by Asher Price
“There’s room for diversity in this city, and I think that’s good,” Whitmire, a self-described progressive who cut her teeth in the women’s rights movement but campaigned on a platform of fiscal conservatism, said just before the election. “Nobody has control. I think what my administration will represent is the idea that Houston can be managed like a business and that it doesn’t have to be the captive of a few power brokers.”
Gender politics inevitably shadowed the race. All of five feet tall and wearing neck bows and cheek-warming glasses, Whitmire was jeered by her opponents as “Tootsie.” When the sheriff, in the run-up to the election, was wishy-washy about setting a date for a debate, Whitmire mischievously took out a full-page ad telling him to “come out and fight like a man.” The national press was naturally keen to write about an election that upended conventional wisdom about Texas. That led to passages like this, from a (male) New York Times reporter trying to tie her political strategy to her appearance: “Until recently she wore her hair in a platinum, shoulder-length pageboy. She has changed it now to a curlier, shorter style in its natural honey color. It is less flamboyant, more in keeping with the tailored suits she wears and the moderate, sensible image she tries to project.”
Whitmire ended up winning more than 90 percent of the black vote in the 1981 election, and about two-thirds of the voters who had moved to Houston since 1975 or were thirty-five or younger. This was the new Houston. These voters were drawn by her promises to run city services; they were unattached to the political network of good ol’ boys that had long held sway, and undiscouraged by her gender.
“I’m a mayor who is also a woman, not a woman mayor,” Whitmire announced.
But leave it to Bud Adams to harass a female mayor. In 1987, when Bud threatened to move the Oilers to Jacksonville if he didn’t get $67 million worth of improvements to the Astrodome, Whitmire visited him at his basement office, known as the Bunker. The Astrodome was a county facility, not a city one, but she thought she might catch political blame if Adams made good on his threat.
At least four other people, including an Oiler general manager, Adams’s son-in-law, a Whitmire aide, and a Houston city councilman were at the meeting, according to an account by Ed Fowler in his book Loser Takes All: Bud Adams, Bad Football, and Big Business.
“What can we do to keep the Oilers in Houston?” Whitmire asked Adams.
The Oilers’ owner replied: “Mayor, I’ve got a little office in the back with a foldout couch if you’d like to discuss it further.”
Four years later, in the fall of 1991, she was invited to participate in a halftime presentation at the Astrodome to celebrate the retirement of Campbell’s jersey. It isn’t hard to imagine why Whitmire opted to stick to a video tribute and not be there with Adams in person. The video was booed—not showing up live was deemed a political misstep. She was locked in a tough campaign in any case, and that November, after ten years as mayor of Houston, Whitmire lost her reelection bid.
The Oilers never had a great offensive line to open holes for Campbell—“He never got the best blocking,” Mean Joe Greene once observed. “The line would shield, get in your way, and let him pick a spot.” But as the 1982 season opened, it was weaker than ever. The team’s only all-pro tackle had been traded to New Orleans for the quarterback Archie Manning—father of the future NFL quarterbacks Eli and Peyton; Carl Mauck retired after thirteen seasons in the league, his last six with the Oilers; and Tim Wilson, Campbell’s trusty lead blocker, had been relegated to backup tight end. What was left was more a sieve than a cast-iron pot.
“Yeah, I’m frustrated,” Campbell, rubbing salve over his battered body, told reporters in the locker room after a season-opening loss to Cincinnati. “I’m not trying to down the rest of the guys. What they do is their business. But I’ve spent half my life working out and the other half watching films. I stay at practice all day and when I get home my wife asks me why I’m so tired. I tell her I’m tired because I practice all day.” He wiped the sweat from his face, sighed, and added: “Then we come up here and blow it.” He broke into a smile: “It makes your wife wonder if you’re really at practice.”
Campbell was about to get a long unasked-for layoff. Up in New York, the NFL and the Players Association were embroiled in negotiations that were leading nowhere. The association’s executive director, Ed Garvey, a lawyer and progressive firebrand from Wisconsin, was pushing for a revised pay scale, one that would fork over 55 percent of NFL revenues to the players—owners would have had to relinquish $1.6 billion from gate receipts and television and radio money over the next four years to the players. For the twenty-eight owners, that was a no-go. “They didn’t like that,” Garvey, who died in 2017, said, adding that Jack Kent Cooke, the Washington Redskins’ owner, “thought it was communism and others thought it was socialism.”
“It seemed like capitalism to me,” Garvey said dryly.
After a Monday-night game in September, Garvey instructed union members to strike immediately. Owners responded with a lockout, declaring team fields, training rooms, weight rooms, and equipment off-limits to players.
Campbell, who never joined the Players Association, grew cranky as the strike wore on. (Stewart, his agent, said he instructed Campbell not to join because he did not want the Players Association to profit from Campbell’s image.) The lockout was costing him $20,000 a week. In a newspaper interview, Campbell compared Ed Garvey to Jim Jones, the cult leader behind the mass suicides in Guyana in 1978: “I don’t understand how Garvey, how only one guy, can control that many players. That’s almost like Jim Jones, if you think about it. Garvey’s speaking for a whole lot of people. He’s messin’ up a whole lot of stuff.” Campbell said he felt “like an innocent bystander who gets caught robbing a bank. The man is sent to prison even though he’s done nothing. That’s me . . . I just hope Garvey knows that when he’s messin’ with me, he’s messin’ with 20 people. And that includes my mother, my brothers and sisters, my wife, my child who’s due in November and my dog named Pam,” a boxer. “Pam loves Alpo. But I haven’t been able to afford too much Alpo lately.”
He told all this to a reporter, Bill Brubaker of the New York Daily News, over lunch at a popular seafood place called Angelo’s Fisherman’s Wharf. Actually, Campbell didn’t have lunch, exactly. He ordered a glass of water and then opened a can of tobacco and stuffed a chaw in his cheek. He sounded off about the union’s demand for 50 percent of the owners’ television revenues.
“It isn’t fair,” he said, rolling the chaw in his mouth. “Like, I have two people working for me in my store. If they came in one morning and said, ‘Hey, Earl, we want 50 percent of your business,’ I would sit down and tell them, ‘Yes, I do agree you deserve more money. But I will not give somebody who works for me 50 percent of my business.’”
He took a quick glance around the restaurant and then spat a mouthful of tobacco juice into a napkin-lined plastic cup.
“I thought the strike was only going to last two or three days,” he said. “I can’t believe this is, what, the third week? I’m not siding with either the owners or the players. But I do feel the players deserve a raise. Like we say in Texas, if you take a mule to the field and work him hard, then you should feed him good. I think the owners should give every player a 35 per cent raise and a flat $100,000 to everyone who’s been in the league two years or more.”
Just then, reported Brubaker, the owner of Angelo’s Fisherman’s Wharf, Charlie Angelo, walked by.
“If the strike continues,” Campbell said, “will you give me a job as a waiter?”
“No,” Angelo said. “You belong on the cash register.”
Campbell turned to his visitor and smiled. “Next time you see me, I might be workin’ that cash register,” he said. “That Alpo ain’t gettin’ any cheaper.”
The strike exposed deep fissures within the Oilers. They had been a strong union team—but the renegade actions of a couple of players led the club to become a leader in the anti
union movement. Linebacker Gregg Bingham, a mile-a-minute talker eager to this day to expound on proper investment strategy in a free-market America, spearheaded a grassroots movement to push for acceptance of an agreement that union execs opposed. “Bingham,” said Bethea, the long-serving defensive player who was the union’s player representative on the Oilers, “is a company whore.”
In the end, the owners agreed to provide severance packages to players on retirement, increase salaries and postseason pay, and award bonuses based on the number of years of experience in the league. But bolstered by the freelancing efforts of Bingham, they didn’t accede to the Players Association’s proposal of tying wages to 55 percent of league revenue.
“What really hurt was seeing those people taking credit or being given credit for settling the strike,” Bethea said of Bingham and a few renegade negotiators. “I won’t say a word. I’m still part of this team. I’ve got to play with them. I’ll go out and perform to the best of my ability, but this thing is going to be with me a long time.”
When the season finally resumed after the fifty-seven-day strike was settled, the Oilers played like a team that had lost faith in itself, one completely uninterested in winning. By the time the squad fell to 1–5, a return to the kind of pre-Campbell win-loss record the Oilers were famous for, the CBS affiliate in Houston began carrying the games of the New Orleans Saints—helmed, not coincidentally, by the still-popular Bum Phillips.
New Oiler head coach Ed Biles, determined to shift away from the run-heavy strategies of the Phillips period, scrapped the I formation in favor of a split-back formation, one that brought the halfback and fullback closer to the line of scrimmage to make it easier for them to slip into receiving routes. “In the I-formation,” Biles told reporters, placing one fist over the other, “the backs are in tight like this, and they can’t get outside fast enough into pass patterns to make the formation very effective on passing downs. There is no believable play action possible, and”—throwing in a possibly true but nonetheless unnecessary potshot at his backfield tandem—“Campbell and Wilson are not what you’d call great natural pass receivers.”
The seemingly small tactical change was a big shift in philosophy and, as far as Earl Campbell was concerned, a vote of no confidence in running the offense through him. “Coming out of the I, even if Earl picked the wrong hole, he got 3, 4 yards every time,” Rob Carpenter, his former teammate, said. “And being 8 yards behind the line of scrimmage instead of 5 was important to him . . . I think Earl needs that extra second of vision to make a cut. And after all those years of being a power runner out of the I at the University of Texas and with the Oilers, it’s not easy to change.”
Campbell appeared especially defeated, and opponents and journalists openly questioned whether all that ferocious running had finally tired him out. In an early-December date in the Meadowlands against the Giants, he was tackled four times for a loss. Twice, a 180-pound cornerback tackled Campbell, sixty pounds heavier, one-on-one in the open field.
Houston had a 14–3 lead in that game with just over eleven minutes remaining. Usually that was Campbell time. But Houston tried him twice, and he lost two yards. The offense went back to him only once the whole game. In the end, he went for only sixty-six yards on twenty-three tries. Houston, forced to rely on its weak passing game, ended up losing, 17–14.
One writer joked: “Earl set an NFL record today for most 2-yard runs in a single game.”
In the Giants’ locker room after the game, New York defensive end Harvey Martin was thinking about the performance in a more somber tone, the kind in which one athlete who spies the nearing end of another great athlete—and sees something distressing about his own future—might speak. “He isn’t the same Earl Campbell who came into the league,” Martin said. “That’s obvious. You still have to respect him, even though you can hold him down. The years take a toll on running backs.”
Campbell was only twenty-seven, had been in the NFL for just five years, but a career of powering through defenders was wearing him down. “I don’t think it’s the carries as much as the number of tacklers who hit him each play,” Carpenter, the former teammate, now a member of the Giants, said. “It seemed like six or seven guys would get a shot at him every play. He’d get tired.”
Campbell himself seemed befuddled by his performance, like a boxer whose hand speed has deserted him. “I really don’t know why I didn’t carry the ball more. I wish someone would tell me. I wish I knew the answer.”
Even at that young age, he was groping with the sort of questions a man three times as old wonders about himself. “It gets harder all the time,” said Campbell. “It’s not the hitting as much as the losing that hurts so much. Maybe I am getting to be an old man. I’m just trying to be like the senior citizen who gets better when he gets older. I don’t think my physical condition is a problem.”
“People can say I’m slowing down, I don’t care,” he continued. “Maybe I am. I’ll play until they tell me to get out of there. I don’t have to say anything on my behalf.” It’s the sort of thing a proud athlete might say, the sort of thing said by somebody who has always loved to compete and has always flourished at it, but it’s also the sort of thing said by someone who grew up in tough circumstances and might make the same bargain again.
The following week, the Oilers were thumped at home by the Dallas Cowboys 37–7. Campbell, Dale Robertson wrote in the Houston Post, “is only a shoddy imitation of the No. 34 who hammered the NFL into whimpering submission his first three years in the league. Everybody seems to agree that he no longer runs with the same fearless determination of years past.”
The city, too, was about to burn out. When the county judge who masterminded the creation of the Astrodome died in November 1982, his funeral cortege circled the Dome twice. The event might as well have marked the death of Houston’s go-go days.
With the US economy in a recession, oil demand suddenly declined. The nation’s drilling rig count fell from more than 4,500 in late 1981 to a low of 663 in 1986; oil prices slid over that period from about $40 a barrel to $10.
Traders were no longer wondering how much oil a drilling rig could pull up, but, eager to sell the metal as junk, how much it weighed. A Houston dentist reported an increase in teeth-grinding problems among the locals. And by 1983, the mills and petrochemical plants that employed many Gilley’s locals were announcing major layoffs; the following year, Armco, a steel mill with several thousand workers, closed for good.
This came just as Gilley’s overextended itself. In 1982, its reputation burnished by Urban Cowboy, Gilley’s opened a 60,000-square-foot rodeo arena and a 10,000-seat concert and convention space. It was now a ridiculous kind of amusement park. A few years later, the club’s owners had a falling-out, and by decade’s end, mired in lawsuits and fending off creditors, Gilley’s was shuttered. Other touchstones of the urban-cowboy moment also soon found themselves discarded. Federal agents raided Cutter Bill Western Wear, connecting the owner of the high-end outfitter to a drug-running operation; the goods were auctioned off, including a gold-leaf sculpture of the namesake equine.
In the fall of 1982, in a deep funk, Campbell decided to head to Austin to see Royal. His old coach now spent much of his time hanging out with Willie and puttering around the golf course. He offered a simple pep talk: “Earl, you didn’t get where you are by quitting.” Recounting the conversation to reporters, Campbell announced: “So I’m not going to quit. Things have to get better. They can’t get any worse.”
They did get better, in a manner of speaking. He ran for a touch over 1,300 yards in 1983—averaging four yards a carry. But the team was terrible. The nadir occurred when 1–11 Houston headed to Florida to play the 1–11 Tampa Bay squad—and lost. The Oilers finished the season 2–14, and Earl, forced for the first time to undergo knee surgery, suggested that he wouldn’t oppose a trade.
The franchise’s management and coaches, for their part, had come to consider Campbell nettlesome—a ball-d
emanding veteran who was no longer the player he had been. Midway through the following season, Houston, deciding to rebuild as it hemorrhaged fans—attendance had plummeted to forty thousand a game, down from more than fifty thousand in 1980, the team’s last playoff year—managed to deal Campbell to New Orleans. He found out in his truck, on the radio—country station KIKK, naturally—after taking his son to get a haircut. He had said once, with some grandiosity, that when he thought about “the things I want to achieve—I want to accomplish those things in America.” That was in the summer of 1981, while he was signing autographs at an Austin auto dealership. He elaborated: “And if God’s willing, I’d like to spend the rest of my life in Texas. I’ve been to places like California, New York, New Orleans. And I don’t want to say anything against those places, but Texas is the only place where I can wear my jeans, put on my boots and dip a little snuff.” Now, three years later, New Orleans it was. That was it for a Texas hero, shipped out of the state without a wisp of notice.
