It’s Eddie Robinson, Fred Hobdy, Wilbert Ellis, Collie J. Nicholson, and president and baseball coach Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones, the cornerstone personalities of an incomparable legacy, developed over many years in relative obscurity, in the red clay hills and piney woods of north Louisiana.
There’s Buck Buchanan, Willie Davis, Willie Brown, and Charlie Joiner, all in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
It’s Doug Williams, Sammy White, Everson “Cubby” Walls, Ernie Ladd and James “Shack” Harris, all with their distinctive places in NFL history.
From the hardwood, along with Hobdy, it’s his greatest player, Willis Reed, the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame member. They combined to win a national championship, an NAIA title in 1961. Another Hobdy superstar: Bob Hopkins, who scored 3,759 points as Tiger from 1952-56, a total exceeding the NCAA Division I standard of 3,667 from Pistol Pete Maravich at LSU more than a decade later.
In the 1970s came future pro players Aaron James, Larry Wright and Kenny Simpson.
Just to drop a few names.
Grambling is no newcomer to the national stage. Robinson and Nicholson took the Grambling football show on the road to major cities in the 1960s and 1970s, including games in Yankee Stadium, and the combination of big crowds in big markets and prime-time players from Grambling in the NFL, AFL and NBA, coupled with the charm and brilliance of “Coach Rob,” made an impression on the American sports consciousness.
Add in the World Famed Band Tiger Marching Band, the featured halftime attraction at the first Super Bowl, as another factor as Grambling emerged among the iconic brands of college sports years before the creation of ESPN, and the proliferation of college sports on television.
It’s Grambling State University. The Mighty G. GramFam. A college that for the first six decades of is existence served students who could not attend most higher educational institutions close to them.
It’s where “Everybody is Somebody.”
And as of about 8 p.m. Central Daylight Time Wednesday night, Grambling became quite something once more.
For all of the glow of big-time college sports, the electricity of March Madness is incomparable, in no small part because of the small schools involved, and the opportunity they get to square off against the super powers on a neutral court, five-on-five, for 40 minutes.
Wednesday night was not that kind of matchup. Friday evening will be, when the 16th seeded Grambling Tigers tip off against No. 1 Purdue in the “first round” of this year’s NCAA Tournament.
That’s because Wednesday night in college basketball’s paradise, Dayton, Ohio, in UD Arena, at the NCAA’s First Four “opening round” event, Grambling did two things it had never achieved before.
- Tipped off in the NCAA Division I Championship, for the first time in 46 years of eligibility. The Tigers had never before won the right to represent their league, the Southwestern Athletic Conference, in the Big Dance. They took care of that the previous week, and took the court Wednesday against NCAA Tournament veteran Montana State (six appearances, including a current streak of three straight).
- They won an NCAA Tournament game. In overtime, overcoming a 14-point second-half deficit, making a heroic charge in the closing minutes and taking total control in the final two minutes of overtime of an 88-81 triumph.
It was nearly exactly a year ago to the day when Grambling’s greatest basketball star passed away. Willis Reed, whose Number 50 Tigers jersey was finally raised in the rafters of the Fred G. Hobdy Assembly Center just a year before, died last March 21.
“This is something I will remember and cherish the rest of my life,” he said that January night in 2022, proudly wearing a Grambling letter jacket.
His New York Knicks No. 19 jersey had been retired almost a half-century earlier, in 1976, commemorating a career that earned him a spot in the NBA’s 50 Greatest Players in its first five decades. But his heart was always centered back along I-20.
“People would ask me, ‘Where would you like to go to a game at?’ Let’s go to Grambling to see them play football, let’s go see them play basketball. I feel like I’m at home here,” said Reed that night.
His smile said even more. The only thing about Wednesday night’s win that wasn’t just right, was that Reed wasn’t around to see it.
Contact Doug at sbjdoug@gmail.com