By Chuck Johnson

This article originally appeared in the UND football game program on Sept. 8, 2001.

Fritz Pollard and Gordon Caldis practiced football together, but they were never teammates in a University of North Dakota game.

That was because Caldis, now a lawyer in Grand Forks, was a freshman in 1938, just out of Thief River Falls, Minn., and Pollard, now living in retirement in Potomoc, Md., was a senior out of Chicago, Ill. Freshmen then were not eligible for varsity sports.

"We were just fodder in practice," Caldis recalled.

Caldis, 80, later captain of the Sioux football team, remembers Pollard well.

"He not only was a great football player," Caldis said, "he was as tough as they come. He was a marked man, a target for other teams to aim at, but the more abuse he took, the more determined he became. He could not be intimidated.

"I remember one game in particular, against DePaul at Memorial Stadium, just before DePaul abandoned football. The DePaul players were shouting oaths and swearing - feelings were running high, perhaps because Fritz was from Chicago and so was DePaul and most of their players. One guy even threw a punch. Fritz never flinched. He just played better."

That was in 1938, Pollard's senior season. UND won, 32-12, and DePaul dropped football before the next season.

Pollard, Caldis said, was a triple threat tailback in every sense. "We ran the single wing, and sometimes the Notre Dame box, and Fritz carried the ball on end runs, off tackle and up the middle," Caldis said. "He passed the ball, and he did all the kicking (both punts and from placement). He also returned punts and kickoffs."

Caldis rated Pollard as a fine passer. "He had a strong arm, and he could find and hit his receivers - short and deep."

In the single wing, the passer was not under center, as in the T-formation, but rather in the shotgun, or spread formation.

Caldis was asked if Pollard was a threat as a pass receiver.

"No," he said, "because he threw the passes, and he didn't catch them."

For all his skills on attack, Pollard also played defense, since those were the days before two-platoon football.

Just before retiring at UND, Pollard's coach, C.A. "Jack" West said that if Pollard had gone on to play professional football, he would have made it in the National Football League as a defensive back. Pollard, when told what West had said, smiled and disagreed with his coach, saying, "My knees were all beat up."

Caldis agreed with Pollard. "I don't think Pollard went out for track his senior year," he said. "He was just too battered from football."

In Pollard's time, the National Football League did not permit blacks to play or coach, following the lead of major league baseball. This was ironic, in that Pollard's father, Frederick Douglass Pollard, Sr., once was head coach of a team called the Milwaukee Badgers in the early days of pro football. Fritz, Sr., a halfback at Brown University, in fact, was the first black to play in the Rose Bowl.

He had steered his son to Brown, but young Pollard did not like it at the Providence (R.I.) school and returned to Chicago, where he had been raised by relatives. West, who had recruited young Pollard earlier, found out that he had returned home and persuaded him to transfer to Grand Forks.

Caldis admitted that he did not remember much about Fritz on defense. The freshman team watched home games from the sidelines of Memorial Stadium. "We even had a bench," he said. "We didn't have a very large squad in those days."

Pollard drew Caldis' attention on offense, perhaps typical for a youngster watching football.

"Fritz ran pretty much straight up," he said, "but he could put his head down and plow straight ahead. He was a tricky runner with lots of moves. He would veer and spin, and if he got outside you, he was gone. He had such great speed, but he also used a change of pace to good effect."

Pollard earned his first fame at UND on the international level when he placed third in the high hurdles, winning the bronze medal in the 1936 Summer Olympics at Berlin, Germany. That fall, 65 years ago, Pollard began his varsity career at UND in football.

He also was on the boxing team, then a popular college sport at which UND excelled.

Obviously, Fritz Pollard could take a punch as well as deliver one.