Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  The patrons were “country boys come to the stinking city to make some money and have a rambunctious time,” the longtime Texas newspaperman Billy Porterfield once wrote. They (or their parents) had moved to urban areas from a rural South that had been left behind—poverty levels in those parts were about 6 percent higher than in any other region of the country as the 1980s approached. The combination of cheap land, a race to the bottom on tax breaks in the 1960s and 1970s, low wages, and an unorganized labor force contributed to what politicians and industrial recruiters called the South’s “good business climate.” But even as the standard of living increased for many southerners, a vast underclass was spawned in the rural areas bypassed by industrialization. The per capita income of rural black southerners barely reached 30 percent of the US average in 1980; early in that decade, over three-fourths of rural black children under eighteen years old living in a female-headed household—the situation in which Earl Campbell had lately found himself—were poor.

  And so, if they could scrape together the money to afford the move, if they had skills to offer, a great tide of young men and women, the sons and daughters of farmers, fishermen, and ranchers, washed up on the fringes of Houston. Earl Campbell was one of those young people, and his skill, unusual as it was, was a prodigious talent for carrying a football. Another was Bum Phillips, a white man who had grown up in the petrochemical heartland as the area was transforming from rural ranches to oil and gas refineries. When he was a boy, his first cowboy hats, hand-me-downs from his grandfather, a ranch boss, were stuffed with tissue paper to make them fit.

  They brought with them small relics of their old life: their Bibles, their photographs, and their recipes. East Texas African Americans migrated to Houston with their meat-smoking customs. In black barbecue joints, you could find smoked sausage links consisting of a heavily seasoned mixture of ground beef and suet stuffed into natural hog casings, also known as “grease balls,” “juicy links,” and “garlic bombs.” Earl Campbell, who, after his pro football career, started a successful sausage company, had grown up with spicy hot links cooked on the grill; in Houston, a melting pot of flavors, he could indulge in a taste of home by visiting any number of barbecue spots run by black migrants.

  More than 1.5 million people lived in Houston in 1978. Close to 100,000 people arrived in that year alone, and 142,000 new telephones were hooked up. All told, Houston added 670,000 jobs during the 1970s. Bank deposits jumped from about $6 billion to $24 billion; office space grew to 100 million square feet from 30 million. This was what an oil boom looked like.

  “The unemployed pour into town in their hopeful thousands, clutching the want ads,” the Welsh writer Jan Morris observed in a 1981 story for Texas Monthly. “Hour by hour the freeways get fuller, the downtown towers taller, the River Oaks residents richer; the suburbs gnaw their way deeper into the countryside; and what was just a blob on the map a couple of decades ago becomes more than just a city—an idea, a vision, the Future Here and Now!”

  Pasadena, home to oil refineries and paper plants, was where many of those émigrés—especially the white ones—found jobs. Nicknamed “Stinkadena,” the area was permeated by a stench that some cracked was the smell of money. The great mass of rural Texans and Louisianans flowing into Houston for work during the boom days of the 1970s got their evening kicks at honky-tonks like Gilley’s. At their peak in the late 1970s, Armco Steel and the Baytown Works, two massive steel mills located along the Houston Ship Channel, employed more than 6,500 laborers who, in the heat and flash of liquid metal, cast untold tons of steel beams, giant plates, and drill pipes to feed the seemingly unending appetite for yet more oil and gas wells.

  Who were these Gilley-goers? They were overwhelmingly white, working-class, and, often, members of their local unions. Soon enough, they would be labeled Reagan Democrats—and decades later, many of them were Trump supporters. The place was on the “redneck end of the hippie-redneck spectrum,” according to the cultural historian Jason Mellard. Ninety-nine percent of the patrons were white or Hispanic, said Gilley’s regular Gator Conley. About five miles from the club, the Ku Klux Klan operated a bookstore on the corner of a major Pasadena intersection—parked out front was a van emblazoned with the words “Nigger Go Home.” Stop at a red light and you might get handed some literature from a man scurrying about under a sheet. A cell leader of the American Nazi Party, asked once why he had resettled from St. Louis as far south as Pasadena to lead a branch of the group, explained: “This was the whitest place I could find.”

  In short, Gilley’s patrons put the honky in honky-tonk.

  And nestled among them were members of the Houston Oilers: their fun-loving temperamental, libertine, the mop-headed and handsome and oft-cracked-ribbed quarterback, Dan Pastorini; their stout six-four center, Carl Mauck, a blonde, boisterous crew-cut midwesterner who worked as a beer delivery man in the off-season; and as soon as he arrived in Houston, the black running back from deep East Texas, who took his turn on the mechanical bull and was always good for at least a couple of beers before heading home to his wife. Earl Campbell, catholic in his approach to the world, was perfectly comfortable scarfing down a garlic bomb at the all-black Kozy Kitchen before heading over to carouse at the all-white Gilley’s.

  The Esquire writer Aaron Latham, dispatched in the summer of 1978 to Gilley’s to write about the sociology of the place, found it populated by “saloon cowboys” long divorced from the country, young men dislocated and unmoored, each trying to “escape from the overwhelming complexities of his petrochemical days into the simplicity of his honky-tonk nights.”

  Some of them had never set foot in rural, cowboying Texas. But they had parents born there, or grandparents, and Latham’s piece is about how they channeled their dislocation into physical competition, a search for their inner Marlboro Man, at Gilley’s. His article “The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America’s Search for True Grit” appeared in Esquire in mid-September, just after the second game of Campbell’s rookie season. It isn’t hard to see how the Houston Oilers, a football team with a cowboy coach and a cowboy running back, migrants themselves to the big city, might have appealed to the Gilley’s crowd.

  “The story was obvious,” Latham told Texas Monthly for a 2015 oral history about the movie Urban Cowboy, which was based on his Esquire piece. “These kids were coming in from the country to find themselves in a mechanized city, just another cog in the wheel.”

  Earl Campbell, descending on Houston in the summer of 1978, only a few years removed from Tyler, Texas, was one of those kids. He was black, yes, and Latham’s version of the story was a white one—the country-and-western scene in Houston was dominated by Anglos, and virtually all the musicians they listened to were white—but Earl Campbell, in his ecumenical way, loved Gilley’s. During Campbell’s senior year in Austin, his old coach, Darrell Royal, would call up his favorite running back after curfew and convince him to slip out of his dorm. “Come on over, there’s goin’ to be some pickin’,” Royal would murmur, and soon they’d be holed up in a honky-tonk or at Royal’s place, talking about—or with—Waylon Jennings and Charley Pride and Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard.

  Now, unpretentious and very, very country—polite, handy, a smoker of meats, a rose farmer, more cowboy than urban—Campbell appeared a perfect fit for Houston, the great absorber of refugees from the rural hinterlands. He, in turn, embraced the city, freely quoting Merle Haggard: “Big city, turn me loose and set me free,” he said once, about playing in Houston. When Willie showed up to play at Gilley’s, Earl was often there, sitting with a pair of the Oiler faithful—an older couple named Whitworth who used to RV to the Oilers’ summer training camp and all their games at the dome (Whit Whitworth worked in Baytown for Exxon)—just to the left of the dance floor, not far from the bandstand. When Willie sang “Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” Earl invariably joined him on stage. At one press conference, he announced that he would “walk halfway across hell and Texas to
hear Willie Nelson sing a country song.”

  Perhaps it says something about Earl Campbell, about his easiness with the world, that he was comfortable in a club that was virtually all-white, listening to musicians who were nearly always white. “Earl was the whitest black man I ever covered,” the longtime Houston Post Oilers beat reporter Dale Robertson told me. “His entire life philosophy was quoting country lyrics.”

  Ahead of contract negotiations with the Oilers, Campbell hired Mike Trope, a young agent in Los Angeles who had recently represented the running backs Ricky Bell and Tony Dorsett. “Earl made it a precondition that I visit his mother in Tyler,” Trope said, and he retraced the pilgrimages that Darrell Royal and other college coaches had made to the old house. “It wasn’t a business meeting; it’s more like you have to meet the father before asking her to marry you.” Trope was charming, bright—and, perhaps, naïve. Following twenty hours of negotiations, Trope and Adams agreed to a contract worth roughly $1.3 million, including a $500,000 signing bonus. Cigars all around. But under Adams’s terms, Campbell deferred all but $200,000; the rest would be parceled out $25,000 a year into the 1990s, ensuring that the bulk of the money remained in Adams’s hands, where it would earn him interest or investment wealth for years. Either Adams snowed Trope, or the agent screwed over Campbell. “His grandmother could have done a better job for him,” the agent Jerry Argovitz told reporters. “And she’s been dead for 10 years.” It probably hadn’t helped that in the middle of contract negotiations, Campbell, interviewed by the Tyler Morning Telegraph, said he would play for $50.

  His second agent, Witt Stewart, who originally joined Campbell halfway through his rookie season to work on endorsement deals, said Campbell didn’t fully grasp the terms of the contract he had signed. “I mean, he didn’t know what the word ‘deferred’ meant,” Stewart said. “He told me he had trouble sleeping at night knowing that he was a millionaire. And I said, ‘Earl, you can sleep real good.’ And I explained to him the contract. And it was life-changing. He felt totally misled.”

  “Leverage was negligible,” insisted Trope. Players at the time “didn’t have freedom to select what team to play for.” There was another problem: Campbell and other African American athletes were at a competitive disadvantage, Trope said, because some team officials took race unfairly into account. He said that during one negotiation, one general manager told him, “These black guys spend money as quickly as they get it, so what difference does it make?” Johnny Sample, a former professional cornerback, told Jet magazine in 1973 that during his time in the league in the 1960s, black players were usually offered $6,000 less than white players—in 1969, the average NFL salary was $25,000. And advertisers were generally less keen to hire black players to hawk their products, shutting them off from important endorsement money. In North Dallas Forty, Peter Gent’s thinly veiled novel about his time on the Dallas Cowboys, the narrator, Phil Elliott, a white wide receiver, calculates that he will have a favorable contract-negotiating position because several receiver or tight end slots have already been taken by African Americans: “They wouldn’t give another black a shot unless he was awful good,” he decides. “The color of my skin was the only point in my favor.”

  Indeed, a decade before he was drafted by Houston, Campbell—or at least a player not quite the star he was—might not have been offered a position on the Oilers at all. Through the mid-1960s, the Oilers had in place a “Negro quota system,” a policy against having more than five black players at any time. Often, like most clubs, they would keep an even number (two or four) so that black ballplayers would always have a roommate and a white player would never be forced to share a room with one.

  But in 1966, the Oilers hired Tom Williams, an African American former football and track coach at Grambling, to recruit black players. In an interview with Jet magazine, Williams said the Grambling athletic staff, disgusted by the cap on black players, used to turn off the television when Oiler games were broadcast. Claiming that the club’s owner wasn’t to blame, the Oilers’ quota, Williams told Jet, “was the fault of the people who work for Adams.” “I’ve been told to go after the best athletes, white or Negro,” he said. The next year, with the quota dropped, the squad had fifteen African Americans.

  Still, into the 1970s, the racial composition of southern teams—Colts (Baltimore), Cowboys (Dallas), Oilers (Houston), Saints (New Orleans), and Dolphins (Miami)—had a statistically significant smaller representation of African Americans than non-southern teams. “The management of southern teams may assume that their white fans”—for example, the urban cowboys and cowgirls who packed Gilley’s, or the attorneys and bankers who lived in Houston’s posh River Oaks neighborhood—“will be more predisposed to identify with the team if its black members are kept at a minimum,” observed Jonathan Brower in his 1973 University of California at Santa Barbara dissertation, “The Black Side of Football: The Salience of Race.” Explaining how the Oilers of the 1970s operated, former (black) Oilers defensive lineman Curley Culp, who overlapped with Campbell on the squad, told me the thinking was that “if your fans have a particular hue, you want that on the team.” Brower interviewed NFL players, management personnel, and scouts. Among black players, he found, there was a “common belief that it is necessary for the black to be superior to the white in order to make the team.” Even after quotas were wound down, NFL teams used a practice they called “stacking,” which involved pitting black athletes against each other for openings informally reserved for black players. Here was how it worked on one team, as one scout explained it to Brower: “Two of the team’s best offensive tackle candidates (both black) were competing against each other in drills on the practice field. One of the two outplayed the other, and this differential in playing ability between the two blacks justified cutting the less capable of the two even though he was better than most of the white offensive tackles retained by the team.”

  George Plimpton gets a similar explanation in Paper Lion, his story of training with the Detroit Lions in 1963: “Even in the strict business of football, despite what was said, if one probed it was easy enough to find the taint of prejudice. One of the coaches told me that as a matter of principle he would never want to have more than six Negro players on a team: cliques formed if you had that many—that was his idea—and the whole all-important concept of the team went awry.” Into the 1970s, the Dallas Cowboys appeared to reserve one slot for a white running back and one for an African American. And owners were especially keen to snuff out political demonstrations. In a harbinger of the blacklisting of Colin Kaepernick, Brower found that black players in the 1970s who were deemed “troublemakers” because they complained about racism—being referred to as “boys,” say, by a coach, while the white players were called “men”—risked being cut. Again, Phil Elliott, Gent’s alter ego in North Dallas Forty, explains why more black players didn’t speak out: “Fear. They all got too much to lose. To them being a second-class citizen on a football team is a hell of a lot better than being a first-class citizen in south Dallas. The ones that did speak up are gone.”

  By 1978, when Earl joined the squad, the Oilers had black players in key positions: Billy “White Shoes” Johnson, a speedster known for his Funky Chicken end zone celebration; Kenny Burrough, a wide receiver who had won high school state track titles in his native Florida—and who, despite being admitted to the University of Florida, he told me, opted to go to a historically black university in Houston after his family got threatening messages at home; linebacker Robert Brazile, known as Dr. Doom; the quick-as-a-cat cornerback Willie Alexander; and defensive linemen Bethea and Culp and offensive lineman Leon Gray.

  Adams bet that Campbell, the Texas native son, would help sell tickets on Sundays—indeed, Oiler home games sold out after Earl was drafted. Phillips had predicted, rightly, the fan base would be grateful: “If there’s one thing Texans hate more than losing their oil, it’s losing their football players.” The Oilers made a big show of the signing: Campbell
was helicoptered from Houston Intercontinental Airport to the practice field to shake Adams’s hand in front of the news media. In a demonstration of generosity, Adams bestowed on Campbell, then and there, on the field, a new Lincoln Continental Mark V. Columbia blue, with a white canopy—roughly the Oilers colors—and little porthole windows toward the rear; it was an impossibly long, bulky car, an impressive piece of machinery. It was apparently the second vehicle that Campbell had been given that year; in February, the people of Tyler had presented the twenty-two-year-old with a van as the culmination of Earl Campbell Day.

  The automobiles marked a material and metaphorical manifestation of his journey out of Tyler. Earl had always had a special lust for cars, but his lifelong poverty had left him bereft of a vehicle of his own. Even during his first trip to Austin in the fall of 1974 in Henry Bell’s Monte Carlo, he remembered “driving through Palestine and Corsicana . . . saying, ‘I wish I had this car for myself.’” At the conclusion of an interview in his dorm room with a student reporter a couple of years later, Campbell reached for his UT letter jacket and a small-brimmed straw hat before asking for a ride. He and the student reporter, Brad Buchholz, walked to Buchholz’s car, a blue 1956 T-Bird. “‘I want it,’ he says softly as we get in. What? ‘I want it . . . the car.’” Mo Olian, a UT alum who volunteered as a mentor for black football students, remembered pulling up in his gray 1957 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud II and Earl Campbell’s gobsmacked reaction—“so reticent to even touch it, asking if that was OK, in his always deeply reserved and so-humble way.”

  And as his senior year approached, Earl called Wally Scott, an Austin attorney and Longhorn booster who had helped steer him to Austin, and told him he “wanted to talk business.” Scott said the two of them should meet at Don Weedon’s filling station. Here is how Scott, who died in 2005, described the episode in an unpublished memoir: