2-5-07, 7:24 p.m.
My man Kevin who lives in Raleigh left a message on my answering machine late Sunday night, “Hey Chris what’s up, sorry I missed your call. We finally gonna have a Black coach win the Super Bowl, that’s my prediction.” Of course by now that’s pretty much everyone’s prediction. Sunday January 21st will go down as a good day for Black coaches, two of them saw their teams win their respective conference championships in exciting thrillers, and one more was named as head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. All I can think of was, it wasn’t easy. Sure there were times when Black coaches got close to the big one in times past, only to have their field goal kicker miss a game winner, but that’s not what I’m talking about. It took more than X's and Os to get these coaches their own teams. Some have labeled this the Soul Bowl, the “Chocolate Bowl,” and you can just imagine what detractors are calling it. All because just the coaches are Black.
Super Bowls have been notoriously overflowing with Black players for decades, any owner dreaming of taking an all-white team to the big dance is flirting with insanity. What white fans would watch them? Whites have all-but stopped viewing hockey. Yet no one saw the need to make such remarks, why? Because all of the coaches, and most of the quarterbacks participating in that were white. Others with Martin Luther King’s birthday fresh on their minds, credit him with making this turn of events possible. If you want an official name for the Super Bowl XLI then call it the Cochran/Mehri Bowl. In the immediate term the Black leader who made it possible for two head coaches to be in this game was the late famed attorney Johnnie Cochran. In 9/03 he and Mehri released a report called Black Coaches in the National Football League, Superior Performance Inferior Opportunities. Among other things this report revealed that African American head NFL coaches actually had a higher winning percentage than white coaches.
The NFL in turn created the Workplace Diversity Committee because in spite of the glowing winning percentage, team owners would still refuse to hire black head coaches. Soon after no team would be able to interview a white coach or recycle a white head coach without at some point interviewing a black coach. Mehri, now a founding member of Mehri & Skalet, PLLC, is no stranger to making corporate fat cats choke on their cigars, he also served as counsel in the two biggest race discrimination class actions ever; $17 million in '97, $5 million back in '01 against Texaco and Coca-cola respectively. Smith is one of the beneficiaries of the Cochran/Mehri study being hired by the hapless Chicago Bears back in '04. In only his 3rd season he has them in the big game.
Of course there was a wave (if you consider 4 a wave) of Black coaches before Smith; Art Shell, Dennis Green, Tony Dungy, and Ray Rhodes, that were the subject matter of that coaches study, and resulting crackdown. Dungy had to overcome decades of discrimination before he was finally hired by Tampa Bay, once during the early '90's he lost a chance to be a head coach with one team because the team owner feared he was going to draft Heisman Trophy winner Charlie Ward as quarterback. That was their Super Bowl down the drain.
In actuality Dungy has built two Championship teams because he made the Tampa Bay Bucs a contender before being fired and replaced by John Gruden who took them to the game in his first year against his old team the Oakland Raiders. In spite of their stellar records, it seemed the only thing keeping Black coaches out of the Super Bowl was their field goal kickers. Back in '98 Green's Minnesota Vikings went 15-1 and played Atlanta for the NFC Championship. Kicker Gary Anderson-who hadn't missed a field goal all season (35/35) missed a 38-yarder with under 2 minutes left. In '04 Herman Edward's Jets went to Pittsburg and almost upset the 15-1 Steelers, but 2 missed field goals late in the 4th quarter led to an overtime loss. Dungy and his Colts were eliminated by those same Steelers in '05, after starting the season 13-0, they lost to San Diego 26-17, and a day or two later Dungy's son is found dead. The media claims suicide (I still suspect murder), Dungy missed the next game and they lose that as well and never really recover after he returns. Their kicker Mike Vanderjagt missed a 46-yard attempt against the eventual Super Bowl champions.
By the time you read this, the game will probably be over, but never forget, the Black Head Coaches and NFL General Managers that your sons, grandsons and nephews will eventually take for granted in the future didn't come easy. Even though I'm picking Dungy and the Colts, I learned long ago that racism in sports has very little to do with winning and losing.
--Chris Stevenson is a columnist for the Buffalo Criterion. Email comments to Stevenson at
