Willie Lanier in Middle of Major Changes To Football Landscape

Black History Month has been celebrated in some form since 1924. For sports fans, it is a chance to reacquaint themselves with those who broke down barriers in all areas of competition and all segments of society. Many are now household names and American icons: Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Wilma Rudolph, Muhammad Ali, up to Tiger Woods, Tony Dungy and Venus and Serena Williams today.

Throughout February, FanHouse will shed light on the other figures in the history of sports whose breakthroughs were as significant as those mentioned above, but who aren't as instantly recognizable as pioneers. During Black History Month 2010, FanHouse aims to give them their due.

For football fans under 50, used to seeing blacks at every position on the field, here's a fact that suggests what sports used to be like:

Willie Lanier, whose career with the Kansas City Chiefs began in 1967, was the first African-American middle linebacker in pro football. Until then, it was commonly accepted that blacks lacked "the necessities,'' a word once used about them in baseball, to play in the middle of the field. It obviously applied to quarterback, but also to guards, centers and the MLB position that serves as quarterback of the defense.

Lanier -- who grew up in segregated Richmond, but went to college in Baltimore because he felt that the north was more tolerant racially in those years -- changed that.
Following four years starring at Morgan State, he was drafted by the Chiefs in the second round in 1967, after they took another linebacker, Jim Lynch of Notre Dame. Lynch was supposed to play in the middle for the Chiefs, but missed the first two weeks of training camp to play with the college all-stars, who in those years competed against the NFL champion in a preseason charity game in Chicago.

By the time Lynch returned, he was an outside linebacker. Lanier had been that impressive in camp and became the starting middle linebacker by the fourth game of his rookie year. He missed four games late that season, then missed only one more in the final 10 seasons of his career and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1986.

Lanier, 6-foot-1 and 245 pounds, was known as "Contact,'' a ferocious hitter who even in those years, when head injuries were considered part of the game, needed to have extra padding on the outside of his helmet to keep himself healthy.

He also was uncommonly mobile.

In a career that lasted 11 seasons, from 1967-77, he had at least two interceptions in all but his first and his last years. He finished with 27 total picks, along with 18 fumble recoveries -- a three-down middle linebacker in an era where defenses revolved around that position. He made the final two AFL all-star games in 1968 and 1969, then six straight Pro Bowls after the merger of the AFL and NFL in 1970.

And he was the consummate leader.

In a 1969 playoff game against the New York Jets, then the defending Super Bowl champions, the Chiefs were leading 6-3 in the fourth quarter and New York had a first-and-goal at the Chiefs 1. "They're not going to score! They're not going to score!'' Lanier yelled at his teammates. Not exactly true, but the Jets got only a field goal after Lanier and the Chiefs stuffed three straight plays.

Kansas City then scored a touchdown on its next possession, went to the Super Bowl and beat Minnesota, 23-7, in the game in which NFL Films wired coach Hank Stram, who is famously overheard urging his team to "matriculate the ball down the field.'' It was that victory, as much as the Jets' win over the Colts the previous season, that established the American Football League on equal footing with the NFL.

After his retirement, Lanier became a banker, rising to senior vice president for capital markets at Wheat First Union bank in Richmond. He also returned to Kansas City frequently, a regular attendee at Chiefs games.

"Playing in the Super Bowl and being inducted into the Hall of Fame were caps on my athletic career," Lanier said in an interview with the Richmond Times-Dispatch a year ago. "But I never saw them as caps on my life. I think we go through multiple life cycles. My goal is to keep surprising myself. That doesn't give me any one set thing as my goal. I aspire to continually surprise myself."