Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  Before the game at College Station, two days after Thanksgiving, the Aggies’ quarterback, David Walker, made a frank admission: “We do wonder if we’re going to stop Campbell, and if so, how.”

  The Sports Illustrated reporter Douglas Looney was in the Longhorn locker room as fifty-seven thousand fans started making a ruckus overhead. He described the atmosphere: “After carrying on about what a good team A&M is, how emotional the game will be, how hard-hitting, how important, Akers concludes, ‘But gentlemen, it does not have to be close.’” Brad Shearer, a strapping defensive lineman, chirped up, as if shouting “amen!”: “Never a lazy step.” The head coach had the last word: “Akers, talking about the Aggie pregame precision marching show says, ‘They’ve already done what they do best—march, hut and holler. Now we’re going out and do what we do best.’”

  As the team rushed out of the locker room, Akers pulled aside Campbell and talked to him quietly. “Earl, I really expect 170 yards out of you today.” Akers, said Campbell, was the first to demand such greatness of him. “Nobody ever walked up to me before and said, ‘Earl, you ought to have 150 yards this afternoon.’ I started thinking I wasn’t supposed to have a bad game. Or a bad practice.”

  Early in the game, with three wide receivers to his right, McEachern bootlegged out that way and then turned and floated a ball down the left side to Campbell. Campbell’s receiving hands were legendarily bad. “If you poured a cup of coffee in your hands and then tried to catch a football with them,” Alfred Jackson said, “that’s what Earl’s hands were like.” One pro quarterback he played with said that Campbell “couldn’t catch a cold.” Some teammates called him “Old Brickhands.” “He never caught that pass in practice,” said Jackson. “They could still be out there trying to complete that pass for 12, 13 years. We must have been laughing all week.” But he managed to haul this one in and run sixty yards for a touchdown. A few minutes later, he finished off another drive with a leaping touchdown run.

  Back in the locker room at halftime, with UT ahead 33–14, Campbell yelled, “How bad do we want it?”

  Starting on their own twenty to begin the second half, the Longhorns set out on a five-play, eighty-yard scoring drive: Campbell for no yards, Campbell for ten, Campbell for five, Campbell for fifty-nine, Campbell for six. By day’s end, Campbell had gone for 220 yards and three touchdowns. The Longhorns won 57–28. “If he doesn’t win that Heisman, they ought to throw it away,” said Texas A&M defensive end Phil Bennett. An utterly exhausted Aggie linebacker named Kevin Monk explained that there was only way to bring Campbell down: “Grab, hold on and hope for help.”

  The season had been peppered with key plays by Campbell: the twenty-four-yard run to score the only touchdown against Oklahoma; a twenty-eight-yard dash after catching a screen pass to set up the winning touchdown against Arkansas; a fifty-eight-yard rush against SMU to turn a close game into a rout. Texas was leading Houston by a single point in the third quarter when Campbell cracked a forty-three-yard touchdown run—and on his next carry, he went on another forty yard dash, to the Houston one-foot line. And he had back-to-back runs of forty-three and twenty-five yards on a sixty-eight-yard touchdown drive against Baylor. “Earl is the best running back I’ve had the privilege—or whatever—of coaching against,” said Southern Methodist University Coach Ron Meyer. “I hope I never have a similar privilege.”

  The regular season over, the Heisman awaited. A 1977 press release from UT touting Campbell’s accomplishments had a section titled “People Run Over.” In his senior season, Campbell ran for 1,054 yards after initial contact, and 1,744 yards overall—averaging nearly 160 yards a game. He scored 114 points. All told, over four seasons—including his injury-riddled junior year—Earl Campbell ran for 4,443 yards, at the time the fifth-highest total in collegiate history.

  About a week before the ceremony, Rick Ingraham, Earl’s trusted offensive lineman, went to his parents to ask for money for a haircut. At first, he was met with skepticism: “Why do you need to get a haircut?” “Earl invited me to go with him to the Heisman.” Immediately: “Oh, you’re definitely going to get a haircut.”

  Out in Tyler, Ann Campbell’s pastor, the Reverend John Williams, announced on Sunday that she was going to New York, and asked the congregation to pray for her. They pooled a collection for spending money for Ann. Henry Bell Jr., the president of Citizens First National Bank in Tyler—Ann had been his maid since she was pregnant with Earl—paid for the hotel and all her transportation and food. And Joe Jamail, the UT-trained trial lawyer known as the “King of Torts”—his famous Pennzoil case, for which he was awarded a fee of $345 million, was still several years away—flew her up to New York in his private jet. A group of two dozen Orangebloods stayed at the Waldorf, the Park Lane, the St. Regis, and the Hotel Americana—the group included John Holmes, a wealthy driller whose son had, less than two decades earlier, inveighed against integrating the UT football team because it would hurt the team’s success.

  The award had traditionally been announced at a noon luncheon on the Tuesday following the Army-Navy game. But CBS had paid $200,000 that year for the broadcast rights, and was determined to lend the event some glitz. The production would be handled not by CBS Sports but by the network’s broadcast arm. And marking the dawn of a commercial approach, the network moved it to prime time.

  Old-schoolers weren’t happy about it. The Reverend Edmund P. Joyce, the vice president of the University of Notre Dame, had harrumphed that college football “was not a Madison Avenue creation. It was not designed as a vehicle selling soap or beer.” In remarks that sound quaint today, Yale coach Carm Cozza said the Heisman “should not have any stigma of advertisement or show business . . . My concern is that when you put anything like advertising attached to it, you take away from the great achievement and pride of the young man who wins it.”

  The event was black-tie. On hand were O. J. Simpson, Reggie Jackson, Elliott Gould—in the winter of 1977, they were A-list sports and film celebrities. Only a day before, Ann Campbell had had her hands in the sand of her rose patch, and now here she was, on the forty-sixth floor of the Downtown Athletic Club, a view across the Battery to the Twin Towers spread before her. Henry Bell’s mother, Nell Bell, who four years earlier had played a key role in steering Earl Campbell to the University of Texas, took a string of pearls from around her neck and placed them on Ann Campbell’s. “I had no idea,” Ann Campbell said quietly, “no idea, I had no idea that I would be able to enjoy the blessings I have behind that kid.” And, being Ann Campbell, she revised herself: “I have enjoyed blessings behind all my kids.”

  Darrell Royal approached her, and she held his hand, swinging it gently.

  Ahead of the award ceremony, some reporters, eager to get his feel for New York City—a small-town kid from Texas in a skyscraper made for a good story—cornered Campbell. A radio journalist asked him about race: he stood to be the first black player from a university south of the Mason-Dixon line to win the award. Only a decade earlier, or less, Earl Campbell, a talented African American kid in Texas, would have had to go to Michigan or Penn State to attend a major football program—or stay in the South and attend a historically black college. (In a sign of how much less exposure players at schools like Grambling or Jackson State receive, no player from a historically black university has ever won the Heisman.)

  “I play football when I have my suit on,” he said. “When I don’t, I take care of my other business. I’m 22 years old and I don’t know anyone in this world that I hate, and I don’t know anyone that hates me. I don’t see Earl Campbell as a black man. I see Earl Campbell as a man. I have too much other stuff going on to be drilling on the black and white issue.”

  I don’t see Earl Campbell as a black man. If the answer reveals something about 1977—a black athlete in 1968, in the thick of raised fists, might not have demurred that way, nor would, for that matter, a black athlete in 2017, in the thick of lowered knees—it also says something about Earl Campbell
and why, as Jenna Hays McEachern put it, he appeared to white fans as “unthreatening.” Not four years earlier, Campbell had confronted Royal, telling the famed coach that Campbell men had been bought and sold for generations. And now, here, surrounded high up in Lower Manhattan by white Texas oilmen and bankers, people who normally would not associate with a twenty-two-year-old black man from Tyler, he was more politic. He was genuinely an open, generous, nonjudgmental country guy. Four years earlier, he had roomed with Lynn King, a white player at John Tyler High, and now the one teammate he invited along to the Heisman banquet was Ingraham, a white kid from suburban Austin. Or perhaps, with a professional contract floating before him, he was savvy enough not to say anything that might alienate potential employers. O. J., there in that room and already the golden TV pitchman for Hertz, had once ranked as his biggest accomplishment that “people look at me like a man first, not a black man.”

  Whatever the case, the answer echoed one he had given earlier that year to a student journalist for the Daily Texan. “I think my biggest thrill so far is being able to adjust to 41,000 people who go here, to be accepted as Earl Campbell the football player as well as Earl Campbell the man,” he told Brad Buchholz. “Some people may be offended by this. I’m sorry, this is how I feel: I’ve learned how to deal with white people more. I learned how to respect them more as people—because I don’t see myself as a black man. I see myself as a man. I’ve learned how to accept other men and other people as people.”

  The answers also suggest something about the varied topography of being black at a predominantly white university in 1977. Earl Campbell, star football player, was cosseted, praised, and befriended in ways that Erna Smith, a gay black journalist, also from rural Texas, surely was not.

  That night in New York, though, Earl Campbell appeared to think of himself as just a guy playing football, one who was aware that his appeal was not world shaking. After all, his answer to the radio interviewer that night of the Heisman Trophy continued: “I am not a football player that brags. All I do is play. People that are interested will know what I do. Millions of Japanese won’t know what I do no matter what. Football isn’t the only thing. I enjoy making other people happy. Earl Campbell is happy all the time.”

  The radio interviewer apologized for asking him about race. “Look here,” Campbell said, in a knowing joke about how his low drawl might come off to white people. “You didn’t offend me. I just got a deep voice. You probably haven’t heard me talk before.”

  The attendees were called to take their seats. Ann Campbell dabbed the perspiration from her brow. Earl was sporting an Afro above his bowtie, and a yellow rose was appended to his jacket. He and Rick Ingraham looked as if they were about to bust out of their tuxedos. In preparation for the broadcast, a TV director lectured guests about keeping their seats and talking quietly. When, shortly before live air, the director announced that “something is mechanically wrong,” a smattering of cheers went up.

  Despite the put-on glamour of the event, there was really no suspense to it. But after his name was called out for a warm-up award, for best offensive player of the year, Campbell suddenly got it in his head that he wasn’t going to win the Heisman. He struggled to be gracious as he muttered through the remarks he had prepared—but he was shocked. “This isn’t what I came to New York City for,” he thought to himself.

  Yet even as he was trying to sort out what had happened, Jay Berwanger, the first Heisman recipient, was announcing the main trophy of the evening, for the overall outstanding player. Ann Campbell crossed her fingers. Now Campbell’s name was called again—he had received twice as many points in the voting as the runner-up—and he approached the lectern. But he had already said what it was he wanted to say, had already given the thanks he wanted to give, had already delivered his prepared remarks. “You know, when I was a kid and I’d get in trouble,” he told the well-heeled crowd, “I’d always want to say, ‘Hey, Momma, I’m in trouble.’ So, ‘Hey, Momma, I’m in trouble!’” The room burst into laughter.

  Three weeks later, back at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Campbell took the field with the Longhorns in the national championship game against fifth-ranked Notre Dame. On a frigid afternoon, the Fighting Irish kept Campbell out of the end zone even as he picked up 118 yards on twenty-nine carries. McEachern’s luck ran out, and he tossed three interceptions. On the opposite side of the ball, the Notre Dame running backs chewed up the Texas defense—and future Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana tossed a touchdown. The Longhorns lost 38–10.

  For years after, Campbell’s Heisman sat on a four-foot-tall pedestal, a chandelier above it, two wall-sized mirrors meeting in a corner beside it, in the home of his late mother, the home he built for her with money from his first contract, to play for the sweaty, rambunctious, growing, oil-rich metropolis of Houston.

  Earl before his boyhood home on the outskirts of the East Texas town of Tyler, 1979. (Shelly Katz, Sports Illustrated/Getty Images)

  Ann Campbell, the revered matriarch of the Campbell family, tending roses on her small family farm, October 1977. (Lynn Flocke, Austin American-Statesman)

  Earl mock arm-wrestling an opponent ahead of a high school football all-star game, 1974. “I was raised not to have negative racial feelings,” Campbell said. (Ray Covey_HP © Houston Chronicle. Used with permission)

  Campbell and Royal, in an undated photo, talking strategy on the sideline. (Courtesy of the Austin American-Statesman)

  University of Texas coach Darrell Royal talking to his huddling Longhorns during their New Year’s Day 1964 matchup against Navy at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. Until 1970, there were no African Americans on Royal’s varsity football teams. (Neil Leifer, Sports Illustrated/Getty Images)

  When Campbell got into the open field, Longhorn wide receiver Alfred Jackson (not pictured) had no trouble finding someone to block: the defensive backs “were hanging onto us, saying ‘I don’t want any part of this.’” (By UT Texas Student Publications, Prints and Photographs Collection, di_02829, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin)

  As Earl won the Heisman Trophy in New York City in December 1977, his family, watching on television in Tyler, was jubilant. In the center and leading the celebration is Earl’s nephew William Fields. (Photo courtesy of the Tyler Morning Telegraph)

  Bum Phillips, Earl’s lovable coach when he was with the Houston Oilers. (Larry Reese © Houston Chronicle. Used with permission)

  Campbell glancing back at Dolphin linebacker Steve Towle (56) as he outraces the Miami defense for a clinching touchdown on Monday Night Football during his rookie NFL campaign. Decades later, Towle said the moment still haunted him. (George Honeycutt © Houston Chronicle. Used with permission)

  He meted out punishment . . . (RGD0006N-1981-2419-025G, Houston Post Photograph Collection, Houston Public Library, Houston Metropolitan Research Center)

  . . . and received it. (George Honeycutt © Houston Chronicle. Used with permission)

  Having endured a handful of knee and back surgeries and battled through an addiction to pain medication, Earl was working out again in 2012. (Reproduced with permission of Jeff Heimsath)

  PART III

  HOUSTON

  When Satan came to Houston,

  He beat a quick retreat.

  He loved its wicked people,

  But he couldn’t stand the heat.

  —Houston Post, July 1969

  Heading into the late 1970s, Houston, Texas, a sprawling morass of a town, hot and mosquito-plagued, was the last place most professional football players wanted to end up. Its team was a mess, out of the playoffs for years. At its home games, at the famed Astrodome, half the seats were empty. Its owner was a fickle, uneasy man known for impulsively canning coaches and stonily waving off contract-renegotiation pleas from his most popular players. “When I was in Cleveland,” center Fred Hoaglin once said, “if you had a bad game (the coach) would threaten to trade you to the Houston Oilers.” Running back Vic Washi
ngton, dispatched to Houston in 1974 by the 49ers after three decent seasons in San Francisco, once said he considered the trade a form of punishment. During his single season in Houston, the team went 1–13; it was the second year in a row the team had posted that record. “We had no friends in the city,” defensive end Elvin Bethea, who began playing with the team in 1968, once said. “Even my dog would bite me when I’d go home.” Perhaps the plight of the Oilers was best summed up by a Pittsburgh Post columnist in the mid-1970s: the team is the “National Football League’s garbage can; a disposal for the wretched refuse of 25 other, better football teams.”