Cookie Gilchrist

[foreverfree]

Being 43 years old, I don't remember, except as hearsay, Chester "Cookie" Gilchrist, the Bills, Dolphins and Broncos running back in the American Football League - and like Jim Brown, who played for the NFL's Cleveland Browns in the same era, an early example of the uppity black star athlete.

Gilchrist's arrogance shines through in a glance at his website, http://cookiegilchrist.com/. I couldn't stand to read it. On it he says he was a football "slave".

Anyone remember Cookie?

John

 

[sport historian]

Oh yes, I remember Cookie Gilchrist. He was a well-known player in the 1960s. At the time, his pretensions were considered somewhat comical. I recall a "Sport Special" article in Sport Magazine in 1964. In those days an athlete being profiled this way in Sport Magazine was a big plus.


It's been many years since I read it, but Cookie (and the author) allowed that while Gilchrist didn't have Jim Brown's breakaway speed, he was probably as good as Packer FB Jim Taylor. Taylor, though forgotten now, was very famous in the 60s.


A few months later, I was looking at Sport's Letters To The Editor, a reader wrote in about the Gilchrist article. The letter said something like, "In a Thanksgiving Game on TV, I saw a 185 pound DB drive Gilchrist back 5 yards near the goal line. That wouldn't have happened to Brown or Taylor." I remember Cookie Gilchrist for this Sport Letter To The Editor.

 

[foreverfree]

A good place to read about Gilchrist's behavior is Going Long, Jeff Miller's oral history of the AFL. In it are tales of Gilchrist hustling binoculars at Toronto's Woodbine racetrack (he played 6 years in the CFL before coming to Buffalo), hustling light globes, and leading the Black players in threatening a boycott of the 1965 AFL All-Star game in New Orleans, which the AFL was scouting out for possible expansion. The Black All-Stars had been promised equal treatment in facilities in N.O. but were denied it.The game was hastily relocated to Houston.

John