Anisa Khalifa: If you want to understand America — to truly feel its history, its cultures and rivalries — going to a college football game is a great place to start. The sport is overflowing with tradition. And it's regional, more so than almost any other cultural institution. In a lot of ways, the game is a mirror held up to America itself. But some folks — especially Asian Americans — haven’t always seen themselves in that reflection.
Shehan Jeyarajah: I think it influences in a huge way who feels like they have the ability to be involved in sports, whether it is from the perspective of, of course, being a player, a coach, but also I think. It changes the way that people are watching the sport as fans.
Anisa Khalifa: A handful of high profile figures in college football are helping to change that perception by adding new stories to the history of the sport. But that history is more complicated than we thought.
Tim Peeler: You can see he stands out from the rest of the class, he is obviously of Asian descent, and to see him in the, uh, football picture from 1895, it just, it was just kind of mind blowing.
Anisa Khalifa: I’m Anisa Khalifa. This is the Broadside. Where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week, the changing face of college football and how an incredible discovery in North Carolina is challenging what we think is possible in sports.
(SOUNDBITE FROM PRESS CONFERENCE)
Press conference: Good morning. Good morning. Good to see you all. Thank you so much for coming out to Davidson College. Happy holidays to everyone. This is an exciting day for Davidson College…
Anisa Khalifa: This is a scene that has played out thousands of times in the history of college sports. Late last year, the school — located in the Charlotte suburbs — announced the hiring of their new head football coach.
Press conference: We wanted someone who was a great person first and a great coach second. I'm proud to say there are many of our coaches here…
Anisa Khalifa: As you can hear, the press conference was a pretty unremarkable event filled with glad handing and cliches. But the announcement at Davidson was also truly historic. And that’s because their new guy is the first head coach of Indian descent in college football history.
Press conference: And with that, I'd like to introduce the 29th head coach for Davidson College Football, Saj Thakkar. I just want to thank everyone for being here, and thank you guys for that kind introduction as well.
Shehan Jeyarajah: He was a bit of a risk. He's a younger guy. I think he's only 34 or 35 years old, but somebody that Davidson was very excited about. My name is Shehan Jeyarajah and I'm a national college football writer at CBS sports.
Anisa Khalifa: Shehan has covered the sport from his home in Texas for over a decade. So I reached out to him to get his take on this and some other fascinating developments in the college football landscape. It’s a culture where Asian Americans make up only a tiny slice of the pie.
And I mean to that point, you and I are both Asian Americans who've spent a lot of time in Southern states where football is a big deal, and that's an experience that doesn't get a lot of mainstream representation, right?
Shehan Jeyarajah: Back when I first started, I mean, I'm one of the few national, Asian college journalists in the field. There really almost weren't any Asian American athletes at the time. I remember just being around the state of Texas, I recall two in the first five to seven years that I covered college football.
Anisa Khalifa: That’s two players in the entire state of Texas. But recently, Shehan says that’s started to change across the country. On the field, but especially on the sidelines.
Shehan Jeyarajah: One thing that I think has really expanded this is you're starting to see See more people on the football operation side who are Asian American than ever before. You're starting to see more people on the training side than ever before. There are multiple teams now, actually, that have general managers or key personnel people that have Asian American backgrounds, and you're slowly starting to see as well, uh, the emergence of a handful of Asian American coaches starting to enter the industry as well.
Anisa Khalifa: That includes Saj Thakkar at Davidson. But without a doubt, the biggest name is Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman, whose mother is from South Korea.
Shehan Jeyarajah: He very quickly has turned into one of the best coaches in college football during the 2024 season He led them to the national championship game their first national championship game since 2012. He won the first playoff games in the history of Notre Dame as well.
(SOUNDBITE FROM NOTRE DAME GAME)
Shehan Jeyarajah: This is Notre Dame. This is one of the most traditional, most conservative, you can say, programs in all of college athletics, obviously a huge history to the Catholic Church, a history that that dates back to the 1930s and 40s when you talk about their history of college football and he's become a beloved figure at Notre Dame, but also outside of it.
Marcus Freeman: All coaches, minority, black asian white, it doesn't matter, great people continue to get opportunities to lead young men like this. But this ain't about me. This is about us, and we're gonna celebrate what we've done, because we've done something special.
Anisa Khalifa: And Shehan has seen Asian American representation in sports journalism and broadcasting improve too.
Shehan Jeyarajah: You know, two or three years ago, I remember, uh, it was one of the coolest things for me. I was covering a college football game with two other people. Asian American writers and an Asian American was actually broadcasting the game Anish for ESPN. And like, that's just not something I would have conceptualized before.
Anisa Khalifa: To Shehan and a lot of people who follow the sport closely, this all seems relatively new. And that is what makes a recent discovery in North Carolina so stunning…
Tim Peeler: So it was a really, uh, uh, fully a happenstance kind of thing.
Anisa Khalifa: This is Tim Peeler. He’s the former managing editor of the North Carolina State University athletics website and pretty much the school’s unofficial sports historian.
Tim Peeler: I was doing some research, digging into some old newspaper files, um, on newspapers.com. I was writing a story back in 2010 about the N. C. State's history of playing games at the State Fair.
Tim Peeler: And so, like, I was just getting into a rabbit hole. N. C. State happened to play VMI. In a, um, at the Cotton States, an exposition down in Atlanta, I was reading the game coverage of it and it was just talking, NC State got pummeled by the way in that game. It was, it was not a great, uh, showing for them. Uh, but, um, just in the game coverage, uh, it mentioned Sugishita's, uh, appearance in the game and they called him the NC State's great Japanese quarterback. And I'm like, what?
Anisa Khalifa: That shock you heard in Tim’s voice is because he was reading an article in the Atlanta Constitution newspaper that was written in 1895. And he immediately knew that he had stumbled upon something remarkable.
Tim Peeler: And then I just started going back into our own interior files at NC State and looking up who this person was, how he got to NC State, which seemed completely out of the blue, uh, and why he played football.
Anisa Khalifa: Coming up after a break, the unbelievable story of Teisaku Sugishita. And what it means today. If you ask sports historian Tim Peeler what NC State football is known for, the conversation inevitably turns to quarterbacks.
Tim Peeler: Russell Wilson, who played in two Super Bowls and one, uh, one of those for the Seattle Hawks. Seahawks, Roman Gabriel, who was college football's first Asian American, All American player. Jamie Barnett, who was the all time leading passer in school history until Philip Rivers came a year after he graduated to break all of those records.
Anisa Khalifa: Look, I'll confess right now that I'm not a football person. But even I know that the quarterback basically leads a team. They control the tempo of the game and are often responsible for most of the scoring. And that long lineage of talented Wolfpack quarterbacks? It pretty much starts with Teisaku Sugishita.
So tell me about him. Who was he? And how did he end up in North Carolina?
Tim Peeler: He came here as part of Japan's reopening to the West, which happened in the 1850s. They started sending students out, only like 12 or 13 students, out to American universities to learn things like agriculture and engineering. NC State opened in 1889 as North Carolina's land grant university, land grant college at the time, and its primary focus was agricultural and mechanic arts education. And so he, this just happened to be one of the schools that the government of Japan sent one of its students to. He showed up here in January of 1895 and was integrated into, um, the college culture at the time, which is vastly different than what the college culture, and college football culture is of today.
Anisa Khalifa: How was it? I mean, can you tell me a little bit about how it was different?
Tim Peeler: It was so, I mean, they just played on an open field. They did not have standard regular measures. They didn't have, you know, touchdowns were five points. Uh, the quarterback was not the focal part of the offense at the time.
Anisa Khalifa: So, as a student who came to study civil engineering, how did he end up playing football?
Tim Peeler: So, the, the thing about football in the 1890s is that no, almost no one who came to college knew how to play the game. It was one of those things where you got to college, you learned about it, and then you just took it up. There was no high school football at that time, or if there was, it was a very rudimentary thing.
Anisa Khalifa: To give us a little context of the time, I mean, were there any other players of color on the team? NC State football team at that time?
Tim Peeler: No, because NC State, uh, because of General Assembly guidelines at the time, did not have its first Black students until the 1950s.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, so given that NC State was not desegregated until the 1950s, like, how is it possible for this Japanese student to be like, not just attending, but be in such a prominent position as the quarterback?
Tim Peeler: Right. And that's what immediately attracted my attention to it is this. This seems too surreal to be possible.
Anisa Khalifa: Tim says that Teisaku was actually the first international student to ever graduate from NC State. He doesn’t actually know how this happened in the deeply segregated North Carolina of the 1890s. Or how Teisaku was treated. But he does know that the young man’s story was incredibly rare. And not just because he played for a Southern school.
Anisa Khalifa: How many Asians or Asian Americans do we know of that were playing college football in the 19th century? Do you know of any others?
Tim Peeler: I do not know of any others. I have asked around. I've researched, uh, newspapers, archives, lots of different football, um, sources to try to find that out. And I would love to hear about it if there were others.
Anisa Khalifa: We reached out to multiple historians and no one could think of a single Asian or Asian American athlete before this. In any sport.
What happened when Teisaku went back to Japan?
Tim Peeler: So he ended up in the silk trade along the Silk Road in Japan, China, or all of the Asian countries who dealt in that. He did use his degree to become. A figure in that trade back at that time
Anisa Khalifa: Now, I wish I could tell you that this story had a happy ending. That this young man went back to his homeland and had a long and fruitful career. But unfortunately…
Tim Peeler: He had, he had a very sad life based on the research that I had, you know, he lost touch with his NC State folks, a couple of his teammates from those days in the 1890s decided at one of their reunions, you know, early class reunions that they had that they wanted to find out about what happened to him.
So Sid Alexander wrote, uh, the Japanese embassy in, uh, or the American embassy in Japan to see if they could track them down. And they did. And it was, it was pretty interesting that, uh, those letters were on file, uh, at NC State's, um, archives, but they found them just about the time that he, um, had been laid up. at his home in Tokyo, um, because of the, uh, effects of alcoholism. And, uh, just about the time they were able to reconnect with his nephew, um, both his nephew and Sugishita were among the 140, 000 people who were killed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh, so that was kind of the end of his story as far as we know.
Tim Peeler: As far as I know, that's through all verifiable information that we have is what happened to him.
Anisa Khalifa: So this is a very old story, but what do you think his legacy is, if he has one?
Tim Peeler: NC State was created in 1887 by the General Assembly of North Carolina to serve the people of North Carolina, but to open those doors and bring people to Raleigh to learn about agriculture and mechanic arts or engineering. And to me. He serves as the earliest example of how we did that with the international community by bringing someone from Japan here to play football, to get an education, and then go as we like with all of NC State students to go back to their own communities and try to improve and elevate where they came from after coming to NC State for an education.
Anisa Khalifa: There's a lot we don't know about Teisaku Sugishita, details that are lost to time, like how he felt about his time in North Carolina, why he chose to play this weird, new American sport, what exactly happened when he went back home… but we do have a couple more clues to his life here. Just before he left the studio, Tim pulled out something incredible.
Tim Peeler: One of the fascinating things is being able to see what a football team looked like in 1895.
Anisa Khalifa: Tim showed me two photos he unearthed of Teisaku from the 1890s — one with his team, and one with his graduating class.
Tim Peeler: You can see that he obviously stands out from the rest of the class. Uh, he is obviously of Asian descent and he is, uh, wearing a, um, um, uh, a suit of the day, uh, with a bow tie and a stiff collar, hair slicked back a little bit, uh,
Anisa Khalifa: Looking distinguished to suit the occasion.
Tim Peeler: Dressed, looking distinguished in the day, but, uh, not necessarily. Uh, a picture of joy and, uh, to call up the, um, graduating class of 1898 and see him standing there, uh, and to see him in the, uh, football picture from 1895, it just, it was just kind of mind blowing to be able to, to, to happen across that because this entire history was happenstance. I happen to see something in the Atlanta paper. I happen to research it. Otherwise that probably all be lost to history.
Anisa Khalifa: Stories like this are precisely why reporter Shehan Jeyarajah fell in love with the sport in the first place.
Shehan Jeyarajah: College football is the story of people and places. You know, you might cover the Dallas Cowboys, and yes, you know, it's a Texas team. But it's not really, right? Like, it's a big brand that people care about all over the place. If you cover Texas Tech University, it's a story of West Texas. It's a story of Lubbock. It's a story of a place and a time and a people. And I, I think that getting to, to see our community become part of the broader, uh, story of sports, I, I think is really gratifying.
I think it also influences in a huge way who feels like they have the ability to be involved in sports, whether it is from the perspective of, of course, being a player, a coach, but also I think it changes the way that people are watching the sport as fans. It connects with the culture outside of the sport, in a different kind of way, when people are watching these games and seeing people on the sidelines involved in the sport and welcomed in the sport that maybe haven't been before.
Anisa Khalifa: Before this past week, had you ever heard of Teisaku Sugashita, who was this Japanese civil engineering major at NC State University from 1895 to 1898, who was the quarterback of the football team?
Shehan Jeyarajah: I had not, I was shocked, certainly, to know that, that a Japanese player was playing college football at that point, but I think that this is one piece that, that really strikes me, right, is, there is a much broader and more complex picture of Asian America than I think people realize. Again, the idea that a quarterback at NC State in the 1890s traveled from Japan to North Carolina and played college football is just insane. But there are so many stories like this that we don't know, that we're still learning, that we're still uncovering. I think it only reinforces, right, the stories are so much deeper, more complex than people realize.
Anisa Khalifa: Shehan Jeyarajah is a college football writer for CBS Sports. If you’d like to check out his work, we’ve dropped a link in this week’s show notes. There, you can also find the incredible article “Quarterback of the Rising Sun” by NC State historian Tim Peeler. And a special thanks this week goes out to Eric Moyen and John Thelin, authors of College Sports: A History, for doing some lightning-fast fact checking on our behalf.
This episode of The Broadside was produced by me, Anisa Khalifa, and our editor Jerad Walker. The rest of our team includes producer Charlie Shelton-Ormond and executive producer Wilson Sayre.The Broadside is a production of WUNC–North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR Network. If you have feedback or a story idea, you can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend! Thanks for listening y'all. We'll be back next week.