This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics, and everything in-between.
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I.
In 1976, nearly 50 years before an NFL kicker decried the “tyranny of diversity, equity and inclusion,” a young man named Greg Coleman arrived at training camp with the Cincinnati Bengals. Coleman had been drafted in the 14th round out of Florida A&M University; he was a punter in college, and he aimed to be a punter in the NFL, but the Bengals, intrigued by Coleman’s speed, demanded he try to make the team as a running back or wide receiver. By the time Coleman got around to punting, he told the New Yorker’s Carvell Wallace, he was so exhausted that he underperformed and got cut before the start of the season.
Coleman went back to Florida. He took a job as a history teacher. The next year, he signed with the Cleveland Browns, whose coach, Forrest Gregg, insisted on trying him out as a running back. Coleman said no. He was a punter. So Gregg kept him on as a punter, and Coleman had a decent year, and then Gregg got fired and Coleman got cut. Finally, he got a call from the Minnesota Vikings. And there he stayed for over a decade, becoming—up to that point—the most impactful black kicker or punter in the history of professional football. Coleman often endured racial epithets from his own base, simply for being black. For a time, he kept his helmet on, he said, “hoping folks would think I was a dark-skinned white boy.”
“Some of the same fans shouting racial epithets at Greg Coleman,” Wallace wrote, “were cheering for the black running backs and receivers on their own teams. It wasn’t a question of integration in football; it was merely the sight of a black man taking space where a white man should be.”
Ideally, Greg Coleman’s very presence—followed by the 15-year career of Reggie Roby, arguably the best punter of the 1980s—would have altered the paradigm at the position. But nearly 50 years later, there is still a vexing lack of black kicking specialists in the NFL, even as more than 50 percent of the league’s players are African-American.
II.
Back in 2018, three years before Jon Gruden resigned in disgrace over a series of racist, sexist and homophobic emails, he made the sudden and surprising decision to let go of one of the best punters in the NFL. Marquette King had been with the Raiders since 2013 after going undrafted the year before out of tiny Fort Valley State University; he was, and still remains, a flamboyant character who didn’t fit the paradigm of a punter. Whether that was the reason Gruden cut King is impossible to know, although longtime NFL writer Bill Williamson wrote that King’s release was a Gruden-led “message” to his team.
King was also the primary subject of Carvell Wallace’s 2016 New Yorker essay about the lack of black punters and kickers. One former NFL scout, John Middlekauff, told Wallace that King had “one of the purest, strongest legs in the league.” After the Raiders cut him, he caught on briefly with the Denver Broncos, got hurt, and now kicks in the United Football League while attempting to launch a career in music. And perhaps you might argue that King’s personality was too expansive for the position he played; perhaps, as we have learned, kickers and punters are meant to fade into the background. But I wonder if Gruden would have had the same reaction if Harrison Butker had been on his roster.
After King came the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Pressley Harvin, who began punting in the ninth grade at a high school in South Carolina, and kept at it even after a series of coaches tried to get him to play a more physical position like linebacker. Harvin got released in February, leaving the NFL with zero black punters or kickers heading into 2024 (at least, none that I’m aware of). Perhaps, over time, the stereotypes will slowly be shattered. But at least for now, says Greg Coleman, things haven’t changed very much since 1976: There are a lot of young kids who don’t look the part, and therefore either never get the opportunity to play the part, or simply don’t see kicking or punting as a viable path to a football career.
“You have to be strong in your conviction,” Coleman told Andscape’s David Hale. “I remember people telling me there were no black punters or kickers in the league, and I’d just say that’s not my problem.”
III.
Which brings us to the crux of the larger issue here, because the retort to Coleman’s claim is to argue that statistical disparities do not equal discrimination. “The very same people who employ blacks at every other position on a football team are the people who hire kickers,” wrote Thomas Sowell of the National Review back in 2016. “Why would they be willing to hire black players in other positions that pay a lot more money than most kickers get, but draw the line at hiring black kickers?”
It’s a fair point, but it overlooks everything that Greg Coleman went through, and it disregards everything that Pressley Harvin and Marquette King went through just to attempt to play the position they wanted to play. Becoming a punter or kicker, Sowell says, is just a choice black athletes simply don’t make. But what he doesn’t acknowledge is that these decisions are often made for them early in life, by youth football coaches who may fall prey to the same stereotypes. How can it even be a choice if athletes are pushed back against all along the way, just as black athletes were effectively discouraged from playing quarterback for decades?
“Whether or not anyone wants to talk about it,” Wallace writes, “there are races attached to some positions in sports.” (One recent study showed that black athletes were often assigned to the NFL’s most high-risk positions.)
A couple of years ago, Harrison Butker’s own quarterback, Patrick Mahomes—who may wind up being the greatest to ever play the position—had a scout accuse him of resorting to playing “streetball” when under pressure (which is like saying that Michael Jordan resorted to taking a defender one-on-one when a play broke down). “Obviously, the Black quarterback has had to battle to be in this position that we are to have this many guys in the league playing,” Mahomes said. “Every day, we're proving that we should have been playing the whole time.”
In his column, Sowell writes that “women make different career choices than men, and wisely so…because…being being a mother is not the same as being a father.” And this is what Harrison Butker was arguing, too—that the increasing number of life choices presented to modern women, among others, are actually “diabolical lies.”
Butker, of course, was arguing in favor of his own life choices, without regard for the lack of choices made available to others—including at the very position he plays. If we believe certain systems in this country might still be fundamentally unbalanced, he seems to be saying, it’s no one’s problem except our own. Which makes it clear that that Harrison Butker has absolutely no idea what the word “tyranny” actually means.
This newsletter is a perpetual work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Reply directly to this newsletter, contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please join the list and share it with others or consider a paid subscription.
I am looking forward to your thoughts on just announced plans to pay university athletes.