Never Before, Never Again: The Autobiography of Eddie Robinson

by Eddie Robinson, Richard Lapchick

Franklin Roosevelt was America's President when Eddie Robinson coached his first game. Fifty-seven years later, Robison left Grambling as the winningest coach in the history of college football. Initially a coach for a segregated society, Eddie Robinson has helped football transcend race in the America he loves and treasures. Yet institutionalized racial barriers kept Robinson a secret from white America for more than 25 years until Howard Cosell did an ABC special on Grambling in the late 1960s. Outside of the world of sport, white America still barely knows him. In the African-American community, he is very likely the best-known coach in America. He is surely the most beloved.

Never Before, Never Again chronicles Coach Robinson's life and his time at Grambling in vivid detail. He overcame all those things that might have predicted that it was not possible for the son of a sharecropper and a domestic worker to become a success. He got a master's degree, became the president of the American Football Coaches Association, and helping thousands of young boys become outstanding men. More than wins, they may be his greatest legacy.

But as much as Coach Robinson's memoir is about sports, it's a social history history as well. The book is a lens through which readers can see the challeges and turmoil of the civil rights movements from the perspective of a sports figure who worked the playing fields of a black campus while caring deeply about the stakes and outcome of the struggle . This book places the hard-news events of the day in the time frame of the trails of Robinson's Grambling teams of that era. Also included are the thoughts of other coaches (both college and NFL) on Coach Robinson, as well as those of national leaders like Reverend Jesse Jackson, M.J. "Mike" Foster, the governor of Lousiana, and President Clinton.

Never Before, Never Again stands as lasting testimony to the work of a true American hero.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published September 24, 1999

Reviews

[Kenneth Flusche · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read by mistake wanted Eddie R the baseball book, very good football and Black University story held my attention from page one

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the better head football coaches (regardless of level) who ever lived, Eddie Robinson, wrote this autobiography to let you the reader know how he lived his life on and off the field up until 1999, which was the year this book was published.

Robinson who passed away in 2007, was a legendary head football coach at Grambling State University (GSU) from 1941 to 2007.

In Never Before, Never Again he didn't go into deep, deep detail on those 68 teams he coached at Grambling. But he did give you a good idea on how he coached those teams, and how he was more interested in sending good Black men into society than sending them into professional football after they left GSU (NFL, Canadian Football League, and other pro leagues that operated during the years he coached at Grambling).

If you are looking for a book where Robinson went into deep detail on the players and teams he coached at Grambling, you're not really going to get that in this book. But what you are going to get is a page turning analysis of a man who was put on this earth to teach and coach college football.