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The Great Unknown and the Unknown Great: GRIDIRON PIONEER: Art Matsu, a Multi-racial Nikkei, Broke Ground
By GREG ROBINSON
Nichi Bei Times Contributor
In a recent issue, the Nichi Bei Times ran a feature on Scott Fujita of the National Football League’s New Orleans Saints, a professional football player from a Japanese American family. Many readers doubtless figured that Fujita must be the first Japanese American in the NFL. Others might have supposed that it was Wally Yonamine, who joined the San Francisco 49ers in 1947.
In fact, the Japanese American presence in the NFL dates back all the way to the early years of the league, 1928 to be precise, when Art Matsu briefly took the field.
Arthur Matsu was born in 1904 in Glasgow, Scotland, and came to the United States as a toddler. His father was Japanese, and his mother was Scotch. He spent his early years in Cleveland, and starred in four sports at Cleveland East High School.
In 1923, Matsu enrolled at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. While William & Mary excluded African American students, Matsu’s athletic talent and good looks assured him campus celebrity, and he pledged two fraternities. Nevertheless, fears that Matsu’s popularity would spark interracial fraternization may have helped prompt Virginia’s Legislature to pass the Racial Purity Act in 1924, extending the state’s miscegenation law and explicitly forbidding intermarriage between Asians and whites. (This same act would be overturned in the landmark 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia � a case in which the Japanese American Citizens League played a crucial role).
In 1924, Matsu took the field as quarterback of the William & Mary team, then known as the Indians. In November, William & Mary shut out the heavily-favored King College, 27-0, with Matsu dropkicking thee extra points, and almost beat Navy’s powerful team. The next year, Matsu helped take the Indians to the state title.
In 1926, at the start of his senior year, Matsu was named captain of the Indians. At the end of the year, in Matsu’s final game, they beat Chattanooga for bragging rights to best of the South. Although he was short even among football players of his day, Matsu was renowned for his keen passing ability and his skill as a kicker. He converted 18 extra points during a single season and kicked three 53-yard field goals.
His talent, plus his unusual racial heritage, earned him national attention. The Washington Post enthused that “The Jap is probably the most consistent extra-point man in the state,” while TIME magazine reported that he was a “clever quarterback and captain.” In 1935, Matsu was named as second-string quarterback on the All-Time William & Mary team. In addition to his football skills, Matsu excelled at golf (his talent at which he attributed to his Scottish ancestry) and diving. In the fall of 1927, following graduation, Matsu became William & Mary’s golf and swimming coach.
In the fall of 1928, Matsu joined the National Football League’s Dayton Triangles. The Triangles were in desperate need of good players: they had managed to win only one game out of 12 in their previous two seasons. Matsu was put at fullback. He was not the team’s only Asian American player � the Triangles featured a Hawaiian-born Chinese American running back, Walter Achieu (nicknamed “sneeze” because of his name).
Unfortunately, Matsu did not do well as a professional�he played in only two games. Although he made two receptions, for a total gain of 15 yards, and returned a pair of kickoffs, he completed only one of eight passing attempts and threw two interceptions. (Matsu’s teammates did not do much better � Dayton lost all of its seven games that season, and was shut out in all but one. The team later moved to New York and became the Brooklyn Dodgers, before folding in 1943).
Even after leaving the NFL, he continued nevertheless to play amateur football. In 1930, Matsu was named to a Virginia all-star team that played an all-star pro squad. While the professionals won the game, 20-7, Matsu made the only score for the Virginians with a touchdown pass to Meb Davis, his former William & Mary teammate, and then kicked the extra point.
Matsu married in 1927. His son Arthur A. Matsu was born two years later, and a daughter followed soon after. With a family to support, Matsu turned to coaching. In 1930, he was hired as football coach at Asheville High School, in Asheville, N.C. The next year he moved to Benedictine College in Richmond, Va.
In 1931, Matsu’s old William & Mary coach J. Wilder Tasker was named head coach at Rutgers University. He invited Matsu to become one of his assistant coaches. It was a plum position, especially at the height of the Great Depression. Not only did Rutgers have prestige as a birthplace of intercollegiate football, it enjoyed a certain reputation for racial tolerance based on the brilliant athletic career a decade earlier of Paul Robeson.
After five years as backfield coach, in 1936 Matsu was selected to coach Rutgers’ freshman football team. He would occupy the post off and on for two decades.
His coaching received mixed reviews. Quarterback Frank Burns, a future Rutgers head coach himself, later termed Matsu “A master of offensive football, a true innovator.” Another former Rutgers athlete, Leonard Weissburg, remembered Matsu as a very austere and strict man who rarely ever smiled, but a very good coach. Arthur Victor Mann agreed that Matsu was a great natural athlete, in spite of his short stature, and a great coach, but he added that Matsu’s great weakness was that he insisted on calling all the plays and did not let his players make decisions on their own.
Toshimasa Hosoda, a Nisei quarterback who played with Rutgers in the 1950s, recalled that Matsu did not show him any particular favor based on their common ancestry, but grumbled at him as much as the other players and did not welcome discussion on topics outside of football.
Matsu took several additional assignments during his Rutgers years. During World War II, he taught physical education and operated the physical fitness program for the school’s Army Specialized Training Corps. He also served as Rutgers’s Assistant Sports Publicity Director. Matsu kept in fine shape himself. In 1948, he won the Rutgers alumni golf tournament, beating several younger athletes.
In 1955 Matsu left Rutgers, and some years later moved to Arizona, where he sold real estate and served as a scout for Arizona State University. He spent his last years near Phoenix, Arizona, where he died in 1987.
Greg Robinson, Ph.D., the author of “By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans,” is an assistant professor of history at the Universite de Quebec a Montreal.
<< Back geovisit();<img src="http://visit.webhosting.yahoo.com/visit.gif?time" alt="setstats" border="0" width="1" height="1">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); Comment submitted by Yoshi Nakamura on January 3, 2008; 3:58 am (GMT): Greg,I hope all is well. I just wanted to bring to your attention a potential Japanese/American NFL Draftee, Haruki Nakamura. Not sure if there has been any Japanese Americans drafted in recent years, but Haruki will hopefully be one. Attached please find the link to Haruki's YouTube.com highlight video.
"Haruki Nakamura Ultimate Highlight"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHApgrJarw8
http://www.nichibeitimes.com/articles/stories.php?subaction=showfull&id=1175815557&archive=&start_from=&ucat=2,4&
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