Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  The after-party, hosted by a Houston socialite whose husband was an oil tycoon, was held, naturally, at Gilley’s. Buses laden with champagne and caviar shuttled out-of-towners from a movie theater downtown to the club, where 3,500 fans waited breathlessly for Travolta, who wore all black, and his costar, Debra Winger, who wore an old-fashioned lace dress, done up all the way to the top of the neck. In the dirt parking lot, the pickup trucks had been displaced by Mercedes and limos. Margaritas, Lone Star beer, Tex-Mex food, and table dancing were on tap. With the Gilleyrats sharing space with Houston doyennes, the whole thing was an “eerie spectacle,” Ennis wrote. “It was as if Gilley’s had been removed to another planet as a tourist attraction, and the extraterrestrial denizens had carefully studied garbled transmissions of Hee Haw and The Country Music Awards in an effort to populate the display with authentically costumed actors.”

  Lines were long to the bathroom, where in-towners and out-of-towners were snorting bumps of coke. Partying, everybody called it back then. Diane von Furstenberg, wearing leopard-skin tights and rainbow suspenders over a white button-down shirt with a sheriff’s badge that said “Disco Sucks” and a black cowboy hat and zebra-print boots, straddled the mechanical bull. “Good Time Charlie” Wilson, the gun-running lush of a Texas congressman, popped up wearing a Doc Holliday leather vest, accompanied by a much younger-looking woman wearing an off-the-shoulder feather-fringed number. Irving Azoff, a Pan-like Hollywood record producer who had bought the rights to Aaron Latham’s Esquire story about Gilley’s and conceived the movie as a vehicle to promote his country-and-western talent, prowled about the bar. The department-store magnate Robert Sakowitz, wearing a silk scarf as a bow tie on a velvet western jacket, had his arm around a Swedish-looking babe with pigtails. The president of Cutter Bill, the ritzy western-wear store, wore a massive white mink jacket despite the summer heat. Arts patron Dominique de Menil and Louise Cooley, wife of the famed heart surgeon Denton Cooley, were on hand.

  And amid all this, rubbing shoulders with the riffraff, was Andy Warhol. “You can make a career out of avoiding all the events and occasions at which Andy is trying to sell something in Dallas or Houston,” Ennis snarkily observed. “So naturally he was here, in a pink tie, jeans, and black boots.” Warhol and von Furstenburg traded pictures of each other atop the mechanical bull. The artist wrote about the scene inside the club in his diary, including a comic moment involving his friend Bob Colacello:

  And, well, once Travolta was at our table it became really impossible because the crowd pushed in on us, and this policeman was standing right behind trying to protect us, and he was drunk, the policeman, and I said, “Don’t look now, Bob, but you have a big gun and a big cock one inch from your neck.” And the policeman said, “Can I do anything for you?” and Bob laughed and said, “Just stay right here.” And he did. And he had two guns in his holster, very good-looking, and he kept hugging us and bumping into us and rubbing cock against us and saying, “Is there anything you need, anything you want?” But he was great because he kept screaming to the waitress and got all this food for us. The whole table. And all these drinks, and beer. And he said, “You’re not eating your pepper,” to Bob, and Bob said, “Are you kidding? It’s so hot. I only took one bite,” and he said, “Well, I’ll just show you how to eat a pepper,” and he took the whole big thing and slipped it into his mouth and ate it and then winked at Bob.

  It’s hard to tell, now, whether it was all one big joke. The moment was purely Houstonian—both unpretentious and ostentatious, earthy and ritzy, a total mishmash of folks. Gator Conley brought along his seven older siblings and his mother and father—“To say we had a modest lifestyle, would almost be exaggerated: we were dirt poor,” he told me. “That was a pretty big deal for me, that I got to share that with my family. A few years after the movie, I was down in Louisiana with my dad and he tells everyone: ‘He has to keep the beard because he’s under contract with the movies.’” The club moved from something gritty and ridiculous—“real” was the word that Tom Brokaw used when he visited for a report in the late 1970s—to a kind of amusement park. Soon you could buy Gilley’s underwear and T-shirts saying: “I rode the bull at Gilley’s.”

  The partying atmosphere had infiltrated the Oilers and just about every other NFL team. During the 1980 season, Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson, the outspoken former Cowboy linebacker now playing for the Oilers, was freebasing at all hours. At three in the morning he would head to the Astrodome parking lot to buy more drugs; in his nine weeks with the Oilers, he spent his entire $110,000 salary on coke. “I was madly stalking Houston full of freebase,” he writes in his candid memoir Out of Control: Confessions of an NFL Casualty. He would show up at Gilley’s “all screwed up,” remembered Gator Conley. Henderson ran with the longtime bouncer, Killer, who later died from an overdose—he had gotten a settlement from a work injury and spent the first check on dope, said Conley. “Hollywood would joke about sending hookers with drugs to key players the night before a game to screw them up.”

  There is no suggestion that Earl Campbell did cocaine—in fact, his old teammates remember him as clean. “The peer pressure for me to snort cocaine got really strong in the late 1970s,” he once said.

  I was in my early 20s, I had just moved to the big city, and I was making a decent living. Some of the pros I played with would say, “Hey, Earl, we believe that you do drugs.” . . . But I never did. I was right in the middle of it, yet I still made my decision not to. . . . Once they knew I didn’t mess around one bit, they left me alone. We stayed friends and I had a good time, yet I stayed by my decision not to do drugs.

  But in a graphic June 1982 tell-all in Sports Illustrated, a defensive end named Don Reese wrote that cocaine “now controls and corrupts the game because so many players are on it.” The Oilers hired a drug abuse consultant, but the NFL Players Association discouraged players from participating in management-sponsored rehab programs.

  “I wouldn’t think anybody would use (the consultant) because of the trust factor,” Elvin Bethea, the Players Association rep on the Oilers, said at the time. “We just don’t trust the owners in this area. You might wake up the next morning and see your name in the headlines or find out you’re being indicted for something.”

  Like much of what went on in this period in the NFL, the use of drugs—and who was suspended for it—was wrapped up in race. The Washington Post reported in 1986 that 86 percent of the players whose drug use had become public since 1980 were black. The Dallas Cowboys’ president, Tex Schramm, said that drug use “has been predominantly a black thing.” But the former all-pro running back Calvin Hill, who had worked as a substance abuse counselor, told the paper, “Anybody who says it’s a black problem doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Whether it’s denial or racism, it’s an erroneous statement. If you look hard enough [for drug use among NFL players], you’ll find it across the board. I know there’s a tremendous sense of anger over this among blacks in the league, that it’s another example of how the system discriminates against us.” The Reverend Jesse Jackson told the newspaper that the league had adopted a double standard to protect its white players.

  If Urban Cowboy’s premiere night was halcyon Houston, a severe hangover was in the offing. The go-go days fell apart as the Oilers and an oil bust sent Houston, and Gilley’s, and Earl Campbell, south in a hurry.

  “There’s two kinds of coaches,” Bum Phillips once explained. “Them that’s been fired, and them that’s gonna be fired.”

  The 1980 Oilers ended the regular season 11–5, and appeared, finally, to have it all together. Twice that year they had won on Monday Night Football, and Campbell, now in his third season as a pro, had logged four games with more than 200 yards apiece, leading the NFL in rushing for the third consecutive year. They were poised to make good on Bum’s promise to “kick the sumbitch in!” But just about the worst feeling is to lose when you expect to win—like a school kid who thinks he has aced a test only to get it back with
a C in a circle and a “Please See Me” at the top—and that was the sensation the Oilers and their fans carried with them after they lost to Oakland 27–7 in the first round of the playoffs. The Oilers handed the ball to Campbell twenty-seven times, but the Raiders held him to about three yards a carry—a mediocre day by his lights—and only twenty-nine yards in the second half. The Oilers’ quarterback, Ken Stabler, who had been acquired from the Raiders in the off-season in exchange for Pastorini and was known to study his playbook by the light of the Gilley’s jukebox, was sacked seven times and threw two interceptions against his former team.

  The simplicity of the Oilers’ offense worked against them. Tight end Dave Casper called Phillips’s passing game “kindergarten level, like painting by numbers.”

  The Raiders derided Houston’s “high school” offense. Lester Hayes, the Raider cornerback who picked off Stabler’s passes and sacked him twice, characterized the Oiler offense as “something out of the 1940’s—all brawn.”

  And then, three days later, on December 31, 1980, Bud fired Bum. The man who had turned the team around, the man to whom the fans were attached, was out of a job. The conventional wisdom was that Bud, a cipher unliked by his fellow Houstonians, couldn’t handle the adoration showered on Bum. The papers called it the New Year’s Eve Massacre.

  “It’s got to be a joke,” Houston’s all-pro linebacker, Robert Brazile, said. “All that Bum Phillips has done for this team. Maybe some players or someone else should get fired, but never him. He was a father, not only a coach, to most players. He treated us like men. When you lose, you put the blame on the players, not on Bum.”

  In a postmortem, Dale Robertson wrote that Bum’s style was “football at the OK Corral.” “Steel guitars, three-cord harmonies, feathered hat bands and shoot-’em-ups on Main Street,” he wrote. “Finesse? That was for them sissies up in Dallas. Houston’s game plan possessed all the sophistication of a barroom brawl. The truth hurt. But it was painfully obvious the Oilers would not be sophisticated enough to cope with the NFL of the 1980s. The Wild West show had played itself out. Even Gunsmoke didn’t last forever.”

  That off-season, feeling underpaid and unhappy about Bud’s treatment of Bum, Campbell asked for a raise. Only a year earlier, at the close of Campbell’s second season, the normally tightfisted Oilers had agreed to restructure Campbell’s contract, adding performance incentives that could boost his pay to $3 million over six years. But they were immovable on the deferments baked into the original contract, the ones that doled out Campbell’s wages over a couple of decades.

  The knowledge that he continued to be exploited rankled, in ways that made him rethink his relationship with the team’s management. “Everything for Earl became about money,” Stewart said. And so in January 1981, after another stellar year on the field and only a few days after Bum’s firing, he and Stewart approached the Oilers and demanded that Campbell’s salary be doubled, to $1 million a year—-about $3 million in today’s dollars. Otherwise, Campbell threatened to sit out the coming season.

  Trying to paint Campbell as greedy, the Oilers general manager alerted the press to Campbell’s ultimatum—“We won’t be blackmailed,” he said—and suddenly Campbell, whose persona was humble and affable, was on the defensive.

  The contract negotiation—especially the holdout threat—was big news in Houston. This was two months into the Iran hostage crisis, and surveying the crush of microphones that greeted them at one of their contract negotiation press conferences, Campbell leaned into Stewart’s ear and whispered: “We’re bigger than the Ayatollah.”

  “Campbell still doesn’t have the security he needs,” Stewart explained to reporters. “Earl really feels God chose him, not his brothers, to take care of the Campbell family.” He said that Campbell had met with the financially troubled, scooter-confined former heavyweight fighter Joe Louis and had told Stewart, “I don’t want to end up” like Joe Louis. And Stewart said that coming out of college, Campbell had “had as much chance as somebody who just landed on earth would have had against a slick real-estate salesman”—meaning Bud Adams. “He bought the land without knowing to check for problems with earthquakes or mud slides.”

  Campbell was a league superstar and was sacrificing his body weekly. But he was also being paid far more than the average NFL running back—-who made $95,000 in 1980—and for the first time in his career, Campbell felt the sting of public and press criticism for his attempt to renegotiate a contract that still had five years to run. “Heroes don’t act that way, people said,” Dale Robertson reported, with a heaping of wryness. “Davy Crockett wouldn’t have asked for a raise at the Alamo. Shame, shame.”

  Some of the accusations of greed were tied up with race, and sometimes they veered darkly toward violence. One day, an FBI agent came by Stewart’s office with a warning. The agency had infiltrated the Houston-area Ku Klux Klan and learned that Stewart had been put on a list to harass or injure if given the opportunity. “The whole point was that I was trying to help Earl, a black man, get more money.” Stewart said the agent suggested he and Earl avoid Gilley’s.

  That January, in a comfortable house in Houston’s Memorial neighborhood, a sixty-year-old osteopath and his twenty-nine-year-old son got into an argument over Bum’s firing—and soon, they started shouting about Campbell’s contract. Lon Tripp, the son, an oilfield worker, thought Campbell’s demand was fair; his father, Franklin, thought the Oilers should trade anybody who asked for that much. Lon Tripp told his father he was like Bud Adams: “You want to make slaves out of people and have them work for you for nothing.” A homicide detective wrote in a police affidavit that the “father got fed up with the argument, went into his room, got a gun, put it in his coat pocket and sat down in a lounge chair in the den.” The detective said that the argument continued and that the son got up from the couch and walked toward the kitchen. The father then allegedly pulled out the weapon.

  Young Tripp told his father, “either shoot that gun or I’ll make you eat it,” according to the detective. A .38-caliber slug hit the son in the chest, the detective said.

  Franklin Tripp was charged with murder. At his trial that July, he said he had acted in self-defense, citing what he called his son’s drug-fueled rages. He said that at one point he had picked up the phone to call the police, but his son grabbed it out of his hands. In the end, a Harris County jury acquitted him.

  Ultimately the Oilers held fast—and Campbell, eager to maintain his reputation, reported to training camp. “Money’s not the thing I’m after anymore,” Campbell said. “I don’t have a lot of it and I probably never will. That used to be one of my desires. But a man matures and learns a few things. If I had to say I deserved a little more, I’d say yes. But I don’t ever want to get in a situation where I have to argue with management to get it. I’m too old to be arguing with people.”

  He was twenty-six years old.

  “I think I love the game more now than I ever did,” he continued. “Only thing I hate about it is I love my wife and I hate being away from her. I’m always worried if everything is all right when I’m gone, and Southwestern Bell won’t give me no breaks. But, when I put on a jock strap, I get higher than train smoke.”

  Even if Earl was still in the fold, Bum’s firing didn’t exactly solve the Oilers’ problems. Houston started the 1981 campaign 4–2, but fizzled out to finish 7–9. Campbell, though hobbled by injuries, compiled 1,376 yards—another monster year, but for the first time in four seasons, he didn’t lead the league in rushing.

  Decades later, Stewart ran into Bud Adams in Nashville, and conversation naturally turned to Earl Campbell and an upcoming get-together of former Oilers that Adams was organizing. “You taught him well,” Adams, who died in 2013, told him. “He’s the only player who ever demanded money to come to a reunion.”

  In November 1981, thirty-five-year-old Kathy Whitmire, a certified public accountant who had served as the Houston City controller, became the first woman to win the mayoralt
y, beating the incumbent Republican mayor and then, in a runoff, a sixty-three-year-old sheriff who had insisted on addressing her as “L’il Lady.” Her pollster told the New York Times that Houston “can no longer be accorded the privilege of being called a Gilley’s kind of town. That’s not Houston anymore.”

  Less than 150 years earlier, in the summer of 1836, black slaves and Mexican prisoners of war had cleared the land for the original town site of Houston. At the outbreak of the Civil War, slaves made up a fifth of Houston’s population and as much as half the people living in the plantation areas outside the city. At the time of Whitmire’s election, more African Americans lived in Houston than in any Sunbelt city except Los Angeles. And they were growing more prosperous, though still trailing their white counterparts: in 1980, the median income for this rising African American middle class was still only 70 percent of that of whites. But the number of African Americans who counted themselves as professionals or managers had tripled since 1960, and the number of black college graduates in Houston almost doubled between 1970 and 1980. Court rulings and galvanized black and Latino political classes meant that minorities in Houston and other cities were finally enjoying representation at the Capitol in Austin. David Lopez, a Houston attorney who worked as a political organizer and school board member in the 1970s, said some amount of credit goes to Campbell. “To a certain extent, we were boosted by Earl Campbell and the success he had,” he said. “This was a time of a real turning point politically, with more African Americans, more Hispanics getting elected. People see someone performing well—someone who is African American enjoy some success—and for a certain segment that really helps.”

  Houston’s demographic and cultural shifts led to the forming of new bases of political power. In 1979, when a federal lawsuit over voting rights resulted in the creation of the city’s first single-member districts, two men became the second- and third-ever black members of the Houston city council. With Montrose a thriving hub of gay life, the Gay Political Caucus became a major new force in city politics. Through the 1970s, city council members were dismissive of gays or explicitly homophobic. One member called them “oddwads,” and the mayor whom Whitmire was trying to replace wondered publicly about the growing gay population, “What are we doing wrong?” (The year of Whitmire’s run, 1981, eight men were diagnosed with a little understood autoimmune disease initially called GRID—gay-related immune deficiency. They were the first known cases in Houston; only two of the men survived through the end of 1981.) The decade also saw an influx of entrepreneurial immigrants from Southeast Asia. And Latinos, only about 10 percent of the population in 1970, were now close to 20 percent. (The trends have continued to this day, and according to Rice’s Kinder Institute, the city is the most diverse in the United States.)