Remembering a remarkable life in football

Iused to sit with Bernie Custis sometimes, usually before Argos games, and ask him to tell me stories about his remarkable life in football.

He would talk softly, almost without ego, about the history he made, and it struck me then, just as it strikes me now with his passing at the age of 88, that he never cared to be any kind of celebrity or pioneer.

He was a quiet man who appreciated the path just not necessarily the politics. And what he wanted, more than anything else, was to play the position he was most comfortable playing: that of quarterback.

That was what mattered to the young Bernie Custis.

Only one problem: He was black.

One year after Jackie Robinson, Custis played quarterback at Syracuse University, the first AfricanAmerican to start at the position at a major American university.

After Syracuse, where he had a later- to- be- famous roommate named Al Davis, he was drafted by the Cleveland Browns and on his way, he believed, to being the backup quarterback behind the famed Otto Graham. That didn’t happen. At the conclusion of his first and only training camp with the Browns, the legendary coach Paul Brown called him into his office. He didn’t want to cut Custis. He wanted him to play another position, maybe defensive back, receiver or running back.

Brown wasn’t ready for an African-American to play quarterback. Maybe America wasn’t either: The NFL didn’t have any black players at any position between 1934 and 1946.

Without coming right out and saying so, Brown told him he couldn’t have a black man playing quarterback.

Custis understood as much as he would allow himself to understand.

Brown also t old Custis he wasn’t going to release him to sign with another NFL team. He was too talented, too athletic and too valuable to just give him away. The only way Brown was going to release him was he if could place him in the Canadian Football League.

And Brown made a deal with Hamilton, basically selling him to the team closest to the U. S. border. That season, 1951, history was made.

Four years after Robinson broke the colour barrier in baseball, Custis started at quarterback for the Tiger- Cats in a game against Montreal.

It wasn’t the big deal it should have been back then, but there was nothing big deal about Custis.

Only his accomplishments, his deportment, his character, all of them were magnanimous.

The Canadian Football League changed football forever — maybe the CFL’s most important role — with the manner in which it welcomed African- American quarterbacks long before the NFL would alter its vision.

Custis led to Chuck Ealey, who never lost a college game at Toledo, to Condredge Holloway, who was Russell Wilson before there was a Russell Wilson. Holloway led to Warren Moon, who changed just about everything in the way football viewed black quarterbacks and most recently, Damon Allen, who broke records that will never be broken, passing the baton to Henry Burris who won a Grey Cup in his 42nd year.

Custis took stock in what mattered in his football life, never stopped loving his game, looked back at it with a sense of humility and honour.

You met him and you l i ked him, almost instantly. There was something almost magical and soft about his ways, his words, his smile.

After football, he taught school and became a principal and scouted and coached Tony Gabriel in junior football, and coached collegiately in different Ontario stops and was a fixture often on the Tiger- Cats sidelines during training camp practices.

Al Davis never lost track of his roommate. He’d offer him job after job with the Oakland Raiders but Custis would turn them down year after year.

He’d left the United States. He hated to fly.

He’d found a home in Canada. Here, he had discovered a place where his colour didn’t seem to matter much, in football or in his professional world.

It took more than 30 years after Custis for the NFL to be in any way welcoming to African- American quarterbacks.

And that was just a beginning. But after Moon, there has been Doug Williams and Donovan McNabb and Randall Cunningham and Michael Vick and Cam Newton and maybe the best since Moon, Wilson.

Progress has to start somewhere: It started in Hamilton with the quiet man, Custis, who like a lot of Americans who played in the CFL in those days, settled in nicely into Canada after his career, making a mark on the field and in education.

The pioneer should have been a household name, but Bernie Custis was just fine being in the background, letting others tell their stories.

He was a first in college football, a first in pro football, a giant of a figure without ever being a giant.

For a long time, he was all but forgotten.

Now he is gone: Bernie Custis is someone worth remembering forever.