Historic day hits Mississippi
STARKVILLE, Miss. – History-making is not always what you expect.
It can be Rosa Parks on a bus, a march to Selma or, as it happened Saturday night, Sylvester Croom running onto a field after emerging from a giant, inflatable Mississippi State helmet.
Surrounded by Bulldog players, Croom burst through a blow-up facemask and, a few steps later, broke down one of sport’s last, and most shameful, barriers.
On a muggy night, in front of a crowd of 52,114 at Scott Field, deep in the heart of Dixie, the 49-year-old Croom became the first African American football coach to lead his team in a Southeastern Conference game.
“It’s a historic day,” SEC Commissioner Mike Slive, who flew in for the occasion, said.
Mississippi State’s 28-7 win victory over Tulane served only as a happy-ending footnote to the larger story.
Jerry Devine, an African American who worked 36 years as a cook for the Mississippi State athletic department, welled with emotion just moments before Croom ran onto the field.
“It’s time, it’s time, it’s time,” the 65-year-old Devine, a lifelong Starkville resident, said. “Everyone should be proud of this. The ones not proud of it, we don’t count them.”
What it took Croom to get to this point: 28 years as an assistant coach in the college and pro ranks and an 80-mile trek from his hometown in Tuscaloosa, Ala.
What it took the SEC: 71 years.
It all hit Croom on the bus to the stadium.
“I thought to myself, ‘Twenty-eight years of work toward this day,’ and how it’s been a dream that has been an impossible dream all that time. Today, it’s a reality. I just relished the moment.”
After his first victory, Croom doffed his capped to both sides of the stands and made his exit.
Croom could not wait for this night to arrive, not to savor it as much to get it over with.
For the nine months since his hiring, he has tried to deflect the focus on him.
Croom knows this watershed moment will be in the lead to his obituary, but all he really wants to do is coach.
“It’s the fun part for me,” he said. “Everything else I do is work.”
Croom is so hip-deep in the mess that is Mississippi State football he doesn’t have time to sit still for a PBS documentary.
He inherited a team that has gone 8-27 the last three years and a program about to be sanctioned by the NCAA for violations incurred under his predecessor, Jackie Sherrill.
Croom is trying to win games in a conference that grinds coaches up like sausages. He is trying to re-tool the offense, re-shape minds, be a father figure to the fatherless.
Croom told a local paper here this week he “hated” the attention his first game was receiving nationally because it was diverting attention from his monumental undertaking.
People want to talk history as Croom tries to tackle a menacing monster called: the present.
“I know the historical significance of the hiring,” he would say Saturday, adding, “but I didn’t get into this to break any kind of barriers.”
The chronicling of his achievement is left to surrogates.