LEWISTON – Bates College can claim one of its own in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Sort of.
Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard is one of four players who will be inducted in Canton this weekend.
In Pollard’s hall-of-fame bio, he is listed as having attended Brown University and Bates College. A trailblazer for African Americans, Pollard was the first black quarterback and first black coach in the NFL. While at Brown, he was the first black to play in the Rose Bowl (1915) and was the first black selected to the backfield on Walter Camp’s All-America team in 1916.
Evidence of his time in Lewiston is sketchy.
An archivist at Bates failed to find any record of the Chicago native, according to Doug Hubley, a staff writer in the Communications and Media Relations office at Bates.
“There is no evidence that Pollard actually enrolled at Bates,” said Hubley.
What little evidence comes from published reports. According to a 1994 article in the Providence Journal-Bulletin, Fritz Pollard graduated from a Chicago high school in 1912. More interested in playing sports instead of getting an education, he left Northwestern without playing a game.
He headed East, where Brown refused to accept all of his credits.
He then went to Dartmouth and Harvard before a Bates coach encouraged him to come to Lewiston to play instead of sitting on the bench at Harvard.
“So he went off to Maine, where he soon found out he had to sit out the football season as a transfer. Unhappy, missing his wife and child, and looking at a bleak Maine winter, he returned to Boston,” said Hubley. With no actual records, Hubley guessed that Pollard was in Lewiston during the fall of 1914. Pollard finally enrolled at Brown in 1915 and began his pro career in 1919. He died in 1986.
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