Super Bowl QB's race not the issue it used to be
NEW YORK - Nine years ago in Jacksonville, an African-American quarterback started for a Super Bowl team, marking only the third time that had happened in 39 Super Bowls. It was a big deal.
Doug Williams - still the only African-American QB to win the NFL championship - talked then about how he was pulling for the Eagles' Donovan McNabb, at a Super Bowl week meeting of The Field Generals, a group Williams founded to preserve the legacy of early black quarterbacks. That week, McNabb recalled being 11 years old and watching Williams win with the Redskins, McNabb realizing then that he, too, could quarterback a Super Bowl team, he said.
This Sunday, Russell Wilson, the great-great grandson of a slave, will quarterback the Seahawks in Super Bowl XLVIII, and nobody much cares, it seems, or notices.
"It will be known, if he wins," McNabb predicted yesterday from his NBC Sports seat along radio row in the Super Bowl media center. McNabb said he spoke with Wilson about that very fact a few days ago, but McNabb agreed the matter is not as relevant to society as a whole as it was in 2005, or in 2000 when the late Steve McNair quarterbacked the Tennessee Titans to the brink of Super Bowl XXXIV victory, and certainly not as relevant as in 1988, when Williams made history.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/eagles/20140131_Super_Bowl_QB_s_race_not_the_issue_it_used_to_be.html#kGMzG9MPcw5QlS2E.99
(full disclosure: Russell Wilson is a family friend, and no I did not pester his family for tickets...But if the SB this year was in MIA-NO-PHX-SD as the gods intended, I would have rang the phone off the hook nonstop)