BCSP Notes . . .
Black college legend passes
When the history of Grambling University football is written, the name of a non-football player will be near the top of the story.
That's because as the sports information director for Grambling from 1948 to 1978, Collie Nicholson was as much responsible for creating the Tigers' national and world-wide reputation as legendary coach Eddie Robinson and their legion of football stars. Nicholson passed last week in Shreveport after a lengthy illness. He was 85.
Nicholson, along with Robinson and late GSU President
Dr. Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones, created a triumvirate that worked to, as
Nicholson explained, "make Grambling to black America what Notre Dame was
to American Catholics." And that's exactly what they accomplished.
Robinson's job was to win games, Jones had to make sure Robinson had the
wherewithal to do so with Nicholson as the architect and marketing genius behind
the effort.
Today, Grambling is known as the gold standard in black college football because of the legacy built by the three.
Nicholson returned from a three-year stint as a writer in the Marines to finish Grambling in 1948 and assume the post of director of sports information. From that post he arranged for the band and the football team to appear in venues across the world.
He drove an hour after games at Grambling to Shreveport, La., to send game stories to over 400 African-American newspapers around the country. He beat the pavement in New York and cultivated corporate relationships that paved the way for Grambling to play Morgan State at Yankee Stadium in 1968, the first-ever televised game between two black colleges that aired on ABC. That event was the spark for the big-venue classic games that Grambling and many other black colleges still play in today.
But he went further, learning Japanese to converse with Japanese sponsors as he arranged a Grambling game played in Tokyo, Japan. He was also the brainchild of the successful Bayou Classic between Grambling and Southern.
He created the Grambling Football Highlight Show that at its peak was shown on over 120 TV stations around the country in the 1960s that as much as anything acquainted a national audience with the G-Men. I
Nicholson's legacy was honored at Grambling State this past summer as the pressbox at Robinson Stadium was renamed in his honor.
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