A Crusade of Civility and Success

Shunning the shade, Eddie Robinson stands impervious to the sun and the passage of time through two-a-day practices in the steamy Louisiana summer.

No shorts for him on the field or at home in his trophy-filled, ranch-style brick house, where he studies tapes through the night while his young assistants sleep.

In his 57th and final year coaching at Grambling State University, the 78-year-old Robinson works harder and longer than anyone. Always has. And especially now as he grimly focuses on going out a winner and ending a year’s misery.

The winningest football coach, college or pro, with 405 victories, Robinson is coming off his worst record, 3-8. His first consecutive losing seasons. The arrest of four players on rape charges. An NCAA probe of recruiting violations. The threat of losing his job.

He practically built Grambling, made the tiny, historically black school as identifiable with college football as Knute Rockne did at Notre Dame, and he’s reluctantly stepping aside at the end of the season.

“I’d like to coach to about 100, if I could live that long,” Robinson says, sipping an icy lemonade in his living room. “This is the only thing I’ve ever done. I’ve got the same wife and the same job. The wife and job are the same age. Frankly, it doesn’t sound right, but I’ve never really wanted to do anything else.”

He doesn’t golf or fish. Doesn’t care to travel on vacations. His life is Grambling football, and those close to him worry about how he’ll survive away from the game.

“It’s going to leave a hole, like a death in the family,” says his son, quarterbacks coach Eddie Robinson Jr. “Sometimes folks live a certain way so long, it’s hard to adjust to anything else.”

*

For one last season, Robinson can weave the poetry that his wife gives him into locker room oratory to make his players laugh and weep and run out to the field roaring like Tigers. His speeches are closer to sermons, full of wisdom and passion.

“He can cry like a preacher, he whi . . . i . . . ines like a preacher, and he can get that voice up real high like a preacher,” says Glen Hall, a former player and now defensive backs coach. “And when he sings the school song, he sings like a preacher.”

Robinson will talk to the players about what the game means to him, to them, remind them of everything they’ve gone through, and what winning would mean to generations of future Tigers.

“The players will swear he’s not going to make them cry,” says offensive coordinator Melvin Lee, who’s been at Robinson’s side for 37 years. “Then the tears are rolling down their cheeks and they’ll say, ‘Coach, you got us again.”’

In a career that’s spanned 11 presidents, several wars, and the civil rights movement, Robinson has sent more players to the pros--over 200--than anyone else. He’s won every award a coach can win, been inducted into every hall of fame for which he’s eligible, and received honorary degrees from such prestigious universities as Yale.

“I’ve met a lot of presidents and other people, and I think a lot of them, but Eddie Robinson is just a special, special human being,” says Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who has long underwritten Grambling’s annual games for the New York Urban League. “Joe Paterno is one of the great men of the world. He’s an institution at Penn State. Eddie Robinson is something more than just an institution. He is a living cause.”

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A man’s most important qualities, Robinson says, are integrity, respect and honesty. He’s taught that to his players for six decades, and he’s urged them to live life to the fullest, to “leave some kind of mark among the people so they know you and what you stood for.”

It doesn’t take long, listening to Robinson spin tales and uncommon sense from the red leather recliner in his living room, to be impressed by him.

Always a man of impeccable taste, his spotless white shoes gleam in the lamplight and his slacks hang crisply creased to the cuffs in the muggy heat. He holds the lemonade near his furrowed brow. The strong chin and intense eyes that create an angry countenance on the sideline often give way to a brilliant smile and a twinkle.

His home and office sit where a peach orchard stood when the school was called the Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute in 1941. Robinson arrived that year after working in a feed mill and driving an ice wagon in Baton Rouge following graduation from Leland College.

That was also the year Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 straight games, Ted Williams batted .406 and Joe Louis flattened everyone in the bum-of-the-month club.

“I guess Joe Louis had a greater impact on me than any other sports figure or anybody else other than my father,” Robinson says. “He never bragged, he never made a lot of promises and things like that, and I could relate to somebody like that. I wanted to be a boxer once because of him.”

*

Robinson, a quarterback, fullback, tailback and baseball pitcher at Leland before the school was absorbed into Southern University, had earlier considered a couple of other careers.

“The preacher and the doctor, that’s what we had as black youngsters coming along,” he recalls. “We heard the best preachers in Baton Rouge and we knew the best doctors. They looked like they were doing well. But then I fell in love with football.”

He went on his first recruiting trip as a Leland student with his coach--”The NCAA would kill you for that today,” he says with a wink--and refined the art of finding talent throughout the South in his first years at Grambling.

He showed extraordinary patience with players, sticking by them even when they fouled up, and he maintained discipline without losing his temper. Few knew about the tough methods that kept him in line, and in school, when he was a boy.

“My daddy had the quickest belt in Baton Rouge,” Robinson says with more respect than resentment. “Some people would call that child abuse now, and my daddy probably would have been in trouble a lot because he was whipping me almost every day. But he was my role model. I never saw my daddy drink or smoke, and I never drank or smoked--except one time. He walked in on me smoking and I ate the cigarette and fanned all the smoke away and swore to him he wasn’t smelling smoke.”

Robinson, who has five great-grandchildren, may also have modeled his work ethic after his late father, a cotton sharecropper who became a laborer for Standard Oil. No one at Grambling, coach or player, can keep up with Robinson.

*

We think, ‘What is this man doing, or what is he taking that got him to the point where he can survive and go on like this when we’re not functioning?”’ says Robert Smith, defensive line coach and one of the former Tigers who played in the NFL. “It’s just amazing to see. At 78 he can go on longer than all of us, in 105-, 110-degree heat, and never in the shade.”

Assisted only by a moonlighting night watchman when he first arrived at the threadbare campus, 65 miles from Shreveport, Robinson did everything to build the athletic department virtually from scratch. He lined the field, taped the players, led the drill squad at halftime. He wrote the stories for local newspapers, waxing poetic at times with something like, “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky,” just as Grantland Rice did.

Robinson coached basketball and baseball and did everything but cook for the students. Sometimes his wife, Doris, did that.

In time, Robinson built the Grambling football team into a nationally respected power, playing in Yankee Stadium, the Rose Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl and the Superdome. He took the Tigers on barnstorming trips around the country in the ‘60s--”a gypsy team with a floating schedule,” he called it--and over to Tokyo to play Morgan State in 1976 in the first overseas game between U.S. colleges.

Early on, Robinson started a tradition of waking players by going around to their rooms with a loud bell. He’d collect their meal cards and give them back if they reported to breakfast at 7 a.m. They didn’t have to eat, but if they didn’t show up they’d have to buy their own food the rest of the day. The idea was to make sure they were up in time for breakfast so there would be no excuses for not getting to class by 8 a.m.

Going to class, studying and graduating were the first orders of business for Grambling players, and nearly 80% of them earned degrees.

*

Last year, for the first time in decades, Robinson had to stop the bell-ringing wake-up calls after the NCAA ordered that athletes and nonathletes share the same dorms.

“The other kids are raising hell when we ring the bell. They don’t want to be woken,” he says.

Robinson has also been running up against resistance toward another longtime practice: teaching eating etiquette, civil language and manners.

“When you’re my age, they figure you’re old and it’s passed by. But we’ve still got people who don’t know how to eat and are afraid to eat in public,” he says.

Early in the 1950s, Robinson asked some teachers to put together a course called “Everyday Living” to teach his students which piece of silverware to use for different courses, how to cut meat, how to break bread, how to be courteous to women.

The course took shape after running back Paul “Tank” Younger signed with the Los Angeles Rams and became the first player from an all-black college to enter the NFL. When the Rams and Younger came through the South for a game, Robinson planned to have dinner with them.

“I asked him where all the black ballplayers were,” Robinson recalls, “and he said, ‘They ain’t coming down to eat. You know this thing y’all worrying us about, cutting the meat and knowing which piece of silver to use, the guys are staying there and eating a hamburger in the room.”’

*

Robinson also noticed that his players weren’t eating on flights because they didn’t know how to handle the meals and tableware on the small trays. So he got some of the same trays and had them practice eating on them.

He wouldn’t tolerate profanity from his players on or off the field, or blacks calling other blacks “nigger.”

“I said, ‘How can you do it, and if another person does it, then you want him to be put in prison or charged? You can’t do it like that,”’ Robinson says. “You still hear it a lot of places. It’s ‘Good morning, nigger,’ or ‘Where you been, nigger?’ When I came to Grambling, I decided I was going to take that out of my vocabulary.”

Trumaine Johnson, who set most of Grambling’s receiving records from 1979-82 before going to the NFL, says that “if a player used incorrect English, he’d actually stop the practice and correct the player right there on the spot.”

Robinson tells the story of Willie Mays passing through Louisiana in his prime in the ‘50s. Robinson asked him to come along on a recruiting trip through Texas, but Mays fretted about speaking to people. Robinson assured him he’d do all the talking for both of them.

“I told Willie, ‘I’ll tell you something, and I don’t want to embarrass you, but while you’re here why don’t you let me take you to the public speaking guy and let him just write you a standard ‘thank you’ and an introduction, and you’ll have it down,”’ Robinson says as walks over to the wooden lectern in his living room where he still practices his speeches in front of his wife. “But Willie wasn’t really for that. Well, that made me know that I needed to go to this class in public speaking and put my ballplayers in.”

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From the start, Robinson made sure his players traveled in jackets, ties and slacks and presented themselves like professionals.

“You’re trying to fit them into the toughest society in the world,” Robinson says.

Robinson’s pro stars include Willie Davis, James Harris, Ernie Ladd, Buck Buchanan, Sammy White, Cliff McNeil, Willie Brown, Roosevelt Taylor, Charlie Joiner, Willie Williams, and Doug Williams.

“Our profession will never, ever be able to repay Eddie Robinson for what he has done for the country and the profession of football,” says Penn State coach Joe Paterno.

An autographed portrait of Paul “Bear” Bryant, the late Alabama coach, hangs from the wall of the conference room where Robinson and his assistants plot out game plans.

“If the Bear were alive, I’d still be chasing him,” Robinson says of his old friend. “I’m no better than any other coach. But I’ve heard the best coaches in America and learned from them for close to 60 years, right down to that young coach from Florida (Steve Spurrier). And I have my own ideas.

“I’ve been fortunate to have some of the best football players to ever put the pads across their heads. I tried to bring out what they had and put it together with the team, but it just kind of faded a little bit these last couple of years.”

*

Grambling has had trouble recruiting top players the past few years, and for the first time that Robinson can remember, the sons of some of his former players chose to go to other schools.

Robinson knows, however, that a coach is measured by victories, not alibis, and with his record he doesn’t need excuses for a couple of losing seasons. In fact, he’s had only seven in 54 seasons.

Robinson has a career record of 405-157-15--Grambling didn’t field teams in 1943 and ’44. He broke Bryant’s 323-win college record and George Halas’ 326-win pro record in 1985, a year after he surpassed Pop Warner and Amos Alonzo Stagg.

Some have denigrated Robinson’s mark, saying most of his victories came against NCAA Division I-AA caliber teams. It could just as well be claimed that Robinson’s record was harder to achieve on Grambling’s shoestring scholarship budget and with a small staff.

He won where he played, capturing or sharing the Southwestern Athletic Conference title 17 times since joining the SWAC in 1959.

Robinson doesn’t boast that his teams might have beaten many of the top Division I-A teams. Nor does he make apologies to critics who say he’s behind the times, building his offense around the Wing-T formation.

“He’d practice one particular play 15 or 20 times, just to get the timing right,” Johnson says. “I’d think that was overdoing it, but on Saturdays you appreciate the time you put in on practice.”

All the problems Robinson faced last year led school president Raymond Hicks to talk to him about quitting and accepting a vice presidency at the school.

“I wondered whether or not he was up to it,” Hicks says. “I was worried about his health. And do we let people ruin his reputation or does he go out now.”

The appearance that Robinson was being shoved out set off a groundswell of support for him. Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster weighed in, calling Robinson an icon who deserved one more year.

The Louisiana Board of Regents, which oversees Grambling and all other state colleges, urged Hicks to let Robinson have one last shot at another winning season. Faxes and letters, including one from Bill Cosby, flooded Hicks’ office until the day he announced that Robinson would coach one more year.

“I’m the coach again!” Robinson shouted to his wife when Hicks made the announcement.

He never criticized Hicks or the alumni who had lined up against him, but others associated with Grambling felt a deep sense of disgrace.

“It put shame on the institution,” Hall says.

*

Hall and other assistants were on the road recruiting last year when the brouhaha about Robinson’s job broke, and suddenly they were all called back to campus.

“It hurt recruiting a lot,” Hall says. “There were a lot of kids we could have gotten and we didn’t get because they wanted to play under Eddie Robinson. It’s not so much playing for Grambling. It’s playing for Eddie Robinson and Grambling, in that order.”

Though Robinson’s job was secured for one last year, his reputation was still threatened by the NCAA probe, which didn’t end until July 31.

The NCAA essentially cleared Robinson of any wrongdoing, though it found Eddie Jr. had unintentionally broken some minor rules.

Grambling, chastened by any cloud over its reputation, gladly accepted a light slap--the two-year probation--and felt relieved not to lose any scholarships, TV money or postseason appearances.

“I didn’t think they would smear my name because they didn’t have anything to smear my name on,” Robinson says. “I surely wouldn’t want to make it tougher for the other guy coming in, like losing a lot of scholarships for him. I’d like to leave him a championship team.”

*

The rape charges against the four players and another student were dismissed, and all five pleaded no contest to a reduced charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. They were expelled for violating the student code of conduct prohibiting sexual intercourse on campus and having a woman in the men’s dormitory.

“I have to be real careful because people would say I’m trying to cover up for the guys,” Robinson says. “I’m not trying to cover up for anybody. Good people can make mistakes. It’s going to hurt their parents, hurt them, hurt the school. But there were kids who played in bowl games who had that happen to them at their school and they were able to have some lawyer and they’re back in school.

“The only thing I’m concerned about, you leave a boy out there and you fix it so he can’t go back to school, how can he improve himself?”

If Robinson could turn around anyone now, it would be ex-heavyweight champ Mike Tyson.

“I would like to talk to him about the type of person he could be, the opportunity he has to leave great footprints on the sands of time,” Robinson says. “I never met him, but I kind of feel there are some things that he could do that he could leave a legacy for himself and those who are dear to him. But he’s got to change on the inside. He’s got to want to be a good person.”

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Being a good person has been Robinson’s goal all his life. He envied the people he thought were good and who were doing outstanding things. He often reads poetry for inspiration or insight, and he frequently quotes from Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life:”

“Lives of great men all remind us

“We can make our lives sublime

“And departing, leave behind us

“Footprints on the sands of time.”

Robinson wants to leave his own footprints on the sands of time. As his career comes to a close, those footprints are large, indeed.