With the fiftieth Super Bowl being played this Sunday, there have been plenty of retrospectives looking back at Super Bowl I, and one of those has a strong CFL connection. Bill Pennington of The New York Times wrote a fascinating piece this week on Pro Football Hall of Fame safety Willie Wood, who made a crucial interception to propel the Green Bay Packers to their 35-10 win in the initial Super Bowl, and then went on to be the first black head coach in pro football's modern era and the first black head coach in the CFL. The sad part, though, and part of the larger issues with watching football today, is that the 79-year-old Wood now resides in an assisted-living facility in Washington, D.C., has faced plenty of physical challenges, and now has so much memory loss that he doesn't remember playing in the NFL at all:



Wood remembers nothing of the play.



He does not even recollect playing in the first Super Bowl, on Jan. 15, 1967, or ever being on an N.F.L. roster.



Wood, who spends most of his time in a wheelchair, has been at an assisted living center in his hometown, Washington, for the last nine years, first for physical woes — debilitating neck, hip and knee operations — and later because dementia robbed him of many cognitive functions.



Nonetheless, Wood, 79, likes to wear a green Packers cap most days now as he sits in his sunny room listening to jazz and 1950s doo-wop. Wordlessly and impassively, he will point to the logo on the cap as if he knows it has some shadowy meaning in his life. But specifics elude him.



When asked about various photographs on the walls next to him — pictures of his wedding or the day in 1989 when he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame — Wood stares vacantly.



“Do you remember going into the Hall of Fame, Willie?” Dee Dee Daniels, an assistant living coordinator at the center where Wood lives, asked one morning last month.



Wood cast his eyes downward and shook his head side to side: no.



“You were the best of the best,” Daniels said.



Wood, who sometimes goes days without speaking, suddenly looked up, his eyes glistening as he raised an eyebrow as if to say, “I was?”

































Wood had a remarkable career, becoming the first black quarterback at USC and the first black quarterback in the history of the Pacific Coast Conference (now the Pac-12) in 1957, while also playing safety and kicker. He went unselected in the 1960 NFL draft, but wrote to Packers' coach Vince Lombardi, received a tryout, and made the team, but was switched to safety full-time. He wound up being an incredible safety in the NFL, earning all-NFL honours nine times in his 12-year career and making the Pro Bowl eight times. After his playing career wrapped up, he went into coaching, starting as an assistant with the San Diego Chargers and becoming the first black head coach in pro football's modern history with the World Football League's Philadelphia Bell in 1975. Unfortunately for him, the league folded halfway through that season, and he wound up out of football for a while.

The CFL was Wood's next landing spot in 1979, first as an assistant coach under former Packers' teammate Forrest Gregg (who spoke to Robert Klemko of The MMQB this week about his own Super Bowl experiences as a player and coach) and then as the head coach in 1980 once Gregg left for the NFL's Cincinnati Bengals (which he would take to the Super Bowl game in his second season, 1981). That made Wood the CFL's first black head coach. He didn't walk into an easy situation, though; the Argonauts struggled through most of the 1970s, went 4-12 in 1978 under Leo Cahill and Bud Riley and 5-11 in 1979 under Gregg, and were an easy punchline inside and outside Canada. The team made some improvements under Wood, going 6-10 in 1980, but the hire of new president Ralph Sazio from their rivals in Hamilton in August 1981 combined with the team's 0-10 start to lead to Wood's firing.

As Paul Woods relates in Bouncing Back, the 10th loss, against the Ottawa Rough Riders on Sept. 13, was particularly brutal, with Wood forced to start Sazio's new quarterback Dan Manucci instead of the much-better Condredge Holloway. The Argos lost 23-6 and Wood was fired the next day. Wood's son, Willie Jr., told Woods that the firing was hard for his father to take.

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