As a first-round pick, Jackson was expected to excel. The Redskins’ 1962 media guide describes him as “the fastest Redskin player of all time,” pointing out that he ran the 100-yard dash “in 9.4 seconds and runs it consistently in 9.5 seconds” while at Western Illinois. But he didn’t run through the NFL. Washington used him as a kick returner but he didn’t have a significant impact. His best day came Oct. 8, when he caught an 85-yard touchdown pass and his photo ran big on the sports page of the next day’s newspaper.
But mostly he was a disappointment.
“They expected him to play and play well,” Mitchell says. “That’s what I always felt happened to Leroy. I think it was the overall disappointment they had in him. He was a No. 1 and they expected him to be bigger and faster.”
On Oct. 20, 1963, Leroy was returning a kick in Pittsburgh, when he was hit as he says, “high-low,” meaning one Steeler hit him high on his body and another low. He crumpled to the ground as the ball rolled away. The next day, an assistant coach approached him and said he was being cut because of the fumble.
“I think that’s the story they told,” Jackson says one afternoon, while chatting in the food court of Union Station, a meeting place he picked over his home which is located less than two miles away.
Then he goes quiet. “That’s all I’m going to say,” he says.
But to Mitchell a fumble was enough to get Jackson cut. The same thing almost happened to him while he was with the Cleveland Browns. In those days, he says, African-American players were expected to show anger when they made a mistake, either by slamming the ball to the ground or kicking the turf, he says. To react stoically, as the white players were taught to do, was to show you were “nonchalant,” as Mitchell puts it.
He learned this in 1958 during his first training camp with the Browns. Right before the team was to move its camp to California for a week of practice and exhibition games with the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams, the Browns’ legendary coach Paul Brown called him into his office.
“We don’t know what to do with you, we don’t know if you want to play football,” he said.
Mitchell was stunned. At first he thought Brown was bothered by his blocking ability, but Brown shook his head. Neither he nor his coaches thought Mitchell was interested in the game. Finally the coach saw the dejected look on Mitchell’s face and said he would take him to California to see how things went.
“I hadn’t thought about [being] nonchalant,” Mitchell says. “They wouldn’t accept a black player who didn’t show emotion. If I dropped a ball I had to show emotion for my mistake. You couldn’t say, ‘Coach, I’m sorry.’ You have to understand where we came from.”