Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  As someone who was widely regarded as one of the toughest guys in a tough-guy sport, Earl Campbell can still fall back on the tritely macho terms common to older athletes. “I can’t play because I’ve got a hangnail on my toe. I can’t play because I didn’t get a pedicure this week. I don’t play because my head hurt,” he said as recently as 2017, waving away what he says are excuses from present-day players. “That wouldn’t have got the job done back in my day.” And yet today a copy of League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for Truth, by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, a book about traumatic brain injury in professional football, sits on the mantelpiece in Campbell’s office. A decade on from his stint in rehab, he remains sober.

  “Sometimes I tell my wife, ‘Shoot, if I knew it was going to hurt like this, I don’t know if I’d have (played football),’” Campbell said. “It’s a hell of a price to pay.”

  When Ann Campbell died, age eighty-five, she left behind nine children, thirty-three grandchildren, and thirty-six great-grandchildren. The obituary her family placed in the paper was modest as ever. It described her as “a housewife and rose grower” and a member of the Hopewell Valley Baptist Church and the Senior Ladies Sunday School Class. It made no mention that she had raised a Heisman Trophy winner in that old broken-down, immaculately kept house of hers. She was buried in the old Hopewell Community Cemetery in Swan.

  The land that her father, Reuben Collins, had once worked and hoped to buy, land that was repossessed after his premature death of a heart attack, was now in Campbell family hands: Earl bought the 250 acres with his NFL money and christened it the 7 Cs Ranch, after the seven Campbell brothers. He runs a handful of cows on it, and some chickens and pigs. When he bought the place, while still a player, he talked about the purchase with a sort of poetry. “Everybody in the world has some place he wants to go home to some day,” Campbell said. “Some people are lucky. They go back walking. Some go home lyin’ down, dead and gone. When I finish football the ranch is where I want to be. I don’t see anything wrong with making plans for the future. Some day, number 34 will play out. But Earl Campbell will still live.”

  If you go there now, it’s likely you will find Herbert and Willie, his older brothers, and one of the twins, hunched in plastic chairs around a metal-framed fire pit, the metal branded with #34—Campbell’s jersey number with the Oilers. On a cool autumn evening, with the sun setting, as you drive through a gate in the wrought-iron fence, a few dogs are running around the wiry grasses. The meadow reaches down to a faraway pond.

  There’s no sign of habitation beyond the small circle around the fire, a couple of massive pickups, and a rough corrugated barn in the middle distance. The three aging black men shooting the breeze seem totally at home, though, teasing one another, laughing and carousing, digging into some cookies, dreaming up the next smoked-meat cookout. The scene has something of the relaxed feel of a prefootball-game tailgate party, only instead of athletic grandstanding, the brothers are recalling with wry chuckles stories of the deeply segregated Tyler of their youth. How in the valley behind them, a small plane had gone down, and their grandfather’s heart had given out from the rescue effort, right there, near that live oak, on land he had worked all his life to earn a piece of. Alternately graciously polite and benevolently sarcastic, their deep Piney Woods drawl can be difficult to make out. Around the brothers, the meadow recedes softly into the dusk. It is impossible, watching them, to imagine a more quintessentially Texan scene.

  In town, in North Tyler, where Confederate Avenue crosses Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, an empty field sits behind a chain-link fence. Once there was a grand three-story building there—the old all-black Emmett Scott High School, which was closed in 1970 as part of the desegregation order.

  Earl Campbell would have gone to Emmett Scott, like Herbert and Willie, if not for William Wayne Justice’s desegregation order. The black kids who went to Emmett Scott still hold it, and their long-dead teachers, in high regard. They organize annual reunions—2020 will mark the last of the Emmett Scott fiftieth reunions.

  As for the fiftieth reunion of the Robert E. Lee Red Raiders, Class of 1974, Bettye Mitchell, who is Campbell’s age and was one of the black pioneers at John Tyler High’s crosstown rival, won’t be attending. She tells a story about running into a white classmate in the early 1990s, ahead of their twentieth reunion.

  “In high school we were a nonentity, but he was one of a handful of whites that showed any kind of kindness to me in high school,” she said. He asked whether she was going to the upcoming reunion, and she told him she wouldn’t pay to go to an event for a group in which she felt second-class. She still remembered that at the senior prom, the organizers had refused to play any music that the black kids liked. But after much coaxing—and his offer to buy her ticket—she said she would go, just to see whether it would be any different.

  At the reunion, he insisted on buying a raffle ticket for her. “I said, ‘No, no,’ and he said ‘It’s yours, it’s yours.’” Sure enough, when they called the tickets out, she had won a prize.

  They had talked about the prize before the number was called, and I was sitting back, and the lights were dim, and I couldn’t really tell what it was. When they called my name, I raised my arm, “I’ve won, I’ve won, I’ve won.” The crowd was speechless. You could hear a pin drop, and I was thinking, “What is that about?” What I had won was a picture, as large as this fireplace, of General Robert E. Lee carrying a Rebel flag and a black slave carrying his things behind him. A hush went over the audience. I thought, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” So they start offering to buy it off me. I thought, “This is what I won, I’ll take it, I’ll throw darts at it.” I mean, it was the prize possession of the night. After the offers got up to $800, I let them have it. That was the last class reunion I went to.

  When Bettye Mitchell and Earl Campbell went to their newly integrated high schools in the early 1970s, the district served a student population that was 67 percent white and 32 percent black. Today, Tyler ISD’s student population is 46 percent Hispanic, 30 percent African American, and 22 percent white. Robert E. Lee, virtually all-white when Bettye Mitchell attended, has a minority population of more than 60 percent. Citing the enrollment statistics, a federal judge in 2016 lifted Justice’s desegregation order, saying it had achieved the desegregation goal. “We’ll forever say this, that the dual system that was being operated prior to 1970 was sinful,” Marty Crawford, the district’s superintendent said, “and that was certainly an error of our country that we should not be proud of.”

  The following year, on a muggy August evening, nearly three hundred Tylerites showed up to a school district meeting as the board took up the question of changing the name of Robert E. Lee High School. The notorious Unite the Right rally had just taken place in Charlottesville, Virginia, and now Tyler, like many communities, was reconsidering its attachment to Confederate names and symbols. The meeting came against the backdrop of a persistent, yawning economic gap between whites and people of color in Tyler. About 65 percent of Tyler’s African Americans and Latinos lived in homes valued at less than $100,000; less than 30 percent of whites live in such modest homes. Some African Americans addressing the board wondered who had stood up for their history when Emmett Scott High School was closed down. A white father of three said that his children, who had graduated from Robert E. Lee, “might as well use their diplomas as toilet paper” if the school’s name was changed. The school board tabled a decision for nearly twelve months before shying away altogether from a name change.

  Every January, the Tyler Chamber of Commerce, along with the Visitors Bureau, hosts an annual Earl Campbell banquet. The event honors an outstanding offensive college football player with ties to Texas. Henry Bell, the president of the chamber, sweetly commissions little chocolate figurines depicting Earl in full football regalia to give out to guests.

  The event is at the Willow Brook Country Club, on the west side
of town, only a mile or so from the Tyler Rose Garden and Museum. Founded in 1922, the club long barred African Americans from membership. Sam Biscoe, who grew up black in Tyler—he and his mother, a maid like Ann Campbell, made extra money on Rose Festival day by selling cool drinks to onlookers—caddied in the summer at Willow Brook in the 1960s. It was, he said, “unthinkable for a black person to be a member. You could have won the lottery and shown up there, and they’d call the police on you if you weren’t there to cook or caddy.”

  Today, on the course and in the dark-wood-paneled, leather-sofaed clubhouse, virtually all the patrons are, still, white; membership is by invitation only, requiring three letters by current members to “vouch for the eligibility and acceptability of the candidate.” If your daughter was Rose Festival queen, there’s a good chance you’ll host her wedding reception poolside at Willow Brook.

  Earl always invites some athletes in his circle to make the annual trip to Tyler for the event. In January 2017, one of them was former NFL player and star University of Texas running back Ricky Williams. Nearly two decades earlier, in 1998, Williams had become the only other Longhorn to win the Heisman Trophy. Williams had gotten a ride that morning from Christian, Earl’s son, into Tyler, and with a few hours to kill before the banquet, he decided to take a long walk in a residential neighborhood behind his South Tyler hotel. As he strolled back, a couple of cop cars pulled up. A dash-cam video shows Williams being asked to put his hands behind his back. Things are taken from his pockets and put on the hood of the police car. He is frisked. When he asks evenly why he is being detained, he is told to calm down.

  It’s a maddening video—partly because the cops are so patronizing as they obviously profile him, and partly because what they are doing seems like such a humiliating violation of a person’s dignity. The cops are white. As Williams, his hands spread on the dash, again questions why they are searching him, one policeman moves into a kind of defensive position behind him. It isn’t hard to imagine that if Williams were less calm, an officer might have drawn a gun. Williams’s Zen-like poise, admirable in its way, also makes the whole thing sad. “Do you know how many times I’ve been messed with by cops just for being black?” Williams asks. “I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing, I’m just sensitive to it.”

  “As long as everything is cool, go back to your hotel, we’ll get out of your face,” a cop says. But they continue to encircle him, and when Williams protests again that he hasn’t done anything, another cop says: “You’re acting really defensive.”

  Though they have found nothing, the police ask for his social security number and phone number.

  Almost six minutes into the interrogation, Williams reveals that he is in town for the Earl Campbell Tyler Rose awards.

  “Football coach?” a cop asks. Finally seeming to put two and two together, the cop asks, “You play football?”

  “I’m retired,” Williams says, still not using the Heisman card.

  The officer asks him where he played; the University of Texas, he tells him.

  The cops explain they were duty-bound to question him. One of the officers tells him: “If you’re staying at the hotel, makes sense what you’re talking about. But if you’re coming from North Tyler”—that is, the black part of town—“you’re not supposed to be here.”

  The cop slaps Williams congenially on the shoulder, as if to say, “We’re all on the same team here,” and they leave.

  The mayor of Tyler, Martin Heines, later said he phoned Williams. “We both reached out to the other, and it was a very positive conversation,” Heines said, according to the Tyler newspaper. “We visited about the incident, and we came to the positive conclusion that he’s very welcome in Tyler, Texas. And I hope I can spend some time with him when he does return. I even invited him to stay with my family when he’s here; we have a guest room he’s welcome to.”

  But a Tyler police spokesman, Don Martin, stuck to the story that Williams had brought the incident on himself. “Bottom line, if this person had not gone back into an area and acted in a suspicious manner the way he did then this never would have happened,” he said.

  Williams, interviewed on KLBJ radio about the episode when he got back to Austin, said that while he ended up putting it behind him and having a good time in Tyler, he still feels disrespected.

  “A black guy walking during daytime in South Tyler is like spotting Bigfoot,” cracked one of the radio hosts, Dale Dudley, who grew up in Tyler. The radio guys played something that sounded like a police radio: “Calling all cars, black man walking in Tyler.”

  Williams said he was relieved that he had had his driver’s license on him. “If I wasn’t myself, I would have been in trouble,” Williams said. “If I couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt who I was . . .”

  Back at the hotel that afternoon, he said, he started writing an angry tweet. But then he thought: “Earl invited me here. This is Earl’s town. I didn’t want to make a to-do.”

  Dudley, who is white and went to Robert E. Lee High, chimed in:

  That’s the hypocrisy that’s always been in that town. There’s nothing at all about the lynchings all around there. There’s no history the kids are taught. You’re taught that the rose queen is gorgeous—even though she’s paid for by her father.

  And it was this thing where, if you run a football well, we love you, and we’ll put you all over the city, and you’re the king—which Earl is, and God bless Earl, and I’ve got nothing but positive [things to say] about Earl.

  But the people who championed Earl, that was because he did that [on the football field] and he got that kind of attention. My father was so afraid for me to go to Stewart Junior High, which was predominantly black, that we lied about where we lived so I could go to Hubbard Junior High.

  And that stuff has lingered. I did a high school reunion, and I’m always trying to prove [to] people I did well. So the reunion was on a Saturday night, and I decided to host a party on Friday night. And I get a call from someone I don’t even know—a friend of one of the people I invited—and he says, “Hey, man, you don’t want to do it at that bar—that’s where all the ‘N’s go.” I’m looking at the cell phone going, “Did I just hear that in a normal conversation? I’m not even talking to a friend.” It’s a long history of the way that goes, and it sounds like it’s in [the] police department also: “Hey, you see a black guy in South Tyler, stop him and see what he’s up to.”

  Williams came back in at that point. “I hope that after this situation, they realize that black lives do matter,” he told the radio hosts. “I’ve never wanted to say that, but this was a time where it fits. It fits in Tyler in that moment.”

  Sociologists talk about the distinction between the speaking black athlete and the smiling black athlete—the athlete who stepped out and the one who got along. Jim Brown and O. J. Simpson: Brown once proudly embodied the defiant black athlete, whereas O. J. listed not being viewed as black as a great accomplishment. Earl Campbell was a kind of amalgam. Campbell didn’t preach revolt. He saw himself as a catalyst for racial conciliation. “I was raised not to have negative racial feelings towards the white people of Tyler,” he told me. The line puts you in mind of what Donald Hamilton, Earl’s sandbox playmate, adopted as his motto: you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

  And as Earl Campbell grew famous, he shouldered the burden of many athletes, especially black athletes, especially now, again, in the age of Trump, of being picked apart over how they did—or did not—react to the political and social struggles of their time. In many ways, his public persona was that of a smiling athlete. Ben Carrington, a sociologist of race and sports, told me that Campbell always struck him as a “Disneyfied version of a black athlete, someone round and cuddly and smiley.” Jenna Hays McEachern, the unofficial historian of UT football, pinned Campbell’s appeal on his appearing “unthreatening.” From the outset of his professional career, he was made mute by advertisers whose products he endorsed. (It was partly
because he got flustered. Appearing in a 1979 Seven-Up ad with a couple of other football players, his sole line was scratched after he kept botching it on camera. “He would get really flabbergasted,” said Verlin Callahan, whose family feed store in Austin employed Campbell as a pitchman, one time paying him with the use of a John Deere tractor for a year. “He could sit down and talk with you about anything. But he was a one-to-one communicator; he wasn’t a camera communicator.”) In recent television advertisements for his smoked meats—he now licenses his name and image to a sausage factory in a little Central Texas town—Campbell is rendered almost Jemima-like: poised over a grill, wearing an apron, always smiling but never speaking.

  But in his own quiet, private way, he relayed his allegiances. In 1997, Ron Wilson, Campbell’s old classmate at the University of Texas, introduced a bill in the Texas Legislature to eliminate athletic scholarships at state universities unless student-athletes met the same academic requirements as nonathletes. This move came in the wake of the Hopwood decision, in which a federal court struck down the University of Texas’s affirmative action policy. (It was named for Cheryl Hopwood, one of four white students who sued the university’s law school, claiming she had been discriminated against because the school gave preferential treatment to people of color.) Wilson’s proposal—which threatened to undercut the competiveness of big-time college football in Texas—was meant to startle opponents of affirmative action by essentially calling them on their logic. If affirmative action is a bad idea for nonathletes, it’s bad for athletes, too. “Obviously, Hopwood means that a lot of average and above-average minority students won’t be admitted through the front door of the University of Texas or Texas A&M,” he told reporters after filing his bill. “If they don’t want us through the front door, then they shouldn’t be allowed to bring us through the back door.” Admitting only athletically talented African Americans because of their “entertainment value” would create a “plantation education system,” he said.