Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  The streak continued. In the semifinals, played in Waco, Arlington Sam Houston fell to John Tyler 22–7; Campbell went for 166 yards, including one giant run in which he basically walked over a player who would become an all-conference defender in college. New bumper stickers began appearing around Tyler: “Thank You, Mrs. Campbell.”

  The state title game, against Austin’s John Reagan High—named for the postmaster general of the Confederacy—was in December, just before Christmas, at the Houston Astrodome, the very same stadium in which Earl Campbell would star, less than five years later, on his way to being named NFL Rookie of the Year. J. B. Smith, a part-time bus driver for Continental Trailways trying to supplement his income as a police detective, drove the John Tyler band to all the playoff games. “Campbell would say, ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir’ even to the bus drivers,” said Smith, who was in the stands for the championship game. “He was always humble.”

  The week ahead of the game, Lynn King got so banged up in a rodeo that he missed two days of practice. “A bull stepped on my head and put a big old knot on it,” he said. “Couldn’t get my dang helmet on.” Still, he made it on the field—and Campbell was not to be stopped. He ran for 164 yards in the 21–14 victory, including a run off left tackle in the fourth quarter that went for fifty-seven yards and, with fifty-three seconds left, the winning touchdown.

  It had been a remarkable playoff performance: more than 850 yards and eleven touchdowns in five games. One journalist said it was like Sherman’s march through Georgia. The newspapers dubbed Tyler’s unlikely championship win the “Rose City Miracle.”

  It was the only title game Campbell would ever win, and, perhaps, in his eyes, the game with the most social import. “I looked up into the stands and saw a sea of people, blacks and whites together, jumping up and down, cheering wildly hugging one another—celebrating their football team,” he once said. Whites certainly saw it as a confirming moment about harmony in their community. Nelson Clyde IV, the scion of a Tyler newspaper business, whose wife, mother, grandmother, and daughters have been anointed Rose Queen, and who himself served in the Cannoneers, the successor to the Robert E. Lee Rebel Guard, likes to call Tyler “Mayberry on steroids.” That integrated championship team, led by Campbell, “had a great impact on how we saw our community,” he said. Joan Brooks, an African American woman who taught business at John Tyler, described that championship run in a slightly different way: “We got used to a bunch of white women hugging us that year.” The victory “was able to at least paper over some of the hard times that followed the desegregation order,” said David Barron, the former band member who was just ahead of Campbell at John Tyler High and who later became the managing editor of Dave Campbell’s Texas Football magazine. “But as time passed, things pretty much went back to the way they were.”

  That night, the team got home about ten. Lynn King and the team manager headed over to Earl’s for a party—the only two white guys there. “We even had some beer, and Mama didn’t fuss about the drinking,” said King. “I guess she felt it was a special occasion. As well as I remember, Earl didn’t drink much, but I know I did.”

  The next day, December 23, 1973, the Campbell boys squeezed into King’s beat-up Pinto to go Christmas shopping. People wanted to give them things for free. And what all of Tyler now knew, that Earl Campbell was arguably the best football player to pass through those parts, was about to hit all of Texas. Six days later, the new issue of Texas Football magazine was published, with a picture of Campbell rolling against Arlington Sam Houston. Over the previous summer, he had received only a brief mention, deep in the pages of the magazine; now he was touted as “the most coveted schoolboy back” in the country. Among the scouts and coaches from major football programs at the Astrodome for that championship game was a charming forty-nine-year-old with a boxy face. Darrell Royal, the storied head coach at the University of Texas, realized that he had less than a month to convince Campbell to become a Longhorn—and for all Royal’s success, he knew his own redemption depended on it.

  PART II

  AUSTIN

  One afternoon in the fall of 1966, Ken Dabbs, the thirty-one-year-old assistant football coach at Sweeny High, situated in a speck of an oil town a little over an hour southwest of Houston, was giving Elmo Wright, his star receiver, a lift home in his green ’39 Chevy pickup when he asked him where he would like to go to college.

  Wright, the second oldest of seven kids, had had no expectation of attending university. Neither of his parents had gone to college, nor had his older brother. And he genuinely didn’t think of himself as a football player, let alone one good enough to get a scholarship. Before his junior year of high school, he hadn’t played a single down; he had played saxophone in the school band and piano at church, and his only dream was to perform in a jazz club in New York City. “I was just going to be happy just to finish high school,” he said. But after getting crosswise with the band director at Carver High School, the all-black school he was forced to attend through his junior year, he took up football, persuaded by a friend who used to cut Elmo’s hair and then play catch with him. He found, to his coaches’ delight, that he had breakneck speed on the field. Wright thinks he ran so fast only because of a deathly fear of being injured by a tackler. That terror, of a slender musician suddenly in a football helmet, pushed him to greatness. Wright set high school touchdown records; in one game, he scored five of them, three on offense and two on interceptions returned as a defensive back.

  Sweeny High, named, like the town, for a Tennessean who had settled the area 130 years earlier with his 250 slaves, was newly integrated and undefeated, and would go on to win the state championship—thanks, in large part, to the talent and work of Wright and other black players who joined the team their senior year. There were thirteen of them, and every one of them got a scholarship to play football in college. Not that there weren’t adjustments. Dabbs remembers that the new players at the start of the season tended to wear their shirttails out, and football protocol at Sweeny called for the players to have their shirts tucked in. So one day Dabbs, who is white, talked to an assistant principal—Everett Gee, who had been principal at Carver—to ask his advice about how to approach the players. “He said, ‘Coach, listen to me. You set the standards. You keep the standards where you want them, don’t ever lower your standards for our people. We’ve worked all of our lives to get across these railroad tracks, and we ain’t going back. You want them to wear a coat and tie on game day, they’ll find a way. Don’t worry about it: they want to be here.’” All their lives, their all-black school bus had made a left at the Y as it headed into town, into the poorer black community, to a beloved school that lacked a good field, first-rate instruments, or current textbooks; now it took a right at the Y, into the white neighborhood to Sweeny High. As at Earl Campbell’s John Tyler High, the story goes that as the Sweeny team began piling on victories, black and white fans who once sat apart started huddling together in the middle of the grandstands.

  Wright, who grew up in a modest house by the Brazos River, his father a construction worker and a lay minister, could have played college ball anywhere—he had already received offers from as far away as Notre Dame. But as a top-notch student, he had been up to Austin the previous summer for Boys State, a camp run by the American Legion to inculcate impressionable kids in the workings of government, and had liked the place immediately.

  “I’d love to go to the University of Texas,” he told his coach that day in the pickup. “I’d like to be first Afro-American to play there.”

  The following morning, Dabbs went to his boss, head coach Ed Wagner, and told him what Wright had said.

  “Why don’t you just call Darrell Royal?” the head coach said.

  “Well, why don’t you call him?” said Dabbs, intimidated by the prospect of phoning Royal, the head coach of the UT Longhorns. At the time, Royal, a thin, square-faced, dimple-chinned man, forty-two years old, had twice won the national championship. Hi
s photo, with his lake-blue eyes and softly parted hair, had held the cover of national magazines, and across football-crazed Texas he was worshipped.

  “No, why you don’t call him?” Wagner responded. He made it sound like it was as easy as asking a neighbor for a cup of flour, though he was clearly daunted himself.

  And so Dabbs called Royal’s office in Bellmont Hall on the University of Texas campus, and his secretary came on the phone. “I’d like to talk to Coach Royal about a recruit,” Dabbs said, and knowing that locating a top-notch recruit was like striking oil, she put Dabbs through to Royal. Five decades later, at a café north of UT, Dabbs still remembered the particulars of the conversation: “I told him who I was and what I was calling about. ‘Coach Dabbs, I’ll tell you this: We’ll certainly evaluate him and we’ll check on him, and I will get back to you.’”

  Royal quietly brought Wright up to Austin to look him over. It was the end of a long day, and Wright remembered the hallowed coach as strikingly noncommittal, even unenthusiastic, though the coach was clearly considering the prospect of integrating the team. “I come into his office, and he’s a little ragged, slouched down in his chair. I was wide open. He explained to me that it’s going to be tough. ‘You’re going to have to be like Jackie Robinson.’ To which I said: ‘Who is Jackie Robinson?’”—Wright laughs at this point in the story, at his own lack of a sense of the moment as a teenager. “I wasn’t into baseball or football or black history; I was into Miles Davis.” Of Royal, he said, “I didn’t get the impression he was really trying, compared to Notre Dame and all the other recruiters.” For decades, he looked back at that meeting and thought perhaps Royal’s indifference had nothing to do with race: “Maybe it was just because he was tired,” he remembered thinking.

  In fact, Darrell Royal—or maybe the institution or its donors—was unprepared to add a black player to UT’s showpiece football squad. And so, a few weeks after Dabbs initially contacted Royal, the Longhorns’ head coach called the young coach back: “First of all I want to tell you that what you described to us is outstanding. He’ll have an opportunity to make it somewhere. He’s the real deal, grades and everything. But unfortunately, at this stage of the game we’re not ready to take that step.”

  “I remember having to tell his mother,” said Dabbs. “I told them: ‘I just don’t think they have a scholarship available.’ I didn’t lie. That was a political way to do it. They probably knew. But he was never bitter.” Dabbs drove Wright to Houston to visit the Astrodome and arranged for him to play at the University of Houston—he suggested to Wright’s parents it would be helpful to go to school not too far away. As it happened, Wright’s first start on the Houston varsity football team was against the Longhorns. He remembered getting a handoff on a reverse: “I was zipping and zapping, and I bounced outside at the line of scrimmage. And it was weird. I remember I was kind of looking for Coach Royal. And then, as I went up the field, I remember thinking, ‘This is some nice grass, right here.’ We never had grass like that at Carver.” That 1968 game ended in a tie, 20–20.

  Wright, who would be named an all-American receiver with the Cougars, gained fame for his practice, first in college and then in the pros, of high-stepping his way into the end zone. “This was after 1968, the year Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated,” Wright said.

  We had just integrated our team, and you can imagine playing against Georgia and Ole Miss. So when I started to dance, there was this mindset of a lot of people at the time, and my teammates were telling me, “You’re crazy. You’re going to get assassinated.” That wasn’t the protocol. You were supposed to act like you’ve been there. But I was just so happy to score. It was the culmination of a lot of hard work . . . We were studying Don Quixote, and he saw things differently. So when I was in the end zone, I was thinking, “The fans love me.” They were throwing things at me, but I pretended as if they were throwing flowers. They had never seen anything like that. I was just so happy to be in the end zone, and I had so much conditioning in my legs, so that’s what I did.

  Eventually, Wright starred professionally for the Kansas City Chiefs, and after his football days were over, he worked as a policy aide in Houston-area government. If ever there was a person, in other words, who had the composure, talent, and smarts to integrate football at the University of Texas—a modern Don Quixote who could dance to the end zone before hostile crowds—it was Elmo Wright. And on paper, Darrell Royal could have taken that step—in 1963, the UT Board of Regents authorized the “full integration” of the university’s dormitories and athletics programs. But the UT Longhorns remained white: his 1969 squad was the last all-white team to win a national championship, and Royal’s varsity team remained free of African Americans until 1970.

  Dabbs, however, had not heard the last of the famed UT head coach. Seven years after informing the small-town football assistant that he would not take Wright, Royal called again. Dabbs, it turned out, had an important role to play in the integration of Longhorn football, the illustrious career of Earl Christian Campbell, and nothing less than the salvation of Darrell Royal.

  From the white-and-gray reading room at the University of Texas’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, you can see the north end of Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium, bulging like a giant cruise liner coming into port. And even in the comfort of the air-conditioning on a summer day in Austin so hot it feels as if you could bake chocolate chip cookies on the pavement outside, even as the stadium shimmers in the distance, reading confidential memos outlining how, over the years, UT resisted integration leaves you with a dizzy, time-warp feeling, as if suddenly being struck with heatstroke.

  At the University of Texas, there was no conspicuous blocking-the-schoolhouse-door moment, of the sort involving governors in other states that played out on black-and-white televisions. Instead, in a scheme nefarious in its bureaucratic smarminess, a steady, quiet stream of paperwork stymied the admittance of African Americans to the university and, when the institution’s hand was forced by the courts, the participation, at every stage, of African Americans in student life. The very last bastion of whiteness at UT to integrate was the football team. In their starkness, preserved on beautifully fragile pieces of onionskin paper, carbon copies that were part of the machinery of segregation, the documents make you lean back from the desk to which librarians bring boxes marked “UT President’s Office Records” containing ancient folders marked “Negroes,” and whisper, to no one in particular: “Jesus.”

  The missives and memos run back and forth between the nine members of the board of regents, the all-white, nearly always male overseers of university policy. Wealthy oilmen, attorneys, and bankers, they were the appointees of, and typically the biggest campaign contributors to, segregationist governors whose political constituency tended to be the conservative, traditional precincts of the state. Authors of the correspondence include the university chancellor, hired and fired by the regents and charged with executing policy across the far-flung state university campuses; the university president, who likewise served at the pleasure of the regents and who watched over the flagship campus in Austin; other university officials, including deans of admissions, chairs of departments, and so on, who posed questions about the ins and outs of integration; progressive students and faculty intent on pushing the regents to liberalize their policies; and finally, alumni and other residents of Texas who generally wrote in to oppose, in cranky and hateful language, the presence of African American students on campus, in their old dorms, or on their beloved football team.

  These records reveal regents who appear more concerned with not getting ahead of public opinion or overstepping the expectations of the legislature, which provided money for the operations of the university, than with promoting any genuine educational ideal or the university’s role in encouraging free conversation—those interests appear not at all. Instead, in a moral cop-out, the university administrators couched their anxieties as a desire to avoid civi
l unrest.

  On the face of it, the chronology is simple. The correspondence travels quickly through the 1930s and 1940s—when African Americans were barred from taking classes at UT—to 1954, when the Supreme Court ordered integration with “all deliberate speed,” to 1956, when the first African American undergraduates were admitted to the university, through 1963, when the regents ordered dormitories and athletics to be integrated, through 1970, when the university finally admitted a black player to the varsity squad, to 1974, when Earl Campbell stepped on the field while his fellow black students complained of being marginalized on campus. The excuses used to bar African Americans from the football team, long after the school had been forced by courts to integrate, illuminate what we might think of as the rationale and logistics of apartheid. In its details, the justification of the racist, two-tier system was characterized by banality, almost practicality: regents argued that integration would leave students unhappy; segregated housing and eating facilities were too big a challenge for traveling teams; no decent African American athletes were also good students; having integrated teams would make it harder to recruit good white athletes; UT had an agreement with other Southwest Conference schools not to integrate. “That racism was subtle,” said Nick Kralj, who attended UT in the early 1960s before serving as an aide to Governor John Connally and as a confidant to Frank Erwin, the powerful regents chair of the 1960s and 1970s who was one of Royal’s chief allies. “It wasn’t the Ku Klux Klan. These were country-club types. And they didn’t want their country club integrated—or their football team or their school.”