Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  But the call on Royal’s future would ultimately fall to another key patron, Allan Shivers, the former Texas governor who now chaired the board of regents. And with each loss—three weeks after the Houston game, UT again lost at home, 27–3, to hated Texas A&M—rumors that Royal could be squeezed out grew in volume. “You can go from great to average in a hurry,” Ken Dabbs, the coach whom Royal brought on board in 1973 to recruit Earl Campbell, said. Shivers’s differences with Royal were over style as much as anything else. The smooth-as-mink former segregationist governor—he served from 1949 through early 1957—had appointed many of the regents who once fought to keep the University of Texas from admitting African Americans and had delivered conservative Democrats to Eisenhower in the 1952 election, thereby warding off federal intervention in UT’s foot-dragging on integration. He couldn’t stand Royal’s multitudinous guitar-picking friends, hangers-on, and retinue. The coach had invited Willie—a known pot smoker!—to watch games from the sidelines.

  Royal favored eating at Cisco’s, the unpretentious East Austin Mexican diner famous for its biscuits, and he lived in an upper-middle-class South Austin subdivision, not far from a golf course, in a house with a large central room decorated with pictures of a diverse group of people. There were photos of the musicians Willie Nelson and Charley Pride; his fellow Oklahoman James Garner; Pete Dominguez, a onetime Austin busboy who rose to fame as the proprietor of a Dallas Mexican restaurant; a black music teacher named Bill Caldwell, a graduate of the Tuskegee Institute whom the Royals had befriended and supported as he worked his way through graduate school in Austin; Luis Murillo, a handyman who long helped out around the football stadium; and Earl Campbell with his mother. The rank-and-file UT fans loved him. Years after he retired, people he had never before met would respectfully approach to confide a sad sort of secret: “You brought me more years of happiness than anyone I know.” His friends, Royal once said, came from “all walks of life. Some of my blue-blood friends—and I’ve got some blue-blood friends—can’t understand my other friends.”

  Shivers, who lived in an antebellum, plantation-style mansion in tony West Austin, had been one of those friends. Once upon a time, Royal and Shivers were close enough that the governor took the coach with him to golf at exclusive Augusta National—Shivers was the sort of guy to belong to a club that desegregated only in 1975 (membership to women was granted only in 2012). Royal, for his part, liked to golf with Willie and, later, Earl. But now the blurring of the two Austins—officialdom and mellowdom—was something that had worn thin for Shivers.

  Weary of the demands of coaching, Royal visited Shivers to tell him he planned to retire and to inform him that Mike Campbell, his longtime defensive coordinator, was his choice as successor. “It wasn’t his interest that waned,” Mike Campbell said of his mentor’s departure. “What waned was the damn personnel. We ran out of Earl Campbells.” But determined to make a full break, Shivers not only told Royal that he would be barred from participating in the selection of the next football coach, but even threatened to fire him as athletic director.

  Just before the final game of the season, against Arkansas, Royal, feeling slighted, found himself in final negotiations over his exit. He had enlisted Joe Jamail, a high-dollar trial attorney and running buddy of his, to represent him—this was not an amicable divorce. As members of the UT Athletic Council, a group composed of donors, faculty members, and administrators, hammered out the details, they had to periodically interrupt the meeting to call Shivers to make sure they met with his approval. The deliberations ran so long that Royal finished his twenty-four-year career as a college head coach by missing the prekickoff meeting with his team, the first and only time he had ever done so. He managed to hold on to the athletic director job—though within a couple of years, feeling like a perpetual lame duck, he opted to leave the department altogether to become a special assistant to the UT president.

  Campbell, who had suffered through the most miserable stretch of his playing career, now deemed himself ready to play, eager to perform for the coach who had won his affection. He ended up taking the ball thirty-two times for 131 yards, leading the Longhorns to victory over Arkansas, thus ensuring that Royal would finish his career without a single losing season.

  At a press conference after the game, with Royal’s resignation public, players dropped in and out to grab snatches of their coach’s valedictory. The only Longhorn to stay for the whole thing was Campbell. The coach who had for so long shunned black players, who had earned a reputation in some quarters as a racist, now looked up to see Campbell fixed there on one of the cheap folding chairs. Reflecting on that time, Bledsoe, the former UT undergraduate and law student who had practiced as a walk-on with the Longhorns and later headed the state NAACP office, said that “you can see there was a change in Royal.” Earl Campbell “no doubt helped change Royal. And even as Royal was leaving coaching, Royal is such an institution here that changing his views on race had to be an asset on a lot of different fronts.” As the postgame press conference wound down, the coach was asked the most difficult part of stepping away. “I’m leaving Earl Campbell,” he said.

  It was an abrupt end, and Campbell had an empty feeling. But leaning on his Baptist background, he declared afterward that “if it weren’t for the dark days, we wouldn’t know what it is to walk in the light.” And sure enough, in the following 1977 football season, no player in the college game would burn brighter than Earl Campbell.

  Every morning at precisely 6:30 during the sweltering Austin summer of 1977, the phone in Earl Campbell’s off-campus apartment jangled on the hook. It was now unlisted. After his breakout sophomore season, he had gotten too many calls from well-wishers and hangers-on to keep it in the phone book; even gamblers, posing as journalists, were known to call Longhorns to get the inside scoop before games. Morning light streamed through Campbell’s bedroom, decorated with pictures of Reuna, his girlfriend since ninth grade, and a plaque with the words “Keep Me Going, Lord” that he received from a little kid at the Mount Olive Baptist Church, the black East Austin congregation that Earl and his twin brothers attended every Sunday. The plaque was a gift as Earl struggled through his junior year, one in which he considered quitting football altogether. And yet here he was, on another early morning, answering the wake-up call from a mahout of men preparing to put Earl Campbell through another round of football-related misery. On the other end of the line, in a wide-awake voice so peppy that it was designed to rouse Campbell from sleep, came a single sentence—“I’m waiting on you.” And then a click.

  Frank Medina, all of four-ten, had served as a sports trainer for nearly his entire life, excelling in devising back-breaking exercises—character building, they called it back then—meant to transform young men into better versions of themselves. With a white towel over one shoulder, as if he were a bartender, he examined not pint glasses but biceps. Squat and bowlegged, with a chesty, muscled body, “his dark crusading face,” in the words of former Longhorn Gary Shaw, was “always marooned by the pure white of his ever-present towel, and this combination gave him the look of an errant, stubby Don Quixote.” By the time he was sixteen, in 1931, Medina, customarily described in old press releases as a “full-blooded Cherokee,” had landed a job as a sports trainer at the Haskell Institute in Kansas, at the time a boarding school meant to assimilate American Indians into white culture. He was hired in 1945 as a strength and conditioning coach at UT. He was old-school. When, in the 1960s, a player appeared in the locker room in sandals, Medina accused him of looking like a hippie. He barred “smutty or foul talk.” He famously could never remember players’ names, so he called all of them “Mr. Man” or “Son.” “It was like a little bitty man training elephants,” said Ted Koy, who played halfback for the Longhorns in the late 1960s.

  The father of fourteen adopted children, Medina was beloved by his university charges—to keep things entertaining, he divided players into their Christian denominations during running drills, called th
e “religious relays”—and was known to now and then dole out cookies. Run afoul of the rules, though, and you were subject to Medina’s will. The 1960s star UT—and later NFL—linebacker Tommy Nobis once remembered that a missed class meant a dawn training session alone with Medina; the broad-shouldered, crew-cut Nobis was made to grab a blocking dummy and run up the stadium stands twenty times, seventy-nine steps each time. The all-American hurdler Ray Cunningham once said that part of Medina’s reconditioning program after an injury was driving the athlete up to the suburb of Round Rock, ordering him out of the car, and telling him to walk the fifteen miles back to campus. “You didn’t want to go see him,” Tom Stolhandske, a defensive end in the early 1950s, said. “If you got under his control for some kind of treatment, it was absolute horror. I’d walk into the training room and see somebody in the steam bath—locked in, pounding on the door, trying to get out. If Frank put you in there for x minutes, you were going to stay in there for that amount of time, whether or not you passed out.” Stolhandske remembers once injuring his ankle against Oklahoma. “We got back to Austin and he said, ‘Come get some treatment.’ I said, ‘Frank, I didn’t hurt my ankle, I just thought I did. Tape it up.’ He wasn’t about to get me in that training room.” Defensive back Keith Moreland, who overlapped with Campbell on the Longhorns for one year, especially remembers the brutality of late-summer practices. “When you’re in two-a-days and the AstroTurf gets to 115 to 120 degrees, you really get to know the courage that human beings have; to be able to put up with all that and go through what you have to go through,” he once said. “In those days, Frank Medina gave no water breaks. The only thing you had was a frozen sliced orange. Boy, that orange looked pretty good most days.”

  Campbell first met Medina the summer before his freshman year, when he arrived on campus and visited the training room just as Medina was working to rehab Roosevelt Leaks’s knee. “I heard him hollering and fussing at Rosie. And as Rosie emerged, I asked him who that was. ‘Oh, that’s Frank Medina, you’ll have your chance to meet him.’” It was in that training room in the spring of 1977, with Medina by his side, that Fred Akers, the Longhorns’ dapper, boyish new football coach, first explained to Campbell, soon to be a senior, that he would be the center of the offense in the coming season.

  Akers, like Royal before him, grew up in straitened circumstances, one of nine siblings in a home in northeastern Arkansas with no electricity or plumbing. By the age of ten, he was picking cotton to pay for his school clothes. A clever kid—he was the only one in his family to graduate from high school—he won an essay contest with a piece titled “The Importance of the Automobile to Our Community.” The prize, Akers could remember decades later, was a hundred-dollar bond. How did he arrive at that subject? “I figured since Ford was sponsoring it, it’d be a good idea to talk about cars,” Akers once told a Dallas Morning News reporter. The punch line: the Akers clan didn’t own a car.

  Like Royal, he was a slight, overachieving athlete. As a 153-pound senior, he was recruited by a slew of universities—he had lost only four football games since fourth grade. He went to Arkansas, where his game-winning twenty-eight-yard field goal against TCU sealed a share of the 1959 Southwest conference title.

  There, the similarities with Royal ended. Unlike Royal, who had riled Shivers and wearied Erwin with his penchant for being weirdly fancy-free and horsing around with Willie, Akers was deemed a dependable man. By his own count, Akers drank twenty-five cups of coffee a day, each generally accompanied by a cigarette; his sole hobby, he said, was football.

  And whereas Darrell Royal was an earthy wit, Akers was polished and glossy. Football News had named him to its best-dressed list, and he appeared at his inaugural UT press conference in a three-piece off-white suit. Accustomed to Royal’s folksy stylings, the press recorded its first impressions somewhat smirkingly. Akers wore his brown hair in a style one described as “little boy regular.” He was “a fashion poster for what the successful young businessman is wearing these days.” One said he looked like a bank chairman. Akers was hesitant before the press, and serious minded: “He makes Whistler’s mother look like a swinger,” wrote the sportswriter Kirk Bohls. Royal had been fond of the phrase “Dance with the one who brung ya”; Akers, wrote Mike Jones of the Dallas Morning News in an article headlined “Akers Has Cool Emotions,” “dances with the one who brought him.” The new coach, wrote Jones, “always looks as though he had just shaved and showered.” Not that anyone really asked, but Akers’s dressiness was an emblem of his up-from-nothing striving. He described his predilection for wearing ties this way: “It was a long time before I ever owned one, so I’m going to wear one every chance I get.”

  Despite having served as an assistant coach to Royal in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before leaving Austin to become head coach of Wyoming, Akers had few supporters among the Royal-loyal Orangebloods or among the rank and file at the athletics department on which he was foisted. After Royal’s resignation, the sentimental choice for head coach was Mike Campbell, Royal’s longtime rough-hewn lieutenant—a Mississippian who had run UT’s defense and was Royal’s choice as successor. But the hiring committee, at Shivers’s behest, passed over Campbell for Akers. As word spread across the coaches’ offices at Bellmont Hall, secretaries wept, and one assistant coach after another paid their respects to Campbell, as if attending a wake. The athletics department was suddenly engulfed in an atmosphere of anxiety and suspicion.

  Royal, miffed at the snubbing of Mike Campbell, never gave Akers a real endorsement. “We haven’t had a confrontation because you can’t have a confrontation without communication,” Royal told a reporter a couple of years after the hiring. And when Akers was forced out ten tumultuous years later, despite compiling an overall record of 86–31, there was little question whom Diane Akers, his wife, had in mind when she told a reporter, “When I come back in the next life—and I believe in reincarnation—I want to be a defensive tackle because I want to hit somebody.”

  As Akers headed into his first season as Longhorn head coach, nobody harbored high expectations of him. With the team having barely dodged a losing record, and its longtime, revered head coach deposed, morale at UT was low. Akers, in that introductory December 1976 meeting with the press, did nothing to contradict the conventional wisdom about the prospects for the coming season. “I don’t think this can be viewed as anything but a rebuilding year,” he said.

  Football soothsayers picked the Longhorns to finish fourth or fifth in their conference. With their huge fan base and championship pedigree, the Longhorns generally earned at least a few nationally televised games each season—but heading into the fall of 1977, they were a scratch, uninvited to appear on the national airwaves. Politically, Akers faced skepticism from influential alumni devoted to Royal. And many of the television stations that had carried Royal’s weekly show demurred when it came to picking up Akers’s version. Royal’s had appeared on fifteen stations; Akers’s would be broadcast on only six—and none in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.

  Akers had a series of football problems, too. Apart from Campbell and a few other mainstays, the 1977 Longhorn squad was full of freshmen and sophomores. “We’re so young we hold hands going onto the field,” joked the new defensive coordinator, Leon Fuller. Medina, in a letter dated May, 9, 1977, just before the Longhorns headed off for summer break, exhorted them to be mindful of their shallow depth: “It is evident by our limitation of personnel that we can ill afford the laggard or the well fed happy claudicants,” he wrote in characteristically idiosyncratic language, wishing his players well that summer. (A claudicant is someone who limps.) “This is not a missle [sic] of distress but just a few words of caution. Our backs are not up against the wall neither are we too far removed from the open elevator shaft.”

  And Akers had inherited a roster of no-name quarterbacks—talented high school passers were unenthusiastic about playing in Royal’s grind-it-out wishbone offense. “We didn’t average three passes a game,” Rick
Ingraham, a square-headed offensive lineman who would serve as Earl’s closest friend and most trusted downfield rusher, said. Other players, including the running backs, were growing weary of the scheme—although novel in the late 1960s, when it led to thirty consecutive victories for the Longhorns, lately it had left Campbell feeling like a battering ram. In the wishbone, the fullback stands only three steps behind the quarterback, giving him little opportunity to accelerate before reaching the entanglements of offensive and defensive linemen. “When you’re a wishbone fullback like I was,” Campbell said, “you only run straight into the line and you get the hell beat out of you.”

  Akers decided to reshape the Longhorns’ base offense into an I formation, moving Campbell farther behind the quarterback to afford his running back a little more acceleration before attacking the defense. “Akers saw what kind of speed Earl had, and instead of starting behind the quarterback only three yards, he was seven yards out; when he hit the line of scrimmage, he hit with full speed said Randy McEachern, the quarterback who was in the same recruiting class as Campbell.”