(Photo: Contributed)

Jessie Griffin has died. That shocking news reverberated through the black community Sunday, when the ex-West Bremerton High School athlete succumbed to a heart attack, the last of four he had over the years, at the age of 73 in Seattle.

Some people – maybe many people – will tell you that Jessie was the greatest athlete to come out of Bremerton. We have had guys like Ted Tappe, Don Heinrich, Hal Lee and Marvin Williams come through Bremerton and Griffin is at least in the conversation among those greats, no question.

I am recounting much of this from a story I did on Griffin five years ago. In that story I revealed Jessie at his finest – his nickname was “Gentleman Griff” – and that he was a star football player who could have been a star basketball player.

West Bremerton basketball coach Ken Wills became a legend and a Hall of Famer, but “Wills told me I couldn’t play basketball for him,” Griffin said in that story. “He said, ‘you can run track for me.’ Why would I run track for him if he wouldn’t let me play basketball for him? So I played in the (Bremerton) City League at Sheridan (Park Gym).”

Griffin said it was a black thing. Wills would in 1962 be forced to take the Olympic College basketball job to replace Phil Pesco, who died suddenly of a heart attack. Wills shot himself the first day on the job at OC.

“He was against blacks being on the team,” Griffin said. “That was the reason he shot himself.”

How does Griffin know?

“Because I lived it,” he answered, adding that his fellow blacks at West who had the ability to play basketball in high school and didn’t, didn’t because of Wills. “We talked about it among ourselves.”

Danny Shedwin, class of 1964 at West Bremerton, added: “Wills told me that Elgin Baylor couldn’t play for him.”

Griffin graduated from West in 1962, the same year James Meredith registered for college at the University of Mississippi ‑ with the help of federal troops.

Terry Mosher (Photo: file)

Segregation was beginning to develop cracks as blacks marched in protest, sometimes to deadly violence, against its practice. But in 1962 integration sometimes it still had to be forced on a divided society.

Bremerton was integrated, but divisions still existed. According to the stories, blacks were hard-pressed to find work in Bremerton unless it was in the service industry, cleaning banks or as janitors, or by getting into the shipyard. It’s a major reason black families back then would move on, usually to Seattle.

When he was young, Griffin washed dishes at the old Hearthstone Restaurant on Kitsap Way and then his grandfather got him a job doing the same at the old Olympic Hotel downtown. He lasted one day there and decided that was enough of that.

Most of Bremerton's black community lived in the old Sinclair Heights neighborhood, where they were segregated from the white community living below. Into that type of climate came Griffin, a sports prodigy who tore it up in youth leagues, in high school football and at Olympic College, where he tore up his knee in his second year.

“He was incredible, man,” Shedwin said. “He was on the mythical championship football team of 1961.”

“Jessie was one hell of a football player,” said close friend Fred Rogers Jr. “He just didn’t get the accolades, which is a sign of those times. Back in those days it was pretty top-heavy in white publicity. The white player got more credit. But Jessie was probably the best in the game. I think if you ask anybody, they will tell you that.”

Griffin was a 5-9, 155-pound fullback who played much bigger.

“Jessie, he just ran right over the top of you or around you,” said Eddie Tobacco Jr., who played basketball for West and later would become a star fastpitch softball player 

“They didn’t like to hit him,” Shedwin said. “They would wait until he passed, and then dive for him. Hitting Jessie was like being in a train wreck.”

His heroics on the football field garnered little notice outside the black community and for years it was almost like he didn’t exist.

“I didn’t understand there was a problem until later in life when I went down to Alabama (with his work) to bring a ship back up that the light came on,” Tobacco said. “I was in Mobile, Alabama, and just seeing how white people there verbally expressed their feelings about black people did it.”

Griffin went on to work as an electrical engineer for Boeing for 37 years and became known around Seattle as a long-ball hitting slowpitch softball player. 

As tough as he was, Jessie had a tender and caring side.

“We Afro-American kids were waiting for the school bus one day and I was just starting to smoke,” said Shedwin. “I was trying to be cool. I put a cigarette in my mouth. When Jessie saw that he dived through the air and through other kids and slaps it out of my mouth. 

“That was it. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I got the message. Everybody else got the message, too. That is where his heart was. He was just a caring guy.”

Jessie Griffin’s funeral will be Aug. 12 at 1 p.m. at Sunset Hills Memorial in Bellevue. Viewing will be held from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. A reception will follow.

Terry Mosher is a former sports writer at the Kitsap Sun who publishes The Sports Paper at sportspaper.org. Reach him at bigmosher@msn.com.