Most of you probably have
heard of Burl Tolar. His story and the story of his teammates at University of
San Francisco never has received the attention it deserved, perhaps because
they played on the west coast. As a kid growing up in California, the names of
the players on this USF were as familiar as the stars at USC or UCLA. What the piece
below does not mention was that Ollie Matson also ran the 400 meters in the Olympic
games. My father-in-law knew Burl Tolar and always spoke highly of him as a
leader and a true class act. he and his teammates helped open the door for today's black athletes. I think it is a shame they have never received the recognition.
Burl Toler, First Black N.F.L. Official, Dies at 81
Published: August 20, 2009
Burl Toler, who as perhaps the best player on one of college football’s
greatest teams became the focus of racial discrimination, and who went on to
become the first black on-field official in the National Football
League, died Sunday in Castro Valley, Calif. He was 81. He died after a
sudden illness, said his daughter Susan Toler Carr.
The story of Toler’s college team, the 1951 University of San Francisco Dons,
is one of the most extraordinary in sports. Called by Sports Illustrated “the
best team you never heard of,” the Dons sent nine players to the N.F.L., three
of whom — Gino Marchetti, Bob St. Clair and Ollie Matson — were eventually
inducted into the Professional Football
Hall of Fame. Its head coach was Joe Kuharich, who went on to coach at
Notre Dame and for three professional teams; and the athletic publicity
director was Pete Rozelle, who became the N.F.L. commissioner.
Toler, who played on the line on offense and linebacker on defense, was
drafted by Cleveland, but he never made it to the pros because of a severe knee
injury in a college all-star game.
“I personally felt Burl Toler was the best player of any of us,” Marchetti
said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “He was the best tackler, the hardest
hitter, and he had the most speed.”
The team went 9-0, defeating its opponents by an average score of 32-8, but
it was not selected for a postseason game by the Southern-based bowl game
committees, ostensibly because of its weak schedule, but in fact because of its
two black players, Toler and Matson. In the interview, Marchetti said Rozelle and
Kuharich told the team they would be invited to play in a bowl only if the team
agreed to leave the two black players behind.
“We answered ‘No, we’d never do that,’ ” Marchetti said. “And after we said
no and removed ourselves from consideration, nobody ever had a second thought
about it.”
In 2000, the United States Senate
unanimously passed a resolution, submitted by Barbara Boxer, Democrat of
California, acknowledging that the Dons were victimized by racial prejudice and
“that the treatment endured by this team was wrong and that recognition for it
accomplishments is long overdue.”
Burl Abron Toler was born in Memphis on May 9, 1928. His father, Arnold, was
a Pullman porter. His mother, Annie King Toler, operated a small store and ran
a boarding house. Young Burl went to a segregated high school and did not play
football because of a severe burn on his arm; he had an accident disposing of a
vat of cooking grease.
After graduating, he went to San Francisco at the suggestion of an uncle who
lived there, and he enrolled at the two-year City College of San Francisco,
where the football coach spotted him in the gymnasium and asked him to come out
for the team. In his first practice, the story goes, he tackled the star
running back, Ollie Matson, on three consecutive plays. Their 1948 team was
12-0, and both Toler and Matson earned scholarships at the University
of San Francisco.
Toler’s wife, Melvia, died in 1991. In addition to his daughter Susan, who
lives in Altadena, Calif., he is survived by a brother, Arnold Jr., of Memphis;
two other daughters, Valerie, of Hayward, Calif., and Jennifer, of Berkeley;
three sons, Burl Jr., of El Sobrante, Calif., Gregory, of Oakland, and Martel,
of San Francisco; and eight grandchildren.
After his knee injury, Toler taught math and physical education at a San
Francisco junior high school, the Benjamin Franklin Middle
School, where he eventually became the principal. The school was closed in
2004, but reopened in 2006 as the Burl A. Toler Campus, home to two charter schools. Toler was
also a commissioner of the San Francisco
Police Department from 1978 to 1986.
N.F.L. officiating is part-time work, conducted mostly on weekends. Toler
was an N.F.L. official for 25 seasons, beginning in 1965, a year before Emmett
Ashford became the first black umpire in the major leagues and three years
before Jackie White broke the color barrier in the National
Basketball Association. Toler officiated a number of crucial games,
including Super Bowl XIV in 1980, in
which the Pittsburgh
Steelers defeated the Los Angeles Rams, and the 1982 A.F.C. championship
game, in which the Cincinnati Bengals defeated the San Diego Chargers. It
became known as the Freezer Bowl because it was played in the coldest
temperatures of any game in league history. The wind chill in Cincinnati on
Jan. 10, 1982, reached minus 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Toler sustained frostbite
on his fingers.
“He was very, very knowledgeable about the game,” Jim Tunney, who worked on
the same crew with Toler for 11 years, said in a telephone interview Thursday.
“He knew about blocking and tackling. He knew about the emotions the players go
through playing the game, which is very important.”
Tunney said Toler was so self-possessed that whatever racist attitudes he
encountered in the game simply never became an issue.
“He just didn’t allow racism to enter into his doing his job,” Tunney said.
“He never mentioned it, and if it ever did occur, he just rose above it.”
Unlike baseball umpires, whose crews rotate positions from game to game,
football officials specialize. When Toler began his career, there were six
on-field officials: the referee, who lines up behind the offensive backfield;
the umpire, who is positioned in the middle of the field behind the defensive
line; the head linesman and the line judge, who are on opposite sidelines on the
line of scrimmage; the field judge, who stands on the sideline in the defensive
backfield, and the back judge, who is positioned in midfield behind the
defensive backs. A seventh official, the side judge, an across-the-field
complement to the field judge, was added in 1978.
For most of his career, Toler was a head linesman, with a twofold
responsibility: first to watch for line-of-scrimmage infractions like being
offside, and then to move downfield to monitor receivers running short and
midrange pass routes and the defenders covering them. The job requires not just
the instinct to read plays as they develop and foot speed, but also, because he
lines up on the sideline and within easy shouting distance of coaches, an
especially serene demeanor.
“Burl was extremely quick; he could run like the wind,” said Art McNally,
the N.F.L.’s supervisor of officials from 1968 to 1990. “But more than that he
was a master of getting people who were up on the ceiling screaming and
bringing them back down again.”
