Mike Celizic

I met Eddie Robinson only once, and it had to be in 1985, the year so many college football fans refused to acknowledge that the great man had passed Bear Bryant as the winningest coach in college football.

He had come to New York with his Grambling team to play a road show in Giants Stadium. Memory isn’t always clear on these matters, but I remember him wearing a suit — an oddity even then for football coaches — and carrying a battered old leather briefcase as he chatted with reporters the day before the game.

You didn’t have to know who he was or what he did to know that there was something exceptional about him. He would have been 66 years old then, and he had that air of quiet confidence and command that living legends often wrap around themselves like a robe. He was humble with no need to toot his own horn, but also proud of what he’d accomplished. In his mind, that wasn’t as much winning football games as helping young men get educations and jobs that allowed them to advance in the world.

He passed uberlegend Paul "Bear" Bryant with his 324th win that October against Prairie View. The critics — who included a good number of racists — said Robinson’s record didn’t count, as Bryant had amassed his wins first at Texas A&M but mostly at Alabama, Division I programs, while Robinson had coached in college football’s equivalent of the baseball’s old Negro Leagues, somewhere around the Division II level.

It was a foolish argument. Wins are wins, no matter where you get them. And to pass Bryant and retire with 408 victories, Robinson had to not only do the same things that Bryant did like recruit, organize, drill, draw game plans and innovate but also for many years do a lot of things no big-time coach ever did, like mowing the grass in the stadium and painting the lines on the field.

FREE VIDEO Coaching legend Robinson dies at 88 April 4: Eddie Robinson, the longtime Grambling coach who transformed a small, black college into a football powerhouse, has died at 88. Chris Mycoskie reports.

There were plenty of other coaches trying to do the same things Robinson was doing in black college football. Robinson did them better.

What I remember most about the man was that as he talked on a lot of subjects — most of them forgotten — he never expressed a drop of bitterness at being shunted off onto a dead end walled in by prejudice.

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The quote the Associated Press ran in his obituary that summed up Robinson was this: "The real record I have set for over 50 years is the fact that I have had one job and one wife."

He was saying much the same thing more than 20 years ago, and he was proud of it. Some people would say the first part of that statement is hardly anything to brag about. Bill Parcells or Larry Brown couldn’t begin to comprehend the one-job-for-life concept. More people would point out that the reason Robinson had just the one job was mostly due to the fact that it was the only job available to a man who had the poor judgment to be born with a rich supply of melanin.

That’s when people start playing the "if" game: "If Eddie had been white, we might be talking about his NFL dynasty instead of Vince Lombardi’s." It’s a good hypothetical, but it’s just that. Robinson was born in the South in the days of segregation. He started coaching in 1941, more than 30 years before the big white universities of the South would allow a black player on the football team and more than 40 years before Art Shell became the first African-American head coach in modern NFL history. (Fritz Pollard had coached Hammond until 1933, when NFL owners came to a "gentlemen’s agreement" — there’s an oxymoron for you — not to employ blacks in such exalted positions.) By the time the door finally opened for African-American coaches, Robinson was already an old man.

There’s no question he could have coached in Division I-A or the NFL or anywhere else. There’s also no question that there was but one reason why he never got the chance — the color of his skin.

I get angry just thinking about it, but Robinson never complained. Like the great Negro League player Buck O’Neal, Robinson knew that while a lot of doors were closed to him, he still had a darned good life doing what he loved to do, and that sure beat picking cotton.