Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  National expectations for Campbell entering his senior year were modest. A promotional tour of likely Heisman candidates organized by the NCAA and ABC-TV included a half-dozen players, from schools such as UCLA and Pitt and Ohio State, but no Campbell. Heisman hype was especially acute that year. The award, first given in the 1930s, had become the premier individual trophy in all sports—and the December 1977 event was scheduled, for the first time, to be broadcast live, from New York City, in prime time. “It came down to Earl’s not having a good season last year,” David Cawood, the NCAA public relations director, explained that August as the tour got underway. The tour drew as many as seventy sportswriters to a handful of key locations around the country—important exposure to potential Heisman voters, especially important if your team wasn’t going to be on national television.

  “Earl’s got a lot of obstacles,” Akers said over the summer. “He’s definitely a candidate. I’ll push him but that doesn’t mean I’ll go out and hire a blimp. I’m not going to buy advertising space or send out flyers, but I think it’s my obligation to help.” And again, he played down expectations: “He may not have enough of a supporting cast, though.” Still, Akers made no bones about how much the Longhorns would lean on Campbell.

  The day the players met for pictures for the Longhorn media guide, each wearing suit and tie, the new head coach tested Campbell’s commitment to the coming season. “I need to know, Mr. Campbell,” Akers asked him, “Do you want to run the ball for this university?” “Yes, sir, I do—real bad,” Campbell said. “Good, Mr. Campbell. You’re going to have to prove it to me, and it’s going to take an awful lot of hard work on your part.” Hard work because Earl Campbell, the man Akers hoped to build an offense around, was overweight. Hobbled by injuries and increasingly sustained by greasy-spoon enchiladas, Earl Campbell’s body had become bloated, it could be said, from benign neglect. Once all-muscle, his five-eleven frame now carried nearly 250 pounds. “What we’re asking Earl to do requires more quickness,” Akers told reporters.

  Meeting again in the training room with Campbell and Medina, Akers issued an edict: lose twenty-three pounds. Earl turned to Medina and wondered aloud where he was going to find the twenty-three pounds to lose. “I don’t know,” Medina said. “It might be in your butt but we are going to lose it.” He hadn’t been down to 220 pounds since his sophomore year in high school, and now he had a little over a month to peel off the weight.

  And so, every morning at seven, thirty minutes after Medina’s call, Campbell showed up at UT’s Gregory Gym, a classy art deco building in the center of campus, to meet the little man. He would pound the heavy bag for an hour while wearing a rubber sweat suit, and then, wearing a weighted vest and ankle weights, he would run the track—sprints, to build up fast-twitch muscles, followed by a mile run. Then, back in the rubber suit for a twenty-five-minute stint in the steam room. Some of that training would today surely run afoul of university policy. “Sometimes,” Campbell admitted, “I would get hot and tired and crawl along the floor to push the door open. Medina must have been a genius because he always knew when I was going to do that. He always pushed the door shut, saying, ‘I told you not to be opening that door, boy.’” To finish it off, three hundred sit-ups. Campbell would shower and then eat a low-fat lunch. The afternoons were spent working construction and making deliveries for a tile company. Years later, Campbell remembered Medina with nostalgia: “I can remember the days he’d serve me milk and cookies in his back room and then I can recall those days of him hollering at me, ‘What are you saving it for, son?’”

  The workouts left Campbell feeling trim, even as he remained thick with musculature. “In church the other day,” he once said, “I felt like a 100 pound man in a 220 pound man’s suit.” His teammates, dedicated as they were to Royal, appeared inspired by the new leadership. Practices shifted from the traditional two-a-days to three-a-days. Akers “told us we could keep doing the same things losers do and we could have another 5–5–1 season if we wanted,” Rick Ingraham, an offensive lineman, explained. The Longhorns were especially roused by Campbell’s dedication. “Watching Earl go through that rigorous routine elevated all of us in practice. When we saw how badly Earl wanted it, then all of us adopted the attitude that we would elevate ourselves to his level,” Ingraham once told the writer Paddy Joe Miller. “Despite all he had been through with Frank Medina, Earl never once slacked off in practice. Watching him out there running over people made all of us want to try harder.” For Campbell’s part, after a frustrating junior season spent largely on the sidelines, the workouts built up his appetite to play. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this hungry for football,” Campbell told reporters as the season kicked off. “I was hurt all season and it was bad, but it taught me a lot, too. The main thing it taught me was that regardless of how high you get, you can always be brought down. Let’s be real about it. I want to spend part of my life earning a living from football. I’ve worked for the chances I’ve had since the fourth grade. And I know I am working for my chances now.” He added, “This year I’m not settling for one guy tackling me. And I really don’t intend for two of them to get the job done.”

  The season began with a nice team effort, a 44–0 defeat of Boston College. Campbell ran for a respectable 87 yards. Against Virginia the next week, he gained 156 on nineteen carries and scored two touchdowns—although he played less than a half. Texas won 68–0. When Campbell got into the open field, Alfred Jackson, the Longhorn wide receiver, remembered going downfield to look for someone to block: “But the defensive backs would be clinging onto us. I mean, they were hanging onto us, saying, ‘I don’t want any part of this.’” Facing Rice, Texas rang up 72 points as Earl went for 132 yards on just thirteen rushes.

  The early-October matchup with Oklahoma now loomed. The previous year’s Red River Shootout, the one that ended in a 6–6 tie, had finally unraveled Royal. And less than ten months earlier, in the December 1976 Fiesta Bowl, Akers’s Wyoming Cowboys were rolled by Barry Switzer’s Oklahoma Sooners 41–7—Wyoming scored its only touchdown with twenty-four seconds remaining in the game. Now it was Akers’s chance to get some measure of revenge.

  The game is played each year at Dallas’s Cotton Bowl, a handsome stadium built in 1930 on the grounds of the sprawling Texas State Fair, which operates beneath the watchful eye of Big Tex, the fifty-five-foot-tall cowboy-hatted mascot with a hinged jaw synchronized to the timing of welcome announcements. Along with its impressive livestock and chainsaw-carving contests, its demonstrations in cattle milking and peewee rodeo, the fair today is renowned for its deep-fried everything: Oreos, Twinkies, pecan pie, hot dogs (corny dogs), butter (really), and banana splits. The winner of the Big Tex Choice Award in the Best Tasting–Savory category in 2017 was the Funnel Cake Bacon Queso Burger. Game day is a social and sports event. Helicopters and blimps float overhead as roller coasters whirl outside the stadium walls. You can smell fried dough if the wind blows in the right direction. Willie Morris described the pregame scene at the Cotton Bowl before the matchup: “Beautiful women in the Neiman-Marcus fashions escorted by their men in expensive ten-gallon hats milled among the crowds shouting twangy salutations. All about me was the ebullient, mindless affluence of the Great American Southwest, the mementos of the incandescent parvenu rich. And from all sides now, as the marching bands came onto the field with their impeccable resounding brass, a deep, nearly erotic hum of anticipation rose from the assembled thousands.”

  Among the official merchandise you can buy at the fair today are T-shirts announcing that the fair was established in 1886. No African Americans were allowed onto the fairgrounds back then, even though the South Dallas neighborhood encircling it was—and remains—largely black. They were not admitted until three years later, and then only on a single day, called Colored People’s Day. When, in 1923, the State Fair of Texas hosted Ku Klux Klan Day, more than thirty thousand people attended to witness the swearing in of new members. As part of the 1936 Texas Cent
ennial bash, fair organizers devised, as a cynical, and successful, attempt to sell more tickets, the rebranding of Colored People’s Day as Negro Achievement Day—even as African Americans were barred from eating at fairground restaurants and concession stands on other days during the fair’s annual two-week run. The Hall of Negro Life, one of the buildings constructed as part of the events that year, was the only one demolished after the centennial celebration ended.

  Not until 1967, three years after the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act, were all attractions and food concessions open to people of all races. But even then, the State Fair of Texas plotted ways to discourage African Americans from attending. In 1966, the State Fair Corporation commissioned a planning report that included a survey of white fairgoers. Economics Research Associates, a Los Angeles–based research firm, found “intense emotional discomfort in middle-class white residents of Dallas” concerning the area surrounding Fair Park. Many felt “embarrassment . . . that visitors to Dallas (had to) see the ‘other side’ of the city.” Especially concerning to respondents was that “so many colored and white people“had to intermingle during the fair. “The solution for all of these conflicts, at least in terms of Fair Park’s location, is simple,” determined the research firm, which had long conducted research for the Walt Disney Company. “All that is required is to eliminate the problem from sight. If the poor Negroes in their shacks cannot be seen, all the guilt feeling revealed above will disappear, or at least be removed from primary consideration.” The report concludes: “This question was posed: ‘If all the land around Fair Park were bought up and turned into paved, lighted, fenced parking lot, would that solve the problem?’ The citizens of Dallas answered with a resounding, ‘Yes!’”

  And so a decade later, when Earl Campbell and the Longhorns traveled up I-35 to meet the Sooners at the Cotton Bowl, a vast new parking lot, covering many tens of acres, swept out from the fairgrounds. The reconfigured Fair Park layout was charmless, a brutal buffer keeping African Americans at bay. Old streets lined with appealing, though dilapidated, single-family homes now dead-ended into a never-ending chain-link fence warning residents their cars would be towed if they parked against it. The city had offered white families whose homes they seized as much as ten times what they paid black families. The properties were, indeed, paved over, used as parking for only a tenth or so of the year. Ashley Walker, whose family has lived near Fair Park for at least three generations, told the Foundation for Community Empowerment for a 2017 report on the future of the State Fair of Texas: “It makes you feel like they’re robbing you from where you’ve been all your life, you and your family. Someone you know is gone and there’s just concrete. They’re taking it away and there’s nothing you can do—to make more parking lots for their Texas-OU games.”

  Heading into the 1977 matchup, the undefeated Sooners were ranked second in the country and had already beaten fourth-ranked Ohio State. For all the Longhorns’ talk of using Campbell as a blunt instrument, six seconds into the game Texas tried a trick play—a Campbell pass—and turned the ball over on an interception. It got bizarre from there. On the Longhorns’ seventh play, the starting quarterback broke an ankle; fewer than ten plays later, the second-stringer was stretchered off, having wrecked his knee after trying to throw a lead block for Campbell. So unaccustomed was he to playing with the third-stringer that Campbell stood on the field wondering who would convene the next huddle. The next man up was Randy McEachern, a slight kid who the year before had suffered a knee injury and spent the season helping out with radio broadcasts and who, in this, his senior year, had quarterbacked the scout team—the guys used as tackling dummies for the defense in practice. Akers gave some brief encouragement to McEachern while searching for signs of nervousness—the coach was thinking about an almost unprecedented move. “I was prepared to use all our timeouts right there to talk to him if he was shaking or anything,” Akers said. The announcers couldn’t pronounce the young man’s name; he was so far down the depth chart that his bio wasn’t in the Longhorn media guide. On his first play, McEachern carried the ball into the right side of the line. “He lost one yard,” wrote Douglas Looney in Sports Illustrated. “But he didn’t fumble, and he got up. Given the way things were going for Texas, this was a good play.”

  Ingraham, the Longhorns veteran offensive lineman, grabbed McEachern in the huddle. His message was simple: give the ball to Earl. Ultimately, McEachern was just good enough, leading the team on an eighty-yard drive that finished with a twenty-four-yard run by Campbell for a touchdown. “It all happened so fast, I really didn’t expect it,” McEachern said. Russell Erxleben, the Longhorns’ phenom of a kicker, booted field goals of sixty-four and fifty-eight yards, and UT’s stout defense, led by Brad Shearer up front and Raymond Clayborn in the secondary, held Oklahoma to six points. UT won 13–6.

  Was he nervous? McEachern was asked after the game. “Oh, no, not unless you would consider your heart stopping a sign of nervousness.”

  What part of the game was the biggest thrill? “The end.”

  Back in Austin, the team was greeted by students with hastily made “Randy is Dandy” T-shirts.

  Suddenly, the Longhorns were 4–0, ranked second in the country and readying for a contest against number eight Arkansas. At a press gaggle, Campbell was asked about the cause of the team’s improvement. “Without taking anything away from Coach Royal—he made us work hard,” he said, “the big difference to me is the split backfield and the I-formation.” In other words, the offense that gave him more room to operate and show his full potential. That was about the closest Campbell came to tooting his own horn.

  That Saturday, he carried the ball thirty-four times for 188 yards as Texas downed Arkansas 13–6. On the flight back to Austin, Campbell got a stewardess to let him use the PA system to address his teammates: “I set a couple records today, but I want you guys to know that those records belong to you as much as they do to me.” And then the joke: “I’d like thank [guard] Rick Ingraham for telling me which holes to run in.”

  On the football field, Campbell “never once blamed anyone for anything,” Ingraham, a white kid from the Austin suburbs who became the godfather of Campbell’s sons, said over a plate of fajitas at Austin’s El Arroyo. He still had a building-block frame. Wearing sunglasses and a polo shirt, he looked like a ratcheted-up golfer. “The easiest job I ever had was blocking for Earl Campbell.” He smiled. “I screwed up, he’d run right over me.”

  Earl was becoming an object of fascination nationwide, and UT’s press team played him up. “The pork chops and dressing and the fried chicken waited on the steam tables Sunday at the Longhorn dining hall, and while on other days guys would hustle to make lunch, closing time is dependent on services at Earl Campbell’s church,” announced an athletics department press release the day after the Arkansas victory. “‘Whenever Earl and the twins get here,’ said a supervisor when asked what time the dining hall closes, ‘that’s when we shut down the line.’”

  With Campbell now a bona fide contender for the Heisman Trophy, reporters looking for an angle were drawn to the story of his modest beginnings, and began making calls to Tyler. Ann Campbell rearranged her schedule for all the media calls, working the rose fields in the morning and talking to reporters at 2:30 p.m., after her bath. “I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it,” she said, “I really have.” Reporters, in turn, took keenly to her: “One of her front teeth has a gold jacket, giving a certain unassailable value to just about everything she says,” Bruce Newman wrote in Sports Illustrated. She made the trip to Austin to watch her son play in a late-October matchup against Texas Tech, and when she was recognized by the public-address announcer, the crowd of seventy-nine thousand gave her a standing ovation. After the game—the Longhorns shut out the Red Raiders—Earl, always the sweet son, said he thought she could never get enough applause. “I don’t think she could ever be as famous as I’d like for her to be,” he said.

  There remained one last major hurdle: the
late-November grudge match at College Station against Texas A&M—the game sometimes known as the Hate Bowl. Tie-dyed UT and military-minded A&M could not, culturally speaking, have been more different, and their student bodies were equally suspicious of each other. Nothing would have been more delicious for the Longhorns than to seal a regular season number one ranking with a defeat of the Aggies, and nothing would have tasted better to A&M than spoiling the Longhorns’ undefeated season. On the line was the Southwest Conference title and the right to play Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl.

  The Sunday night ahead of the game, more than ten thousand UT fans showed up at a pep rally, dancing, swaying, and chanting. “‘All I wanted to do is see what Earl looked like without a uniform,’ moaned one coed looking over thousands of fans tightly squeezing toward a small orange-draped stage of University of Texas cheerleaders and football players,” recounted one contemporary writeup of the scene. “That was the greatest party I’ve ever been to,” Tom Swinnea, then an undergraduate at the university, remembered four decades later. “Beat the hell out of A&M,” bellowed fraternity brothers.

  The pep rally was organized by a campus club called the Texas Cowboys, the chaps-wearing students charged with blasting a cannon every time UT scored a touchdown. Partway through the rally, someone noticed something horrifying: a sign painted on the side of a shack that the Texas Cowboys were using as headquarters said, in large orange letters, “If an Aggie and a nigger jumped off the [UT] Tower at the same time, which one would hit first? Who cares?” An assistant dean, David McClintock, immediately had the sign destroyed. “The sign was put there by someone other than the Texas Cowboys . . . The Cowboys have been embarrassed and are making apologies for the incident,” he announced following an investigation.

  The pep rally incident “was really a black eye to the Cowboys,” Tim Alexander, who was chairman of the club at the time, said. He hails from Tyler and now heads a bank there. “To this day I can’t tell you who painted that there. It was a very, very bad thing, and we were being pegged as a racist organization.” It was Campbell, said Alexander, who “kind of saved us” from that label by going public with an exoneration of the Cowboys, giving them some cover. His response was typically down-to-earth. “I feel sorry for those kinds of people in this world,” Campbell said about the perpetrators. “I respect people and people respect me. I wouldn’t know how to fight someone. We’re all the same people, just different colors. But someday we’re going to have to go to one another for what we want. We need to mix together and care for one another.” In his optimistic way, when it came to racial tensions, his inclination was to extend the benefit of the doubt. “I’m not trying to tell you there are no black-and-white problems at Texas because I’d be telling you a lie. But mainly I think they are communication problems.”