Although Roly Gregoire’s Sunderland career was brief he was nevertheless their first black player, a claim to fame that no one can take away from him. He made a total of only 10 appearances, four of them as a substitute and only six of those appearance were at Roker Park. His debut was in a home game against Hull City on 2nd January 1978 and he appeared for the last time on 16th April 1979. His only goal came in a 3-1 win at Luton on 8th April 1978.
Here is the programme from his debut game:
Roly had signed from Halifax Town on 7th November and played several times for the reserves before breaking into the 1st team. ‘Breaking into’ is perhaps pushing it a bit, he was called up at short notice (15 minutes) due to the injury and illness of two players above him in the pecking order. In the circumstances it is no surprise that his name doesn’t feature in the programme.
More of a surprise is that, in spite of the brevity of his career and over forty years after his last appearance, in 2011 he was named in an article as one of Sunderland’s ten worst strikers of all time. Roly, bought for a fee of just £5,000, rubs shoulders in the list with multi million pound signings like Tore Andre Flo (£8 million), Lilian Laslandes (£3 million) and Andy Grey (£1.1 million).
His name also cropped up in 2021 on the Sunderland fans’ forum, RTG, and prompted this exchange between two fans (WARNING: the language is robust, as it is on many such forums up and down the country, if you are of a delicate disposition you may want to look away now):
‘Roly Gregoire got a bit from us IIRC.’
FAN A, Thursday 7.31
Did he? I was pretty young at the time and I remember a bit of casual racism with plenty of ‘lighthearted’ darkie jokes and references, he was a bit of a novelty truth be told and I had the impression most of the people around me (Roker End) really wanted him to do well.
I suppose the political climate and the rise of the NF around that time and the predominantly working class crowd there was always going to be. Can’t remember nowt like that which Canoville describes from the Chelsea lot though’
FAN B, Thursday 8.36
‘I was young also and my memories are hazy. I remember bad racism to oppposition players monkey chants every time they touched the ball (chamberlain, crooks) and the he’s a wig chant. With Gregoie it was more people shouting stuff, the Blackburn defeat he got dogs abuse with racist comments and shouting but not on the level of Cannoville’
FAN A, Thursday 10.01
‘Aye I remember when you’d get ‘hes a wog a wog’ rolling down of the Fulwell to the likes of Cyrille Regis or Vince Hillaire.
I don’t think it helped that Gregoire was shite, I mean you see the abuse players can get now irrespective of colour, if they aren’t doing as well as expected. Its pretty obvious what kind of abuse Gregoire would have received. I bet if he had been the next Chamberlain or Crooks he wouldn’t have received much abuse, racist or otherwise.’
FAN B, Thursday 10.04
So, the question that needs answering is whether Roly Gregoire was abused by his own fans because he was not very good or because he was black?
Bill Hern, co-author of Football’s Black Pioneers has written a great article about Roly that appeared in Roker Report in December 2020, it really is essential reading for anyone interested in the true story of Sunderland’s first black player and it may help answer the question posed above:
Please read Bill’s article and decide for yourself but our view is that racism played a part, probably a big part, in the way that Roly Gregoire was viewed by Sunderland fans.