October 4, 1946. The Montreal Royals, champions of minor-league baseball’s International League, were hosting the Louisville Colonels, champions of the American Association, at Delorimier Stadium in Montreal. The hometown Royals led the Little World Series — the minor-league version of its big brother, the World Series, which was contested by the best of the American and National Leagues — three games to two. A record crowd of 19,171 was there to watch their beloved Royals vanquish the despised Colonels from Kentucky. One more win and the Royals would accomplish the ultimate victory: good over evil, enlightenment over ignorance, love over hatred, and, finally, equality over racism.
Montrealers did not throw around terms like “karma” back then but they knew about payback. Their star player that year was none other than Jackie Robinson, who led the International League in batting average and runs scored and was second in stolen bases with forty. The stolen base in particular appealed to Montrealers, who liked their sports figures to display a dash of élan like hometown hockey hero Maurice “Rocket” Richard, whose famous glare as he broke in on goal had backed down many a defenceman and frozen goalies where they stood. They also loved an underdog, and no one had faced a greater uphill battle in his career than Jackie Robinson, who would go on to become the first black Major League Baseball player, playing with the Brooklyn Dodgers the following year.
But this year Jackie Robinson belonged not just to the Royals, a Brooklyn farm team, but to them — the people of Montreal. When Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signed Robinson in 1945, he knew what he was doing by sending him to Montreal. There were teams and cities in the United States that would not exactly open their arms to a “Negro” ballplayer living and plying his trade in their midst. It was expected that Robinson would have an easier time in a foreign country. Hector Racine, president of the Royals, had gone on record as claiming that Montrealers were not racially biased and would judge Jackie Robinson on his play alone.
Unfortunately, not every game during the long season and the playoffs would be played at home. Jim Crow laws were still in effect in America, particularly in the South, and though Kentucky was considered a border state — the Mason-Dixon Line passes right through it — most of its inhabitants would probably have considered themselves Southerners. And that’s where the trouble in this series started, right in Louisville, during the opening three games.
“I had been booed pretty soundly before, but nothing like this,” wrote Robinson in his autobiography, I Never Had It Made. “A torrent of mass hatred burst from the stands with virtually every move I made.”
The extreme vitriol was enough to throw him off his game as he had only one hit through the first three games. The Royals returned to Montreal down two games to one. The Montreal fans had read and heard about the way Robinson had been treated in Kentucky and, through the first two games in Montreal, they let the Louisville players know it every time they came to bat. The Royals won those first two games; momentum shifted to the home side.
“I felt a jubilant sense of gratitude for the way the Canadians expressed their feelings,” Robinson wrote. “When fans go to bat for you like that, you feel it would be easy to play for them forever.”
But even the Montreal fans knew that Jackie would not be satisfied with playing in the minor leagues forever. They knew of Brooklyn’s plans for Robinson and the role he would play in the making of history south of the border. They were, however, determined to give him a send-off befitting a player — and man — of his stature.
In the bottom of the first inning in that sixth game, Robinson stroked his first hit of the day and would eventually come around to score. That would prove to be the winning run as veteran pitcher and former National League All-Star Curt Davis pitched a shutout for Montreal. The final score was 2–0. When the final out was recorded, Montreal fans swarmed the field. They hugged and kissed Robinson before he broke away and beat a hasty retreat to the dugout and dressing room. He had to catch a plane to Detroit where he was set to join a barnstorming tour of the States. But the fans refused to leave until Robinson made another appearance.
“Finally I had to take a chance. I passed my bag to a friend, hunched my shoulders and plunged smack into that throng.”
Robinson forced his way through the crowds, who slapped him on the back, hugged him tightly to their breasts, sang his praises to the skies, and kissed him on both cheeks as French Canadians do. At last, he managed to squeeze through the gates and into the street before breaking into a sprint with hundreds of Montreal fans in hot pursuit. Residents emerged from their homes to see what all the ruckus was about. A passing car pulled up and someone shouted, “Jump in, Jackie!” So he did, landing right onto a strange woman’s lap. Jackie shouted instructions and the car sped off. He caught his flight to Detroit that night.
Credit for the most famous description of the riotous post-game celebration and Robinson’s desperate efforts to escape his adoring fans goes to Robinson’s writer-friend Sam Maltin, who wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier: “It was probably the only day in history that a black man ran from a white mob with love instead of lynching on its mind.”
Someone who watched Robinson’s success on the field and his popularity with the fan base with a keen interest was Lew Hayman, the newly installed general manager and coach of the latest addition to the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union (a.k.a. the Big Four), the Montreal Alouettes. The Alouettes had been reborn from the ashes of a succession of failed Montreal efforts to sustain a professional football team, under various names: Indians, Cubs, Royals, Bulldogs, and most recently, Hornets. Montreal had won a Grey Cup in 1931 as the Winged Wheelers over the Regina Roughriders. Hayman, together with local businessman Leo Dandurand and financier Eric Cradock, formed a partnership to bring a Montreal franchise back to the Big Four.
Hayman was the football mind. He had come to Toronto in 1932 as an assistant coach for the University of Toronto basketball program. He had been a standout athlete at Syracuse University in basketball and baseball, winning All-American honours in his senior year as a high-scoring forward on the Syracuse Orangemen basketball team. While coaching basketball at U of T in ’32, Hayman looked around for something to do in his spare time. He heard about the local football team, the Argonauts, and managed to swing a meeting with the head coach, Buck McKenna. McKenna was impressed with this brash, young Jewish-American from New York City and offered him a position as assistant coach. When McKenna fell sick partway through the 1932 season, Hayman was appointed interim head coach. The next year, Toronto management dropped the “interim” title and made Hayman the full-time coach. In his first full year as head coach, he led the Argos to a Grey Cup victory, and he followed that up with two more Grey Cups in back-to-back years, 1937 and 1938.
When the war came, both the IRFU and the Western Interprovincial Football Union (WIFU) suspended play for the duration. Hayman enlisted in the RCAF and was stationed in Toronto. When the war ended, seeing a void in Montreal, he hooked up with Cradock and Dandurand to form a football team. Dandurand, as the homegrown connection to the French media, no doubt pointed out to both Hayman and Cradock that it wouldn’t hurt to have a symbolic name that appealed to the Québécois populace and cultural imagination. Thus, the Alouettes were born.
Montreal at that time was the most cosmopolitan city in Canada and, with the exception of New York, in all North America. It had achieved a reputation as a pleasure capital, the “Paris of North America,” with jazz clubs, strip joints, gambling dens, and hundreds of brothels where tourists and inhabitants alike could indulge their every desire without fear of arrest. When Hayman saw the popularity that Jackie Robinson enjoyed in Montreal and the buzz he helped to create around the Royals, he figured he could duplicate that success and at the same time get a jump on the rest of the league by integrating the Alouettes. Hayman knew it was only a matter of time anyway before someone else accomplished the feat. He wanted to be the man who did it first. And Montreal was the place to do it.
Canadian teams were limited in the number of import players (Americans) they were allowed to have on a team. In 1946 that number was five. Since most Canadian teams were either managed or coached by Americans, no one in this group had been eager to break the unwritten code prohibiting the signing of black players that had existed in the National Football League since 1933. Prior to 1933, there had been a number of black players in the NFL. But these were the Depression years and the feeling shared by most American owners was that employing black football players would take jobs away from more-deserving white ones — “more deserving” by virtue of being white, that is. The owners may have actually believed their own rhetoric that by prohibiting black athletes from joining the professional ranks they were doing a great service to the nation during those troubling economic times. Black players were slowly and not so subtly encouraged to find greener pastures elsewhere until none remained in the league. After 1933, it was understood throughout the NFL that there would be no more black signings.
Most historians attribute much of the NFL ban against black players to the influence of George Preston Marshall, the owner of the Washington Redskins, which was the last team in the NFL to integrate (and when it finally did in 1962, it was only through government intervention). While it seems only natural that the owner of a team with the most racially insensitive name in professional sports, then and now, would promote a racist ideology when it came to black athletes, he openly encouraged the employment of Native Americans as a promotional tie-in to what today we would call his “brand.” In defending the continued use of the offensive term “Redskins,” Washington’s current owner, Dan Snyder, has argued that Marshall was honouring the legacy of the Redskins’ first coach, William “Lone Star” Dietz, an Oglala Sioux.
(The factual problem with that argument was that fourteen years before Marshall and Dietz had come up with the name “Redskins” in 1933, Dietz had been tried in Spokane, Washington, for avoiding the draft in the First World War by falsifying his identity and posing as the son of an Oglala Sioux mother. He pleaded “no contest” and received a sentence of thirty days in jail. This minor setback did nothing to discourage Lone Star in his endeavours and he continued with his charade for the rest of his life.)
Just as Branch Rickey had conducted an intensive search of the Negro leagues and minor leagues to find the right ballplayer to be the first black player in the majors, Hayman searched for the right football player. Hayman took a more cautious approach. He chose not to go for a big signing, an offensive dynamo with the potential pizzazz to equal or surpass that of Jackie Robinson. Instead, Hayman set his sights on a defensive lineman out of Ohio State University, Bill Willis, who had graduated in 1944 and, with nowhere to play professionally in 1945, had taken a coaching position at Kentucky State College for Negroes, an all-black school in Frankfort, Kentucky. (The school would drop the title “for Negroes” in 1952 and eventually earn status as a university in 1972, becoming Kentucky State University with a student body today that is 51 percent non-black.)
Willis was set to accept Hayman’s offer to play in Montreal when he received an invitation to try out for the Cleveland Browns of the fledgling All-America Football Conference. The Browns were led by Willis’s former coach at Ohio State, Paul Brown, the man who had coached the Buckeyes to a national championship in 1942. Willis decided to sign with his old coach. Lew Hayman now had to adjust his plans. Willis recommended a former Kentucky State College lineman named Herb Trawick who was, according to Willis, even better than he was. Trawick was also a veteran of both the European and Pacific theatres of the Second World War, which, combined with the Willis stamp of approval, Hayman took as a testament to Trawick’s ability and character. Plus, Trawick fit the bill as a blue-collar kind of player, the guy in the trenches, someone who would never get to touch the football unless he fell on another man’s fumble.
Trawick was small by today’s standards, only five feet ten inches tall and weighing in at 230 pounds. In today’s game he would be a fullback, the last line of defence against onrushing Goliaths intent on ripping the head off David, the team’s puny stone thrower. He was also quick, the first tackler downfield on kicks ready to separate some unsuspecting receiver from his senses as well as the ball. Trawick had a reputation for being tough as nails, a reputation he’d earned while playing football at Kentucky State.
Trawick was a three-time black All-American in college. He left in 1942, before graduating, to join the army. When he was overseas in Fordingbridge, England, serving in the medical corps attached to the 183rd Combat Engineers, the white officers warned the locals they would be well-advised to watch out for and keep their distance from the “Negro soldiers.” In a November 10, 1956, Maclean’s magazine article by writer Trent Frayne, Trawick recalled how one officer went so far as to tell the townsfolk that the black soldiers “had tails” as if, being British and non-American, they were anatomically ignorant or gullible enough to swallow tales of bogeymen hiding in their closets. Instead of breeding fear in the people of Fordingbridge, the warnings had the opposite effect. The townspeople held a dance and made sure they invited all the American soldiers, not just the white ones.
“They saw that a lot of our boys could sing and dance, and I guess they figured we must be human beings.” And with a certain satisfaction and perhaps a bit of the old nudge nudge, wink wink, Trawick added, “We had a good time at Fordingbridge.”
After the war, he returned to Kentucky State in order to graduate before going on to Ohio State to study for his master’s. And that’s when Lew Hayman reached out to him.
“I was just out of college and needed bread,” Trawick told Frayne. “Lew offered me $1,500 that first year and I accepted. I must have been pretty hungry. I was disappointed but I knew if I made good I would get more money. So I put football ahead of everything else.”
Before Hayman’s offer to come play in Montreal, Trawick had never played against white football players. He was naturally a bit hesitant to start now, especially in another country and in a city where French was the predominant language. But by this time, everybody knew that Montreal was the current address of Jackie Robinson. So when Trawick came to Montreal, he and Robinson hooked up and became fast friends. They shared the anxieties and experiences that come with being ground-breakers. But Trawick conceded that Robinson’s roadmap contained the bumpier terrain.
“I’ve never run into discrimination on the football field,” he told Frayne, “although I must say it’s the only place I haven’t. Jackie ran into it everywhere, probably more of it on the field from other players than off it.”
Although Jackie played for a team that was located in Montreal, Canada, his sport was not played by Canadians at that level. Professional baseball, outside the Negro leagues, remained a game played exclusively by white Americans, a huge percentage of whom came from the rural South and thought that black people were inferior. Black athletes, to a great degree, were shielded from the worst excesses of racism on the playing fields in Canada by the rule preventing teams from having more than five American imports on the roster. Teams were therefore limited in the number of players they could have that had been raised in hotbeds of Southern racism.
Before the 1946 season had even begun, Lew Hayman heard from two of the teams competing in the Big Four, Ottawa and Toronto. Toronto’s owners, who had chosen not to sign any American players despite the new rules allowing imports, said they were particularly incensed that Hayman was planning to play league games on Sundays, citing unwritten ethical and moral standards for operation, and concluded that “we simply did not use black players.” Hayman replied that he “couldn’t find anything in the rules against either one.” Undeterred, Ottawa and Toronto responded that if he intended to go ahead with his plans, they would boycott games against Montreal. Hayman told them to go ahead, “because if they forfeited, it would be the easiest two points I’d ever pick up.” As Hayman had figured they would, both teams meekly capitulated.
It is only natural that when athletes in any sport come into a new environment, they want to make an impression on the coaching staff, their teammates, and the fans. They want to prove to the coaches that they’re dependable. Their teammates just want to know that new players have their backs and won’t put their own needs above those of the team. And the fans just want to see a player who will bust through brick walls for the logo on their chest. In Montreal, they had the Rocket. They had Jackie Robinson. And now they had Herb Trawick. All three were wall busters.
“Trawick’s irrepressible bounce on the field has endeared him to Montreal fans,” wrote Frayne. “He has a habit, when the Alouettes are kicking off, of jumping straight up and down as the Montreal kicker starts forward to boot the ball. This brings a rising roar from the crowd that reaches a crescendo as Trawick churns downfield under the kick and barrels his bulk at the player who catches the ball.”
In 1951, now playing for the defending Grey Cup champion, the Toronto Argonauts, former Alouette Billy Bass settled nicely under a punt one day only to have the human tank that was Herb Trawick bring Billy’s participation in that afternoon’s game to a sudden and terrible end. As Bass lay there on the turf like a deflated balloon and the Argo trainers dutifully sprinted out carrying a stretcher, Trawick stood over Bass’s crumpled body, not pounding his chest or trash-talking in the manner of today’s more self-aggrandizing players, but gently coaxing his friend to get up.
“C’mon, Billy, get up. My wife bought a roast and we’re expecting you for dinner at our place right after the game.”
Billy Bass would have to skip dinner that night at the Trawicks’ house. He had a broken bone in his back and would have to return to Toronto for medical treatment. The two had become good friends during the 1948 season, Bass’s lone season with the Alouettes. Black players enjoyed the companionship of other black players on their teams and were drawn even closer because of their estrangement from the white players. It was that closeness that drew Herb Trawick to the Montreal train station that night to see his friend Billy off to Toronto.
Herb Trawick would last twelve seasons with the Alouettes; in eight of those years he was a true “sixty-minute man,” playing offence, defence, and special teams. He never left the field. He was rarely injured badly enough to miss playing time. (Concussion protocols? What are those?) Trawick suffered four broken bones in his back and four broken ribs, and yet missed only three games in his career. In 1951, his teammates named him captain, the first black team captain in professional football. Herb Trawick was a man his teammates knew they could depend on.
Perhaps his greatest moment on the gridiron occurred in the 1949 Grey Cup game against the defending champs, the Calgary Stampeders. The Stamps had come into that game believing it would be a cakewalk, led by their own black stars, Woody Strode (of later Hollywood fame) and Kentucky State alumnus Ezzrett “Sugarfoot” Anderson. The field conditions, as they often were in November in Varsity Stadium, the home of the Grey Cup game, were hideous, mud swamps broken by islands of iced-over turf. The Alouettes began the game strong and leaped out to an 11–0 lead but the Stampeders closed the gap to 11–7 near the end of the first half and they had the ball again. The Stamps’ quarterback, Keith Spaith, dropped back to pass — he never saw Trawick coming. Trawick slammed into him and the ball came loose. Trawick trampled the poor quarterback into the muck as he scooped up the loose fumble and rumbled thirty-five yards for the touchdown.
Herb Trawick had done what Lew Hayman had never signed him to do: stolen the show on the biggest stage in Canadian sports, the Grey Cup game. The Alouettes won that game, 28–15. Trawick would play in three more Grey Cup games, the three classic matchups in a row against the Edmonton Eskimos from ’54 to ’56; Edmonton would win all three. The most bitter of the three straight losses was the first, the 1954 Grey Cup, which is remembered for Jackie Parker’s ninety-yard touchdown run after he recovered a Chuck Hunsinger fumble in the dying minutes, tying the score at 25–25. The Alouettes claimed Hunsinger had been in the process of passing and the play should have been whistled dead, negating Parker’s touchdown. The referees stood by their call. The Esks would score a single point shortly afterward, bringing the final score to 26–25 for Edmonton.
Though much beloved by Montrealers during and after his career with the Alouettes — he had a park in Montreal named after him in 1997, Parc Herb-Trawick on Avenue Lionel-Groulx — life was not always easy for Trawick away from the gridiron. As Frayne reported in his article, Trawick never felt “social discrimination” in Canada but he did feel a certain “economic discrimination.” In those days, football front offices would find jobs for many of their players during the off-season to help supplement their income. The many revenue streams teams have today to boost their finances did not exist back then; what the team took in at the gate was all it could pay its players. Thus, a good job arranged by the team was, more or less, a benefit package. Trawick was offered the job of doorman at a popular Montreal restaurant.
In his view, other players — white players — seemed to have fared much better, landing more rewarding jobs that promised future positions if they were inclined to pursue them. It wasn’t a question of money because, as a celebrity doorman at a local hot spot, Trawick made a lot of money in tips. It was the nature of the job: there wasn’t much of a future in doormanship. He had a degree. To him it was menial work with undertones of racism. Nevertheless, he took the job and together with his income from football managed to put away enough money to start a shoe-manufacturing business in the late ’40s. The business thrived for a year until Trawick and his partner had a falling out. Trawick tried to sell his end of the business but could not find any takers at the price he wanted. It wasn’t long before the animosity between the partners led to a decline in business and eventual bankruptcy, leaving Trawick with a heavy debt load.
So, he went back to being a doorman. Once again, pooling his resources from tips and wages along with his football salary, he managed to save another $6,000 and opened his own restaurant in close proximity to two popular nightclubs, Rockhead’s Paradise and Café St-Michel, located at the intersection of Rue Saint-Antoine and Rue de la Montagne, which was known to the citizens of Montreal as simply The Corner. The broader neighbourhood, including The Corner, housed the vast majority of Montreal’s English-speaking black community in a pocket known as Little Burgundy. Oscar Peterson was born in Little Burgundy and was a semi-regular at Café St-Michel along with a number of Black American bebop jazz musicians, like Art Farmer and Sonny Rollins.
But change was in the air in 1950s Montreal as city officials looked to crack down on the criminal influence and seedier aspects of Montreal nightlife. It was during this period that both Café St-Michel and Rockhead’s Paradise “were closed down,” according to Frayne. Whatever the reasons behind the closures, no longer was The Corner drawing crowds to the neighbourhood. With the decline in drop-in traffic, Trawick’s modest restaurant suffered a slow and quiet death.
With another failed business under his belt, Trawick decided to try his hand at professional wrestling. Why not? He had the build for it. Other pro footballers had had success making the transition to wrestling, perhaps none bigger than football legend Bronko Nagurski, who won three NFL titles with the Chicago Bears in the 1930s. Besides, wrestling was a big attraction in Montreal during the ’50s with hometown boy and fan favourite “Mad Dog” Vachon capable of drawing 14,000-plus to the Forum. But, as Trawick soon discovered, the big money went to either heroes or villains, and unfortunately for him he did not fit either category. That experience lasted a year and a half, both during and outside of football season. With expenses coming out of his own pocket, he was barely breaking even. Hardly the supplemental income he had hoped it would be. He needed a less physically demanding job than wrestling, one that wouldn’t put his football career at risk through injury.
When the Maclean’s article came out in 1956, Herb Trawick had found success in a printing business, which he ran until he retired from football in 1957. While he may have struggled off the field to find career opportunities in an age when football amounted to a decent but not high-paying part-time job, his on-field performance over a twelve-year career ranks among the very best in Canadian football. His jersey number, 56, is one of only seven jersey numbers retired by the Montreal Alouettes since the team’s inception. But it wasn’t just the Alouettes who recognized his contribution to the game. Trawick was named an Eastern All-Star seven times and appeared in four Grey Cup games, winning one and losing three heart-breakers in a row to the magnificent Edmonton Eskimos team of the 1950s. He was the first black captain of a CFL football team and was elected to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 1975. Had he played a far more flashy position, like Tom Casey had out in Winnipeg — Casey was the first black player inducted into the Hall of Fame, in 1964 — Trawick would have been knocking at the doors to the Hall of Fame long before. At his induction ceremony, Lew Hayman, the man who had brought Trawick to Montreal thirty years before, paid him the highest compliment anyone could about a football player of that day.
“He was the best two-way player I ever coached.”
Herb Trawick was being recognized for an accomplishment that transcends the sport itself. Like Jackie Robinson in professional baseball, Herb Trawick was the first. Always a humble man, Trawick might have said he was just in the right place at the right time or that sooner or later it would have been somebody else. And he would have been right. But history chose him. And he was there to answer the call.