Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  This, at least, was how white teachers and coaches perceived the turbulence of integration. What was it like for a black teenager? For Campbell, a feeling of discombobulation, compounded by going from being the oldest kid in school to one of the youngest, and having to prove himself now as a teen, manifested itself as a kind of indifference. Nelson was unimpressed. Campbell was still undisciplined: because he wanted to play with his brothers on defense, when he was occasionally trotted out as running back in practice, he would intentionally fumble the ball. And in the fall of 1971, in his tenth-grade year and his first at John Tyler, Earl Campbell, destined to be one of the great football players of all time, was relegated like other newbies to the junior varsity team. In a sense, this liberated Campbell; he was not under the direct thumb of Nelson and could assert himself on the field. He flourished. With Campbell leading the squad, the B team began the year 5–0; the varsity went 0–5. Then, midway through the season, the starting varsity linebacker went down with an injury, and Nelson called up Campbell.

  In his first game, against Longview, Campbell notched eight sacks. “No one knew who he was,” said David Barron, who was ahead of Campbell at John Tyler High and was at the game to visit friends still in the band. You didn’t go to John Tyler games at that point to watch football as much as to hang out—if you went at all. The previous season, the squad had notched a 3–7 mark—and that, in turn, was better than the 2–8 record from the year before that. “Our band was much more accomplished than our football team,” said Barron, who had played trombone. Before desegregation, “there was not a lot of talent coming into John Tyler.” But now, in the stands, Barron saw something he had never seen before, something that made him sit up and stop palling around. “Somebody was getting across the line of scrimmage at the snap and getting to Jeb Blount”—the Longview quarterback, who was good enough to one day play in the NFL—“who was still pulling back from center.” Barron happened to be witnessing the first public glimpse of one of history’s most dominating football careers. Campbell was such a better athlete than the kids he was up against that he passed through the opposing offensive linemen as smoothly as a current of water washes through weeds. With Campbell on board, the varsity squad finished 4–0–1; despite playing only five games, Campbell was honored as the region’s newcomer of the year.

  If not for desegregation, Earl Campbell and his younger twin brothers, excellent football players themselves, would have played at Emmett Scott—if it had still existed—and John Tyler surely would have remained mired in mediocrity. “White [high school] coaches were privately salivating at integration. They wanted to have all that athleticism and speed,” Michael Hurd, the author of Thursday Night Lights, a history of black high school football during segregation, said. “All of a sudden schools that couldn’t score a touchdown were winning a championship.”

  The following fall, his junior year in high school, marked Campbell’s maturation as an adult and as a player. He reached his full height, five-eleven—not quite tall, but certainly muscular. He had the head of a Roman senator—big, imposing, large featured. And he was strong; his teammates shied away from trying to tackle him in practice. “We decided to see if he could carry the football without fumbling it,” said Leon Van Alstine, one of Nelson’s assistant coaches. The “only two people who would really hit him were [his brothers] Tim and Steve.”

  Nelson had made him a two-way player, which at first further alienated Campbell, who was bent on being a defensive great. An episode off the field led Campbell to think more closely about his commitment to school and football. One Thursday, following a morning pep rally ahead of the big rivalry game against Robert E. Lee, Campbell and some teammates skipped class to hang with friends in another part of town. Nelson decided to hold them out of the game—and gave them a tongue-lashing for their irresponsibility. It was a complicated moment: conventionally, of course, a coach chews out his players, but Corky Nelson was a white coach—Campbell’s first white coach—and here he was admonishing a handful of black teenagers, including the team’s star. But something about Nelson’s straitlaced ways—“If you score a touchdown, people are going to know it,” he had once told Campbell; “You don’t have to show out”—fit Campbell’s workaday approach. On a cold, rainy Friday night, the team squeaked out a 6–0 victory even without Campbell, but he felt some guilt. He had let down the John Tyler Lions, the twelve thousand fans who had come to the rivalry game to see him play—and his mother. For her part, Ann Campbell told Nelson that it was his right to suspend Campbell, but to leave the lecturing to her. “Momma Campbell, she kept tight rein on those kids,” said Van Alstine.

  Ultimately, the team finished 8–2, missing out on the playoffs. That summer, in an astute move that recognized that an inspired Campbell could be the star player on the team, Nelson hired LaCroix as an assistant. Earl later said he considered the hiring of his mentor part of God’s plan; Tyler fans would come to think of the choice as heaven-sent.

  If you wander into Tyler Commercial Kitchens, a restaurant supply business that sits just past the Walmart Super Center as you head west out of town, you will invariably find a hefty sixty-two-year-old man with wild shoulder-length hair matted beneath a camouflage gimme cap and a silvery goatee on his chin, wearing a denim blue shirt and cargo shorts. His shoes rest on the foot flaps of his decked-out electronic wheelchair, and he plies a little joystick as he spins along the aisles full of chrome-plated appliances. Running vertically up both his knees are three-inch purple scars. This is Lynn King. When I talked to him on the phone, I was honestly not sure whether he was a black man or a white man, and was too embarrassed to ask—he told me about growing up working class and country in an area not far from Swan, the small community that was home to the Campbells, and I had been told by a former coach that the best way to learn about Earl Campbell and John Tyler football was to talk to King.

  He is white. In his pine-paneled office in the back there is a hospital bed crammed in across from the desk. The only decoration on the walls is a single framed black-and-white photo, cut from a magazine, of two young men executing a running play in a football game. One, Earl Campbell, is clutching a football with two hands; ahead of him, an even larger person plunges upfield, looking, evidently, for someone to clobber. “Power football,” reads the caption, “as supplied by the blocking of fullback Lynn King and the big thunder of super back Earl Campbell, pays off big for Tyler.”

  When you tell King that you have come to talk about Earl Campbell, he warmly grasps your hand with both of his and stands up out of his wheelchair as if he has been called again to block. He shows you that picture in the back and tells you that he never asked for Earl’s autograph. You take the framed photo off the wall and look at the back. A flowing script says: “To My Friend, Lynn, Peace and Love, Earl Campbell.” “Earl had the quickest feet,” says King, whom Tylerites described at the time as “the white guy blocking for that black boy.” “There was no sweeter feeling than setting a block, hitting the ground, rolling over, and still see him running,” he says.

  On the face of it, King and Campbell could not have been more different. King was a hell-raiser and goat roper whose friends were mostly into Future Farmers of America. When he wasn’t playing football, he was prepping for the rodeo, riding broncos and bulls. “Lynn King was the epitome of the redneck white guy and Earl, of course, was on the other end of the spectrum,” Nelson once said. In some ways that is obviously true. But Campbell was country, too—everyone who lived poor outside Tyler knew something about handling hay. King and Campbell had spent all their football time together during their junior year, and as senior year approached, they became close friends off the field, too. King began giving Campbell lifts around town in his Pinto and then eating meals at Ann Campbell’s place—he even stayed overnight sometimes. Nelson said the friendship was key to the team’s success, making it easier for uneasy people to get together: “A strong bond developed between them, and that was the turning point for our team. That
’s when the team came together.”

  Ahead of the fall 1973 season, Campbell’s senior campaign, the team was taken lightly by pigskin prognosticators. John Tyler was returning just six starters, so Dave Campbell’s Texas Football magazine, the state bible for all things gridiron, picked the team to finish fourth in its district. But under the radar, the team was gelling—bonding on the field as the players sweated together through late-summer two-a-day practices, and off the field as teammates gave Earl Campbell and his younger twin brothers rides. “No big thing,” said King. “They just weren’t fortunate enough to have a vehicle.” Not only could Ann Campbell not afford a car for her teenage sons to share, but the boys didn’t even have luggage. When Earl and his brothers prepared for away games, they packed their uniforms into Brookshire’s supermarket brown paper bags.

  His teammates had come to realize there was something special about Campbell. “Earl wasn’t Earl until his senior year,” said King. He and Campbell roomed together on the road, the only black and white players to do so. But that August, during the swampy summer two-a-days in the Pit—the John Tyler High practice fields—Nelson decided that Campbell would play only offense during the upcoming season. The decision appeared to make little sense—Campbell was the team’s best defensive player. A University of Texas defensive coordinator who had been sizing Campbell up for recruitment called him the best high school linebacker he had ever seen. “He could have played at any college or university or pro team at middle linebacker,” Leon Van Alstine recalled, still sounding a wistful note about the havoc Earl Campbell might have wreaked. In his junior year, Campbell weighed a muscled two hundred pounds. “He would body-slam a ball carrier,” said one high school opponent. “He was so strong he would just pick him off the ground and throw him down. There wasn’t a back who could outrun him, so he was all over the field.” But Nelson wanted him to be crisp on offense. “He couldn’t score points on defense,” Nelson observed.

  Earl was unsure: “I didn’t like Corky before my senior year,” Campbell joked in 1979, when he was a pro football player, back in Tyler to dedicate a new gym. “He came to my house and told me they were going to switch me from middle linebacker to running back. Thank God for Corky Nelson, he was smarter than I was. He knew my future was at running back, not linebacker.”

  The playbook was shorn down to two plays, said John Tyler High quarterback Larry Hartsfield: “Earl left; Earl right.” It was hard for other players to get the ball—even as defenses put virtually all eleven players on the line of scrimmage to stop Campbell. “I’d be so wide open, I’d do jumping jacks in the end zone,” Johnson, the wide receiver, told a reporter years later. “It would be on the film. Corky would say, ‘If you do another jumping jack, you’ll never play another down for this football team.’”

  Campbell played special teams and in goal-line defense situations, too: the team blocked an astonishing thirty punts that year. Tim Alexander, who played for rival Robert E. Lee, remembers that as the upback in the punting formation—the guy who is a kind of firewall between the center and the punter—his job as soon as the ball was snapped was to “run straight at Campbell like I was in heat”: “We figured that was the only way to stop him from blocking punts.”

  As the team racked up wins, Tylerites, black and white, began piling into the stadium to cheer on the Lions. It’s impossible to overstate how important football was (and remains) in this part of Texas. Basketball was still the precinct of the Lakers and the Celtics—no Texas team made it to the NBA finals until 1981—and major league baseball was relatively new to Texas. Football was king. The University of Texas Longhorns had won the national championship in 1969, and the Dallas Cowboys had won their first Super Bowl in 1972.

  This corner of East Texas was especially football obsessed. Jeb Blount—the quarterback Campbell had sacked eight times in his varsity debut—claimed to have developed his passing accuracy while herding cattle on his parents’ ranch. He would frighten the lead bull by nailing him in the forehead with a football, causing all the other cattle to follow. That John Tyler team “was something for us whites to be excited about,” said Sam Kidd, whose family ran a prominent Smith County rose nursery. Before that 1973 season, perhaps the last time Kidd had been at the school district football stadium—today named for Earl Campbell—was for a James Brown concert in the late 1960s with his wife. They were among the few white people at the show. But now, in a sign of what Earl Campbell and the Lions meant to Tyler, fully mixed crowds were showing up to games. Even people who were opposed to the desegregation order came out to cheer. “Everybody in Tyler, blacks and whites, got behind Earl Campbell,” said Kidd. “He was our hero. It was a weird feeling to have a black hero. He was the first one.” The observation echoes what Yarborough, the senator, had once said: “People in deep East Texas have told me, ‘Ralph, football’s the main thing here that’s done more to end friction between whites and blacks, and more to bring about integration of schools, than all of the courts put together.’”

  After the sting of missing the playoffs the previous year, the 1973 John Tyler squad worked desperately to close out each regular season game. Against Texas High, for example, Campbell threw a seventy-three-yard option pass to ensure a 21–16 victory. Before the season-ending game against John Tyler, coaches at Robert E. Lee, studying 8 mm game film, found the Lions had a tell: the spatial relationship between King and Campbell in the backfield as they got into their stances was a tip-off about which way Campbell would take the ball. “We knew the plays they were about to run, and we still couldn’t stop him,” said Alexander, who also played linebacker for Lee. John Tyler ended up crushing its rival.

  As Earl was gaining his stride on the football field, his academic career plodded along. He struggled to a C average through much of school. One coach for an opposing program grumbled that Campbell “can’t read, can’t write, and can’t fail.” “My mother asks me if it hurts to hear that,” Campbell told a reporter while still in high school. “I just tell her Jesus Christ had it worse than me. He died on the cross.” It’s a remarkable—and, in its winking irony, self-deprecating—rejoinder, and one that speaks to how he was approaching deification in the town of Tyler. Campbell learned at an early stage to speak about himself with the third-person remove of a celebrity athlete: “[Academics] didn’t always interest me a great deal. I played a little too much. I can make it in college. The only thing Earl has to do is apply himself to his studies like he does on the football field.”

  Top college football programs appeared unworried—he had plenty of offers to tour campuses. Campbell’s performance in the playoffs further ramped up interest. In the district championship game against Plano, Campbell gained 219 yards on twenty-four carries, including one in which he carried six Plano players on his back fifteen yards before finally falling under their weight. Campbell scored three times, and John Tyler won 34–0.

  Before the regional final against Campbell and his squad, Coach W. T. Stapler of Conroe High had decided “to ignore the pass and put nine people on the line to challenge him.” For most of the game, the strategy worked well for Conroe—the top-ranked team in the state—and Campbell was even knocked unconscious early in the second half, missing most of the third and fourth quarters. But with his Tyler team down 7–3, he came back for the last drive—this was a time long before “concussion protocol” became a phrase known even to casual watchers of the game. Of the final nine plays, Campbell got the ball eight times. On one third down, he threw an eighteen-yard pass to Hartsfield, his quarterback. Defending near its end zone, Conroe stacked the line of scrimmage to stymie Campbell. It didn’t matter: from the five-yard line, Stapler observed afterward, “he carried my whole team into the end zone.” Later, Stapler and his staff studied films of the run. “It took 10 different hits to put him on the ground. I’m not saying all 10 tacklers hit him. But they did have shots at him. He ran past two tacklers at the line of scrimmage. Then he spun and bounced around till somebody else got a shot a
t him. I know it sounds impossible, but we’ve got the film to prove it.” Campbell’s performance in the Conroe game made him the consensus top running back recruit in the country.

  “Every Monday morning during the playoffs,” said Van Alstine, “there’d be scouts there from all over. The further we went along, the more people were there Monday morning. Kids didn’t even want to talk to news media or anybody else. They’d go the other way.” The postseason tear continued, even as teams were determined to stifle Campbell. In the quarterfinals, Tyler beat Fort Worth Arlington Heights 34–12, with Campbell logging 189 yards on eighteen carries, including four touchdowns. In a sense, Fort Worth’s gang-tackling was successful—until Campbell made it into the open field. Two of his eighteen carries totaled 138 yards.

  Among that game’s spectators was Ray Renfro, a former Cleveland Brown wide receiver whose son, a speedster named Mike Renfro, was playing cornerback and wideout for the Arlington Heights squad. On one play—one that would make Ray Renfro realize that Campbell had not only power but also speed—Campbell got loose up the middle, leaving it up to his son Mike to make the tackle. “Mike hesitated for a moment and lost his angle on him,” he later told a reporter. “Earl was gone. No one caught him. I thought then he had the potential to be one of the best.” What he saw that day put Ray Renfro in mind of his old teammate Jim Brown—at that time the greatest running back in the history of the NFL. “Jim was more of an upright runner and he didn’t punish tacklers like Earl does,” he said, in what amounted to an extensive scouting report. “He’s the most punishing runner I’ve ever seen. Jim seldom ran over defensive backs if he didn’t have to, but Earl runs over anybody who gets in his way—backs, linebackers, or linemen. Jim had sprinter’s speed, but he didn’t have Earl’s power. At the same time,” he added, “a lot of people don’t realize how quick Earl is.”