Out of the media contingent surrounding Williams days before the game came a stunning inquiry: "How long have you been a black quarterback?" a reporter asked Williams, then 32. Williams replied tongue-in-cheek that he recognized the color of his skin as a child, and he played quarterback for years before reaching the Super Bowl.
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 answer for how Doug Williams supposedly answered 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; Williams didn't hear it correctly (quite possibly because the laughter of other reporters drowned out its latter half) and therefore answered what he thought he'd been asked. But Bob Kravitz, a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, explained what really happened:
I hate to burden this column with the truth — really, why start now? — but I was next to the guy when that question supposedly was asked of Doug Williams, and what the reporter actually said was, ''Doug, obviously you've been a black quarterback your whole life. When did race begin to matter to people?'' Which was a perfectly reasonable question on a day when Williams was fielding hundreds of ''black quarterback'' questions. Problem was, Williams either misunderstood or didn't hear the question because he said, ''How long have I been a black quarterback?''
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:
An hour listening to my colleagues question Williams was easily the highlight of the week. Of course, everybody's favorite [question] has to be [the one that began], "Doug, you've been a black quarterback all your life ... "
But, of course, Williams' answer was the better story, even if it didn't correspond to what he was asked, so that's what got reported, and the misintepretation of the query that prompted it became enshrined as a mistaken 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?")
