Everywhere Eddie Robinson has gone this fall, someone has asked him what was the hardest part.
Was it when his own president tried to push him out the door last year, and only the governor’s intervention saved his job for one more year?
Was it enduring his third straight losing season, a school record?
Was it last weekend, when only 2,000 people showed up to say goodbye in the stadium named in his honor?
Or will the hardest part come on Saturday, when the 78-year-old Robinson leads the Grambling State University Tigers one last time in the State Farm Bayou Classic against Southern?
None of the above. Those who know “Coach Rob” know the hardest part will be on Sunday. For the first time since 1941, Eddie Robinson will wake up as an ex-coach, his playbook replaced by a scrapbook.
“Eddie truly thinks there’s not going to be anything left for him,” said Collie Nicholson, one of Robinson’s closest friends.
As Nicholson spoke, he gestured to the other side of a room in a corner of the Louisiana Superdome, where a smiling Robinson, in a dapper brown suit accented by a patterned silk pocket square, was posing for snapshots with admirers. Robinson’s PR man had been trying to get the coach on his way for a good 20 minutes, but a knot of well-wishers had hemmed in Robinson like a quarterback in a collapsing pocket. The flashbulbs popped as Robinson hugged the women and children and grasped every hand that was thrust at him.
Nicholson and Robinson drove down to New Orleans that morning for a press conference hyping Saturday’s Bayou Classic matchup. It was needless hype. Tickets sold out a week ago.
“He’s still Eddie,” Nicholson said. “He’s going to be in demand every day, 365 days a year.”
Robinson joked with reporters about the kind of demands he’ll face as soon as he takes off his whistle.
“My wife is not going to put an apron on me,” Robinson said. “I’m not going to wash dishes and take them out of the dishwasher. And don’t tell me where everything is around the house, because I haven’t known for 55 years and there’s no reason for me to know now.”
Robinson laughed, but there it was. The man has 408 victories, more than any football coach in history, but he doesn’t want to go. And that’s the hardest part for the many who love Robinson and cherish his singular career.
It’s time. It’s past time. The football Grambling has played for the last three years is a disgrace to the legacy of Robinson. If the Tigers lose Saturday, they will finish 3-8. They have lost 24 of their last 35 games. They didn’t lose more than 22 games in either the 1960s or the 1970s.
“I think he would like to stay,” said Doug Williams, the former NFL star and a Grambling alumnus. “But I don’t want to get into that. That’s a touchy subject.”
Williams, the head coach at Morehouse College, has to be careful about what he says because he is a candidate to succeed Robinson. “You don’t follow Eddie Robinson,” Williams said. “You pick his shoes up and you get them bronzed and you put them on a pedestal. And then you go on in your own shoes.”
Unlike Williams, Nicholson isn’t bound by politics. He was Robinson’s first press agent at Grambling, and though he eventually opened his own firm in nearby Shreveport, Nicholson remained close to Robinson. He’s seen his friend suffer as the losses have mounted.
“I think he should have left after his 400th (victory in 1995),” Nicholson said. “He should have gone out in his prime.”
Robinson’s prime lasted longer than the entire careers of many coaches. This is his 57th year at Grambling. The 12 head coaches in the Southeastern Conference have spent 45 years at their respective schools–combined.
Robinson couldn’t have known he’d have such durability when he started out in 1941, coaching basketball, baseball and football for $63.75 a month. The school was called the Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute.
It eventually changed its name to Grambling. The school used football to spread its name, in much the way Notre Dame did in the 1920s. Robinson took his Tigers to leading venues across the nation, from Yankee Stadium to Soldier Field to the Rose Bowl.
Because many of the so-called “major” colleges in the South were slow to integrate, talented black athletes flocked to play for Robinson. He sent more than 200 players into pro football, including such Hall of Famers as Buck Buchanan, Willie Davis and Charlie Joiner.
But Robinson didn’t just crank out football players. At a time when many young men in the African-American community struggled to find models, Robinson served as a father to many players. He taught his players how to behave in restaurants. They wore suits and ties on road trips.
“I appreciate the men who turned out to be good daddies and good fathers,” Robinson said.
Robinson worried as much about his players’ lives off the field as he did their performance on it. In the late 1970s, the NCAA investigated Robinson for setting up a loan fund for his players. At the time, Robinson was troubled by what he saw as a conflict between morality and the NCAA’s rule book.
“Suppose a boy comes in to you and you know he hasn’t got any money and his mama has passed or his daddy has passed and he hasn’t any way to get home,” Robinson told an interviewer then. “What are you going to tell him? Well, if you’re any kind of man, you’re going to see that he gets help somehow, some way. Especially since you know he thinks that once he’s reached you, his problems are over.”
Though he sometimes seemed obsessed with winning, Robinson was able to transcend the boundaries of the gridiron and become an icon among people who never saw the Tigers play. Comedian Steve Harvey is among them. He isn’t a Grambling alumnus and had never met Robinson, but he agreed to fly here this week to emcee the Bayou Classic press conference.
“I don’t care which one of y’all wins,” Harvey told the fans who lined the room. “I came down here for coach Eddie Robinson. He is a testament to the strength of black people. I’m telling you, this man has touched my life with his dedication to us as a people.”
“People say I touched lives,” Robinson said. “Well, they touched me. I got a piece of every boy who ever played at Grambling–good and bad.”
In recent years, there has been more bad than good. The NCAA hit Grambling for minor violations. Robinson agonized as four players were accused of rape, a charge that later was dropped.
Last year, then-Grambling president Raymond Hicks tried to force Robinson to retire. Gov. Mike Foster intervened, and Robinson was given one more year.
Some may have wished Robinson hadn’t taken it. He has watched his 1997 team nearly disintegrate before his eyes. So few players came out to a recent practice that the coaches had trouble fielding a scout team to run the opponent’s offense. This was a brutal twist for a coach who for most of his career had to turn away talented players because he didn’t have enough scholarships to offer.
Outsiders didn’t understand why such a paltry crowd showed up for Robinson’s last home game, but Nicholson did.
“It doesn’t mean they don’t love him,” Nicholson said. “But they just can’t stand to come out and see Eddie lose.”
That’s a likely result Saturday–Southern is 9-1 and already has accepted an invitation to play in the prestigious Heritage Bowl–but the fans finally will turn out in force. The game is being billed here as the last chance to glimpse the legend.
Farewell tours rarely seem much fun for anyone (are you listening, Michael Jordan?). As Robinson has pointed out, it’s hard to take when folks are showering you with gifts and tributes one minute, then whacking the daylights out of your team the next.
“I’m just not able to sleep,” Robinson said. “I never really thought there was any way possible I could lose eight games in a year, 16 in two years. It just ain’t right.”
All season, Robinson told friends that if he just works at it a little harder, the team will act like his old Grambling teams. The fact that it hasn’t happened adds a measure of poignancy to his final game.
“All my life, all I’ve ever wanted to do was stand for what was good in our society,” Robinson said in a speech to reporters, alumni and friends here this week. “The young men we had playing for us, I never let them rest.”
Robinson paused for a moment, tightening his grip on the podium he’d leaned on during his address.
“Never rest,” he said.
