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At 49, Warren Moon is about to become the first black QB in the NFL Hall of Fame. How can someone so young carry that label? Plus: Terrell Owens, Billie Jean King.

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Aug. 3, 2006 | The NFL is inducting a new class of Hall of Famers this weekend, and it's a pretty glamorous class: Troy Aikman, John Madden, the late Reggie White, Warren Moon and Harry Carson.

The guy I can't get over is Warren Moon.

What I can't get over is that he's the first black quarterback to be inducted. His story sounds like something out of the South in the days of black-and-white newsreels.

He had to listen to racist taunts from the stands as a high school and college player. He had to go to junior college because college coaches didn't think blacks could play quarterback. He had to go to the Canadian Football League because NFL coaches didn't think blacks could play quarterback.

What I can't get over is that Warren Moon is only six years older than I am, and we grew up in the same city, and it wasn't in the South.

He led the University of Washington to the Rose Bowl in 1978, before the Huskies became Pasadena regulars. He dominated the CFL with the Edmonton Eskimos. And then, as a 27-year-old rookie -- about five months younger than Jackie Robinson was when he made his long-delayed major league debut -- Moon started an NFL career that lasted 17 seasons.

You couldn't watch Moon, athletic and strong-armed, play quarterback at Washington and not think he at least had a chance in the NFL. He went undrafted not because teams didn't think he could play in the league, but because he'd made it clear he only wanted to play quarterback. His longtime agent, Leigh Steinberg, has said Moon probably would have been a third- or fourth-round pick if he'd agreed to play some other position.

This isn't how the NFL, always ready to bend history to suit its purposes, seems to remember it.

In his column on NFL.com, Gil Brandt, the longtime director of player personnel for the Dallas Cowboys, writes, "Moon, at just under 6-foot-3 and 210 pounds, was an athletic blend of fast legs and a strong right arm. It just took the arm a little longer to get there. And that's what made Moon so difficult to scout as a college player ... and probably why he had to go to a J.C. and to Canada to prove his talents to those at the next level." (Ellipsis his.)

Yeah, Gil, sure. That's probably why.

Brandt lavishes praise on Moon and identifies him as the first African-American quarterback in the Hall of Fame, but otherwise ignores the gigantic role of race in Moon's nomadic early career.

The NFL's Hall of Fame bio for Moon acknowledges the racial issue.

Next page: The black kids in my school idolized Warren Moon. Plus: Terrell Owens, Billie Jean King