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Every January, the two-week break (which now extends into February) between the NFL Conference Finals (the two contests that determine which teams will face off in the Super Bowl) and the Super Bowl itself provides thousands of sports reporters from all over the world plenty of time to whip their audiences into a football frenzy, as they all seek some angle to distinguish that year's game from every previous Super Bowl. Never was this phenomenon more evident than just before Super Bowl XXII in 1988, when the Denver Broncos squared off against the Washington Redskins: the contest was somewhat more notable than usual because the latter team was helmed by Doug Williams, the first black quarterback to play in a Super Bowl. That year the media fed the public an endless stream of first black quarterback stories, as journalist after journalist plied Doug Williams with every conceivable black quarterback-related question they could dream up. Among the queries put to Williams, as recorded by Washington Post reporter Michael Wilbon, were: To his credit, Williams handled the interrogation with aplomb, providing full, thoughtful answers to every question put to him, never snapping at reporters whose queries bordered on the ridiculous, and without expressing impatience or irritation with journalists who asked him the same questions over and over. In the aftermath of Super Bowl XXII, this excessive media focus on race came to be symbolized by an absurd (or, at best, poorly-worded) question purportedly put to Doug Williams by a naive journalist: How long have you been a black quarterback? This query now gets trotted out every year as the paramount example of really dumb things reporters ask during the build-up to the Super Bowl. Being of a skeptical bent, we started wondering whether anyone had actually asked this of Doug Williams, and if so, who. A little digging turned up some curious gaps and discrepancies: the How long? question didn't start to show up in news articles until after Super Bowl XXII (rather than at the time it was allegedly asked), the journalist who posed it was nearly always identified only as a white sports writer or a reporter (rather than by name or media affiliation), and what Doug Williams reportedly said in response to the query varied quite a bit from telling to telling. Starting with the latter point first, we found that searching just a handful of articles produced completely different versions of how Doug Williams was said to have answered the infamous question supposedly put to him, How long have you been a black quarterback?: It seemed rather odd to us that even sportswriters who were chronicling the sometimes silly, often repetitive questions tossed at Doug Williams didn't mention the one that surely would have been considered the whopper of them all. Even odder was that once this issue arose in post-Super Bowl discussions, every reporter seemed to provide a different report about how Doug Williams supposedly responded to the question. With a little more searching, the answer turned up: The question actually asked of Doug Williams (by Butch John, a reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger) was a similar but much more sensible one which Williams didn't hear correctly (quite possibly because the laughter of other reporters drowned out its latter half) and therefore instead answered what he thought he'd been asked. But Bob Kravitz, a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, explained what really happened: That explanation was borne out by Washington Post reporter Michael Wilbon, who was also present, was actively making note of all the race-related questions tossed at Doug Williams, and reported at the time that: But of course, Williams' pithy answer was the better story (even if it didn't correspond to what he was asked), so that's what got reported, and the misinterpretation of the query that prompted it became enshrined as an apocryphal real-life example of a really dumb question. (For his part, Williams still maintains in interviews that a reporter really did ask him How long have you been a black quarterback?) Sadly, the season after he led Washington to a 42-10 triumph over Denver (and garnered Super Bowl MVP honors) in Super Bowl XXII, Williams was beset by injuries to his knee and back, underwent an emergency appendectomy, and lost his starting job to Mark Rypien. He played in only four games in 1989, was waived by the Redskins, failed to impress the Los Angeles Raiders at a tryout, and was out of professional football for good by 1990. We hope we don't detract from the attention Doug Williams merited with his on-field performance that day by noting that our own favorite silly pre-Super Bowl question-and-answer exchange involved one of his opponents in that Super Bowl:
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