football player; teacher
Personal Information
Born c. 1946, in Nebraska;
Education: Attended the University of Nebraska-Omaha, mid-1960s; earned teaching degree in the 1990s.
Career
Began career as defensive back with Denver Broncos, 1968; played eight games as quarterback; traded to Buffalo Bills, 1969, played three seasons as wide receiver; also played wide receiver for 1972, 1973, and 1974 Miami Dolphins; spent 1975 season with San Diego Chargers and then Detroit Lions; played 1976 season with the New England Patriots; worked as teacher in Los Angeles area during the 1990s; Watts/Willowbrook Boys and Girls Club, Los Angeles, assistant project manager and fundraiser.
Life's Work
Marlin Briscoe earned a place in professional football history during one brief season with the Denver Broncos as the first African-American starting quarterback in the game. His rookie record with the 1968 Broncos still held 34 years later, but subtle racism in the game endured almost as long: it took nearly 20 years after Briscoe's historic first for talented African-American athletes to regularly hold this integral team position. Briscoe himself never did so again. After that season he switched to the position of wide receiver and subsequently won two Super Bowl rings. After his 1977 retirement from the game, the once-powerful athlete descended into an urban nightmare of drug addiction and danger. Briscoe told Colleen Kenney in an article published on ESPN.com, "I overcame a lot of obstacles in my life. But the biggest one by far was getting off of drugs."
Drafted by Broncos
Briscoe was born in the mid-1940s and grew up in public housing in Omaha, Nebraska. At Omaha South High School, he was a star basketball and football player prior to his 1963 graduation. He went on to the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where he served as the Chargers' quarterback. At the time, however, a black quarterback on an integrated collegiate team was still somewhat of a rarity. Quarterbacks enjoyed an exalted status on the roster because they led their team's offense; in a sport where brute strength and speed were integral, the quarterback position called for strategic-thinking skills as well. Briscoe set college records during his time at Nebraska, and in 1968 became the Denver Broncos' 14th-round draft pick. Like the few other black quarterbacks at the time, Briscoe was signed as a defensive back. "I knew that if I was going to get an opportunity to play in the league it wasn't going to be as a quarterback but at another position," he told Sam Adams in an interview published in the Rocky Mountain News.
The Broncos were the Colorado franchise of the American Football League (AFL), a rival to the National Football League (NFL) during the 1960s. Permitted to try out for the quarterback position at his first Broncos training camp, Briscoe impressed the Denver coaches and management. When the team's starting quarterback, Steve Tensi, suffered a broken collarbone early in the season, Briscoe was offered the job. At the time, Briscoe himself had a hamstring injury that had temporarily sidelined him, but when he came to practice one day, he opened his locker and in place of his defensive back jersey was a No. 15 Broncos jersey-- the quarterback's. The equipment manager told a stunned Briscoe that coach Lou Saban wanted to speak with him. As Briscoe recalled in the Rocky Mountain News interview with Adams, "I thought I had been cut. I hadn't been playing so I thought they weren't going to wait on me."
Instead Briscoe made his historic debut on September 29, 1968, in a game against the Boston Patriots. He scored a fourth-quarter touchdown, but the Broncos lost, 20-17. He started regularly with the team for the remainder of the season, permanently breaking the color barrier for quarterbacks in pro football. Only one other black athlete had ever played the position before him in the pros--the aptly named Michigan State star, Willie Thrower, who was sent in during a 1953 Chicago Bears game. At that point, blacks had been playing in professional football for just seven years, and were still a relative rarity.
Barrier Not Entirely Dismantled
Briscoe was one of a new generation of athletes, those born after World War II who came of age during the civil rights era. America was becoming a more integrated society, and black players were advancing in all areas of professional sports. When Briscoe's 1968 season ended, he had set a Broncos rookie record, completing 93 of 224 passes for a total of 1,589 yards. He rushed 41 times for 308 yards, threw 13 interceptions, and made 14 touchdown passes. A hometown favorite in Denver and a popular teammate, Briscoe was dubbed "the Magician" for his prowess.
But in the summer of 1969, Briscoe returned to the University of Nebraska to finish his architecture degree, and the Broncos held pre-season quarterback meetings without him. When he arrived at training camp, he was told he would not be playing quarterback for the team that season. Irate at Saban, he asked to be released from his contract, and signed with another AFL franchise, the Buffalo Bills. He was offered the wide receiver job, and felt compelled to accept it, though he had never played the position before. Briscoe, however, proved a quick study: he became the first 1,000-yard receiver in Bills history, and scored five touchdowns in his first season with the team, more than any other Bills player that year.
He fared even better in the 1970 season, scoring eight touchdowns and making 57 catches for 1,036 yards. By this time the AFL teams had been subsumed into the NFL, and Briscoe won the league's receiving title that year. Haven Moses, his teammate from this era, told Rocky Mountain News writer Adams that Briscoe's talents were legendary. "I thought he was the only guy that could throw the ball and then catch his own pass," Moses recalled.
Played For Legendary Dolphins
Briscoe's promising career was cut short when, at the close of the 1971 season, he joined a 32-player anti-trust lawsuit against the National Football League and its so-called Rozelle Rule, named after the league's powerful commissioner, Pete Rozelle. The rule gave the commissioner permission to compensate teams for free agents, and players filed the suit in protest, arguing that this restricted their options. Moreover, hard feelings remained between him and Saban, and when the latter was hired as the Bills' coach in 1972, Briscoe was summarily traded to the Miami Dolphins. Briscoe again proved to be a standout receiver and helped take the Florida team to its unprecedented 17-0 season that year, which remained an NFL record 30 years later. He played in two Super Bowl games with the team as well.
Briscoe spent rest of the 1970s with NFL franchises in San Diego, Detroit, and Boston, and retired in 1977. He spent the next twelve years addicted to cocaine, losing his house and family along the way. Shot at on the rougher streets of Los Angeles where he had settled, and even jailed twice, he traded on his former NFL glory with drug dealers, who dubbed him "17-0" in mock homage to his Dolphins years. In debt to crack dealers, he was once held hostage for a weekend until his NFL check arrived in the mail. It was just one of several near-death experiences he had during his darkest days, he told Buffalo News journalist Jerry Sullivan. "I thought I was invincible and that nothing like that could happen to me. I was always headstrong, so I must have thought I couldn't be conquered."
Briscoe was merely a footnote in football history at the time. No other black player started as a quarterback until 1974, when Joe Gilliam of the Pittsburgh Steelers took Terry Bradshaw's job during a players' strike. Doug Williams became a regular for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1978, but as late as 1983, 99 percent of the quarterbacks in the NFL were white. In 1987 the New York Times ran a Sunday sports-section article about the changing tide in the NFL. There was a strike that year, and the labor dispute had served to elevate three talented black quarterbacks--Williams, Warren Moon of the Houston Oilers, and Philadelphia Eagle Randall Cunningham--to starter slots on their teams. The article's author, Roy S. Johnson, discussed the breakthrough, noting that there were also several prominent starters at the college level as well. Johnson predicted that in the future, the 1987 season "might ... be remembered as the season when pro football showed signs of overcoming its most lingering phobia: apprehension over the use of the black quarterback." Likely unavailable for comment, Briscoe was mentioned by Johnson only in passing.
Mentored to South-Central Youth
Briscoe finally overcame his cocaine addiction in 1989. He remained in the Los Angeles area, earned a teaching degree, and began working with at-risk youth. By early 2002 he was serving as the assistant project manager and fundraiser for the Watts/Willowbrook Boys and Girls Club in South Central Los Angeles, a new facility in a notably rough part of the city. At the center, Briscoe has played basketball, taught chess, and mentored teens. Outside of its sanctuary, he has lectured to help raise funds, ardently courting his former contacts from his pro ball days. These former teammates, who now hold jobs in NFL-franchise front offices or on coaching staffs, have also helped Briscoe obtain autographed footballs and jerseys from current pro stars. These are auctioned off at Watts/Willowbrook's annual fundraiser. The Boys and Girls Club is near a park whose construction and equipment were donated by former Los Angeles Laker Magic Johnson. "These kids desperately need a proud place and a safe haven," Briscoe told Sullivan in the Buffalo News article. "So between Magic's park and our club, it's a source of inspiration for kids."
Briscoe's rookie quarterback record with the Broncos still stood in 2001. He recounted his historic first in a 2002 autobiography, The First Black Quarterback: Marlin Briscoe's Journey to Break the Color Barrier and Start in the NFL, written with Bob Schaller. In it, Briscoe recounts his Omaha childhood, the pro days, and his twelve-year battle with drugs. He toured to promote the book, but the athlete-turned-teacher was already an accomplished public speaker before audiences of all ages. Invited to tell his story to elementary-school students, he told Kenney on ESPN.com that the more football-savvy listeners among them would often mention his size--at just five feet, nine inches in height, he was relatively undersized for a quarterback job. "Usually a kid says, 'You played quarterback? But you're so small,'" he said in the interview with Kenney. "And I say, 'Don't ever let your size or circumstances in life dictate whether you succeed or fail.'"
Works
Selected writings
- (With Bob Schaller) The First Black Quarterback: Marlin Briscoe's Journey to Break the Color Barrier and Start in the NFL, Crosstraining Publishing, 2002.
Further Reading
Periodicals
- Austin American-Statesman, August 4, 2001, p. C7.
- Buffalo News, January 29, 2002, p. D1.
- Denver Post, January 12, 2001, p. D1.
- New York Times, November 8, 1987, sec. 5, pp. 1, 7.
- Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), January 11, 1998, p. 24N; December 15, 1998, p. 2C; November 15, 1999, p. 30C; September 22, 2001, p. 2D; September 12, 2002, p. 2C.
- St. Petersburg Times, October 3, 2000, p. 4C.
- ESPN Network, http://www.espn.go.com/ (October 9, 2002).
— Carol Brennan
