A Father By Proxy, A Man By Example

1917-2007

Louisiana lost a legend yesterday. In 56 years as Grambling’s football coach, Eddie Robinson took a tiny, all-black college to international fame and recognition, and along the way, shaped the lives and careers of a couple of generations of young black men. And he did it in the heart of the South before, during and after the peak of the civil rights movement, when being a young black man was no easy thing.

Ask any of his former players or the people whose lives he touched, and the common refrain would be, “He taught more than football. He taught me how to be a man, and succeed in life.”

Aside from his success on the football fields, the winning seasons, the titles and championships, the hundreds he sent to the NFL, the four NFL Hall of Famers, his players had a graduation rate that would make any current college coach envious. He taught them dignity, responsibility, and the value of hard work – lessons any good father would teach his sons, and lessons that many, many of Eddie Robinson’s boys would not have gotten otherwise.

Sports writers will wax poetic today about the kind of man he was, and do so in far more eloquent words than I. But I’ll say this: Eddie Robinson was a credit to his race.

The human race.

Rest easy, Coach.