Forty Years To Get To Super Bowl.

This Sunday history will be made when not one but two African American coaches battle it out for footballs highest honor, the coveted Lombardi Trophy in Super Bowl XLI. This is history in the making at it's finest but what i'd like to know is how come it took
so long? The article below may shed some light.



The presence of two black head coaches at the Super Bowl isn't a time for African Americans to be excited, it's a time for all Americans to be ashamed. This would have been a great story back when the Roman numerals consisted of I's and Vs and Xs. But now there's an L, as in XLI, as in 41. It shouldn't have taken so long.

It's a reminder of just how slowly the wheels of racial equality move. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law three years before the first Super Bowl and here we are, more than four decades later, finally seeing its impact in this little sector of our society.

I'm happy for Chicago's Lovie Smith and Indianapolis' Tony Dungy, but I can't help but wonder how many great African American football minds that came before them could have done the same thing, had they not been explicitly or implicitly denied the chance to be head coaches because of the color of their skin.

That's why the real positive sign in the NFL was posted Monday, when the Pittsburgh Steelers named Mike Tomlin head coach. For a franchise that has had only two head coaches since 1969 to put a roster still stocked with last season's championship players into the hands of a 34-year-old African American with one year's experience as an NFL defensive coordinator — now that's a breakthrough.

A black coach reaching the Super Bowl was inevitable. A young black coach getting one of the best jobs in the league is evidence of equal opportunity. For years, one of the explanations given for the paucity of black coaching hires was that African Americans lacked long-term experience as coordinators. But Tomlin's predecessor, Bill Cowher, was only 34 when the Steelers hired him in 1992. And Eric Mangini was a 35-year-old who'd spent one year as Bill Belichick's defensive coordinator in New England before the New York Jets made him their head coach last year.

Just as I viewed the 1997 hiring of Tubby Smith to occupy the Kentucky basketball head-coaching job once held by the racist Adolph Rupp as a more important occasion than Georgetown's John Thompson's becoming the first black NCAA championship basketball coach in 1984, Tomlin's hire means more to me than Dungy's or Lovie Smith's becoming the first black Super Bowl coaching victor.

Tomlin is a living, breathing representation of Dungy's legacy, of much greater value than a silver Lombardi Trophy. Tomlin was an assistant coach under Dungy at Tampa Bay and now is the latest member of the Dungy coaching tree — which includes Lovie Smith and Kansas City Coach Herm Edwards — to get his own head-coaching job.


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