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Confessions of a hometown Super Bowl veteran. BY BRIAN LIBBY 243-2122 EXT. 355 |
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At first glance, Claxton Welch may not look like a Super Bowl veteran. Clad in a camel's-hair jacket and spectacles, this polite middle-aged businessman with salt-and-pepper hair doesn't cut the towering figure one might expect from a former NFL running back. It's at this point you notice his Super Bowl ring and discover that he was once a bruising running back for the Dallas Cowboys. Although Welch wasn't a household name (he was a reserve running back and special-teams player), he belonged to a group of players who, at least for a time, could call themselves the best in the world. From their sexy cheerleaders to their trademark speed and swagger, the Dallas Cowboys of the 1970s--also known as "America's Team"--enjoyed a mystique that made them the most talked about team in the nation. As Welch recalls, some teammates were bombarded with letters and pictures from women, while others got free cars. When you win Super Bowls and look great doing it, the world is yours. For the past several years Welch has led a quieter existence as a successful local insurance broker and volunteer with youth programs like the Urban League of Portland's Saturday School. "I didn't wear my ring my first three or four years out of ball," says Welch. "I didn't want anybody to know I played." Welch is weary of the stereotypes we often make about athletes. "Sometimes people think all we can do is run and jump," he says. Not so. After being recruited by the University of Oregon to play football in 1965, Welch quickly became aware of the growing social revolution on campus and beyond. "It was great," he recalls. "Everyone was very open-minded about life." Welch dove into sociology, eager to understand the burgeoning rifts between blacks and whites, men and women, hawks and doves (who were divided over Vietnam). His studies made him acutely aware of how stereotypes can erode the respect we have for one another. Meanwhile, Welch began to tear up Hayward field playing for the Ducks under legendary coach Len Casanova, whom Welch remembers with great fondness. "He was interested in me as a person, not just as a football player." That was not the case in Dallas. A ninth-round selection by the Cowboys in 1969, Welch was hesitant to return to the South (he was born in Tuskegee, Ala.). "I didn't want to go there because it was so conservative," he says. "People could be so overtly racist, but when they found out you were a Cowboy they rolled out the red carpet." Take the time he went into a Dallas auto dealership for one of those Cowboy perks, a free car. As he held court with the sales staff, fielding enthusiastic questions about the team, Welch noticed two African-American customers waiting to close a deal on a car with cash in hand. They were being completely ignored. "It was like a slap in the face," he recalls. "I just wanted to get out of there." Welch's on-the-field memories carry more fondness. When he was 24 and only in his second year (1970-71), Dallas reached Super Bowl V. Was he nervous before the game? "No, we were very calm," he insists. "We were totally focused on what we had to do." Dallas lost 16-13 to Baltimore on Jim O'Brien's last-second field goal; Welch still describes it as "the worst feeling in the world." But the next year the Cowboys destroyed Miami 24-3 in Super Bowl VI to become world champions. "The older I get," says Welch, "the more I appreciate how great it was to win a Super Bowl." Despite the ring and the glory, it's the teammates he remembers most. There were Hall of Famers like quarterback Roger Staubach, lineman Bob Lilly and cornerback Mel Renfro, a fellow Duck who also now lives in Portland. Welch also remembers teammate Dan Reeves, who has just become the third coach in NFL history to take two different teams (Denver and now Atlanta) to the Super Bowl. Though Reeves' Falcons were the underdog to Minnesota in the NFC championship game, Welch was confident in his friend's coaching. "I knew if they could stay close, Danny could win it," he says. When Reeves left the Cowboys to coach, Welch was impressed. "I said to myself, 'I'm gonna be just like my friend Danny. When my career's up, I'm going to go into coaching,'" he recalls. But with only two black assistants in the entire NFL at the time of his retirement and no black head coaches to come for a decade, Welch soon drifted away from the game, earning a master's degree in English from Seattle University and moving on to the business world. "I do think change is coming," he says of racial barriers in the NFL, "but so far it hasn't been enough." Welch's memories of legendary Cowboy coach Tom Landry are mixed. Although he uses words like "football genius" and "nice man," Welch sees Landry as a symbol of the way the last generation was allowed to treat players. "When I look back on it, we were basically enslaved," says Welch. "If you said the wrong thing, wore the wrong clothes or did the wrong thing, you were gone." Today professional athletes won't stand for that kind of treatment, which Welch sees as positive even as he condemns the violence of the NBA's Latrell Sprewell and of NFL linebacker Kevin Greene (both of whom struck their coaches). Was race a factor in the inequality of their punishments? (Sprewell is black; Greene is white.) "Race is a factor in everything," Welch says with a slight grin. But none of this will keep Claxton Welch down. Years after leaving the game, he is still shaped by the sport's vision of the world as a series of yard lines to burst your way past. "There will always be barriers, there will always be obstacles," says Welch. "But that's what great people are made by."
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