Eddie Robinson, the iconic former college football coach whose pioneering career spanned 11 U.S. presidents and the civil rights movement, died late Tuesday night in Ruston, La., following a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 88.
During a 57-year career, Robinson won nine national black college titles and 408 games at Grambling State University, a small, predominantly black school in Louisiana. But Robinson also will be remembered for cutting through racial boundaries in what was once the segregated South and for, as he once wrote, challenging “racism by proving a black man could be a good football coach.”
Robinson sent more than 200 players to the NFL, including Doug Williams, who later became a Super Bowl-winning quarterback (against the Broncos) with the Washington Redskins. He also graduated about 80 percent of his players over a career that began in 1941 and ended in 1997, when he retired.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson wrote in Robinson’s 1999 autobiography, “Never Before, Never Again,” that Robinson “developed minds before he developed muscles. The breakthroughs provided by the work of Coach Robinson might have been less dramatic than the day Jackie Robinson donned the Dodger uniform. However, they were no less meaningful. Two men named Robinson changed American life forever.”
Robinson had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s shortly after retiring in 1997. He had been in and out of a nursing home in the past year and had been admitted to Lincoln General Hospital on Tuesday afternoon.
“For the Grambling family, this is a very emotional time,” Williams said. “But I’m thinking about Eddie Robinson the man, not in today-time, but in the day and what he meant to me and to so many people.”
Robinson demonstrated excellence at both ends of his career. In 1942, Robinson was 23 when he coached a team that was undefeated and unscored upon. In 1994, Robinson was 75 when he led the Tigers to a co-conference championship and was named the Southwestern Athletic Conference coach of the year. On his last team, Robinson savored the fact that he coached nine sons of his former players.
“Nobody has ever done or will do what Eddie Robinson has done for this game,” Penn State coach Joe Paterno has said. “Our profession will never be able to repay Eddie Robinson for what he has done for the country and the profession of football.”
The son of a cotton sharecropper in Louisiana, Robinson received national attention in 1949 when former player Paul “Tank” Younger signed a contract with the Los Angeles Rams to become the first player signed by the NFL from a historically black college.
In 1985, Robinson passed Paul “Bear” Bryant as the winningest college football coach when Grambling beat Prairie View, 27-7. What Robinson said he cherished most about that team was 20 players made the honor roll. (Coach John Gagliardi of St. John’s, Minn., passed Robinson in 2003 and has 443 wins.)
Robinson was cited by the Football Writers Association of America in 1966 as the person who contributed the most to college football in the previous 25 years. Robinson, whose career record was 408-165-15, received the NFL Players’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 1988.
“People talk about the record I’ve compiled at Grambling, but the real record is the fact that for over 50 years, I’ve had one job and one wife (Doris),” Robinson had said. “I don’t believe anyone can out-American me.”
