A Retrospective on Progress

MIAMI Feb. 2, 2007— -- "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or does it explode?" From "A Dream Deferred" by Langston Hughes

As the drumbeat surrounding Super Bowl XXII escalated over two weeks, the pressure on Doug Williams approached oppressive.

The Washington Redskins quarterback played the most visible and important position in the most scrutinized sporting event of the year, but his historical burden was far heavier. Forty-one years after Jackie Robinson broke major league baseball's color line, 24 years after the landmark Civil Rights Act, Williams was the first black quarterback to start in the NFL's ultimate game.

On Jan. 31, 1988, in the second quarter against the Denver Broncos, all that anxiety, the fears and the doubts, were released through Williams' powerful right arm. He threw four touchdown passes -- including 80- and 50-yarders to Ricky Sanders -- and Washington scored 35 points, an NFL playoff record for a quarter. The Redskins won 42-10 in San Diego, and Williams was named Most Valuable Player.

Tony Dungy, the 32-year-old defensive coordinator of the Pittsburgh Steelers, was profoundly moved.

"Hey, we have a quarterback," he thought to himself.

"Roger Bannister runs a four-minute mile -- no one has done it -- and right after he does it, you get three or four guys who do it," Dungy said last week in Indianapolis. "Doug Williams wins a Super Bowl and, all of a sudden, you begin to see Donovan McNabb and Michael Vick and Warren Moon."

And now Dungy and Lovie Smith, the man he hired a decade ago to help rebuild the Tampa Bay franchise, find themselves on the threshold of history. In retrospect, it seems preposterous, but in the first 40 Super Bowls there wasn't a single black head coach. On Sunday, there will be two.

"For me, it was the greatest thing from a professional football player standpoint," Williams said last week at the Senior Bowl. "I think when you talk about Lovie and Tony, it might even be more significant.

"African-American players have played in this league for a long time, but very few African-American coaches have been given the opportunity to coach in this league, as to say that we're not capable of doing it. I think what these two men have accomplished lets everybody know it can be done."

Dr. Harry Edwards, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, has worked as a consultant for the San Francisco 49ers for two decades.

"It is not perhaps on the level of the White House or the first black secretary of state or the first black head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, [but] it is one more river that we really needed to cross," Edwards said.

"It wasn't that [NFL] people were, quote, less racist, it was just, 'Wow, this guy can coach. This is somebody that I want to take my $600 million to $800 million investment and put it in his hands on Sunday afternoon out there on the football field.'"