Two days before Super Bowl XLI in 2007, the game's two opposing head
coaches posed with the trophy one of them would hoist after the contest.
It was a fairly unremarkable event, except that both coaches were
African American--a fact that was as much of a story as the game itself.
As Jeremi Duru reveals in Advancing the Ball, this unique milestone
resulted from the work of a determined group of people whose struggles
to expand head coaching opportunities for African Americans ultimately
changed the National Football League. Since the league's desegregation
in 1946, opportunities had grown plentiful for African Americans as
players but not as head coaches--the byproduct of the NFL's old-boy
network and lingering stereotypes of blacks' intellectual inferiority.
Although Major League Baseball and the NBA had, over the years, made
progress in this regard, the NFL's head coaches were almost exclusively
white up until the mid-1990s.
Advancing the Ball chronicles the campaign of former Cleveland Browns
offensive lineman John Wooten to right this wrong and undo decades of
discriminatory head coach hiring practices--an initiative that finally
bore fruit when he joined forces with attorneys Cyrus Mehri and Johnnie
Cochran. Together with a few allies, the triumvirate galvanized the
NFL's African American assistant coaches to stand together for equal
opportunity and convinced the league to enact the "Rooney Rule," which
stipulates that every team must interview at least one minority
candidate when searching for a new head coach.
In doing so, they spurred a movement that would substantially impact the
NFL and, potentially, the nation. Featuring an impassioned foreword by
Coach Tony Dungy, Advancing the Ball offers an eye-opening, first-hand
look at how a few committed individuals initiated a sea change in
America's most popular sport and added an extraordinary new chapter to
the civil rights story.
