In the NFL, A Historic First Arrives at Last

Lovie Smith, left, and Tony Dungy are the first black head coaches to lead their teams to the Super Bowl. (By Jonathan Daniel -- Getty Images)

MIAMI In March 1988, David Cornwell, a young black assistant general counsel for the National Football League, was charged with giving a speech to team owners and executives about the lack of black head coaches in the league.

"We could not come at it as a racial issue," Cornwell said Friday, recalling that he sought the advice of some of the league's talented minority assistant coaches before the meeting in Phoenix. "It was agreed that we'd come at it as a football issue, as a coaching issue and a business issue."

So Cornwell, who was less than 10 years removed from Sidwell Friends and only three years removed from Georgetown Law at the time, told the owners: "If you ask me to search for the best candidates to fill a position and I bring you a batch of résumés where everybody's name is Smith, you're bound to ask me why I think only people named Smith can do the job. You're going to wonder, 'Aren't there any Joneses out there?' . . . Right now, the NFL is stuck on hiring only Smiths."

Almost 20 years after Cornwell's speech, the Indianapolis Colts and Chicago Bears will meet Sunday in a Super Bowl that for the first time will have blacks serving as head coaches for both teams. The meeting between Tony Dungy's Colts and Lovie Smith's Bears is not the only story line of Super Bowl XLI, but it is the one with the greatest historical and cultural significance.

"It belongs on the same page in sports history as Joe Louis getting to fight Max Schmeling, as Jesse Owens forcing [Adolf] Hitler out of that reviewing stand at the '36 Olympics, as the first pitch to Jackie Robinson," Hall of Fame tight end Kellen Winslow said.

Perhaps Sunday's moment is elevated because it climbs one of the few remaining unscaled heights for people of color in sports. With Tiger Woods's conquest of golf and Serena and Venus Williams's rise a few years ago in tennis, there is a sense that few doors remain closed.

In some ways, the feeling in Miami this week has been similar to the feelings after Denzel Washington and Halle Berry in 2002 became the first African Americans to win Academy Awards for best actor and actress in the same year. For African Americans in pro football, the Washington Redskins' Doug Williams ended the wait for a starting Super Bowl quarterback in 1988. All that remained was for a black head coach to reach the game.

The fact that Dungy and Smith are old friends -- Dungy gave Smith his first NFL assistant coaching job and the two are so close that Smith said the game would be like a big brother playing his little brother one-on-one in basketball in the back yard -- has stripped the moment of any ill feelings. There has been little rooting this week here among blacks for one coach or the other.

Clearly, Dungy is the more sympathetic figure merely because he is viewed as a far bigger victim of discrimination than Smith. Dungy was one of the talented assistants that Cornwell was pushing owners to consider hiring. But progress came slowly. A year after the meeting, Art Shell was hired to coach the Oakland Raiders. Four years later, Dennis Green became head coach of the Minnesota Vikings. So it went. Dungy waited until 1996, when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers named him their head coach, for his first top job.

But even Dungy, as Cornwell remembered, didn't think public protest would budge NFL owners who felt they weren't ready to have the franchise face be a brown one.

Cornwell said Dungy turned down an appearance on NBC's "Today" show in the late 1980s because Dungy didn't think courting such attention was the best way to pursue the agenda of inclusion.

But it's not that Dungy didn't dream of leading a team to the Super Bowl. In his fourth season coaching the Buccaneers, Dungy lifted a ragtag outfit from laughingstock to the conference championship game. In a rare moment of full disclosure this week, Dungy admitted: "I've thought a lot about the significance of making it to the Super Bowl as an African American coach. . . . I've probably thought about it since 1999 when we were one step away from this game [but lost to St. Louis] and what it would have meant to me at that point.

"Now, seven years later a lot of it has crystallized," he said. "It's important for people to know how proud I am to be here. It's important for me to let people know who spurred me on and were my role models. I watched John Thompson win the NCAA championship [at Georgetown] and I was excited. Most often, it had been basketball, and it's great we're seeing it in football now and it's important."

The National Basketball Association had two black coaches, K.C. Jones of the Washington Bullets and Al Attles of the Golden State Warriors, face each other in the Finals in 1975. But while basketball is "The City Game," played for decades on the concrete and blacktop of inner cities from New York to South Central L.A., football's roots largely are in the rural South, which made the game subject to the same Jim Crow laws and cultural pressures as most every other Southern institution. Football didn't just fail to include blacks, it actively excluded them. As Winslow said, "Diversity and inclusion are nice words, but we're talking about integration here."

Dungy, even in very private conversations, would avoid saying hiring decisions were race-based. "I think we had a vision of what a head coach looked like," he said this week. "The head coach of a successful team, to many people, looked like Vince Lombardi. It was a white, middle-aged coach who screamed fire and brimstone. That's what we saw in NFL Films and it was a great picture. I don't think there was ever a picture of somebody who was not white. When I had some of those earlier interviews, I know people were trying to figure out in their minds if this would work. They thought, 'We've never had this blueprint before.'

"I think now, with two guys coming to the Super Bowl with maybe different personalities than most people perceive of an NFL coach, a different value system, maybe a different way of expressing themselves, people say: 'You know what? Anything can work if you get the right person.' "

Smith's ascension was much quicker. After working for Dungy as linebackers coach for Tampa Bay, he was named defensive coordinator of the St. Louis Rams in 2001 and helped the team reach the Super Bowl in his first season. He took over the Bears in 2004.

Asked what he feels now, nearly 20 years later, about seeing Dungy and Smith prepare to coach in the Super Bowl, Cornwell said, "That it worked, that a lot of people worked very hard and some men sacrificed quite a bit to stay with a plan that was often criticized at the time, but that it worked."

As a result, Super Bowl XLI always will be remembered for this cultural breakthrough, one that concerns sports television commentator Charles Barkley if that's all that's remembered.

"I have great pride and joy when I look at Lovie and Tony," said Barkley, a former NBA star. "But it's very necessary for the conversation to move beyond how black they are to how great they are as coaches. Tony Dungy has been a damn good coach for two teams, Tampa Bay and the Colts. And Lovie Smith in three years changed a losing culture with the Bears. Having grown up in Alabama and gone to Auburn [from 1981 to '84], I can appreciate how difficult it was for them to be passed over. You'd see only one black assistant at Auburn when I was there -- pretty much one black assistant and that was it. But we have to move the conversation to what they've done as coaches to get their teams to the Super Bowl."

Winslow, sitting just outside the Super Bowl media room filled with very few faces of color, thought of the next step in what he called "an ongoing effort -- and not just about African Americans, but Asians and Hispanics. We're talking about different perspectives, about voices unheard. How can we not take a much closer look at who is telling the stories?"

Cornwell, now president of the DNK Cornwell law firm, had many of the same thoughts, saying at one point: "As significant as this is, I don't want to see it rendered merely symbolic if we don't see similar breakthroughs in other areas, in the general managers and lawyers that are hired by teams, the marketing experts, the public relations professionals. I think we're hoping to see organizations and fans get to the point where they think of a black coach: 'We can't get it done without that guy. We've got to have Lovie Smith. He's the name. It's a coup to get him.' "

Much of the examination will give way to a tremendous sense of pride, particularly for those who are old enough to know what a pipe dream it seemed 20 years ago to have one black coach, much less two, in America's signature sporting event.

"I'm going to feel the same way I felt when Tiger won the Masters for the first time," Barkley said.

"I'm going to sit there, watch and enjoy every single minute of it."