Friday, October 18, 2024

Books: "The Great Black Hope," By Louis Moore

 


The Great Black Hope: Doug Williams, Vince Evans, and the Making of the Black Quarterback

By Louis Moore

PublicAffairs; hardcover, 304 pages; $30.00

Louis Moore is a historian of African American history and sports history, and his work has appeared in USA Today, Sports Illustrated, and the New York Times. His research was cited in Brian Flores' landmark lawsuit accusing the NFL of racial discrimination. 

In the new, engrossing book, The Great Black Hope: Doug Williams, Vince Evans, and the Making of the Black Quarterback, Moore takes us back to a time when you couldn't turn on the TV and expect to see Patrick Mahomes or Lamar Jackson, Kyler Murray, Jordan Love, and Jacoby Brissett at quarterback. 

In fact, it was not only rare, but discouraged, to have a Black quarterback, and that was the world that Doug Williams and Vince Evans entered the NFL in the late 1970s. Each of them got death threats, faced racist questions, and knew that a single mistake could end their careers. 

Evans was an electrifying dual-threat quarterback who was ahead of his time who also had crossover appeal, as he had plenty of acting roles while quarterbacking USC, with roles in The Six Million Dollar Man and Rich Man, Poor Man. Williams had a rocket for an arm, and nearly a decade into his career, would become most known for being the first Black quarterback to win a Super Bowl, with Washington in 1987.

The future became apparent when Williams and his Tampa Bay Buccaneers faced off against Evans' Chicago Bears on September 30, 1979. It was a moment that, Moore contends, did not get the attention it deserved at the time.

"The matchup between Williams and Evans was one of the most significant games in regular season history. After years of denying Black men a chance to succeed in the sport's most important position, the NFL had finally been unable to ignore the sheer talents of these two Black players. And they were two different types of quarterbacks. Williams was big and strong, and although he could run, his mentor, Eddie Robinson, taught him to stand in the pocket like a classic quarterback, so NFL teams would not try to switch his position like they did with so many other Black men. Evans had blazing speed and was more comfortable rolling outside of the pocket and presenting himself as a dual threat to the defense, where he could run or pass."

Throughout this book, it becomes apparent how Williams and Evans' stories track a lot of NFL history into the 1980s, and Moore presents a view of what they went through that might not have been apparent to the general public.

The first hinge moment they had to endure was heading into the 1982 season, when revenue sharing with the players became a bigger issue than ever as the NFL's revenues from TV contracts started to explode.

Williams also took issue with how the wage scale was set, that a reserve linebacker could end up making the same money as a quarterback if they had the same service time, and went against the players' union, the NFLPA. Derided as a "company man," Williams' position became so contentious that there were concerns his own teammates would sabotage his performance, either by forcing him to fumble the ball or have his line not protect him. 

The players went on strike in the second week of the 1982 season, and when the league resumed in mid-November, he led Tampa Bay to the playoffs by winning five of the remaining six regular season games.

Tampa Bay lost in the playoffs to Dallas, and Williams then focused on his wife, Janice, giving birth to their daughter soon after the season ended. Then, his wife's health took a turn for the worst, as it was revealed she had a brain tumor, and she passed away in early April, with their daughter, Ashley Monique. just 11 weeks old.

After his world came crashing down, Williams had to tend to negotiating his contract with Bucs owner Hugh Culverhouse, who he viewed as a redneck from Alabama. The first offer he received was not a salary, but a real estate deal that Moore contends had racist undertones. Williams requested $600,000, but Tampa Bay countered at $400,000 and would not budge. 

The Tampa Bay Times even took a fan poll and 52 percent stood with the team's position, so Williams responded by joining the Oklahoma Outlaws of the USFL on a five-year contract worth $3 million.

At the same moment, into the 1983 season, Evans' future as Bears quarterback became hazier, as it was clear that Head Coach Mike Ditka was leaning to Jim McMahon to be his quarterback, even though Evans outplayed him. 

The difference here that the press backed Evans, with the columnist for the Chicago Metro News calling the Bears a racist organization, which led the team to remove their press pass.

Moore saw a larger pattern in the Evans-McMahon battle, as he writes, "The Blacks fans' and Evans' frustrations continued to grow during the first quarter of the season. To them, it was clear that Evans was outplaying McMahon. That's how the Black quarterback syndrome went. Even when you were twice as good as the white guy, it would never be enough. In their first four games of the 1983 season, Evans played three quarters to McMahon's thirteen, but the Bears had scored 40 points with Evans in the game compared to 37 with McMahon."

Eventually, McMahon became the starter, leading the Bears to a Super Bowl win in 1985, but that team is most remembered for Buddy Ryan's defense. Like Williams, Evans ended up in the USFL, joining the Chicago Blitz in 1984, and then the Denver Gold the following season. He came back to the NFL for the Raiders in 1987, and remained there until 1995.

Williams found his way back to the NFL in 1986 with the Washington Redskins, where he served as the backup to Jay Schroeder, and played just one game, against Dallas and their backup QB, Reggie Collier.

Heading into 1987, there wasn't much question Schroeder would be the starter, until he got hurt in Week 1. Williams entered that game and he outdueled Randall Cunningham of the Philadelphia Eagles. 

The NFL went on strike following the second game, and when they returned in Week 6 (replacement players filled in the interim), Schroeder was healthy. By the time Week 10 rolled around, Schroeder was struggling, and Gibbs removed him in the second quarter of a game against the Detroit Lions, in favor of Williams.

After that win, Williams was all set to face the Los Angeles Rams on Monday Night Football, but a back injury sidelined him. Schroeder had his job back until Williams took over in the final game of the season, and shockingly, Redskins Head Coach Joe Gibbs proclaimed Williams the starter heading into the playoffs. The story of his odyssey through the playoffs, including a massive news story involving a big TV personality of the era, on the way to beating the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl is one of the best parts of this book.

In this excerpt, Moore writes of the pioneers that paved the way for Williams and Evans: "The pro quarterback was a symbol that carried weight in America. More than just a position in a popular sport, team owners, coaches, media, and the fans celebrated the quarterback as the ultimate sign of leadership and intelligence. As one white writer put it in the mid-1960s, 'This is the glamour position. This is where the money goes. This is, most of all, the job which requires great physical skills, high intelligence, and the ability to lead. And this is where the Negro has never been given a complete chance.'

As modern pro football slowly started to integrate after World War II, there was a small window when the possibility of a Black quarterback didn't seem so far-fetched. In fact, two pro teams, the 1946 Los Angeles Rams (Kenny Washington), and the 1949 Brooklyn-New York Yankees of the AAFC (Alva Tobar), had Black quarterbacks. But just as Black players reintegrated pro football, starting with Kenny Washington in 1946, the quarterback also became the most important position on the field. And very quickly, quarterbacking became the domain of white men. To protect that privilege, white coaches built nearly impenetrable defenses of stereotypes, excuses, and flat-out refusals to give Black men a chance. As Pittsburgh sportswriter Phil Musick once mused, 'There are, of course, no such things as black quarterbacks; only figments of the liberal imagination. Somewhere on their way to the pocket - poof! - they became defensive backs, flankers, pulling guards, automobile mechanics, insurance salesmen.' He was right. For far too many Black quarterbacks, the NFL stood for 'not for long.' That's because pro football protected the position like a precious heirloom. Black quarterbacks, Kevin Lamn of the Chicago Sun-Times observed, 'had to swim the moat white folks had built around the football position that stood for leadership and glory.' He added, 'They've struggled more than most quarterbacks just for the opportunity to struggle at being a pro quarterback.' In other words, pro football had a caste system, and quarterbacks were a white-only class.

This was intentional. White owners, general managers, coaches, and scouts did not believe the Black quarterback belonged in the league, and they found all manner of rationalization. They said he was not smart enough to read a defense, his white teammates would not follow his leadership, and he did not have the courage to stand in the pocket and deliver an accurate pass with a defender barreling down on him. One unnamed coach even claimed in 1968, 'I don't know quite how to describe it, but the Negro is often sort of loosey-goosey. He seems to throw the ball a little differently. He doesn't seem to keep his forearm as rigid. He tends to snap his wrist like he's throwing a curveball. A pass thrown like this wobbles. It doesn't have as much speed on it. It's less accurate.' Then there was the Black quarterback's vernacular. With most Black quarterbacks coming from the South, the stereotype suggested that white players would not be able to understand his Black Southern accent. One white writer wrote of Doug Williams, 'In truth, Williams' sentences are filled with a combination of black jargon and Louisiana bayou slang and it all adds up to distinctive listening.' Williams heard the nonsense and chided, 'I know I have bad English, but I think everybody understands me.'

Then there was the Black quarterback's speed. In a nation where racial stereotypes ran ripe, the Black quarterback could never outrun the belief that his speed was more valuable at any other position than quarterback. So, they threw him at receiver or tossed him in the secondary. If he wanted to play pro ball, he had no choice. When asked about what happened to him, Cornell Gordon, who starred at North Carolina A&T in the mid-1960s before playing defensive back on the 1968 Super Bowl Champion New York Jets, emphatically put it, 'Sure, I wanted a chance to play quarterback, but they wouldn't give it to me.' Most coaches had a special formula they used to evaluate Black quarterbacks: Black + quarterback = defensive back.

Why the secondary? Speed. Football experts believed cornerbacks had all brawn and little brain. According to the white power structure in pro football, cornerback was the opposite of the quarterback; there was no thinking involved. Very quickly, the cornerback became thought of as the domain for the Black athlete. In 1968, Sports Illustrated's Jack Olson vividly explained, 'The cornerback areas resembled the middle of a cotton field in Crumrod, Ark. Three-fourths of the starting cornerbacks, 24 out of the 32, were black.' An amazing stat considering the league was only 25 percent Black...In the period between 1955, when Charlie 'Choo Choo' Brackins played three snaps at quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, and 1968, when Marlin Briscoe became the Denver Broncos' starting QB, pro teams switched the positions of every Black college quarterback that made a roster. The great majority of them became cornerbacks. It did not matter if they went to a big-time white school or a small Black college. Pro football had no use for them them as signal callers."



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