A lot of Bears fans cried tears of joy Sunday.
Roy Curry was one of them, but not because the Bears defeated New Orleans in the NFC title game. As the final seconds expired and Lovie Smith became the first African-American head coach to reach the Super Bowl, Curry got misty-eyed thinking about how far African-Americans have come in football.
He thought about his two years with the Pittsburgh Steelers, about how he arrived in 1963 as a rookie quarterback but had to make the team as a running back because he was African-American, and African-American players weren’t deemed smart enough to run an offense.
He thought about the veteran black players who warned him that no more than six roster spots would go to “colored” athletes and about how no African-Americans were on the coaching staff.
“I was so happy Sunday just to see a black coach do so well because it showed some of those guys who thought the game was too complex for us to learn that, hey, we can take a team and we can win,” the former Robeson coach said. “That’s the reason I was so emotional.
“It just showed we can coach, that we understand the game.”
That already was obvious to anyone who has been paying attention, but a little reinforcement never hurts. Sunday provided lots of it when first Smith and then the Colts’ Tony Dungy won Super Bowl berths, ensuring that an African-American head coach finally will hoist the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
“It’s a great feeling of elation and a feeling of long overdue,” Morgan Park coach Lexie Spurlock said. “I think it just shows now that given the opportunity African-Americans cannot only be great football players but also great football coaches.”
Curry and Spurlock have proved they are exactly that at the high school level. Curry’s 1982 Robeson squad is the only Chicago Public League football team to reach the state finals. Spurlock’s teams have made the state playoffs the last seven seasons and in 2004 reached the Class 7A semifinals.
Each man found his calling helping kids, many of them from underprivileged backgrounds, but each knows he could have succeeded at a higher level had he enjoyed an equal chance.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to answer that question,” said Spurlock, who graduated from high school in 1965 and enrolled at Tuskegee Institute “at a time when I couldn’t set foot at Auburn or Alabama.
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“But you try not to let things block you. You just keep pushing forward.”
Dunbar coach Glen Johnson knows the feeling. He attended Du Sable in the mid-1950s and heard some white counselors tell black kids to forget about college and learn to “do something with your hands.”
Johnson didn’t listen and has gone on to coach in Chicago public schools for 34 years, leading Dunbar to the 1997 Prep Bowl title.
“One of the great things about sports and why football is such a great game is because despite certain kinds of things, you can still come out as a shining example,” he said.
In 1989 the then-Los Angeles Raiders made Art Shell the first African-American head coach of the modern NFL era. Eight have followed him, including six presently in charge.
That number still is too small, and you long for the day black head coaches will be so numerous we won’t even notice it.
That’s what has happened with black quarterbacks. When people debated Texas QB Vince Young’s talents before last year’s NFL draft, the talk centered on his style of play and throwing motion, not the color of his skin.
It was a great leap forward from Jan. 31, 1988, when Doug Williams became the first black quarterback to start in a Super Bowl and culminated two weeks of mind-numbing questions about that fact by passing for 340 yards and four touchdowns in a 42-10 Redskins victory over the Broncos.
His performance helped trash old stereotypes and open the floodgates for African-American quarterbacks. The Smith-Dungy matchup promises to do the same for coaches, certainly in the NFL and, one hopes, in our colleges, which have their own woeful minority-hiring history.
It has started to happen in the pros already. Smith and Dungy both are former defensive coordinators. So is Mike Tomlin, whom the Steelers hired Monday as their head coach. Smith and Tomlin used to work for Dungy.
NFL bosses follow trends in hiring head coaches, and for decades African-Americans were on the wrong side of those trends. Now, suddenly, black defensive coordinators, especially ones who worked for Dungy, appear to be an embryonic trend.
“I think we’ll begin to see more black coaches because people want to win,” Curry said. “There’s nothing like winning.”
For Curry, Spurlock and Johnson, there was nothing like watching Smith and Dungy win their way to the Super Bowl.
“It is so great because I just think we’ve come so far,” Curry said. “You can say, `Hey, man, it was a long time coming,’ but they got in, they got in.”
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