Grambling's South Carolina State connection: Willie Jeffries

Grambling’s connection with South Carolina State is the affable legend Willie Jeffries, who briefly served as athletics director for both.

Jeffries and the SCSU football team also faced the Tigers with some regularity over the years, including consecutive seasons between 1983-90. Jeffries’ most significant win over the late Grambling coach Eddie Robinson, 31-27, was in the 1994 Heritage Bowl — the last time these two teams met before Sunday’s MEAC-SWAC Challenge in Orlando, Fla.

“You all remember Coach Rob carrying that briefcase,” Jeffries once said, during a 2005 news conference on campus in Grambling. “All the young coaches thought if they carried one, they’d win as many games as he did. But –”

Here, Jeffries paused for effect.

“They didn’t do that.”

Jeffries, then 67-years old, had everyone in stitches from the moment he took over as Grambling’s AD in ’04 after coaching at SCSU between 1973-78 and 1989-2001, and serving as a director of athletic fund-raising there for another three seasons. He was the Bulldogs’ AD between 1990-92, as well.

But Jeffries was as sharp as he was funny, a person who used humor to open doors of opportunity.

“He’s the best man I know — a straight-shooter, a no-nonsense guy,” said South Carolina State’s Oliver “Buddy” Pough, who succeeded Jeffries. “He’s a strong enough personality that people enjoy being around him. People migrate to him.”

Though Jeffries only served at GSU for less than a year in 2005, he brought a lot of good ideas — some of which came to pass (games against FCS opponent Northwestern State, and against nearby FBS opponent ULM), some of which haven’t yet (a new scoreboard).

Since his return to Orangeburg, Pough told me, Jeffries has shown the same sense of duty, and of humor, while reconnecting immediately with the local community.

“He’s retired, but he’s still involved in a lot of different kind of adventures,” said Pough, who was a tackle on Jeffries’ first SCSU team. “Coach might have been one of the best handlers of men I ever been around. He just had a special style about him. He was the first football coach I had who believed the game ought to be fun.”

A native of Union, S.C., Jeffries is best known nationally as a racial pioneer, becoming the first black coach on the NCAA Division I level when he took over at Wichita State in 1979. Jeffries’ career accomplishments would eventually span four decades.

Nineteen seasons were spent leading South Carolina State, his alma mater, where Jeffries compiled a 50-13-4 record from 1973-78 then, after returning in 1989, led SCSU to a 78-64 mark over 13 seasons. Jeffries also coached for five years at Howard, where he won a sixth MEAC title and the Bisons’ first ever.

In all, Jeffries overall coaching record was 179-132-6. He sent a number of players into the NFL, including Donnie Shell, Orlando “Zeus” Brown, Jumpy Geathers, Harry Carson, Robert Porcher, Chartric Darby, Dexter Clinkscale and Anthony Cook.

He gained early collegiate coaching experience as an assistant at North Carolina A&T under Hornsby Howell in 1968. Jeffries then joined Johnny Majors’ staff at Pittsburgh in 1972, where he served as an assistant for one year before coming back to South Carolina State in ’73.

“When he came in here as a sharp young ex-assistant, he had a cutting-edge approach to things,” Pough said. “He’s been that way his whole life. He’ll always try to keep up with the common trends in any endeavor. He’ll be as energetic as anybody you’ll find today.”

His shortest stay, by far, was in Grambling — around 10 months away from his beloved South Carolina after replacing Al Dennis, who was fired on the first day of new Grambling president Horace Judson’s tenure in July 2004.

In the end, I guess this abbreviated visit wasn’t so surprising. The Orangeburg area was home to Jeffries, and he’s always been fiercely loyal to it.

Over years, and then decades, he followed in the deeply embedded footsteps of Eddie Robinson, winning games and lifelong friends from both the local white and black communities. Similarly congenial, Jeffries would also forge a emotional bond with one program — and one place.

“To have known him, to have had a chance to play against him, it’s just amazing,” Jeffries said of Robinson. “Everybody wanted to beat him; that would’ve been a star in your crown. Of course, you’re looking at one of Coach Rob’s victims.”

Jeffries eventually accomplished something, however, that even Robinson didn’t. He left for a time to travel in FBS circles, at Pittsburgh and then at Wichita State. Along the way, he became legendary in his own right — for that likeable banter, a hard-nosed style of coaching and a playbook so conservative that Jeffries once said he “didn’t even pass on the interstate.”

But he always came back. Jeffries graduated at SCSU in 1960, then returned in 1973 to coach. He left in 1979 for FBS, only to reunite with the Bulldog faithful in 1989.

That said, there was never any question about Jeffries’ open-hearted enthusiasm at Grambling, about his upbeat attitude, about his easy way with a turn of phrase.

So short a stay certainly robbed us of hundreds, maybe thousands, of one-liners and throwback talltales.

I still miss that.