Last Chocolate City contributor and resident football fanatic Tommy Gibbs is convinced that ESPN is up to no good. The titles of his two recent posts (ESPN is Racist I and ESPN is Racist II) are blunt and to the point.

I don’t know if ESPN.com columnist Gene Wojciechowski is aware of Tommy’s accusations, but his column about Fritz Pollard, the NFL’s first Black player and head coach, is significant in the way it discusses (or doesn’t discuss) Pollard’s legacy.

Lovie Smith, one of the first two Black coaches to lead NFL teams to the Super Bowl and the lowest paid head coach in the league, works for the Chicago Bears, a team founded by the legendary George Halas.

Remember the cement block-sized piece of hardware Smith hoisted after winning the NFC championship a few days ago at Solider Field? It was the Halas Trophy, and it was held tightly by, technically speaking, the first black head coach to lead a team to the Super Bowl.

“That is ironical,” says 85-year-old Eleanor Pollard Towns, one of two Pollard daughters who live in the Chicago area.

Ironical, she says, because Halas was no friend of Fritz Pollard or his causes. Ironical because Halas has always been linked to the 1934 unwritten edict by NFL owners that banned black players from the league until 1946, as newspaper reports at the time detailed.

I’m sure this small online article won’t change Tommy’s mind about the color and tone of the sports channel’s television coverage - one little known Black history fact shouldn’t - but it’s a bit scandalous to see ESPN (or The Disney Sports Channel) point the finger at a dead man and his organization for his history of discrimination.

Let’s not forget that ESPN is primarily a news network. It’s beat is sports and it covers sporting events, but like any other television news organization, the network follows the credo, “If it bleeds, it leads.” This is surely at the heart of ESPN’s decision to sensationalize the story every time a Black player is accused of breaking the law.

Coincidentally, this historic Super Bowl will take place at the beginning of Black History Month. But in the end this article is less about Fritz Pollard than it is about George Halas and his racism.

Is ESPN’s coverage of the long-running Halas-Pollard feud an attempt to make amends or are they dragging Halas and the Bears organization through the mud for the sake of ratings?
ESPN: Pollard would be proud

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 10:36 am and is filed under Race, Media Madness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.