How the NFL forgot its greatest black pioneer

Fritz Pollard Jr suffered from Alzheimer's during the final years of his life, but just before he died there was a moment of clarity.

With his last words, spoken to his family in 2003, he said: "Don't forget your quest."

That quest had also been his own - to get his father into the US Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Some 27 years before Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier in baseball, Fritz Pollard was the best player for the first NFL champions in 1920.

In a decade during which hundreds of African-Americans were still being lynched, he was playing a 'white man's game' when the NFL was in its brutal infancy.

In 1921, Pollard became the league's first black coach and in 1923 its first black quarterback. Yet after he retired, the doors he forced open were slammed shut by a 'gentleman's agreement' that saw African-Americans banned from 1934 until 1946.

By the time the NFL's second black head coach was appointed in 1989, Pollard, who died in 1986, had long been written out of the history books.