Up North

There is no doubt that some projects we work on are more memorable than others.   

As I clean up old files (so I’ll have room for new files) I stumble on ones I barely recall. But here is one well remembered completed project that calls out for an update. 

Thirteen years ago, I was asked to do a story on Chuck Ealey, a Canadian Football player who played in the seventies.  There was a one-hour documentary coming out on him called The Stone Thrower and a book with the same title written by his daughter Jael Ealey Richardson. *  

The occasion for doing this was the 100th anniversary of the Grey Cup.  I like many sports, follow some, but really don’t like writing those typical “he shoots, he scores” stories.  My interest is in the sociological side of sports.  So, this assignment was perfect.  You’ll see why.           

The 1972 Grey Cup held December 3rd at Hamilton’s Ivor Wynne Stadium was decided by a last-second field goal with the Hamilton Tiger Cats winning an exciting match over the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Rookie quarterback Chuck Ealey was the star of that game and that season for the Cats.

The game represented much more than the typical east-west Cup Final and this is why: Ealey shouldn’t have been in a position to earn the game’s MVP award, because in a just world he would have been quarterbacking in the National Football League.

Bowl victories and an undefeated college record (35-0) at the University of Toledo weren’t enough to get Ealey drafted by an NFL team. Prior to the draft, his agent sent a “well-thought-out, professional, not harsh” letter to all NFL teams, Ealey recalled. 

The essence of the letter went like this: “The only position I’m interested in playing is quarterback. Thank you for your consideration.”

He wanted to play QB because clearly, that was the position where he excelled. But an Afro-American had no chance to compete for a quarterback position in the NFL of the seventies. There were no takers among NFL general managers.

“There was an overall stigma in the NFL at that time that African Americans were not to be playing quarterback,” recalled Ealey. And so, Ealey, the quarterback, moved on.

This story isn’t unique, of course.

Charles Officer directed the movie, The Stone Thrower.*  Officer had considered doing a “bigger picture” that would have looked at other Afro-American quarterbacks who came up here to play. Standouts like Warren Moon, Condredge Holloway, Damon Allen and Bernie Custis all had to come north for their opportunity.

In 1951, Custis, a star quarterback at Syracuse University, was drafted sixth overall by the Cleveland Browns. But the Browns had no intention of letting him play the pivot position so let him go to Hamilton. Custis became the first Afro-American regular starting quarterback in North America. Earning all-star recognition in 1951, he was moved to halfback the next season.

“It’s the same story,” said Officer. “Bernie Custis coming up here and then getting switched over. He had to come here for a reason.”

Officer, an Afro-Canadian actor, writer, director and former semi-pro hockey player, believed that by documenting Ealey’s journey he could tell the bigger story of what was going on in American society in the seventies.

Meanwhile, Jael Richardson, Chuck’s daughter, had been on a journey of her own, recounted in her 2012 book, similarly called The Stone Thrower: A Daughter's Lessons, a Father's Life.**  Richardson was born after her father’s football career had ended. As an adult, she would go to Ohio with her dad.

“When we went back to Toledo, people would start screaming ‘Oh there’s Chuck Ealey’ and ask for autographs,” Jael’s father recalls. “She’d go, so who are you? What did you do?”

Ealey acknowledges that he “never shared a lot of the story of how I got here.” 

It is hard today to fully appreciate the barriers Chuck Ealey faced growing up poor in the racially divided city of Portsmouth, Ohio, a typical American small town. Portsmouth was the kind of a place that valued football players but didn’t let black children swim in their public pools.  Located on the Ohio River and bordering Kentucky, the city was a significant pass-through point on the route of the Underground Railroad and the opportunity for freedom in Canada for fugitive slaves.

Ealey remembers the prejudices that held him and others back and contrasts that with the freedom “to do things a lot differently” that he found when he arrived in Hamilton.

“There were none of the issues that socially held you back or that seemed to hold you back in the States,” he stated. And so, Ealey was able to continue with his winning ways that memorable rookie season, 1972, in Hamilton, all the way to the Grey Cup win.

Director Officer documents how Ealey, denied the opportunity to play quarterback in his native land, essentially followed that same path that slaves had taken to get to Canada. As Officer told me of his movie: “It is a significant Africo-American story that has everything to do about being Canadian.”

Today nearly half of the starting quarterbacks in the NFL are Afro-American.  However current research shows that from 2010 to 2022, teams were chronically underrating Black quarterbacks in the draft and significantly underpaying them when they were signed. *** 

*Officer’s movie Stone Thrower can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmL1EvtQy3E

**Jael Richardson’s successful debut novel Gutter Child was published in 2020.  

*** https://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/nfl-draft-analysis-racial-bias-quarterbacks-18355172.php