• Eddie G. Robinson
• Fred C. Hobdy
• Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones
• Collie J. Nicholson
  

Collie J. Nicholson, 85, Who Promoted Grambling’s Teams, Is Dead

Collie J. Nicholson, for 30 years the imaginative sports information director whose marketing brought national and international fame to Grambling State University in Louisiana, died Wednesday at his home in Shreveport, La. He was 85.

The cause was heart failure, said Jane Davis, a family friend and spokeswoman.

When Nicholson was a student, Grambling was an obscure, historically black university. His education was interrupted by World War II, when he served for three years in the South Pacific as the Marine Corps’ first black war reporter.

He returned to Grambling and graduated in 1948. Ralph Jones, the president of Grambling, induced him to become the university’s first sports information director. His starting salary was $5 or $10 a week, Ms. Davis said.

The university was paying Eddie Robinson, its new football, basketball and baseball coach, $63.75 a month. Robinson went on to win 408 football games, which was an N.C.A.A. record, and send more than 200 players to the National Football League.

Nicholson wanted his football teams to travel around the nation, accompanied by the university’s high-stepping marching band. In 1968, he found sponsors for a game against Morgan State at Yankee Stadium and sold 64,000 seats. In 1974, he moved the annual game between Grambling and Southern University, previously played on their campuses, to New Orleans, named it the Bayou Classic and sold it out year after year. He promoted sellout games at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, the Houston Astrodome and the Silverdome outside Detroit.

He also came up with the idea of Grambling playing games in Japan in 1976 and 1977.

The memories last for Doug Williams, a 1978 graduate of Grambling, who became the first African-American quarterback chosen in the first round of the N.F.L. draft. Williams, a native of Zachary, La., told The Associated Press:

“Here I was, a kid from little old Zachary, playing in Japan, Hawaii and Washington, D.C. And it was all because of Collie’s mighty pen.”

Robinson used the same word, once calling Nicholson “the man with the golden pen.”

Nicholson arranged to have the Grambling band play at three Super Bowls. The first time, Ms. Davis said, the university president had him drive to Los Angeles and gave him $150 to cover hotels, meals and gasoline for the week.

In addition to Williams, Nicholson publicized the Grambling players Paul Younger, known as Tank, the first player in the N.F.L. from a predominantly black college; James Harris, the first African-American drafted as a quarterback; Willie Brown; Buck Buchanan; Ernie Ladd; Willie Davis and Charlie Joiner. As Harris said, “He was way ahead of his time in terms of marketing players.”

Collie James Nicholson was born July 7 , 1921, in Winfield, La. He is survived by his wife, Ophelia; a son, Carl, of Houston; a daughter, Shirley Rhodes, of Shreveport; two grandchildren and a great-grandson.

Last May, the press box at Grambling’s Eddie Robinson Stadium was named for Nicholson. In 2002, when he received the Trailblazer Award from the College Sports Information Directors of America, he said:

“I was at the right place at the right time. We had a five-year plan to make Grambling black America’s football team. Just like Notre Dame built a Catholic base, we wanted to build a black base with Grambling football.”