Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  Still, at Moore Junior High, the first integrated school he attended, and then at John Tyler High, the previously all-white working-class kids’ school, named (like the town) for the obscure US president who, following his term in the White House, supported the cause of the South so ardently that he became an outspoken representative of the Confederacy, Campbell witnessed vitriol between white and black kids, snickers, threats, turned shoulders.

  Campbell wasn’t interested much in the friction. In fact, he was at that age interested in very little other than gambling, petty thievery, and smoking Kools—in sixth grade he picked up a pack-and-a-half-a-day habit. He hustled for cash at the pool hall. His beloved father, who had worked in the fields beside his children by day and had left them nightly after dinner to work at Kmart, had been dead a year, felled by a heart attack brought on by liver failure. Panging with puberty, his father gone, a young Earl drank bootleg whiskey and played dice games at the Sugar Shack—at least once, with the cops calling, he had to rush out the back door and into the pea fields. He would later call this the “bad Earl” phase of his life.

  It was his mother, who cleaned houses and farmed roses to keep her children fed and prepared for school, who disciplined him. She scolded him: if Earl’s behavior, which verged on the criminal—“I was on the path to the penitentiary”—required her to bail him out, it would be unfair to his siblings, “who didn’t make trouble, to take what little money we made and carry it down to the jailhouse and pay fines,” she told a reporter for Ebony in 1978. “I always told them I would go my limit to get them something to eat and clothes to put on their backs, but I would borrow a dime from nobody to get them out of jail.”

  Today, a blown-up photo of Earl and his mother hangs in Earl Campbell’s office. Earl, along with his brothers and his sons, bears a close resemblance to her: high, soft cheeks, a broad forehead, soft brown eyes, a wide nose, bright smile. The athletic features are rounded out a little now, the hair more salt than pepper. He still wears the full beard of his playing days. He likes to keep his mouth doubly occupied: while he talks, he chews on some barbecue or spits tobacco juice into a red Solo cup or sucks a lollipop.

  People have Googled whether Earl Campbell is still alive. And yet, he’s right there: popping up to defend the performance of the University of Texas’s first black head football coach, waving his hand from a banquet table at a fund-raiser for his son’s multiple sclerosis foundation, appearing at a Houston Hall of Fame event, or getting back pats at the “Sober Bowl,” an annual get-together to encourage athletes to get clean.

  For this book, he offered limited cooperation, making himself available, ultimately, for a pair of interviews—as well as generously providing introductions to several of his family members and friends. The book draws on those encounters as well as on a vast number of firsthand accounts, in-person interviews, boxes upon boxes of memos and long-ago correspondence, faded notes, old newspaper clippings, and other primary-source material about Earl Campbell, Tyler, the University of Texas, the Houston Oilers, and so on. He was perhaps understandably wary of a journalist’s capitalizing, however modestly, on his life. The kid who told recruiters that he was not for sale was also savvy enough as an adult to license his name to a successful sausage brand, and hesitant to give it away for free to a reporter. His decision to talk with me about his experiences of desegregation and football, but less so about his wider career, reflects his natural reticence. Despite the Paul Bunyan reputation, Earl Campbell in many ways retains the shyness that marked his youth. He has long been deflective. As a pro, he encouraged reporters cornering him in the locker room to interview the blockers who had opened holes for him. “I don’t think I talk enough to be a team leader,” he said. “I’m just not that guy.” Even as far back as high school, when he was obviously the star of the team, his loyal lead blocker thought of him as a “follower.” “Earl had to be led at times,” said the high school teammate. “That made me a better ballplayer—I wanted to do a much better job to help him accomplish what he could.” Campbell has always possessed a sly, countrified sense of humor. Quiet and self-serious, he wasn’t beyond a prank. One night, after his Oiler road-trip roommate Conway Hayman, a 295-pound offensive lineman, had drifted off to sleep, Campbell filled a series of Styrofoam cups a quarter of the way with tobacco juice and placed them on the floor of their hotel room. Then he shut out the lights. When Hayman woke up to use the bathroom at night, Campbell suppressed giggles till he broke out with all-out laughter when Hayman stumbled into the booby trap.

  But the public diffidence added to the perception that he was a brawny bumpkin. The embarrassing ravages of football, the natural tightness of his family, a history of panic attacks, the increasing burdens of celebrity—today, at functions, older men constantly regale him with memories of his play, and he generously smiles and extends a warm, knobby hand—and, finally, the man’s small-town nature have left him seemingly withdrawn. As if protecting himself and his name, he can be mercurial with journalists, eager to speak up one moment, hard to reach another. “You work to get a status in life,” Earl Campbell once said about the isolation of celebrity. “You think, if I could just get this one into the end zone. One problem with getting it into the end zone that nobody ever thinks about, though: it’s pretty damn lonesome after you get it in. Everybody that helped you get it in, eventually you move away from them. You’ve got to be very careful to keep it to where all of you are like one little family.”

  Now, underneath that photo of Ann Campbell, he sits at the head of a long oak table in his office in a Craftsman bungalow in central Austin. A mess of posters—he and Walter Payton, both helmeted, enjoying a laugh while walking on a field together, circa 1980—is waiting to be autographed. His secretary, his son Tyler, a handsome, slimmed-down, smaller version of his father—he also played football, at San Diego State, before a multiple sclerosis diagnosis sidelined a potential pro career—won’t usher you into his father’s chambers until Earl is situated behind the table, his famous, battered legs hidden from sight. A folded walker, tennis balls on the feet, leans in the corner. To maintain the appearance of a dynastic continuity of power, royal courts used to seat a dummy on the throne after one king died and before the next was crowned. The King is dead! Long live the King! And as you come in the door, because you haven’t seen him take his place and because that face is so familiar, the immediate, instinctive feeling is that a simulacrum of Earl Campbell had somehow been assembled and placed there in homage to a long-ago gridiron hero. Then of course, he speaks, and because of his greatness, because of his shyness, because of the ways his kids guard him and his legacy, you have the idea that you’re having an audience with a wide-shouldered monarch who sits in some kind of exile.

  “The goal was get out of the rose fields, and not end up at Tyler Pipe,” he says now, explaining the very basic aim for a young Earl Campbell.

  Was he born with the wrong name—had his parents had some other name in mind for him? “Not that I can figure,” he said, as if the notion never crossed his mind.

  Even as a twenty-one-year-old college junior, Earl Campbell was savvy about, and, in his easygoing way, floated over, the racial tension that bedeviled his hometown. “The relationships between the different skins are not very good in Tyler, you know what I mean?” he explained to a reporter in 1976. “I’ve got a lot of friends of both skins. It doesn’t take much for me to get along with people. I mean, someone can step on my toes and I continue to get along.” Today, Campbell remains shaped by the rural Baptist upbringing that encouraged him to see the best in people. And yet, as a middle-aged African American man who has endured his share of indignities, even as a celebrity, he smarts from his treatment.

  He chews on this for a bit. In a discussion of whether his blackness has worked against him, he wonders aloud why his face doesn’t appear on billboards in his hometown. “I’d love to do commercials for a car dealership,” he says. And then a broad smile: “Let that be known.”

 
He becomes serious again. “You’d think that Earl Campbell has a business in Tyler. They say, ‘We’ll give you a street.’” There’s now an Earl Campbell Parkway in Tyler. “As if it’s enough to say thank you. ‘That’s all you get and be grateful for it.’ It’s a confusing puzzle for a man sixty years old.”

  He strokes his giant knuckles across his cheek, like Marlon Brando, and his answers suggest a worldliness stretching beyond the narrow county roads that bounded his childhood neighborhood. “Ninety-nine percent of black men growing up in North Tyler would never have visited Pittsburgh or Cincinnati”—homes of two AFC rivals of the Houston Oilers—“or even Austin,” he says. “Goddamn: Most of them wouldn’t have gotten out of Tyler.”

  In a sense, this was Campbell’s version of the Great Migration, the same mass twentieth-century movement that saw millions of African Americans head to the cities of the North or the West Coast. In her magisterial The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson sums up the Great Migration plainly: “They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.” “I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off,” Richard Wright wrote in Black Boy, his autobiographical novel about growing up in the South. “Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.” The Campbells, tied to their modest plot of roses, coping with the vicissitudes of their lives, were not among those who joined Wright. But Earl Campbell’s remarkable ability to run with a ball altered his family’s trajectory just as much as any relocation to the North might have. And if he strayed from that path? The stakes were laid out starkly in The Courting of Marcus Dupree, Willie Morris’s 1983 book about an outstanding high school football player in another part of the South. Morris recounts that a college recruiter told him that if Dupree “breaks his leg this season and never plays again, he’ll be just another colored boy from a small town in Mississippi.”

  Football, which he took up in junior high, and a dose of Baptist church (the family still attends Hopewell Baptist No. 1), where he began singing in the choir, helped straighten out the young Earl Campbell. “If you want to be someplace safe, be in church,” his mother was fond of saying. And so as he strode through the campus of the newly integrated John Tyler High as a sophomore in 1971, already powerfully built, sports appeared as a salvation; and though he didn’t think about it this way at the time, he eventually came to imagine himself as a divine tool of desegregation. “As we made our way through the racial battleground on our way to the bus each afternoon, I never dreamed the good Lord would choose me to help bring the blacks and whites of Tyler together,” Campbell would later say. “The football team was the Lord’s answer to Tyler’s integration problem, and He handed me the ball.”

  Of course, it wasn’t quite as simple as that.

  Campbell, like any great running back, had a lead blocker, in this case a balding federal judge doing his best to keep his weight down, William Wayne Justice. “If it hadn’t been for Justice, there wouldn’t have been an Earl,” said Gary Bledsoe, a civil rights attorney who is dean of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law in Houston.

  It was Justice, an activist liberal, who had issued the broad 1970 desegregation order. And it was Justice who, in that first year of the integration of John Tyler High School, just before Campbell arrived, presided over a dispute distinctive of East Texas’s mix of race, politics, and football: a case about the John Tyler High cheerleading squad.

  This part of Texas was nearly as obsessed with cheerleading as with football. The next town over from Tyler was Kilgore, where the famed Rangerettes, the Kilgore College drill team, were known to kick so high that they could leave lipstick on their knees as their shins brushed the brims of their cowboy hats and who swore by the motto “beauty knows no pain.” And the Rangerettes remained, after thirty years, all-white—though their renowned director had sworn she would be receptive to having a black member as soon as a qualified one tried out. (“Can you believe that bullshit?” said the sports columnist Cedric Golden, who was raised in Tyler—his family and the Campbells were friends—and whose wife grew up in Kilgore. “You can’t find a black girl who can dance?”) Cheerleading was about joy and about community spirit, and there was nothing so warming to some East Texas communities as an unbroken line of wholesome white girls lifting one leg and then the other, a smile stuck on their faces. Of course, cheerleading was also about football, and the two taken together were like Friday-night church.

  Historically, white cheer squads had rooted for white football teams, and black squads for black teams. As a consequence of the 1970 desegregation order, Emmett Scott, the black high school, named for a son of former slaves who grew up in Houston and became Booker T. Washington’s right-hand man, was shuttered, and most of its students and prospective students—including Earl Campbell—were sent to John Tyler High. About halfway through that first volatile year of busing, the administrators at John Tyler distributed ballots that identified the cheerleading tryout candidates by race—and required that students select four white cheerleaders and two black ones—despite the white-black ratio at the school being roughly 3–2. Incensed at the quota system, African American students staged a walkout. “We weren’t going for it,” said Linda Campbell, née Hamilton, Earl Campbell’s future sister-in-law. “We were sitting around trees on campus. The principals told us we had to leave, so we walked and stopped traffic and went to the Dairy Queen on Lincoln”—now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Earl Campbell was too young to be involved, but not his brother Alfred Ray—Linda’s future husband. About three-quarters of the African American students walked out; Alfred Ray wasn’t among them. “He knew my mother would disapprove of his participation in that type of demonstration,” Earl Campbell said. “Had I been at John Tyler at that time, I would not have joined for the same reason.” Linda Campbell said her family, too, had concerns of the sort that divided families between kids growing up in the 1960s and parents who grew up during Jim Crow. “My father was worried about me, about getting an education”—she said this last part with a little eyebrow raise; he himself was an alcoholic, a womanizer who left her mother, a domestic worker, with seven children, and returned only after she died from complications related to heart trouble and diabetes at the age of thirty-nine. “After a couple of days off, the black radio station told us [it was settled and] to go back.” But the administration, determined to stand its ground, decided to suspend all 200 protesters. The students, in turn, wise to the civil rights struggle, sued, claiming they had been unfairly penalized for exercising their rights of free assembly and speech.

  William Wayne Justice grew up in the 1920s in Athens, a farming town thirty-five miles west of Tyler, steeped in the law. His father, a politically connected East Texas attorney who was a friend of the future senator Ralph Yarborough’s parents, added his son’s name to his office stationery when the boy was just seven years old. Pages of the Southwestern Report, a legal publication, served as toilet paper in the family outhouse. Justice, who came of age during the Depression, grew to believe it was his job to help the marginalized. A particular incident from childhood stuck with him, one he was determined to address as a judge: a black boy wandering through his neighborhood stopped to play with Wayne, as he was known, and another boy. The mother of the playmate called her child back. “After awhile, he came back out and said that he couldn’t play with niggers. This little ol’ black kid, he just didn’t know what to make out of this. I imagine it just crushed him. He just slunk on home. That angered me.”

  Yet as a US Attorney, before his judgeship, Justice had, for practical reasons, mostly kept his feelings about race to himself as he cultivated friendships as an overweight, cigar-chomping head of the Tyler Rotary Club—a seemingly run-of-the-mill good old boy. Privately, he supported the landmark 1954 Brown decision, he told an interviewer in 1985, but added, “I would not have for the life of me let that be known out in the community, because I suppose that m
y law practice would have practically dissolved at that point . . . It was a question of economic and social preservation. You couldn’t have made it if you’d come out publicly in favor of the decision.”

  But the federal judgeship, handed to him by President Lyndon Baines Johnson at the behest of Yarborough, for whom Justice had campaigned as a teenager, lent him the cover he needed to express himself. “God-dang, when he got on that bench with a lifetime appointment, he turned into a tiger,” his former law partner once said.

  By the time of the desegregation case, Justice had presided over a dispute involving a Tyler Junior College rule barring “extreme hair styles.” The rule, adopted before the beginning of the fall semester in 1970, required male students to wear their hair above their eyebrows in front and above the shirt collars in back. Beards were prohibited, and sideburns could not drift below the earlobe. Moustaches had to be neatly trimmed. Trouble began when a professor refused to permit a twenty-year-old student to take a final exam in a government class because his hair was too long. Three students were then barred from registering at the college because their hair did not comply with regulations. Several plaintiffs, including a Vietnam veteran and a straight-A student, challenged the rule. The Tyler Junior College president and vice president testified that at educational conferences they had learned that long-haired male students led sit-ins and protests at other universities. (“Some of the administration were not what you would call raving liberals,” recalled Robert Peters, who, as a young man, was then teaching US history at the school.) As soon as the lawyers finished their arguments, Justice—who had worn a Beatles wig to court one day as a gibe directed at the defendants—ruled from the bench that the community college rule was unconstitutional. His published decision noted that thirty-seven of the thirty-nine delegates to the Constitutional Convention—the one in Philadelphia in 1776—would have been ineligible to participate under the college rules. The college administration’s “rationale apparently was that since long-haired students caused disruptions in other institutions of learning, all long-haired male students are potential troublemakers,” Justice observed in his opinion. “I am unwilling to accept a syllogism so perverse and jejune as this to justify the humiliating and demeaning restrictions which this regulation would place on the plaintiffs.”