Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  Earl said, “Mr. Scott, I need a car.” I said, “Earl, you are poor, aren’t you, and you have been poor all your life?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I then said: Earl, if you had a car, you couldn’t afford to buy gasoline. You room with Alfred Jackson, and he has a car. Borrow his car. You don’t have to be poor but a few more months. But if you have to have a car, just go down to any bank in Austin and tell the receptionist, “I am Earl and I want to see the President.” I can assure that she will put you in his office and if you tell him you want to borrow the money for a car to be paid back in two or three months when you sign your pro contract, he will loan you the money. However, you should also know that when you show up on the campus with a new car, all of our enemies will say, “I knew they bought him, and they are just now giving him his car.”

  That summer, he ended up buying a ’67 Oldsmobile back in Tyler for a few hundred dollars—“Hop in my Rolls,” he joked to passengers. Now, after years of yearning for other people’s luxury or classic cars, he finally had, it appeared, one of his own.

  Shortly after the signing, however, Campbell drove the Lincoln back to Austin, where he got a call from the Lincoln dealership to arrange for the $289 monthly payments. Welcome to the Oilers: the car, it turned out, wasn’t a gift after all. Campbell called his mother and asked her what to do. The following day, he got back in the Continental and drove it straight to Houston to return it to Adams.

  (Suspicious, underhanded circumstances around Oiler contracts were not unusual: Culp, the defensive lineman, told me that Bud Adams would agree one day to terms and then the next present a contract with different ones. “Bottom Line Bud” was a behind-his-back nickname. Once, as a signing bonus, Elvin Bethea ended up getting a bunch of cattle and livestock from Adams. Later, said Pastorini, Bethea, came “to find out there was some kind of drought; all of his cows died and all of Bud’s cows lived.”)

  Whatever the terms of Earl Campbell’s contract—at each Pro Bowl and inside the Oilers’ locker room, he heard that he was underpaid, until he renegotiated his deal in 1980—he finally had the money to get a quick start on what he described as his prime goal: “to build a house for my mother so that when she lays down at night she can’t see the Big Dipper.” He had grown up in poverty and subsisted on little in college, even as he made the University of Texas millions in alumni donations and national television exposure, and now, finally, he had cash of his own. Ever since people started telling him in high school that he could one day go pro, that had been his dream.

  “It’s going to be simple and it’s going to be big,” said Ann Campbell, who already had nine grandkids. “I want them to have plenty of room when they come see me. The main thing is to have a house that’s full of love and a roof that doesn’t leak.”

  The four-bedroom house—brick, low slung, insulated—was finished in May 1979. It was a middle-class sort of place, one that wouldn’t be out of place in any number of 1970s suburban developments, but in the pines and farmland northwest of Tyler, it appeared grand and, especially, solid. The old ramshackle place remained, as a kind of house museum, just behind it. Ann Campbell opened the new house up to the public—visitors lined up outside her home to catch a glimpse of the Heisman Trophy, on a pedestal by the living room. She was asked what she made of her son’s contract and how it felt to have a place of her own. “All this money don’t make me nervous,” she said. “I was always in fine places, beautiful homes. They may not have been mine, but I could enjoy them just the same.”

  To get away from the big city, the Oilers opened their 1978 training camp in the former frontier military outpost of San Angelo, a wide-streeted town of just under 75,000, a brushland, desertlike sort of place so dry that five years earlier one of the town’s reservoirs had caught fire.

  At the training camp were more than a few walk-ons hoping to catch the eye of a coach and be signed to the team. They included an operator of Houston cement trucks; an actor from a New York improv troupe; a grade-school teacher; a night guard at the state prison in Huntsville; an antiques refurbisher; the driver of an ice cream truck; and an industrial machinery salesman. But Earl Campbell, the reigning Heisman Trophy winner, didn’t enter camp with any kind of swagger. The longtime Austin sports reporter Kirk Bohls, who had gotten to know Campbell when the running back was at the University of Texas, remembers an insecurity about him as he prepared for his rookie season: “I’ll never forget one starry night at training camp in San Angelo in the summer of 1978 when a nervous Campbell and I sat on a curb outside his dormitory and he told me, ‘I don’t know if I’m good enough to play at this level.’ I told him he was nuts because he was going to turn the league on its ear. I really went out on a limb there.”

  The rookie’s need for reassurance also struck Tim Wilson, the second-year fullback who would act as Campbell’s lead blocker. “I remember one time he asked me, ‘Do you think I can really make this team?’ And he was serious. I felt like telling him, ‘Man, you probably are this team.’” Even players Campbell was displacing realized quickly they had little standing for complaint. “It was the second day of camp,” recalled Rob Carpenter, who had led the team in rushing the previous year.

  Earl took a little off-tackle play to the right and accelerated into the line. At that point in camp, your linemen aren’t going full speed, and it was one of those routine plays where the line is stalemated and the play is going to stack up. Most people would have turned it outside. Earl put his head down. Next thing anyone knew, he had his right shoulder pad on (offensive lineman) Ed Fisher and his left on (offensive lineman) Conway Hayman, and he knocked those guys about three yards forward. Then he pushed the whole pile into the defensive guys and knocked them back. It was only about a four-yard gain, but it’s a no-gain for most backs. And I’m standing there, thinking, “Well, OK, he’s proved his point to me.”

  In a sense, Campbell’s was the kind of anxiety endemic among professional players, who constantly worry about playing time and compete for management’s approbation. The fear is simple: if you don’t outperform the guy next to you, you could be out of a job. Money was something the players and coaches talked about constantly.

  What passed for glamour on the team belonged to the quarterback, the romantically named Dante Antonio Pastorini. A poor man’s Joe Namath, Pastorini was a California heartthrob who had once counted as a wife the Playboy bunny June Wilkinson—known as “the Bosom.” “She may be why Pastorini is continually having abdominal pulls,” an Oiler PR man once told the writer Roy Blount. Pastorini had declined an invitation to appear naked as a centerfold—“It wouldn’t have bothered me,” said the then–Mrs. Pastorini, “I think his body is so gorgeous the whole world should see it”—but during that training camp he agreed to judge the weekly wet T-shirt contest at Danceland. Occasionally, the winner would show up with him at practice the next morning.

  His spirit was emblematic of the team’s. He drag-raced cars and starred in the B movies Weed: The Florida Connection and Naked Sun (aka Killer Fish), in which he played a skin-diving jewel thief who meets his demise courtesy of some hungry piranhas.

  Pastorini was tough, too—early in his Oiler career, he was the first NFL quarterback to don a flak jacket so that he could continue playing with broken ribs. He spent most of his career behind a porous offensive line, and so despite a rocket of an arm—he was drafted by the Oilers with the third overall pick in 1971, after turning down an offer to play baseball with the New York Mets—he typically completed fewer than half his passes, tossing more interceptions than touchdowns in most seasons. But now, finally, he had a competent group of men playing ahead of him—and a premier power back behind him. “Every quarterback wants a running back like Earl,” Pastorini said.

  In training camp in San Angelo, Campbell, naturally, gained the most scrutiny. After he stumbled during a drill that involved sprinting backward, reporters asked Phillips for his thoughts. “If y’all think about it, we didn’t draft him to go backward,” he said. Another time, the
y asked about Earl Campbell’s slow time in the mile run. Reporters observed that Campbell couldn’t—or didn’t—cover the distance without stopping. “That’s all right,” Phillips deflected, “We just won’t give him the ball on third down and a mile to go.” The coaches were actually thrilled about what they were seeing from Campbell: He “has two speeds—crawling and exploding,” said running back coach Andy Bourgeois. “He’s as far along as any rookie I’ve ever coached. We will get the ball to Earl enough times for him to set the world on fire.”

  Earl, for his part, remained resolutely country. “Easy Earl” he was nicknamed by one of his Oiler teammates for his laid-back way off the field. “You know what he reminds me of?” Bourgeois said. “A Sunday morning. Just an easy Sunday morning.” In training camp in San Angelo, Campbell, like all rookies, was forced to sing a song. He opted for “Mamma, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”—Willie and Waylon’s version had topped the country charts that year. Here was a 220-pound, twenty-three-year-old man with a sizable Afro, standing in shoulder pads on a cafeteria table, belting: “Cowboys ain’t easy to love and they’re harder to hold.”

  In fact, just about the only notable matchup during that preseason was against the Oilers’ cross-state rivals. The Cowboys had glamour, they had their famous cheerleaders, and they had victories—during the 1970s, the ’Boys won more games than any other NFL team. The Cowboys could arguably lay claim to having more fans in Houston than the Oilers. And the situation on Sundays in Tyler was indicative of that in much of the state: if both Dallas and Houston were playing at the same time, Tyler’s sole broadcast television station wanted the Cowboys, native son be damned.

  Compared with Houston, the Cowboys even had sophistication. “If you could count to three you could play for the Oilers,” Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson, a linebacker who played for both teams, wrote in his memoir. “They were not a high-tech system. I never saw a playbook while I was there.” The Cowboys, on the other hand, distributed notebooks three inches thick, “every page a defense and a diagram that I’d never seen,” Henderson wrote. “Here was the 31 Safety Zone, the 41–46 Man, the 41–46 Zone, the 48 Banjo Flex Strong Tiger. There were inside defenses and outside defenses and (head coach) Tom Landry’s famous flex weak and flex strong. And every defense had at least six variations.” The linebacker coach, a longtime Landry assistant, gave each player a few colored pens. “‘Your blue pen is for flow weak,’ he told us. ‘Your red pen is for ‘fire’ or flow strong. Your green pen is for passes—you draw the routes of the backs and receivers out of the backfield.’”

  There was a kind of choreography to the way the Cowboys played. A beat after taking their stances, for example, the offensive linemen, in unison, would stand and reset—a maneuver intended to mask the pre-snap backfield motion known as the Landry Shift. The Oilers’ style, as captured by Gray, the lineman who joined the team in 1979, was simpler: “Try to knock the other guy off the line of scrimmage. It’s one-on-one, you against him. Nothing fancy. Either he whips you or you whip him. It’s the lowest common denominator.”

  Chiefly, the teams were creatures of their coaches. Landry, who had won 116 pro games by the time Phillips was named Houston’s head coach, was a stoic, a hard-ass, a brainiac; Phillips was folksy, emotional, a players’ coach. “Dallas players are made to feel that Landry’s system is what wins games and not the people involved,” Steve Kiner, a linebacker on the Cowboys’ 1970 Super Bowl team who also played for the Oilers, said. “It’s sort of like the players themselves don’t really matter, that the system would win anyway whoever you put in.” Landry required that beards be shaven and moustaches trimmed at the corner of the mouth. He put his player through his notorious 110s: you had to run 110 yards and back in sixty seconds, ten times.

  Phillips threw beer-and-pizza parties with his players and took them bowling. “Everybody makes fun of these little chickenbleep parties,” he once said.

  But don’t tell me they’re unimportant. You gotta remember, friendship is nothin’ you can take from a guy. He has to give it. That means sometimes you have to take the first step. It isn’t that the whites don’t like the blacks or that the blacks don’t like the whites. They’re just more comfortable staying by themselves. That’s why I think you should have the parties. Force ’em to mix.

  In this spirit, he would stop practice to surprise players with an ice cream truck. Thursdays were beer keg days at the training field. Saturdays, players could bring their wives, kids, and dogs.

  I don’t want to say too much about this because I’m still trying to fool some of these guys, but the only secret I’ve found is to recognize that everyone’s different and has to be treated differently. There’s not one right way to treat a player, just as there’s not one right way to treat a coach. You deal with a player the way you want him to deal with you. You can’t expect loyalty if you’re not loyal. It doesn’t work that way. Sure I’m close to my players, but I think you should be.

  Race was not an issue in the Houston locker room, according to Campbell, Bingham, Burrough, Pastorini, Mauck, and Culp. Each of them, interviewed separately, said that Bum Phillips encouraged players to get to know one another—and their girlfriends, wives, and kids—so that the team would consider itself a family more than just a group of coworkers. “You won’t fight for anyone like you will for your family,” he was fond of saying. And so the white players would take the black players to a country-and-western bar—a place like Gilley’s—and the black players would take their white teammates to one of their soul music hangouts. Years later, Phillips put his relationship with his players this way: “People said I was too easy on my players. We weren’t too easy on them. I love my mama, and she loved me, but she whipped me when she needed to. That’s how I felt about players.”

  That summer in San Angelo, Phillips’s one major innovation was to add the I formation to the team’s offense. It had served Campbell well at UT, he figured, giving him time to set up his run as each play developed. Now, against the Cowboys in a preseason game, the offense put it to good use. The previous January, Cliff Harris, the Dallas Cowboy free safety, had competed against Campbell in the Bahamas in Superstars, one of those off-season TV shows in which athletes challenged each other in feats of strength and skill: chin-ups, soccer shots, a sprint, rowing—that sort of thing. Campbell, at the time a month or so removed from winning the Heisman Trophy, struck Harris as retiring and mild. “I approached my first tackle thinking he was a nice, shy running back,” Harris said. “That is, until I ran into him and he proceeded to knock me backwards and step on my chest.” In all, Campbell went for 151 yards, including a fifty-five-yard scoring run. Harris, who is one of about a dozen players to have competed in five Super Bowls, said that he always scouted running backs to find what he called their “balance point”—the vulnerability that would leave them exposed to toppling. On Campbell, he decided, after viewing game film and playing against him, there was none: “There wasn’t any place. Oh, there was one way. As he ran past, you grab him by the jersey, dig in your heels, and wait for others to pile on.”

  The Cowboys, wrote the Oilers beat reporter Dale Robertson, play “three-piece-suit football.”

  Computer football. Orwellian football. I find that a little bit discomforting, but I’m not sure I like those talking cash registers in supermarkets, either. I guess it’s all a sign of the times and the Oilers had no choice but to fall into line, or become a pair of brown shoes at the NFL’s black-tie ball. Under Phillips, Houston had a very simple modus operandi: Campbell to the left and Campbell to the right, with everybody busting helmets straight ahead. No traps, no pulling guards, no misdirection. Just simple power football, may the better—and stronger—man win.

  On the morning the Oilers were due to break camp in San Angelo in 1978, Gregg Bingham, the team’s defensive captain, was asked by some black fans when the Oilers would take off for the roughly 365-mile drive back to Houston.

  “One o’clock,” he said.
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br />   About a half hour later, as if double-checking, one of the black fans again asked the same question.

  “One o’clock,” he said once more, wondering about all the interest.

  Finally, at one the Oilers started to head out of their West Texas redoubt, ready for the long drive through remote and rural Texas.

  “There was a caravan behind me of cars, and they’re all black guys,” says Bingham, who is white. “And I’m thinking, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And they told me: ‘We’re going through some towns that black people don’t get caught dead in.’”

  Perhaps they had in mind the story of Isaiah Hill. A black man from Austin, he had been arrested a year earlier in Brownwood, ninety miles east of San Angelo, for robbing a hotel. Hill told police he didn’t do it—he said another person was to blame. But the Brown County district attorney reportedly told him, “This is a white folks’ town and if you don’t take this plea bargain I’m going to make an example out of you.” Hill insisted he was not guilty, and in February 1978, an all-white jury convicted him and gave him a life sentence. (He was finally paroled a few years ago, after more than thirty-five years in prison.) Some of the other towns roughly between San Angelo and Houston—Boerne, Comanche, Hamilton, Goldthwaite—were so devoid of African Americans that the sociologist James Loewen, author of Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of Racist America, has identified them as places where African Americans, through a combination of discriminatory local laws and intimidation, were not welcome after sunset. Census takers in these areas could find virtually no African Americans. Decades later, when the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department moved its training academy for game wardens to Hamilton, the few black wardens rebelled, calling the decision ignorant or intentionally racist. One of them, Melvin Fowler, said that as a child he learned that Hamilton County, a Klan stronghold, was a “drive-through” county—that is, a place where African Americans shouldn’t stop for gas or chow. For his part, Bingham still remembers what he was told that August day by those black fans: “You’d be able to negotiate for us if anything happened, so we’re following close on your ass.”