Williams Seeking a Second Legacy

Most everyone thought Doug Williams would return to Grambling University and wait for Eddie Robinson’s retirement after the 1997 football season. Then the favorite son would become coach.

“Everyone was thinking for me,” Williams said with a smile. “But no one was asking me what I thought.”

It’s a wonderful smile born of self-confidence, contentment and joy. To see the big man smile is to see a man at ease with who he is. And right now he is more than a coach-in-waiting. Williams is the new coach at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

We sat in a cinder-block office under the bleachers at Morehouse’s little football field. An NCAA Division II school, Morehouse last season won two of 11 games.

Williams wore a Jacksonville Jaguars windbreaker. He’d been a scout for that team. The job put him on the road for weeks away from his family. A man driving from New England to Louisiana can be forgiven for thinking: I’m better than this.

Williams said, “An old scout told me, ‘Doug, with everything you’ve accomplished, All-America, NFL, Super Bowl MVP, you ought to be in somebody’s front office, not out here on this road.’ ”

Even as Williams looked for a way out, Morehouse looked for a coach. Athletic Director Josh Culbreath wants football operating at the high level of Morehouse academics. So in the fall he drew up a list of potential coaches. He said Williams was first on his list.

Their negotiations pre-dated the Grambling brouhaha. Williams’ name came up when some grumbling alumni tried to force Robinson out. But by then, Williams had all but accepted the Morehouse job.

And when Robinson won his fight to stay on for another season, the coach said he didn’t want Williams around in any capacity. Robinson’s rejection of Williams surprised some people, but not Williams. “I know Coach Rob,” he said, leaving a listener with the idea that Robinson’s ego demands such constant feeding that the coach could not abide anyone diverting attention from him.

Anyway, who would want to take over a Grambling program mired in alumni politics and caught in a death spiral of NCAA violations and criminal charges? Better to succeed the coach who succeeds Robinson.

“All I’m thinking about now,” Williams said, “is building a legacy at Morehouse.”

We talked for an hour. All the while, I thought of him as the quarterback who did that great thing in the Super Bowl. I said, “I want to thank you.”

“For what?”

“Sportswriters hate the Super Bowl because it starts late and we have to write fast on deadline. But not your Super Bowl. We could write at halftime.”

Williams laughed. He said, “When I look at the tape of that game, all I look at is the first half. The second half was boring.”

In Super Bowl XXII on January 31, 1988, he threw for four touchdowns and 228 yards in the second quarter. He took the Washington Redskins from 10-0 behind to 35-10 ahead en route to a 42-10 victory.

Never before had anyone done that in a Super Bowl. Maybe someone will do better. But never again will anyone do the really great thing Doug Williams did. No one else can be the first black quarterback to start in a Super Bowl, win it, win the MVP trophy and put up unimagined numbers.

A U.S. senator said Williams did more for civil rights in one night than Ronald Reagan did in eight years. Old black folks seemed especially happy, Williams said. “They say, ‘Baby, I don’t know nothing about football, but I was praying for you.’ ” He most enjoyed the pride felt by friends in his Louisiana hometown, Zachary. “Those are the people who knew me before I was ‘black.’ ”

Inevitably, race had been the backdrop of that Super Bowl. Broadcaster Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder had touched off controversy by saying “the black is the better athlete (and) he’s bred to be the better athlete because (the) slave owner would breed this big black with his big woman so he could have a big black kid.”

A Super Bowl journalist began a question to Williams, “Obviously, you’ve been a black quarterback all your life . . . “ And Williams saved the fool from further embarrassment by saying, “If you’re white, black, yellow or pink, it means a lot to a quarterback if you can take a team to the Super Bowl.”

He spoke with the grace of a man who knew the important things in life. His wife had died of a brain tumor three months after their daughter’s birth. He had left the NFL for the United States Football League rather than submit to a low-ball contract offer from Tampa Bay, the woebegone Bucs whom he had taken to the playoffs three times in five years, once to the National Football Conference Championship Game.

The USFL folded early in 1986. Williams was 30 and in the prime of a quarterback’s life. But he received only one NFL offer. It came from the Redskins. They signed him as a backup for Jay Schroeder.

Williams threw one pass that year. The next season, the Super Bowl year, he so often came to Schroeder’s rescue that Coach Joe Gibbs made Williams the starter for the playoffs.

For Williams, then, the Super Bowl was less about race than about perseverance--which knows no color. He had said of America’s racial divide, “Martin Luther King didn’t change it, John F. Kennedy didn’t change it. All I can do is live my life the way I’m living and be an example of how you can overcome.”

Injuries forced Williams’ retirement in 1989. He coached in high school and at the U.S. Naval Academy before joining the Jaguars in 1995. As to why he is now at a Division II program rather than, say, in an NFL front office, Williams smiled and said, “Maybe I’m too honest and not a good ol’ boy.” Not a good ol’ white boy, anyway.

Then Williams answered a call from a high school coach. “Thank you, Coach. . . . How big? . . . I need football players, that’s for sure. . . . “

The quarterback who did that really great thing was at work on another legacy.