Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  Mielly wrote that on November 19, 1963—eleven years before Earl Campbell joined the Longhorns. His inquiry continues: “Also can the star negro of a future Texas football team be taken home and accepted over weekends in some of our best homes?”

  Chancellor Harry Ransom replied to Mielly and copied Royal: “You can be sure that Coach Royal and his staff will pursue a moderate, wise, and equitable policy in the conduct of all athletic affairs at the University. I am quite certain that the Regents did not intend and Coach Royal does not intend to ‘search the nation for football material’ with any such purpose as you have in mind.”

  Yet not all regents were roadblocks to equality. Wales Madden, who, at the age of thirty-three, was the youngest-ever regent when he was seated in 1960, pushed for the integration order—he was partly inspired, he said, by a memory he still carries with him. As a five- or six-year-old in Amarillo in the early 1930s, he persuaded his parents to let him go to church with the black couple who worked for the family; he can still recall the smell of the dirt and straw beneath the tent and the “simplicity of equalness.” From the law office he still visits, at age ninety, in Amarillo, he said, “I can assure you about my views and Darrell Royal’s views on giving anyone a chance who had been proven fit for the position—color did not matter. I was pretty broad-minded, as you can imagine, and Darrell was just not prejudiced against the black people.”

  Whether or not you believe Madden’s assurances, that November 1963, after the regents announced their decision to integrate university athletics, the education reporter Anita Brewer of the Austin Statesman observed: “Just how soon the backfield will be integrated depends now on athletic director (and football coach) Darrell Royal.”

  The Longhorns did not put a black player on the varsity team until 1970. In that long, seven-year period between the regents’ nod to Royal to bring on black athletes and the day he finally did—a biblical span, equal to the length of time Joseph sequestered food in the great warehouses of Egypt ahead of the seven years of famine—the beloved coach had, in some quarters, earned a reputation as a racist holdout.

  How much of that long stretch—a stretch that included the slighting of Elmo Wright, the speedy wide receiver from Sweeny whom Ken Dabbs brought to Royal’s attention in 1966—can be blamed on Royal and how much on the regents, boosters, and university officials remains an open question, even to the people who played for him. “Royal, at the end of the day, was the whipping boy, if you will, as it relates to carrying the banner for discriminatory practices at UT,” said Alfred Jackson, who played wide receiver for the Longhorns, roomed with Campbell for nearly his entire stint at the university, and went on to play in the pros. Even after the regents rescinded the prohibition on black athletes, Gary Cartwright observed in Texas Monthly, Royal faced resistance from the “Orange Coats,” “that splendid assortment of dentists and bankers and contractors and Regents who hired Royal in the first place, then attached themselves to the UT football program like ticks on a bird dog. Those were and still are your racists, your true orange-blood bigots.” They “made it clear that the first black Longhorn had better be two steps faster than Jesus and able to run through a brick wall.” The 1963 decision, absent a mandate, “was like handing Royal an anchor and telling him to swim with it,” the Austin American-Statesman sports editor Lou Maysel said.

  Royal appears to have made a calculation—call it shrewd, call it cynical—not to get ahead of the regents. “When I first came here, one of my friends told me, ‘if you play your politics right, you’ll have a long career.’ I told him right quick that I wasn’t a politician and didn’t intend to be a politician; I was going to coach the best I could and hope that would be acceptable,” he once told a Texas Monthly reporter. “That turned out to be a naïve, immature approach. You’re just ignorant and dumb if you don’t know who the Regents are and the chain of command.”

  Politically speaking, Royal had the clout to integrate the football team. He had earned the fealty of the regents and major donors by delivering a national championship in 1963; having already appointed him athletic director, the regents in the championship’s aftermath named him a tenured professor. His support was sought by the governor. And so, in 1966, he could have called Ken Dabbs back and told him that he was pleased to take on Elmo Wright. Decades later, speaking about general foot-dragging on integration, Julius Whittier, Texas’s first black varsity football player, said Royal “could have had the courage to stand up in the main mall and yell, ‘Look, you assholes, you’ve got to do this.’”

  But publicly, at least, Royal did the opposite. The same year that he privately passed on recruiting Elmo Wright, Royal offered three reasons why African Americans weren’t on UT teams: the athletes were not interested in the university; they were not talented enough; and they failed to meet entrance requirements. And so, as in every previous season, there were no black players on the 1967 varsity football squad. That season, the group Negros Associated for Progress picketed home football games with signs that read: “Orange and White Lack Black.” During one 1967 game, in a reference to the UT mascot, forty black students in the end zone bleachers held up cards that said: “Bevo Needs Soul.” Campus police asked them to leave.

  Nor were there any black players on the 1968 varsity team. The previous year, a black student named E. A. Curry made the freshman team as a walk-on, and in the 1968 season, he was allowed to suit up, but never took the field as a varsity player—a stacked Longhorns squad and weak grades kept him from playing and from traveling with the team. In a devastating 1972 series by a pair of Associated Press reporters examining racism in the UT football program, Royal bristled at criticism that he had tried to mock Curry. “So lo and behold the blacks on the East Side said I just suited him up to ridicule him, put him on the bench, exhibit him, not let him play, embarrass him, when really I was trying to reward him.” During that season, 1968, Royal offered the first UT football scholarship to a black player, a linebacker named Leon O’Neal. But he, too, failed to make the varsity squad after grades forced him to leave school.

  In 1969, a student questionnaire administered by the university’s counseling department, its results marked confidential and “not for circulation,” found that most black students felt they were unwelcome as participants or spectators at sports matches. “The black student on this campus obviously feels very alienated . . . due to the racist attitudes and policies of many organizations, e.g. sororities, fraternities, the whiteness of the sports scene, insulting politics of University housing facilities, and the presences of racist faculty and staff members,” observed the researchers Ira Iscoe and Jess Preciphs of the UT Psychological Counseling Center. (Just over 20 percent of black respondents felt they were treated unfairly during classroom participation and activities; 18 percent felt they were graded unfairly.)

  The journalist (and, later, Hollywood screenwriter and director) James Toback, just twenty-five years old, journeyed to Austin on assignment for Harper’s in the fall of 1970, when, finally, Whittier joined the varsity. “Why, I want to know, is UT lagging?” he wondered to a group of black football players, some still in high school, some at college, assembled in an Austin bar. Even conservative schools—SMU and Baylor—were outpacing supposedly progressive UT in the area of integration.

  One of the players pointed to the chairman of the board of regents, the imperious Frank Erwin, known around campus for his burnt-orange Cadillac and the moment in October 1969, when, wearing a hard hat and brandishing a bullhorn, he ordered students to unchain themselves from the live oaks and pecan trees that Erwin had directed be bulldozed to make way for a 15,000-seat stadium expansion. As the protestors sang “God Bless America,” Erwin demanded that campus police arrest twenty-seven of them on charges of disorderly conduct.

  Erwin “don’t like black folks and he loves that Texas football team; so he wants to keep it lily white,” one of the players told Toback. “And he can do it, too, because he’s the man that can pressure the coach out
and hire a new one. The coach will be doin’ whatever Erwin wants him to.” Another blamed it on “the players”: “You get a cat like the star running back who went to high school in Bridge City, the whitest town in Texas, and he said, ‘I’ll never play football with a nigger.’ Who wants teammates like that? Better to go to a worser school or out of state.” Another player pegged it to the coach: “Darrell Royal. He’s the man. Darrell Royal is the Man. He could be Governor of this state tomorrow if he wanted. He don’t have no use for no nigger. He wants a ‘colored’ boy. A proper Christian, a Boy Scout. And you won’t find many of them around anymore, even in Texas.”

  Larry Goodwyn, a white historian of populism who had studied at UT and helped organize the get-together, told Toback that Royal was “no racist”: “At least no more than the Northern liberals or half-liberals who also claim not to be. He’s subject to a lot of pressures. Quiet pressures. Some people who hold power in the university don’t figure there’s any reason for having a black player when the team’s winning all the time.”

  Another of the players interrupted Goodwyn, asking, rhetorically, why Royal hadn’t recruited more black players.

  “He’ll say they’re too dumb, they can’t get in, their SAT scores are too low. I’d like to get a list of the SAT scores of some of those white morons he carries every year.”

  “Right on, brother. And there’s another thing. He doesn’t want no black stars on his team. A black cat’s got to be better than a white cat to get an even break but he can’t be too good. He doesn’t want any black boy dominating the game. It’s part of the whole attitude.”

  After the 1968 game against Houston—the one that saw Elmo Wright handling the football in Austin—ended in a tie, Darrell Royal did not schedule another game against the Cougars. “You ask Royal why he doesn’t schedule Houston,” one of the players told Toback. “You know why? Because he’s afraid Houston would whip his ass and Houston is nearby Texas with black cats carryin’ the team! He’d be humiliated. It would bust his whole white-supremacy thing. You just ask him!”

  Royal, game for an interview on race, picked Toback up at a hotel and drove him over to a Mexican restaurant. One of the first things Toback asked about was the Houston scheduling theory. “‘Bullshit, bullshit!’ His face reddens. ‘Look, I can see people who haven’t made it becoming bitter, using all kinds of excuses to explain away their mediocrity. . . . Houston’s not in the Conference and that’s all there is to it. Do you think that just because Notre Dame had Negroes I’d have been any madder last year at having lost to them than I would have been at having lost to Arkansas which was all white? It’s ridiculous.”

  “This whole race question is very complicated,” Royal said over the meal, during which the headwaiter came over and asked the coach to autograph some menus.

  “A bunch of Negro boys came to me a while ago and said I could solve all possible difficulties by hiring a black coach. Now that would be fine for them but I’ve got to look at the other side. I’d have a whole lot of white boys on the team coming to me saying they couldn’t play for a black coach. The family atmosphere of the team would be destroyed. And don’t kid yourself. A lot of these Northern teams—professional and college, in all sports—that brag about their integration aren’t getting along at all. Once the club harmony and spirit begin to deteriorate, I don’t care what kind of talent you have, you won’t win.”

  “Is it important to you that you have Negro players on the team?”

  “No.”

  I wait again.

  “Listen, I know a lot of black people think I’m a racist. But what am I supposed to do, run around denying it? That’s incriminating in itself.”

  His own culpability was something that Royal wrestled with his entire career—and his public statements always carried a flavor of defensiveness. “The proper thing—and the true feeling, too—is that we should’ve done it a lot sooner,” Royal told John Wheat of the University of Texas’s Center for American History in the 1990s, long after he had retired. “But, you know, no one school is any more racist than the other, or any less racist than the other. They rap the University of Texas, saying it’s more racist because they were the last to integrate, and that’s not true. But that’s recruiting talk; that’s stuff that they put on you.”

  Michael Hurd, the historian of black Texas high school and college football, said as a kid in the late 1950s and through his teenage years in the early 1960s, he used to lie in the grass outside his Houston home in the working-class black neighborhood of Sunnyside—his mother was a teacher, his father a welder—tune his transistor radio to a black station, and root for the Longhorns. Then he encountered one of those disillusionments of adolescence: “I remember learning from someone that ‘Darrell Royal doesn’t want black players’ and feeling really sad about that.”

  When, on an icy early-January day in 1974, Darrell Royal, handsome and seemingly self-assured in a William Shatner way, stepped into the modest Campbell abode, determined to convince Ann Campbell that her son ought to play football for the University of Texas, he might as well have descended from the starship Enterprise. He was among the most famed coaches in college football: still shy of his fiftieth birthday, he had already presided over three national championship teams. He had never once endured a losing season; at one point, his Longhorns won thirty straight games. He was voted “Outstanding Coach of the Sixties” in a poll conducted by ABC Sports, beating out Bear Bryant of Alabama, John McKay of USC, and Woody Hayes of Ohio State.

  And yet when Darrell Royal showed up in Tyler, less than two weeks after John Tyler High had won the state championship, he was a vulnerable man. In many respects, the meticulous order that Royal had built for his family and his program was crumbling. He was still reeling from the death of his twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Marian, a talented artist, in an automobile accident in Austin that April. She left behind two young children who were in the car with her when it collided with a University of Texas shuttle bus.

  In a separate, professional key, he had grown sick with concern about his most hated rival, Barry Switzer, the bright, loud, upstart coach of the Oklahoma Sooners. Royal thought Switzer was a cheat and a son of a bitch who had been stealing recruits and secretly filming UT’s practices—as indeed, Switzer later admitted in his autobiography, he had.

  And at that very moment, when Royal was at the peak of his fans’ adulation, he felt keenly that his legacy was in jeopardy. President Nixon had sauntered down to the locker room to declare the undefeated 1969 Longhorns the national champions after a thrilling 15–14 victory over second-ranked Arkansas, another all-white team. But in that increasingly self-aware period, Texas and other schools of the South stood out for their whiteness. And now, as Royal approached the Campbell home, black players, though finally allowed onto the varsity, found much to criticize in the UT program. In the autumn of 1972, a little more than a year before Royal journeyed to the Campbells, his first half dozen black players had told a pair of Associated Press reporters about their alienation from the team. “Nothing out in the open,” said sophomore linebacker Fred Perry about racism among Longhorn coaches. “Just their overall attitude.” Across Texas, black players and their parents, long ignored by the state’s flagship institution, assumed, with some justification, that the Longhorns’ head coach was a through-and-through racist; the second part of the five-part AP series began, “Darrell Royal’s image is so bad among some blacks that they suspect he even taunts and mistreats his maid.” Separately, a former player of Royal’s, Gary Shaw, a white offensive lineman, had recently published a tell-all book that painted Royal as two-faced—charming and uncaring. Royal and his aides were quick to dismiss the book, Meat on the Hoof, as the work of a disgruntled bench warmer. And yet, buried in Meat on the Hoof, which sold more than 350,000 copies, was a damning scene. Shaw recalled how, after he had popped a dummy in practice, Royal approvingly said, “Shaw, if you keep playing like that, we might have to start treating you like a white man around
here.”

  The book put Royal on the defensive, and the AP series had stung. Together, they appeared to confirm the football team’s earned reputation as one inhospitable to African Americans. Alfred Jackson, who was Earl Campbell’s freshman roommate at the University of Texas and who, like Campbell, was the middle kid of eleven children and grew up black in rural Texas before heading to UT on a football scholarship (the similarities to Campbell stop about there) remembers an uncle warning him not to attend the university: “Don’t go to the University of Texas. You’re going to be discriminated against. And Darrell Royal doesn’t like black players. You’re never going to make it there. You’re not going to get a chance to play.”

  Jackson keeps an office in Austin, on the very top floor of the Frost Bank Tower, a Gotham-like, iconic glass-and-steel building that towers over much of downtown. That aerie offers him a panoramic view from which to describe the relationship between the stadium and the rest of the university. He favors pinstripe suits with pocket squares, of the type former NFL players on the Sunday pregame shows wear. Still broad shouldered, with an athlete’s purposeful gait, he has naturally gone a little soft in the belly, and today, amid all this luxury, he worries whether his private-school-educated kids, even as they face the inevitable slights of growing up black in America, will understand the struggles their parents and grandparents faced. The stories about Royal, he said, were “also circulated by all the other coaches in the Southwest Conference and outside the conference.” But Jackson pushes back on the narrative, crediting Royal with setting up a mentorship program to help black athletes think about a professional life after football. “I was an unexposed black kid who didn’t know anything about zero,” he said. “Royal was very fair to me in an era in which there was not a lot of fairness around.”