For ASU's Herm Edwards, sports bubble helped to overcome racism growing up

Jeff Metcalfe | The Republic | azcentral.com

This is the first of a four-part series profiling the life of new Arizona State football coach Herm Edwards.

The bubble, Herm Edwards calls it.

What Edwards really means is his life. He's almost always been in the sports bubble, at least since junior high and really before that when he was playing flag football, tackle in the street and basketball growing up in Seaside, Calif.

“When you become an athlete, you live in this bubble," Edwards says. "You're in the world, but you're not in the world.” It's an idealist world that for Edwards is deserving of broad-scale emulation.

“There's one common denominator, and it's respect. It doesn't matter where you grow up, what color you are, what religion you are. It's just a bunch of guys that come together for a common cause. Let's go win this game. It's called team.”

To understand Edwards, Arizona State's first-year football coach, requires penetrating his bubble to discover what is compelling enough to bring the 64-year-old out of a high-profile NFL analyst position and back to the highly scrutinized coaching life.

It begins with coming from a racially mixed family that struggled at times for acceptance in the 1950s and '60s.

Herm Edwards on parents, growing up during Civil Rights movement ASU football head coach Herm Edwards talks about his parents and what it was like growing up during the Civil Rights movement.

Not ready yet

When Edwards reinforces his big-picture message to ASU players via social media, he hears his father, Herman Edwards Sr., and is transported back to Highland Street in Seaside and his 1960s childhood.

ASU Players,



If you try to live your life guided by wisdom you won’t stumble as much when you run. #ForksUP — Herm Edwards (@HermEdwards) May 21, 2018

Let your actions and words match up.

Every job is a self-portrait of your work.

Conduct yourself all the time in accordance to being a well-mannered gentleman.

The tweets are Edwards channeling his late father, whose dying words he still lives by (more on that later in this series), and honoring his 93-year-old mother, Martha, now unable to remember much of her long and rich life due to Alzheimer’s disease.

“My passion is from my mom,” Edwards says. “She was passionate about leaving Germany and coming to America and making a life for her and her family. My father – discipline, a chain of command, it works this way.”

Edwards Sr., who was black, served in World War II and Korea during a lengthy Army career. He met Martha Gerstner, who is white, in the late 1940s on the German military base where she worked in the post exchange. There was resistance to their interracial relationship overseas and more so when they married in 1953 and returned to the United States.

Herm was born in 1954, when his father was stationed in Fort Monmouth, N.J. The family was back in Germany when his sister, Irvina, was born in 1958. Then, because interracial marriage was not legal in the South where Herman Sr. grew up, the next stop was at Fort Ord, Calif., in 1959. The family outlasted and eventually won over those who tried to block them from moving onto Highland Street in the early 1960s.

Edwards recalls “no bitterness from my mom or my dad. They just said they’re just not ready for this yet. That’s OK. We just marched on.”

ASU Players,



Your success will not be measured by your fame, wealth or power, but rather how far you have come using your talents as well as helping others along the way. #ForksUP — Herm Edwards (@HermEdwards) May 5, 2018

Never underestimate the power of dreams and the human spirit.

The way a person lives and treats others is a way to judge their character.

Everything in life costs something … is the price worth the prize?

Edwards walked a half mile from his house to junior high school and proximity-wise should have attended Seaside High School. Instead, he was among the first students bussed some 15 miles away to Monterey High School to meet desegregation laws.

That’s where Edwards first played organized tackle football and met Dan Albert, one of the only names an average fan would not recognize on a printed list of 14 coaching influences that Edwards always keeps handy.

Albert was head football coach at Monterey High for 23 years, preceding his 20 years as the city’s mayor. Next to his father, no one has had a longer and perhaps greater influence on Edwards than Albert.

“To be quite honest, and anybody will tell you, growing up I was going to be a pro athlete,” Edwards says. “I didn’t have any option. That was my way out. I was a young guy and you’re trying to figure out who you are. The things I learned from him (Albert) applied at every level. It was always about the team with him. You start listening to all these other coaches and you go, Man, I learned that when I was in the 10th grade from that man.”

Albert is a lively 88-year-old who still refers to Edwards as Herman, same as he did when they first met 40 years ago. They meet for lunch periodically to hash over the old and new days with Edwards doing a lot of talking just like at 14, except when his mother was around Albert recalls.

“Herman was a tremendous athlete, not just a football player,” Albert says. “He planned on being a wide receiver, but we didn’t throw that much. He could see that and right away switched his ambition to be a defensive back because he could catch the ball more on defense. If they ever threw into his zone, the offense was already grabbing their helmets because there’s a good chance the ball was going to get intercepted.”

Edwards claims he never left the field during his three high school seasons (junior high went through ninth grade) and even was a kicker on teams that almost always attempted a two-point conversion. The Toreadores won all but two games from 1969-71 (all championship teams), but there wasn’t an all-out recruiting war over the best player, Edwards.

He knew when he was a sophomore where he was headed next.

Tell me why

ASU’s Frank Kush made a recruiting pass at Edwards to play for his new defensive backs coach, Al Luginbill, in 1972. (Instead, 46 years later, Luginbill is now Edwards' director of player personnel at ASU).

Others sought Edwards as a basketball player.

Edwards, though, only had eyes for the University of California even if it meant a disagreement with his father.

“That school (Cal) was about the world I’m about to live in,” Edwards says. “I’ve got to go to the campus and find my way. My father was shocked. He wanted me to go to Stanford so bad.”

The master sergeant peered across the dinner table during that strained conversation in the Vietnam War protest era and said, “Son, don’t you understand? They burn the American flag up there. They smoke the funny cigarettes up there in plain view.”

Herman Sr. relented only after repeating an admonition that Herm uses to this day: “He said you bear my last name. You carry it up there and act like an Edwards, and you’ll be fine. And that was it. I went.”

As it turned out, Father probably knew best.

Edwards played in 1972 at Cal with quarterback Vince Ferragamo as his roommate. First-year Bears head coach Mike White was fine – he’s also on Edwards’ list of coaching influences – but Edwards did not connect with the secondary coach.

Consider Edwards’ March tweet before hearing the story of why he left Cal’s 1973 preseason camp in Santa Barbara.

Great players keep improving: Always searching for ways to keep learning and improving what they do by asking (why).

Back to 1973: “I asked him why we were doing something, and he didn’t have an answer. The answer was, are you questioning authority? No, Coach, I just want to know why we’re doing this because I was seeking knowledge. Black player, big Afro, asking a white football coach why are we doing this? That probably wasn’t the right question, but for me it was because my father always told me you can always ask why.”

If the answer isn’t forthcoming, you can catch a bus back to Monterey and a cab to Seaside then try explaining the decision to give up a scholarship to your parents, neither of whom attended college.

Cal’s loss was a monster gain for Monterey Peninsula College coach Luke Phillips. Edwards intercepted 10 passes in 1973 and was a junior college All-American.

Before Edwards could make another move, some of Cal’s stars – Steve Bartkowski, Chuck Muncie, Wesley Walker, Ferragamo – came to Monterey and convinced him to return to Berkeley, where the objectionable secondary coach had been moved to linebackers.

Edwards had a team-high six interceptions for the 7-3-1 Bears in 1974 only for that secondary coach to leave for the NFL. The former assistant returned, and Edwards left again at the start of spring practice in 1975.

“I get in the car, never say goodbye and drive south to San Diego State,” Edwards says. “That’s where all the double transfers went. At that moment, I said to myself when I stop playing this game, I’m going to be a coach. And I’m always going to tell the player why.”

Accepting consequences

Cal, even without Edwards, had enough talent to tie for the Pac-8 title in 1975 only to lose out via tiebreaker on a Rose Bowl berth and not make any of the then 11 bowl games.

Edwards, initially without a scholarship and required to sit out a transfer season at San Diego State, watched his buddies go 6-1 in conference while he worked a night shift in a shipyard.

“You can leave,” Edwards Sr. told his son, “but you’ve got to deal with the consequences of this.”

Herm’s response: “I’ll be alright, Dad. I’ll get another scholarship. I ain’t worried about that.”

Soon enough, Edwards was back on scholarship for 1976 when San Diego State, playing an independent schedule before joining the Western Athletic Conference, went 10-1. Edwards, not surprisingly, was selected as the team’s most inspirational player and chosen to play in the Japan Bowl all-star game.

There would be more consequences for Edwards because of his nomadic college career, but the sports bubble provided an impenetrable shield. A wiser man at 22, he was no less confident about his future than starting high school eight years earlier when he imagined himself as the next Bob Hayes even given his less than bullet-like speed.

“We used to watch football on TV, and Bob Hayes was his idol,” his sister, Irvina Perez, says. “He used to say one day I’m going to make it. Sure enough, his dream came true.”

How is a story for another day.

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