Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  On the first play against Pittsburgh, Campbell took a handoff and was met head-on by linebacker Jack Hamm; the force of the collision cracked Hamm’s helmet, and Campbell was stopped for a two-yard loss. Joe Greene, the Steelers’ famous defensive lineman, told his teammates in the next huddle: “That’s the way we’re going to hit him all day.”

  “He can inflict more damage on a team than any back I know of,” Greene later told a reporter. “O. J. did it with speed, Campbell does it with power. He’s a punishing runner. He hurts you. There are very few tacklers in the league who will bring Earl Campbell down one-on-one. When we’re preparing for the Oilers, we emphasize the importance of gang-tackling Campbell. We work on it.”

  In the second quarter, a nineteen-yard field goal by Oiler kicker Toni Fritsch cut the score to 14–3, but then the Steelers scored seventeen points during the last forty-eight seconds of the first half. First, Houston running back Ronnie Coleman lost a fumble, and moments later Pittsburgh wide receiver Lynn Swann caught a twenty-nine-yard touchdown pass. Then the Oilers’ return man, having fielded the ensuing kickoff and sprinted into the clear, inexplicably coughed up the ball—leading to another quick Steeler touchdown. After the Oilers got the ball back, Coleman fumbled again, and the Steelers kicked a field goal to increase Pittsburgh’s lead to 31–3.

  “The ball didn’t feel like a football,” Coleman dolefully explained.

  Houston never threatened the Steelers again during the game, turning over the ball four times in its six second-half possessions. All season long, Pastorini had benefited from having Campbell as his running back; fake handoffs to Campbell had halted onrushing linebackers, leaving the quarterback more time to pick out receivers. He passed for more touchdowns and yardage than he ever had before in his eight-year career. That day in Pittsburgh, Earl carried the ball twenty-two times, gaining only sixty-two yards and fumbling three times—that entire season, he had fumbled only seven times in more than 300 carries.

  “For all his talent,” observed a Houston sportswriter, Earl Campbell “cannot walk on water, much less run or cut or turn sharp corners on it.”

  Pastorini was no help, throwing five interceptions.

  Bum, in his inimitable way, summed up the game thusly: “The behinder we got, the worser it got.”

  The whole scene was a bad one. Steeler fans pelted the Oilers with snowballs as they left the field, and then the team had to stew at the airport for five hours because of the weather.

  What unfolded upon their arrival in Houston, however, said something about how beloved the team had become.

  They landed in Texas at eleven that night, and a couple of buses whisked them to the Astrodome. Fifty thousand people punching white pom-poms in the air went absolutely bonkers upon their entrance. Earl got on a cop’s motorcycle and did a kind of victory lap, waving his hand to hosannas. They sang, “Houston Oilers No. 1,” one of the many fight songs they had adopted, like English soccer fans, and chanted a cascade of “Luv Ya Blue, Luv Ya Blue.” You could see, for a moment, how Earl might have thought he had brought the entire city together.

  During the summer of 1979, in a muddy, stenchy stretch by the banks of Brays Bayou, overgrown with weeds and high grass except for a tired running path squeezed behind an apartment complex and a small shopping center, Earl Campbell and a few of his teammates could be found doing sprints and calisthenics. Putting the players through their paces was Tom Williams, the team’s former assistant general manager. He was a lean fifty-year-old with a closely shaven head. The players met there because Williams owned two shops in the little strip mall—a kolache and pastry shop and Touchdown Barbeque. When he first joined the group, receiver Mike Renfro said he thought Williams “was some guy who ran a doughnut shop and our guys had lost their minds.”

  One of the drills devised by Williams, who had previously coached at Grambling, was known as The Hill. On a steep fifteen-yard incline on the side of the bayou, Campbell and his teammates would charge up first forward, then backward, and then forward again. That was a single repetition; Williams might call for three sets of ten repetitions—an exercise meant to build up hamstrings, calves, and quadriceps—in short, explosiveness.

  Campbell said the workouts trimmed four inches off his waistline in a month and increased his flexibility. “Look, used to be I couldn’t even do this”—Campbell sat on the ground before a reporter, spread his enormous legs in front of him at a wide angle, and then bent forward, his forehead touching the ground. He claimed that he had added an inch to each thigh while cutting his ten-yard dash from 1.9 to 1.4 seconds.

  Across town at Gilley’s, John Travolta, only twenty-five and already a star, spent that summer shooting the movie Urban Cowboy. He had been jetting in and out on his private plane and was staying in Houston’s tony Memorial neighborhood in a $10,000-a-week compound known as Fort Travolta. Each morning at six, a caravan of Angelenos would head out of West Houston to the grimy, oil-odored air of Pasadena to film at the club. Travolta would take locals in the cast out for lunch. “You ride in his limo, and he’d get on that car phone. ‘What’s your mama’s number? Let’s call your mama,’” Gator Conley said. “He’d get on the phone and say, ‘Guess where your baby’s at?’” Gator was a Gilley’s regular who walked Travolta through country-and-western dance moves and more or less played himself in the movie, wearing his Gilley’s getup of black jeans, black western shirt, and black cowboy boots. A small-brimmed hat, an alligator buckle, and a cigarillo completed the look.

  That year, 1979, GQ devoted an issue to the style of the “New West.” Hollywood, keen to jump on what was hot, green-lit a handful of country-and-western-themed movies: The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia, Honeysuckle Rose, and Coal Miner’s Daughter. In Houston, Travolta was an object of obsession. From the Urban Cowboy set, bottles of cloudy water collected from an on-set pothole that Travolta’s character had fallen in were reportedly going for $25 apiece. The Bee Gees happened to play Houston that summer, and there, as a special guest, showing off moves from Saturday Night Fever, was Travolta. Women screamed, and cameras flashed like stars.

  When the rookie Rich Ellender joined the team in the fall of 1979 to return kicks, he asked Bum what was expected of him. The coach replied, “I don’t want you to fumble, and every yard you move the ball toward the goal line, that’s one less yard Earl will have to get by himself.”

  Finally, after years of dire play, the Oilers were great. “Before Earl came along,” Oiler defensive end Elvin Bethea said, “this was just a stopover for a lot of players. We’d show up on Sunday and give the other team a good fight, but we knew all along what the outcome was going to be. Earl put us at the watering hole; now we’re going to drink with everybody else.”

  When the Oilers needed a play that season, they went to Earl. And even when the defense knew they would go to Earl—when everyone in the stadium knew they would go to Earl, even the little boys and girls cracking peanuts up in the nosebleed seats—he would deliver. In a game against the Chicago Bears, he racked up 206 yards, running nine consecutive times at the finish to kill the clock and preserve a four-point Oiler win. On fourth-and-goal in a game against the Colts, the Oilers handed the ball to Campbell. Touchdown. On fourth-and-three from their own thirty-eight in the same game, they handed the ball to him again. Move the chains. “I have never played against a back as strong as he is in short-yardage situations,” Colt safety Bruce Laird said in the locker room after the game. “He gets what he needs every time. He is the key to their offense. We went into the game knowing we had to stop him to win and we couldn’t do it.” Cornerback Dwight Harrison sounded a note of awe when a reporter asked what he made of Campbell. “On film, it looks like guys just don’t want to tackle him,” he said. “But you get out there and try to hit him . . . my goodness. If you go low, he’s a good enough athlete to jump over you and if you go high, well, that could be suicidal.”

  The high point of Campbell’s second pro season was a game against Houston’s in-stat
e rival. The Oilers, led by Campbell, were carrying a 9–3 record, but the Cowboys, at 8–4, were favored by three points. Dallas since 1966 had compiled twelve winning seasons and three trips to the Super Bowl; Houston had four winning seasons and no Super Bowls.

  “It may be the most noticed shootout on this state’s hallowed soil since Sam Houston ambushed Santa Anna,” Dale Robertson of the Houston Post, observed, with only a little irony. “We hate them and they hate us,” said defensive back Willie Alexander. “You feel that the minute you step on the field. This is for the bragging rights.”

  Bum alternated between joking about how the matchup amounted to a Texas Super Bowl—“You think we’re obnoxious now, you just wait and see”—and acting coy about the Cowboys, calling them “the team up north of here, I can’t think of their name.” In the locker room before the game, Phillips delivered this line to his players: “They’re America’s team—but we’re Texas’ team.”

  Roger Staubach, the upright former Navy man, nicknamed “Captain America,” who later parlayed his fame and money into real estate and Republican politics—in other words, the anti-Pastorini—opened the game with a fifty-six-yard touchdown pass to Drew Pearson; Campbell answered with a sixty-one-yard touchdown run. It went back and forth like that until the Oilers finally made a stop late in the game.

  In the end, Campbell went for 195 yards and two touchdowns as the Oilers won 30-24.

  It was left to Cliff Harris, once more, to describe to reporters what it was like to face Campbell. “He’s the greatest running back in football,” he said. “All you can do is close your eyes and hope he doesn’t break your helmet.” After the win, Phillips told reporters: “Remember how I told you guys last week that was just another game? I lied.”

  The 1979 season, which saw the Oilers go 11–5, ended again in the AFC Championship—again in Pittsburgh. In the off-season, Bum had purchased special boots for games against the Steelers—eel and turkey skins in blue, and crocodile leather in gray. “Crocodiles like water,” Phillips reasoned. “They’ll swim out there and bite you. Hey, I need all the help I can get.” Once more, the temperature at kick-off was below freezing. But this time, the game was tight. Facing a predictable Oiler offense, Pittsburgh stacked the line with seven or eight defenders to stop Campbell, especially whenever the Oilers’ lone deep threat, Ken Burrough, headed out of the game. “We knew Earl would carry,” Mean Joe Greene, the Steelers’ defensive tackle, said later. Campbell, coming off a groin pull that had sidelined him the previous week, rushed for only seventeen yards on fifteen tries.

  The game turned on a call that canceled an apparent Houston touchdown—officials called the pass incomplete, even as replays available to TV watchers showed that the Houston receiver clearly got his feet down in the corner of the end zone. The Steelers came out on top again, 27–13. Bethea, the twelve-year veteran who had played through Houston’s most miserable seasons, cried in a corner of the locker room. “Last year was a nightmare, but this time we came to win,” he managed to get out. “I knew we were going to win. I can’t believe it.” Pastorini, in what would turn out to be his last game as an Oiler, sat grim faced on a low stool as reporters circled. His upper leg was black and blue—he, too, was playing through a pulled muscle—and blood still dripped from an elbow. He had had a terrific game, but like everyone else was dwelling on the touchdown that wasn’t counted: “I saw it,” he said. “It was in.”

  Once more, the Oilers, beloved losers, got a hero’s greeting upon touching down in Houston. All along the drive, people stopped their cars or went out on their front porches to cheer them on. Outside the stadium were about twenty thousand people who couldn’t get in; the dome was again packed, with fans going berserk. Bum, wiping tears from his eyes, was asked to give a speech. “One year ago we knocked on the door.” Pause. The man had a flair for delivery. “This year we beat on the door.” Pause again. The crowd waited on his every word. “Next year we’re going to kick the sumbitch in!” Everyone went bananas. Marching bands played a polka version of the Oilers’ fight song. Even players were crying. The pledge inspired a new country song, as did everything Oiler: Tom Cantrell & the Newton Minus Dink sang “Bum’s Promise,” an entry in the trucker-outlaw genre of country:

  Well, I was hanging out in Houston just before the season died

  The thrill of victory left me so I hung my head and cried

  Then a vision came to me and I lifted up my head

  Stood a prophet in the Astrodome and this is what he said . . .

  Later, Bum told reporters he wanted engraved on his tombstone the words “I’d live a lot longer if I didn’t have to play against Pittsburgh three times a year.”

  “The only way the Oilers became who they became, and the last Houston team to reach a conference title game—and got there twice—was because of Earl Campbell,” Dale Robertson says. “Without Earl Campbell, they were a perennial 7–9, 8–8 team. Earl single-handedly turned them into a team that could have got to the Super Bowl if they had caught a break. But that Steelers team had nine Hall of Famers. Just bad timing. Now he paid a horrible physical price for the role he played in those games. The Earl you see today is because of that.”

  Like most Oilers—or “Earlers,” as they were now known—Campbell loved playing for Phillips, who was always easy with a wisecrack. He once updated reporters on Campbell’s injury status this way: “Earl’s walking better, but he’s much more valuable to this team if he can run.”

  That joke got at a complicated truth about their relationship. On the one hand, Bum appeared to be another in a line of father figures to Earl. They had a deep loyalty to each other, and when Phillips was fired by the Oilers in the early 1980s and rehired by the New Orleans Saints, Earl followed him to Louisiana to finish out his career. On the other hand, you could say that Bum Phillips took advantage of Earl, running him ragged in a way that made Campbell appear both heroic and tragic.

  As early as October 1979—when Campbell was merely twenty-four years old, a second-year pro—the daily newspaper in Austin, the American-Statesman, ran a story titled “Campbell’s Style May Take Its Toll.” “He runs with a lot of reckless abandon and exposes his body to some tremendously painful hits,” Ron Johnson, a former New York Giant running back, said. “If Earl continues this way there’s no question but that his career will be a lot shorter than if he adopts a style that brings a little more finesse to his running.” And the Cowboys’ star running back, Tony Dorsett, shuddered when asked about Campbell’s methods: “If I ran that way, I’d get chopped in half. When you’re dishing out the punishment like he does, you’re taking a lot, too. I hope to get together with him this spring. I might tell him jokingly, ‘Hey, man, why don’t you let just one tackle bring you down sometimes?’”

  Campbell has long been defiant—even defensive—when it came to questions about whether his running style was bad for him in the long term. “This perception of abuse on my running abilities is definitely wrong,” Campbell said when he was still a player. “In fact, I want the ball thirty times a game. I’d be upset if it didn’t turn out that way.” He had a favorite phrase during those playing days, as if he had studied the physics of football: “It’s the hitter versus the hittee. The hittee gets hurt worst.”

  Reporters asked Bum Phillips about leaning so heavily on Campbell, especially late in a game in which the result was no longer in doubt. “Many of y’all have questioned my use of Earl Campbell, since it’s obvious that it takes him longer than most players to get up off the ground,” Bum Phillips said about his charge. “That’s true. But did y’all ever notice that it also takes a long time for Earl to go down on the ground?” It was the sort of line that endeared Bum to the press, to the fans, and to his players. “He’s the kind of guy you’ve got to give the ball to lots of times—25 to 30 times a game—no matter what he’s doing,” the coach said. “He wears a team down. Eventually he’s going to break one. You can feel it, like a time bomb ticking. He keeps rocking, rocking, and all o
f a sudden, he’s gone.” “Earl Campbell is the best running back who ever put on a pair of shoulder pads,” he crowed about his star player. “He always got better from his twentieth carry to his thirty-fifth, ’cause by then he’d done hammered ’em way down.”

  The hammering went both ways. Years later, after Campbell got both knees replaced in his fifties, after he began undergoing nerve therapy to combat the effects of a neurological disorder called chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, which can lead to declining strength and sensitivity in the arms and legs—even after all this, Bum Phillips told an interviewer: “I never felt like he carried the ball too much, and he didn’t either: He hurt people, he didn’t get hurt.”

  The official last breath of cowboy chic came on the evening of June 5, 1980. On that sultry night, the sun still high in the sky, crowds with their Instamatics pressed in outside a shopping-center movie theater for the red-carpet premiere of Urban Cowboy. The Derrick Dolls performed. Travolta, wearing a black hat, green sport jacket, and two-tone satin western shirt, whooshed in to lots of clicking.

  In Texas Monthly, the reporter Michael Ennis described the whole scene as “the day cowboy chic ended and cowboy schlock began.” There were glitter, gold, silver, reptile skins, feathers, sequins, beads, fringe, satin, suede, and rhinestones. White mink boots and white mink coats. “As the procession thickened to include stars, producers, directors, and local plutocrats, cowboy schlock congealed on top of cowboy schlock like molten rock solidifying into a fearsome menacing lava dome,” he continued. “It was entirely expectable. You take the greatest schlock dressers in the world—the Hollywood–Beverly Hills smart set—mix them with the second-greatest schlock dressers in the world—the coterie of wealthy Texans with show-biz fetishes—throw in the cowboy theme, and you get a sartorial hallucination.”