There was Steve McNair, at least, maybe others.
Not sure if Doug Williams started the whole year.
ALinChainz
01-17-2005, 11:05 PM
Williams busted Broncos, barriers
By Phil Barber
NFL Insider
Thirteen years after the fact, they still manage to find Doug Williams.
In airport terminals and hotel restaurants, little old ladies in orthopedic shoes amble forward to meet him. "Mama," an escort will say, "this is the guy who won the Super Bowl that day."
And the woman will clutch Williams's large hand in two small ones and look up at him with a face that has seen immeasurable social change. "Baby," she'll say, "I don't know nothing about football, but I was praying for you that day."
A lot of people were rooting for Doug Williams on Jan. 31, 1988, when he was introduced as the Washington Redskins' starting quarterback in Super Bowl XXII. One of the final barriers in the arena of sports was showing cracks. A few good spirals from the arm of the Washington quarterback could turn it to rubble.
Imagine the pressure that weighed on Doug Williams when he took the field at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium that afternoon. And imagine the mass consternation when he dropped back to pass late in the first quarter and suffered a hyperextended left knee. For a decade, Williams had battled overt racism, whispered doubts, and the defensive monsters of the NFL. Now, with his team already trailing the Denver Broncos 10-0 in the biggest game of his life, it looked as if he might be done in by a patch of moist grass.
Of the 73,302 spectators at that game, none was more emotionally invested than Eddie Robinson, the legendary Grambling State coach. Robinson saw his former pupil lying on the ground in pain, and his heart practically stopped. "That was the first time I challenged the deity," Robinson says. "Well, not challenged. But when Doug went down, I pointed up and said, 'I know you didn't bring me out here for this.' "
Robinson was right. After giving way to backup Jay Schroeder for two plays, Williams returned to orchestrate one of the most remarkable quarters in NFL history. In the space of 15 football minutes, Washington's 10-0 deficit became a 35-10 cakewalk. Everything went right that quarter, especially Williams's passes. He fired four touchdown strikes, two to Ricky Sanders (including an 80-yard bomb to get the ball rolling) and one each to Gary Clark and Clint Didier.
The shell-shocked Broncos never recovered. Williams ran a cautious, clock-consuming offense in the second half, and the Redskins powered to a 42-10 victory. Williams set a Super Bowl record with 340 passing yards and was named most valuable player.
"It was a big deal to see him play in that game," says Tennessee quarterback Steve McNair, who was two weeks shy of his 15th birthday at the time. "For him to be one of the few black quarterbacks in the league, and to do well. And not just to win, but to be MVP. It was big."
After the game, NFL officials ushered Robinson onto the field. "You won't understand the impact of what you did today until later," he told Williams while they embraced. "This is like Joe Louis knocking out Max Schmeling."
"The thing that was funny about it," Williams recalls now, "is he told me, 'I can remember when I was standing there watching the Schmeling-Louis boxing match.' But actually he wasn't watching it. He was listening to it on the radio. But to him, he was watching it."
That's how vivid, how meaningful Joe Louis' knockout victory was to African-Americans. And that's how important Doug Williams' triumph was some 50 years later.
There is no Jackie Robinson among NFL quarterbacks — no superstar who broke the color line and immediately set white and black on equal footing. Instead, there is a continuum of contributors. George Taliaferro, Willie Thrower, Marlin Briscoe, Joe Gilliam, James Harris, Warren Moon, Randall Cunningham, and Steve McNair — they are among the links in a chain that stretches into this relatively enlightened age. None of the links was more vital than Doug Williams.
By the time Williams went to Grambling State in 1973, Eddie Robinson was fairly obsessed with the issue. He had come to the school in 1941, when there wasn't a single African-American in the NFL. Throughout the next 30 years, he witnessed (and facilitated) tremendous strides — at every position but quarterback.
"I made no bones about it," Robinson admits. "I'd say, 'Hell, I want somebody from Grambling to play quarterback.' They knew that in the league because I'd go to them and say, 'Tell me what I've got to teach this boy for him to play in the NFL.' I'd talk to the scouts who would come. I'd talk to the general managers. I'd talk to the owners."
Robinson had some fulfillment with James (Shack) Harris, one of Williams's predecessors at Grambling State. Harris led the NFC in passing while with the Rams in 1976. But his NFL career didn't pan out as many hoped. Some, including Williams, insist that it was racial bias that made the talented Harris an eighth-round choice in 1969, and that ultimately turned him into a second-string quarterback.
The situation was different for Williams. He was the first All-America quarterback from a black college and the first African-American passer picked in the first round. (Though Oakland selected Tennessee State quarterback Eldridge Dickey in the first round of the 1968 draft, the Raiders did so with the intent of moving Dickey to receiver.) In short, he was the league's first high-profile black quarterback. He was going to get his shot in the NFL, and his level of success would establish a baseline for those who followed.
So Williams became a lightning rod.
Everyone knew he could throw the ball 70 yards on a line. But a lot of people heard that crawfish drawl, noted his small-school background, and came to the conclusion that he lacked the "intangibles" to succeed as an NFL quarterback. It was an old song. Sometimes it got twisted. When Williams played for Tampa Bay, one anonymous "fan" mailed him a rotten watermelon and a note that read, "Try throwing this to your [n-word]s. Maybe they can catch this."
Fortunately, Williams was well qualified to deal with the detractors. He always possessed an unwavering confidence, especially on the athletic field, where he starred in football, basketball and baseball. And he had weathered enough adversity in his life to put it all in perspective. When Williams was growing up outside of Zachary, La. (just north of Baton Rouge), he lived midway between two crossroads that were separated by about a mile. On Friday nights, the Klan liked to burn crosses at each intersection. When someone grows up in proximity to such palpable hatred, he's not apt to be intimidated by a rotten watermelon.
During his football career, Williams had five knee surgeries, a back operation, an emergency appendectomy, and a separated shoulder. His mouth was wired shut for six weeks when his jaw was broken on a Fred Dryer tackle. The day before Super Bowl XXII, Williams was subjected to four hours of root-canal surgery. Tougher than any of that, his first wife Janice had died of a brain tumor in 1983, when their daughter was an infant.
"It was a rocky road," Williams reflects. "I had some obstacles in the way. It wasn't the interstate, where you can just put your cruise control on. There were some detours and some curves. But I think that made it that much better."
"You could say he was a champion before he even got to Washington because of the way he handled everything," says Sammy White, Williams's best receiver at Grambling State.
The Super Bowl made it tangible, though. Until that memorable second-quarter barrage, the merits of Doug Williams's NFL career were debatable. True, he had taken over a Buccaneers team that was undeniably dreadful, had led it to three playoff appearances in five seasons, and when he left, it was dreadful again. But his numbers were unremarkable. He completed fewer than 50 percent of his passes during his tenure at Tampa.
What didn't show up in the statistics was Williams's willingness and ability to avoid the sack. "The Tampa Bay offensive line won an award for outstanding athletic achievement in 1979, by allowing only 12 sacks," says Jimmie Giles, who played tight end for the Buccaneers and now works as a financial advisor for Allstate Insurance in Tampa. "But this was more because of Doug Williams' ability to scramble and get rid of the ball quickly, and his intelligence when it was a situation in which he should throw the ball away. That reflects on your passer ratings."
It was this trait that appealed most to the Buccaneers' offensive coordinator, Joe Gibbs. By 1986, when Williams returned from a three-year stint in the USFL, Gibbs was the head coach in Washington. He quickly signed the quarterback. A year later, the two of them made history.
"See, in pro ball you've got to win to eat," Robinson says. "You've got to win to pay the notes on your house and your car. This is what makes the game what it is, and makes guys have a chance to play."
Today, African-American quarterbacks are common around the league. The door burst open in 1999, when three black quarterbacks — Donovan McNabb, Akili Smith, and Daunte Culpepper — were among the first 11 picks of the draft. Now it hardly raises eyebrows when one African-American quarterback (such as the Saints' Jeff Blake) gets hurt, and another (Aaron Brooks) replaces him.
"The ones I'm proudest of are the backups and the practice-squad guys," Williams says. "Those are the positions that were not handed to the African-American quarterback [when I played]. You've got to give them a chance to develop."
Williams never shied away from the racial issue. The title of his autobiography is Quarterblack. A line in that book reads, "Black quarterbacks are always going to be controversial in the NFL."
But are they? A decade after making the suggestion, Williams acknowledges that African-Americans are moving inexorably toward equality in the pocket. And in contrast to his heyday, there are three black head coaches: Minnesota's Dennis Green, Tampa Bay's Tony Dungy, and the Jets' Herman Edwards.
Just the same, Williams is not quite ready to put his soapbox into storage. Next in line for a makeover: NFL general managers. He even has a candidate, his old friend James Harris, currently the director of pro personnel for the Baltimore Ravens.
Meanwhile, Doug Williams's life path has completed a tidy circle. After leaving the Buccaneers with bitter feelings toward the man who owned them, Hugh Culverhouse, he has embraced — and been embraced by — current owner Malcolm Glazer and his family. "I'm probably Tampa's biggest fan," Williams says. "I take my hat off to the Glazers for what they've done down there."
Even more satisfying, Williams succeeded his mentor in 1998 as head coach of the Grambling State Tigers.
It isn't easy to step into those shoes. Eddie Robinson coached at the Louisiana school for an improbable 55 seasons (1941-42, 1945-1997; the school dropped football for two years during World War II). He won 408 games, an NCAA record. Four of his alumni are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Now the team plays football in Eddie G. Robinson Stadium. Looming over the field is a giant banner advertising EddieRobinson.com. The man's image is everywhere. It's the kind of situation that could intimidate an inexperienced coach.
"I'm not easily intimidated," Williams says with a laugh. "You know, you can't eliminate Eddie Robinson. The man spent 57 years at one place. Everything that is out there, Coach Robinson deserves that. But I don't coach with Coach over my head. It's not like we're in the 'this is the way Coach used to do it' mode."
Williams has made his coaching position a family affair. His oldest daughter will attend Grambling State as a freshman this fall. His mother and seven siblings all live in Zachary, some of them in the compound Doug built with guaranteed money from his contract with the USFL's Oklahoma/Arizona Outlaws. And when it's game day at Grambling, the 3-hour, 45-minute drive keeps nobody away.
"My mom cooked gumbo last Sunday and froze it," Williams said after his Tigers defeated Alabama State 20-2 in their homecoming game last fall. "They came up here, and we had gumbo and chicken last night. When I got home yesterday my house was full. That's why I stayed at the hotel — not enough beds in the house."
There's another reason Doug Williams is happy in his current job. He seems to be fairly good at it.
When Williams took over the program, the Tigers were coming off three consecutive losing seasons. In 2000, they posted a 9-2 record, then won the Southwestern Athletic Conference championship game. There is an excitement on campus that had been missing for several years.
"I think it's just starting," Robinson says. "I told him the other day, 'As I went to 57, if you could ever go 43, we could go a hundred together. A hundred years at Grambling.' "
Wouldn't that be something? Stepping down as head coach of the Tigers at the age of 85? How will Williams be remembered then? Most sporting accomplishments tend to recede over time, gradually nudged aside by other heroics. Something tells you that Doug Williams and Super Bowl XXII might grow bigger and bigger as the years pass.
Republished from the September-October issue of NFL Insider Magazine.
http://www.nfl.com/insider/2001/williams_doug090601.html
Originally posted by Sammy Who??
Mcnabb is the first african american qb starter to even make a super bowl. so let's hope the Pats win or we'll never hear the fucking end of it!!
What about Steve McNair, dope? :rolleyes:
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