FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
LANDMARK GAME: NOT ONE BUT TWO
BLACK HEAD COACHES IN SUPER BOWL

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

2 super coaches make a breakthrough

Indeed, Dungy has come a long way since those formative years. So has the NFL.

The leader of the Indianapolis Colts awoke today as a Super Bowl coach — one with a rapidly growing legacy. In two weeks, he'll face one of his proteges, Chicago's Lovie Smith, for the league championship. They'll be the first black head coaches to pace the sidelines in the NFL's biggest game.

"I've been thinking about my generation of kids who watched Super Bowls and never really saw African-American coaches and didn't think about the fact that you could be a coach," Dungy said of the black kids who grew up in the 1960s. "Hopefully, young kids now will say, 'Hey, I might be the coach some day.' That's special."

Click here for the rest.

I guess the real landmark game was the first time an African-American became head coach at all, and this Super Bowl is simply a necessary consequence of that barrier being torn down first. On the other hand, there were only seven NFL black coaches this past season, and the number tends to fluctuate from year to year; it's usually lower, so maybe this is a pretty big deal. You gotta admit, one way or the other, it's pretty cool. What's really interesting to me is that, as the article observes, the Colt's coach Tony Dungy made a strong conscious effort when he first became head coach for the Buccaneers a few years back to recruit and groom African-Americans as assistant coaches, getting them "into the pipe," as it were--the payoff is that he'll be facing one of those black former assistants on Super Sunday. That's a major testimony to what one man can do to change entrenched institutional attitudes when he gets into a position with some power.

Actually, given my utter hatred for massive institutions at the moment, I ought to think about Dungy's example for a bit. I so often feel like big organizations are so extraordinarily monolithic that working within them is a waste of time. Perhaps I'm wrong.

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