Emlen Tunnell made history on the football field — first as a Hawkeye, then in the NFL — and continued do so after his playing days ended in 1961. In 1965, he became the first Black assistant coach in the NFL, and in 1967, Tunnell was the first Black player inducted into Pro Football Hall of Fame.
But the latest recognition for Tunnell, who died in 1975, has nothing to do with football. It’s for heroic acts he performed while serving in the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II.
To honor Tunnell, the Coast Guard is naming its latest Sentinel Class Cutter after him. The cruiser, which is still under construction, is scheduled to be launched this fall. Also this fall, the Coast Guard Academy will be opening a new athletic department facility named the Emlen Tunnell Strength and Conditioning Center.
“It is so important that we take a look at these trailblazers, just like Mr. Tunnell, and we honor them because of all the things they faced in laying the groundwork for where we are today in making a better future,” Cmdr. Bill McKinstry told the Associated Press. McKinstry’s research on Tunnell helped bring about the Coast Guard’s belated recognition of him.
An 18-year-old Tunnell joined the Coast Guard in 1943 and served until 1946 as a steward’s mate. It was a common assignment for Black Coastguardsmen. Tunnell served under the racist restrictions that were part of all branches of the military — the military was still segregated at the time, and that did not begin to change until three years after the war, when President Truman issued an executive order in 1948 to integrate the armed forces.
As a steward’s mate, Tunnell’s role was largely confined to washing dishes and other cleaning assignments. But on at least two occasions, Tunnell showed extraordinary courage performing acts that had nothing to do with those duties.
In 1944, a ship Tunnell was serving on in the South Pacific was struck by a torpedo and caught fire. Tunnell ran into the burning part of the ship and dragged a shipmate who was on fire to safety. He beat out the flames with his hands, severely burning them.
Two years later, Tunnell was serving on a ship in the North Atlantic when a shipmate, Alfred Givens, fell overboard.
“Without regard to his own safety, Tunnell jumped into the 32-degree seas and rescued Givens. Tunnell saved his drowning shipmate, and despite being in the water for only fifteen minutes, suffered exposure and shock,” Coast Guard historian David Rosen wrote in 2011.
Tunnell’s commanding officer nominated him for the Silver Lifesaving Medal, one of the Coast Guard’s highest awards. But the heroism of Black service members in every branches of the military was routinely ignored during WWII, and they rarely received the medal their actions warranted. Tunnell was finally awarded both the Silver Lifesaving Medal and a Combat Action Ribbon in 2011, 36 years after his death. Tunnell’s sister and his niece accepted the medal and ribbon on his behalf.
That posthumous recognition was sparked by McKinstry’s research. In 2008, McKinstry was looking through some photos of Coast Guard basketball teams of the 1940s, when he recognized Tunnell’s unique name in a caption. McKinstry knew Tunnell had been a great professional football player, but didn’t know he’d served in the Coast Guard. McKinstry started looking into Tunnell’s career.
Emlen Tunnell was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania in 1925. He grew up in the neighboring town of Radnor, where he played varsity football in high school. In 2018, the town erected a bronze statue of Tunnell in his football uniform. Radnor also has a park named after him.
After graduating from Radnor High School, Tunnell enrolled at the University of Toledo, where he made the football team. But during an early season game, Tunnell fractured his neck. The doctor who treated him told Tunnell he should never play football again. The college freshman switched sports, and earned on a place on the university’s basketball team.
After his freshman year, Tunnell left college to join the war effort. He tried to enlist in the Army, but failed the physical because of his neck injury. Tunnell kept looking for a way to serve, and the Coast Guard accepted him.
As his service was coming to an end in 1946, Tunnell was stationed in Connecticut, and despite the doctor’s advice a few years earlier, he played for the Fleet City Bluejackets of the Connecticut Football League when he had shore leave.
It was those games that brought Tunnell to the attention of the University of Iowa Athletics Department, which offered him a football scholarship.
Tunnell played for the Hawkeyes during the 1946 and 1947 seasons. As a halfback and a receiver, he was a star player. Tunnell set school records for single-game receiving yards and touchdown receptions. But his time as a Hawkeye did not go as smoothly as those accomplishment might suggest.
In November 1947, Tunnell briefly quit the team, following a heated argument with backfield coach Frank Carideo. Tunnell felt Carideo was making players take unnecessary risks during tackling practice.
“I’d rather get killed on a Saturday afternoon than during the week,” Tunnell said after quitting, according to a contemporary Des Moines Register story.
At the time, Tunnell was the leading receiver in the then-Big Nine. He and the team quickly came to an understanding and Tunnell returned, but he only saw very limited playing time in the final games of the season.
Needing money, Tunnell took the next semester off and went back home to Pennsylvania to work. To be eligible to play during the 1948 fall season, he would have had to take classes during the summer. Tunnell told the sports editor of the Press-Citizen in August that year he didn’t know that rule, and no one at UI told him until the day before the summer semester started.
“I got a telegram on Sunday saying I had to be back in school Monday and didn’t have any money or nothing,” the editor quoted him as saying.
By then, Tunnell didn’t need to return to UI. He’d already been signed by the New York Giants.
Weeks earlier, Tunnell had hitchhiked to New York and went to the Giants’ office to ask for a tryout. It was an especially bold move, considering that only two years earlier the “gentleman’s agreement” between team owners to keep Black players out of the NFL had been broken, when the Los Angeles Rams signed Kenny Washington and Woody Strode, and the Cleveland Browns signed Bill Willis and Marion Motley.
The agreement had ensured there were no Black players in the NFL from 1927 to 1946.
The Giants had never had a Black player, but were so impressed by the athleticism of the 6-foot 3-inch, 210-pound Tunnell, the team offered him a contract.
Tunnell played 11 seasons for the Giants. He quickly became one of the team’s mainstays, as both a defensive back and punt return specialist.
“Emlen changed the theory of defensive safeties,” Jim Lee Howell, a member of the Giants’ coaching staff, told the New York Times when Tunnell died. “He would have been too big for the job earlier, and they’d have made him a lineman. But he had such strength, such speed and such quickness I’m convinced he was the best safety ever to play.”
Tunnell finished his 14-season career with three years as a Green Bay Packer. At the time of his retirement as a player, he had held 16 team records with the Giants, five NFL records — the most career interceptions and most yardage following an interception, and most punt returns and most yardage on punt returns, as well as the record for most consecutive games played — and had been named to All-Pro Teams seven times.
In 1967, Tunnell was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the first Black player to enter the hall. Two years later, he was named as a starting player for the 50th anniversary all-NFL all-time team.
When he retired in 1961, Tunnell told reporters his heart was still in the game.
“I could make tackles until I’m 50,” he said. “Your body may go, but your heart doesn’t.”
In 1962, Tunnell started a new career as a scout for the Giants. That year he also married Patricia Dawkins. The couple would be together until Tunnell’s death.
Tunnell made history again three years later, when the Giants hired him as an assistant coach. No NFL team had a Black assistant coach before Tunnell took the job. Throughout his decade-long coaching career, Tunnell advocated for the hiring of more Black coaches and expressed frustration over NFL teams’ failure to open up opportunities to qualified people regardless of race.
The New York Times obituary published after Tunnell’s unexpected death from a heart attack at the age of 50 in 1975 largely avoids mentioning his frustration with the lack of opportunity in the league, but noted that some people felt “Mr. Tunnell’s sensitivity on such issues as the failure of pro teams to hire black head coaches or more black management executives was justified.”
The obituary also doesn’t mention the racism Tunnell faced during his years as a player, but speaking to the AP earlier this month, his cousin Yvonne Gilmore Jordan said there many incidents. She cited an exhibition game the Giants played in Alabama in 1951, in which Tunnell had to sit out because organizers insisted no Black players be allowed on the field.
“But Gilmore Jordan, 82, said her cousin endured those indignities by being kind to everyone and making jokes about his situation,” according to the AP.
“He didn’t ever let it get him down, he really didn’t,” she said.
“Emlen was a great Giant as a player, coach and scout,” Giants co-owner John Mara, whose father Wellington Mara was the team’s co-owner when Tunnell was a Giant, told the AP. “More importantly, he was a wonderful human being, which is why he was the most beloved person in our organization throughout his time with us. Vince Lombardi traded for Emlen in Green Bay because he knew Emlen would be vital in establishing a championship culture.”
Mara’s words echo what Tunnell’s former Giant teammate Andy Robustelli told the Times in 1975.
“Emlen was good to all people,” Robustelli said. “He was a hell of a decent person who meant a lot to young ballplayers.”
The Times obituary didn’t mention Tunnell’s service in the Coast Guard, and his official bio for the Pro Football Hall of Fame only mentions it in passing without any reference to his heroic actions. The head football coach of the Coast Guard Academy C.C. Grant hopes that changes, and people begin to learn about Tunnell’s service in the Coast Guard as well as his pathbreaking football career as a player and a coach.
“I think it’s important, because you have a teachable moment with young people when you talk about a guy like Emlen Tunnell,” Grant told the AP. “They need to understand what he did, what he went through and what kind of a person he was.”
The Emlen Tunnell Strength and Conditioning Center at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut is scheduled to open in September. The new cutter named for Tunnell will be launched in October.
