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DEL.ICIO.USBriscoe cleared the path for Vick
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
You study the blur on NFL Films, and you see that it is a quarterback weaving between defenders faster than the wind. Although he is short for his position, he still shocks your senses with his legs and his arm behind a creaky offensive line.
I’m talking about …
Well, not him.
“The other guy is just the left-handed Marlin Briscoe,” said the real Marlin Briscoe, 61, chuckling inside the bookstore at Morehouse College. As one of life’s forgotten Jackie Robinsons, Briscoe joined Doug Williams and James Harris on campus this weekend to sign their new book called “Third and a mile: The trials and triumphs of the black quarterback.”
Briscoe took a break to tell of a conversation he had with that left-handed Marlin Briscoe.
You know, Michael Vick.
Let’s return to last July in Los Angeles, where Briscoe and Vick were part of Nike’s brilliantly conceived commercial that featured NFL coaching and playing stars of the past and present. Between filming sessions, Briscoe gave Vick something to watch in a nearby trailer. It was a DVD called “The Field Generals,” and it highlighted the career of Briscoe, along with those of black quarterbacks Warren Moon, Randall Cunningham, Vince Evans, Williams and Harris.
The way Briscoe remembered it, Vick returned from the trailer with wide eyes and a bright smile. “He said, ‘Man, I didn’t know you guys were that good,’ ” Briscoe said. “See, they had never seen [most of ‘The Field Generals’] play, because, in some cases, you’re talking about the late 1960s and the early 1970s. These guys were only kids back then.”
In Vick’s case, he wasn’t around back then. He was born 12 years after Briscoe became the first black starting quarterback in the modern NFL (actually, the AFL at the time). Even so, you have those striking comparisons between Briscoe and Vick. Now here’s one of the striking contrasts: While Vick flashed his middle-fingered hand signal last season at the hometown crowd after his idea of hearing excessive booing, Briscoe just played and prospered while encountering much worse.
The same was true of those other Jackie Robinsons. There were the death threats to Harris, the first black quarterback to lead an NFL team to the playoffs when he did so with the Los Angeles Rams in 1974. There were the racial slurs that Moon’s wife, Felicia, endured while sitting in the stands (home and away) with their kids during the 1980s and watching Moon’s Hall of Fame career with the Houston Oilers.
Mostly, there were tons of black quarterbacks such as Sandy Stephens, Wilburn Hollis and Jimmy Raye who weren’t allowed to battle hate mail or racial slurs. That’s because they weren’t allowed to bring their brilliance as quarterbacks from college to the NFL.
“All of a sudden, when I played for Denver, I never got any mail, and that’s because they were trying to hide the death threats from me,” said Briscoe, who still was abused in other ways. Consider that he was a rookie in 1968, the year of political assassinations, a stirring black protest at the Summer Olympics, violence during Chicago’s Democratic Convention and Vietnam. You also had Briscoe shaking the world — or at least pro football — with a then rookie record 14 touchdown passes for a season. Such a feat by a black quarterback scared many around the league more than it impressed them.
Not coincidentally, Briscoe spent the next eight years in Buffalo, Miami and New England as a wide receiver.
“Aside from Fran Tarkenton, I was able to create a buzz in the league with my running, but being black, I wasn’t accepted,” Briscoe said. “They looked at me as being just a runner, but I don’t know how you can ‘run’ 14 touchdown passes. Mobile quarterbacks, back in those days, were considered a no-no, because people liked the prototypical, dropback passers.”
Sounds like the controversy involving Vick and his backup, Matt Schaub, the traditional quarterback. Sounds like Briscoe was the right-handed Vick.
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