“Pollard is one of the greatest runners these eyes have ever seen.”
-Walter Camp, legendary Yale coach and “father of American football.”
A star running back at Brown University, Pollard led the Bruins to the 1916 Rose Bowl before being named head football coach at Lincoln University in 1918. He later played professional football for the Akron Pros in 1920, where he and Bobby Marshall of the Rock Island Independents were the NFL’s first two Black players. The following season he was named the NFL’s first Black head coach. He was named to both the College and Pro Football Halls of Fame.
His arrival at Brown was the result of a complicated series of events and miscommunications that had the Chicago native headed to Dartmouth, but not before a visit to Brown at his mother’s urging. And though Brown rarely admitted students at mid-term, their President, William Herbert Perry Faunce, told Pollard, “You’re too far from home for us to turn you out…I guess we’ll have to let you stay as a special student.”
After studying both French and Spanish for the college’s language requirement, he was ultimately refused admission after failing Spanish. This led him back to Dartmouth, where head football coach Frank “The Iron Major” Cavanaugh supported his admission, only to be overruled by a dean who got word of Pollard’s abortive term at Brown.
Pollard then sought the advice of former Harvard All-American William Henry Lewis, a noted Boston attorney, who’d also been the first Black to captain the football team at Amherst College. He was then admitted to Harvard, and on the week prior to his official registration he was granted the privilege of sitting in street clothes on the Harvard football bench for their game with Bates College. He then met an old acquaintance who was serving as a Bates assistant coach who informed Pollard he had little chance of playing for the Crimson. He then convinced him that Bates would offer him the immediate chance to be a starter.
Following the game, he joined the Bobcat team on their train back to Lewiston and within hours was granted admission but told he’d be ineligible to play that fall due to his admission to Harvard. The despondent Pollard was loaned ten dollars by the Bates president for his fare back to Boston.
