REMEMBERING COOKIE GILCHRIST

This tribute forms the lead of my weekly Friday Morning Tight End column at nfluk.com. If you want to see the whole column, you can link to it here. Otherwise, here's my remembrance of one of the iconic players of my childhood, and his importance...


I was reminded of a landmark this week, and no it wasn't Brett Favre retiring or the Seahawks making the playoffs with a losing record and upsetting the Super Bowl champion Saints. But this landmark did take place in New Orleans. It was 11 January 1965, and the event was the 1964 AFL All-Star game, held in a neutral site to seal the deal for an expansion franchise in the city. But a funny thing happened on the way to the game. A number of the players found they couldn't get taxis from the airport. They'd been booked into different, less attractive hotels than some of their fellow all-stars. They weren't allowed into the same night spots, or to eat at the same restaurants. These players were, of course, black.

Cookie Gilchrist, died 10 January, just a day off the anniversary of that game. It was Cookie who stood up and called a meeting that led to the 22 black players voting to boycott. You think of the guys at that meeting: Ernie Ladd, Earl Faison, Dick Westmoreland, Sherm Plunkett, and the idea that people would try to treat them like 'boys' seems absurd, but the absurdity simply highlights the atrocity which was America's apartheid in my childhood. Gilchrist's teammate Jack Kemp, the future congressman who during the season had kept Cookie on the Buffalo Bills after he feuded with coach Lou Saban and took himself out of a game, had himself walked out of a nightclub the night before when they wouldn't admit his teammate Ernie Warwick; Kemp and the Chargers' Ron Mix (who was Jewish) got the other white players on board. The game was moved to Houston, and New Orleans didn't get a team at all, not until after the AFL merged into the NFL, at which point the city agreed to take steps to ensure the same thing wouldn't happen again.

It was inevitable Cookie would take the lead, because he began his career as a man among boys, and demanded to be treated as a man among men. Sometimes a bit more, because he also tried to sell the story of the boycott to the papers! Once, when Buffalo was losing a game, Gilchrist told his teammates in the locker room that if they didn't put it together and win he would beat up every one of them. Then he pointed to the coach, Saban, and said 'starting with you'. The Bills won. In the spectrum of role models of the time Cookie fit somewhere between the quiet self-assertion of Jim Brown or basketball's Bill Russell and the flamboyance of Big Daddy Lipscomb. He saw the world from Cookie's point of view, and expected others to do likewise. Like Brown, he was a fullback, but at 6-1 250 pounds, Cookie was even bigger, probably stronger and maybe even faster. But his application to the game was not always as great as Brown's and his approach less orthodox. Cookie was a punishing blocker, a strong runner, a placekicker (until his hamstrings stopped that) and even offered to play linebacker for the Bills, but only if they'd pay him two salaries. He always needed money, because he was fond of bad investments and according to his teammates was also an inveterate, and lousy, poker player.

Cookie was that way because he came up on his own. He was so dominant as a high school star in Pennsylvania that Paul Brown, always in the forefront of signing black players, going back to Bill Willis and Marion Motley in the AAFC in 1946, a year before Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier in baseball, signed him for Cleveland. But the NFL nullified the contract, because he hadn't gone to college, and the NCAA then declared him ineligible for college. So Cookie turned pro and played for two years for Sarnia and Kitchener of the Ontario Rugby Football Union before moving to Hamilton in the CFL in 1956. He led them to the Grey Cup the next season, played one season with Saskatchewan and then was traded to the Toronto Argonauts. He was an all-star at fullback five times in six years, and at linebacker as well in 1960. He joined the Bills in 1962, became the AFL's first 1,000 yard rusher, and was the league's MVP. When the Bills beat San Diego to win the 1964 championship, he had 122 yards rushing. Saban traded Cookie to Denver for the very similar, but less assertive, Billy Joe (Saban, curiously enough, would also discard black QBs Marlin Briscoe in Denver and James Harris in Buffalo) and Cookie wound up his career with a year in Miami. He was voted to the fullback spot on the all-time AFL team, ahead of Keith Lincoln and Jim Nance, but in modern terms he would have been simply a running back, and a great one.

Cookie turned down the CFL Hall of Fame, because the league's then-commissioner had been the GM he feuded with in Hamilton. The story goes he was asked to behave if he attended, and when he said 'I'll take it under advisement', he was told that wasn't good enough. So he said no. He turned down the Bills' Wall of Fame partly because of more old feuds and partly because he wanted to get paid to appear.

Despite that bad history, I believe four things ought to happen, now that he's passed away. Cookie ought to finally be honoured, posthumously, by both the Bills and the CFL, recognising he was a great player, a trailblazer in a trailblazing AFL, even if he was also sometimes his own worst enemy. There also ought to be some kind of landmark put up at the Hotel Roosevelt in New Orleans, and another at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, to mark the act of courage of the players' rebellion that Cookie led, which pushed race relations forward in football, and New Orleans, forever.

JACK KEMP: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Jack Kemp is in today's Guardian, you can find it here. As with the Indy's Doc Blanchard piece, his sporting career was of less interest than other facets of his life to a British audience , though in Kemp's case I thought it was particularly instructive, in that he was an unfancied quarterback leading teams in an unfancied league. I made a mistake while I was trimming it: Kemp was cut by only four NFL teams, not five (!). He was actually on the taxi squad of the New York Giants when they lost the NFL title game to the Colts in 1958; the so-called greatest football game ever played.

The two salient points cut from my precis of his football career were , first, that after taking Sid Gillman's Chargers to two title games in the league's first two years, Kemp broke a finger in his throwing hand. Gillman, who had John Hadl in waiting --just as the Bills would have Darryl Lamonica behind him-- tried to hide Kemp on waivers, but the Bills (and two other teams) claimed him, and he went to Buffalo for the $100 waiver fee, a supply-side bargain by any standards. The other was that he was arguably the AFL's most successful quarterback (Len Dawson is usually picked as the league's best, or Joe Namath, who benefits from his image and the big win over the Colts in Super Bowl III) not because he played in all ten AFL seasons but because he took six teams to title games, and won twice. I love the image of him, at the right, with the single-bar helmet, no chin strap, throwing from a leap like a prototype Doug Flutie, though Jeff Garcia might be a closer comparison. Kemp was very much like Flutie; although he was undersized, his arm was actually very strong, and he could throw just as well on the run as from the set. His persistent shoulder injuries probably had something to do with that.

I mentioned he co-founded the AFL players' union, which came about as a direct result of the boycott of the 1965 All-Star game when the players were subjected to segregated facilities in New Orleans. Kemp's Buffalo teammate Cookie Gilchrist was one of the boycott's leaders, with Kemp's support, and it got the game moved to Houston. Ironically, his ex-Charger teammate Keith Lincoln stole the show at the game itself, shortly after the Bills had beaten the Chargers (by then in San Diego) for the AFL championship.

Kemp also intervened with Gilchrist earlier in the season. Cookie bristled under coach Lou Saban, not necessarily the most flexible of guys (nor in fairness was Cookie) and in one game, incensed he'd had only five carries in the first half, he took himself out a game and told Willie Ross to go in. Saban put him on waivers, and, as had happened with Kemp, three teams claimed him for $100. But before the waivers expired, Kemp talked Gilchrist into apologising to the team, if not Saban directly, and he was reinstated. Cookie gained 122 yards in that '64 AFL title game, which the Bills won. After the All-Star game, Saban traded him to Denver for Billy Joe.

I'd written that Gerry Ford and Bill Bradley were among the sportsmen who went into American politics, though Ford didn't play pro football, he was a college All-American. NFL star Whizzer White and baseball pitchers Vinegar Bend Mizzell and Jim Bunning were others who preceded Kemp. Steve Largent, JC Watts, Heath Shuler and former Nebraska coach Tom Osborne were football figures who followed him to Congress, all of them conservatives. Athletes in general tend to believe in individual achievement, even when they come from team sports. They usually emphasize their own hard work over their God-given abilities. Kemp (and Largent) were both examples of players making the most of limited physical talents, but the bigger picture, of the NFL as a monopoly, and its ultimate success as a revenue-sharing socialist collective never seems to sink in with them.

Kemp, by the way, served in the Army reserve while pursuing his NFL and CFL career; it wasn't until he was established in the AFL he was called up for active duty, and ruled unfit due to that injured shoulder. Ron Mix told how Kemp would often have multiple shots to the shoulder before games, to allow him to play, and throw; that he could play pro football but be unfit for the Army is another small irony.

Politically, I would have liked to examine the paradox of the way in which Kemp's fairly liberal social positions were contradicted by the easily perceptible effects of his policies. Like many conservative ideologues he seemed able to relate policies to personal experience, but unable to project beyond his own experience. Even Dick Cheney takes an enlightened view, for example, on gay rights; his daughter's experience runs contrary to his ideology, but though it affects his personal conduct, it doesn't change his ideology. I'd call that a lack of wide empathy. I also thought the link between Reagan (and Thatcher) economics and the current financial crisis is straightforward and obvious, though listening to 'Lord' Saatchi discussing the thirtieth anniversary of Thatcher's ascencsion on the Today programme, one wonders if it isn't straightforward at all to the presenters asking the questions.

It was also interesting that Kemp wasn't chosen as Bush's running mate in 1988; he would have been a stronger candidate than Quayle, but Bush never agreed with Kemp and Reagan's 'voodoo economics' and also likely did not want a potential usurper operating as VP. Hence the appointment to HUD, a thankless and almost invisible job. It's to Kemp's credit that he left Congress and took that post, and shows that he was, indeed, a true believer.

There's a nice piece by Greg Easterbrook in the Sunday New York Times; he grew up in Buffalo idolising Kemp, then coached some of Kemp's grandchildren (he had 17!) in pee-wee football. It's funny to read about Kemp putting his arm around the right-wing columnist and calling him a 'socialist' because he voted for Obama, and detailing all the ways the country would be ruined by Obama's socialism.

And finally, I did find it intriguing that his two sons both were pro QBs; Jeff went to Dartmouth and then 10 years in the NFL, despite, like his father, having limited natural ability. Jim played nine years in the CFL.