Franklin Roosevelt was America's President when Eddie Robinson coached his first game. Fifty-seven years later, Robison left Grambling as the winningest coach in the history of college football. Initially a coach for a segregated society, Eddie Robinson has helped football transcend race in the America he loves and treasures. Yet institutionalized racial barriers kept Robinson a secret from white America for more than 25 years until Howard Cosell did an ABC special on Grambling in the late 1960s. Outside of the world of sport, white America still barely knows him. In the African-American community, he is very likely the best-known coach in America. He is surely the most beloved. Never Before, Never Again chronicles Coach Robinson's life and his time at Grambling in vivid detail. He overcame all those things that might have predicted that it was not possible for the son of a sharecropper and a domestic worker to become a success. He got a master's degree, became the president of the American Football Coaches Association, and helping thousands of young boys become outstanding men. More than wins, they may be his greatest legacy. But as much as Coach Robinson's memoir is about sports, it's a social history history as well. The book is a lens through which readers can see the challeges and turmoil of the civil rights movements from the perspective of a sports figure who worked the playing fields of a black campus while caring deeply about the stakes and outcome of the struggle . This book places the hard-news events of the day in the time frame of the trails of Robinson's Grambling teams of that era. Also included are the thoughts of other coaches (both college and NFL) on Coach Robinson, as well as those of national leaders like Reverend Jesse Jackson, M.J. "Mike" Foster, the governor of Lousiana, and President Clinton. Never Before, Never Again stands as lasting testimony to the work of a true American hero.

Never Before, Never Again: The Autobiography of Eddie Robinson

Biographies & Memoirs

Robinson, Eddie

Lapchick, Richard

Community & Culture

Thomas Dunne Books

Eddie Robinson’s career lasted sixty-five years and spanned the era before and during World War II, integration, the organization of the players union, expansion, use of artificial turf, free agency, labor stoppages, and even the steroid era. He was a Minor League player, a Major League player, a coach, a farm director, a general manager, a scout, and a consultant. During his six and a half decades in baseball, he knew, played with or against, or worked for or with many of baseball’s greats, including Hank Aaron, Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, Bob Feller, Rogers Hornsby, Mickey Mantle, Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, George Steinbrenner, Casey Stengel, Bill Veeck, and Ted Williams. The lively autobiography of Robinson, Lucky Me highlights a career that touched all aspects of the game from player to coach to front-office executive and scout. In it Robinson reveals for the first time that the 1948 Cleveland Indians stole the opposition’s signs with the use of a telescope in their drive to the pennant. This edition features a new afterword by C. Paul Rogers III.

Lucky Me: My Sixty-Five Years in Baseball

Rogers, C. Paul

University Of Nebraska Press

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