No color line for Pacific Coast Pro Football League

The class of the league in the final year was the Hawaiian Warriors, according to the Pro Football Research Association’s Bob Gill who reported in Coffin Corner football magazine that the team averaged 30 points per game. However, before the season ended, the Long Beach Bulldogs, earlier the Los Angeles Bulldogs, “called it quits after drawing only 850 fans in the only PCPFL game played in Long Beach; the league soon followed suit and folded.”

The backers of the recently unveiled Pacific Pro Football League, including Don Yee, who is Tom Brady’s agent, say the league will provide an alternative path to the National Football League that has never existed, a sort of farm league that will allow players to play professionally right out of high school. The league is slated to start next year with four teams in Southern California.

The old Pacific Coast Professional Football League provided an opportunity for non-whites to play pro ball at a time when the dominant National Football League in the East didn’t have one African-American player, although it had some as far back as the 1920s. The African-American star on the Pacific Coast pro circuit was Kenny Washington, a member of a UCLA team which included Jackie Robinson. Robinson also suited up in the PCPFL before moving to baseball where he made history.

Washington died in 1971 and his obituary in The New York Times noted that he was “passed over by the NFL, which had no African-American player since 1933.” The Times’ obit also said Washington, despite leading the nation in total offense in college in 1939, made the second team rather than the first in the major All-America selections. In addition, he was not selected to play in the post-season East-West game. “Each of these slights provoked outrage in the national black press and in the mainstream press on the West Coast, where Washington was both greatly admired and immensely popular,” the Times wrote.

Washington became a pro star with the Hollywood Bears of the PCPFL during World War II when many players were in the military. A knee injury kept him out of the armed forces. He joined the NFL’s new Los Angeles Rams in 1946 but knee problems haunted him and he spent three modest seasons with the team. His teammates on the Bears included Woody Strode, also black, who played with him at UCLA.

The PCPFL flaunted the fact that it had no color barrier. As a child, this writer recalls seeing a poster for an upcoming game that promised fans a chance to see “the great colored star” Kenny Washington in action. In 1945, Mel Reid, an African-American player on the Oakland squad, was named the league’s most valuable player.

As for the new Pacific Pro Football venture, it is slated to start play in July 2020 with four teams in Southern California. The only color line will be the 10-yard stripes.

The Rear View Mirror by history columnist Jim Clifford appears in the Daily Journal every other Monday. Objects in The Mirror are closer than they appear.