eddie robinson

[alocispepraluger102]

http://www.gram.edu/news/040407.asp

[paul secor]

When I saw the topic title, I thought it was a thread about the Albany, NY area drummer. Didn't even think about the Grambling football coach. Shows where my head's at these days.

[bertrand]

... And I was ready to prattle on about how the BN discography and the vinyl issue of Chant identified drummer Teddy Robnison as Eddie Robinson and how it was corrected and how he recored with Andrew Hill and yada yada...

Bertrand.

Edited April 4, 2007 by bertrand

[ValerieB]

that picture of mr. robinson in today's l.a. times crying while the national anthem played at his last game a few years back is incredibly poignant. a special man, for sure!

Edited April 5, 2007 by ValerieB

[alocispepraluger102]

Gordie Jones

Eddie Robinson dies, and now we hear the echoes. The echoes that were always there, in the background, as quiet and dignified as the man himself. But the ones we only noticed when we chose to notice.

It's like that with great coaches: All they are, and all they do, reverberates with those they touch.

And then it is passed along once, twice, a third time. The echoes are heard, a thousand times over.

The obituaries tell us that Robinson, who passed away late Tuesday night, at age 88, was a man of strength and resolve, not anger and bitterness. That though he was an African-American man who coached at a historically black college, Grambling, for over half a century -- through Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement and the black-white tensions that continue to this day -- he refused to believe racial barriers were impenetrable.

Everyone, he believed, could carve through those walls, and carve out a niche.

''The best way to enjoy life in America is to first be an American, and I don't think you have to be white to do so,'' he once said, according to the New York Times. ''Blacks have had a hard time, but not many Americans haven't.''

Beliefs like that appear to have struck a chord with those he coached.

Bill Curry, one of the more thoughtful voices at ESPN, was talking on the radio Wednesday morning about one of Robinson's former players, Willie Davis, the Hall of Fame defensive end on those great Green Bay Packers teams of the 1960s.

Curry had never so much as shared a huddle with an African-American player before he was drafted by the Packers in 1965, but Davis -- ''the greatest leader I've ever been associated with,'' he said -- opened his eyes. He did so, Curry said, because of who he was, how he carried himself and what he represented.

Curry couldn't help but think that Robinson had something to do with that. As he told the radio audience, Robinson ''insisted all the time his work was in the hearts and minds of his young men. He was using this sport to make a statement: 'We are just as good as everyone else.' And it worked in the long run.''

And though Curry believes there are ''miles to go'' in race relations, he also said that much of the progress that has been made in the sporting realm ''simply wouldn't have happened without Eddie Robinson.''

Robinson started at Grambling in 1941, months before Pearl Harbor. In the early days he would line the field, make sandwiches for his team's road trips through the segregated South, even write game stories for the local newspaper.

Corky Simpson wrote Wednesday in the Tucson (Ariz.) Citizen that Robinson also had a solution when one of his players had trouble getting out of bed for class in the morning.

More cowbell.

Robinson would invade the dorm room of the slumbering slacker and clang the thing in the player's ear.

Certainly there were many other things he said and did over the course of his career -- which ran through 1997, and saw him win 408 games -- that echoed a lot longer.

''He never told us life was unfair,'' Doug Williams told the New York Times.

Williams is one of the most famous of Robinson's protégés, a Super Bowl-winning quarterback who later succeeded his mentor as coach.

''He always told us this was America,'' Williams told the Times, ''and we could be anything we wanted to be.''

Even an inspiration. Especially that.

gordon.jones@mcall.com

610-820-6628

»

[connoisseur series500]

He was one of those great small-school coaches whose influence went way beyond his surroundings. Great coach and important to all involved in football.