Friday, March 29, marks 100 years since Emlen Tunnell was born in eastern Pennsylvania. Tunnel made history on the football field, first as a Hawkeye, then in the NFL. After his playing days were over, Tunnell continued to make football history by becoming one of the first Black assistant coaches in the NFL. In 1967, he broke another barrier by becoming the first Black player inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
But the most recent honors for Tunnell, who died in 1975, had nothing to do with football. In 2021, the U.S. Coast Guard named both a ship and a new athletic training facility at the Coast Guard Academy for Tunnell, to honor the memory of his service and the heroic acts he performed as a Coast Guardsman during World War II.
“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 in 2021. McKinstry’s research on Tunnell helped bring about the Coast Guard’s belated recognition of him.
Emlen Tunnell was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania on March 29, 1924. 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 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.
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 armed forces were still segregated at the time, and that did not begin to change until 1948, three years after the end of World War II, when President Truman issued an executive order directing the services to end racial segregation.
As a steward’s mate, Tunnell was largely confined to washing dishes and other cleaning assignments. But on at least two occasions, he 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 heroic actions of Black service members in every branch of the military were routinely ignored during WWII, and they rarely received the commendations their actions warranted. Tunnell was finally awarded both the Silver Lifesaving Medal and a Combat Action Ribbon in 2011, 36 years after his death. His sister and his niece accepted the medal and ribbon on his behalf.
That posthumous recognition was sparked by Cmdr. McKinstry’s research. In 2008, he 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.
Basketball wasn’t the only sport Tunnell played during his years in the Coast Guard.
As his service was coming to an end in 1946, Tunnell was stationed in Connecticut, and despite the doctor’s advice after his neck injury a few years earlier, he joined the Fleet City Bluejackets of the Connecticut Football League and played when he had leave.
It was those games that brought Tunnell to the attention of the University of Iowa Athletics Department and led to 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 accomplishments 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 Des Moines Register story at the time.
Tunnell and the team quickly came to an understanding, and he returned to the Hawkeyes. But Tunnell only saw very limited playing time in the final games of the season, even though he had been the leading receiver in the then-Big Nine.
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,” he said.
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 gone to the Giants’ office to ask for a tryout. It was an especially bold move, considering it had only been two years earlier the “gentleman’s agreement” between team owners to keep Black players out of the NFL had been broken for the first time, 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.
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 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.
Tunnel returned to the Giants after his career on the field was over. In 1962, he became a scout for the team. That year Tunnell also got married. Emlen Tunnell and Patricia Dawkins would be together until he died 13 years later.
In 1963, the Giants hired Tunnell as a special assistant coach, and in 1965 he became the assistant coach for the defensive backs. Before Tunnel there had only been one other Black assistant coach in the post-gentlemen’s-agreement era. Throughout his coaching career, Tunnell advocated for the hiring of more Black coaches and expressed frustration over the failure of NFL teams 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 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 in 2021, 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 opened in September 2021.
The following month, the USCGC Emlen Tunnell, a fast response cutter, began its service in the Coast Guard.
“What really defined Emlen was his character, that selflessness,” Adm. Karl Schultz, commandant of the Coast Guard, said during the commissioning ceremony for the ship. “It was who he was as a human being.”
