howell played both ways for Grambling, and defensive back eight years for the Cleveland Browns.

Quietly, Robinson says: "I went looking for James Harris," the N.F.L.'s first full-time starting black quarterback (for Buffalo first, later Los Angeles and San Diego). " 'You're going to play quarterback in the N.F.L.,' I told James. 'And for sure you're going to graduate because they're going to be questioning your intelligence.' " Robinson thinks of Tampa Bay's starting quarterback, Grambling's Doug Williams, and smiles. "James Harris only had Eddie Robinson. Doug Williams also had James Harris. Some people build the roads, some drive over them. But we're getting there."

The pros have traded on so much black talent for 30 years, it is more than shameful that not one black has ever been a head coach in the N.F.L. Tank Younger, the Chargers' assistant general manager, is silent a moment, and then says, "I can tell you what kind of N.F.L. coach he would have made. A winner."

Robinson counts people as victories, and not only those in the pros. "I don't want anyone to predicate his whole life on playing football. Do you know what I like best? Going to their homes and seeing them as daddies." He is unsure how long he will go on coaching. This is his 41st season, though he doesn't seem old, doesn't look 63. He is tall, fit and dapper. Now he has a full complement of assistants and no longer lines the field.

So many years ago, the first time Robinson stood up at a coaches' clinic to name his school, there was laughter. "Gambling?" they said. "Grumbling?" To himself he thought, "One day they'll know. " -- By Tom Callahan

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