Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  UT coaches stormed the Capitol in opposition to the bill. “It would be a disaster if it passed,” basketball coach Tom Penders told the Senate Education Committee. “You might as well blow up the football field and the basketball courts and make parking lots out of them.” He was joined by Darrell Royal, long retired, who had asked Earl Campbell to come down to testify against the bill. He even signed Campbell’s name to a witness list. That day, as the committee heard from a stream of people, the question was whether Earl would show up. “You had a bunch of white coaches who needed him to legitimize their position,” said Alberta Phillips, who was a reporter covering the bill for the Austin American-Statesman. Phillips, who is African American, was sure that Campbell would appear: “I was of the thinking that Earl was an Uncle Tom,” she said. “But Ron kept saying, ‘He’s not going to come, he’s not going to come,’” she remembered.

  And he never did.

  “My feeling about him changed that day,” Phillips said. “Earl did have a social consciousness to him. Maybe he wasn’t vocal, maybe it wasn’t visible, but it was there.” Given the amount of pressure the university must have exerted on Campbell—he remained an employee—the black lawmakers “were so proud” of him for his decision, she said.

  “He left Darrell Royal hanging,” she laughed.

  In the end, assembling a coalition of lawmakers that included minorities, conservatives, and just enough egghead types who wanted to deemphasize athletics, Wilson managed to get the bill passed—but with amended language that excluded UT and Texas A&M.

  After Hopwood, Campbell helped organize scholarships for students of color. And more recently, in 2016, Campbell presided over a celebration on campus of the first African Americans to attend UT, a revered group known as the Precursors. Their steadfastness in the late 1950s in an often-inhospitable atmosphere laid the groundwork for the African American students and athletes who would follow them, and in a sense, Campbell’s appointment as the honorary chair of the event recognized his link to their persistence. The event came amid a newfound reckoning at the university. A few years earlier, in 2013, UT had hired its first black head football coach—“I was more surprised that UT hired a black coach than that the US elected a black president,” the sports columnist Cedric Golden told me. In 2015, following months-long deliberations by a panel appointed by the university president, UT forklifted a statue of Jefferson Davis from its pedestal, which sat along an iconic promenade in the south part of the campus; in 2017, shortly after the Charlottesville rally, the president ordered the remaining Confederate statues in the same area pulled down in the dead of night; and in 2018 the law school unveiled, in its atrium, a portrait of Heman Sweatt.

  How, in the final analysis, should Earl Campbell be regarded with respect to the fight for civil rights? “The way I would judge someone would be in terms of whether they did things within the realm of what they’re capable of to help or advance things,” said Gary Bledsoe, who was a law student at the University of Texas when Earl was playing football there. A lanky African American from Odessa, at the opposite end of the state from Tyler, he can remember his friends in the late 1960s discouraging him from attending UT as an undergraduate because, they said, “those folks don’t want you down there; they’re going to flunk you out.” He went anyway, walked on to the football team after Julius Whittier broke the color barrier, and went on to graduate from the UT Law School before heading up the state chapter of the NAACP. He is now the dean of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern, in Houston. He summed up his view of Campbell’s role in the area of civil rights: “Being the activist, the vocal thing, that wasn’t Earl’s style. But Earl was a real asset to the advancement of civil rights in this state. There are different ways to do things and accomplish things. We can’t judge everybody by the standard of Martin Luther King. He [Earl] did things in his way. We’re wrong to try to prejudge that he should have done this or should have done that. Did he do things to hurt? No. Did he do things to help? Yes.”

  In the scars that mark Campbell’s surgeries, a map of brutality, you can see what Wilson, the former lawmaker, called “the ultimate sacrifice for his people.”

  In 2012, the University of Texas invited Earl Campbell to flip the coin at the opening of its home football game against the Lobos of the University of New Mexico. It was an early-season game against a cupcake opponent. UT’s football coach, the folksy Mack Brown—wide face, soft river-bottom voice—had asked Campbell to do the coin toss. The football team had had a disappointing campaign the year before, and what better way to start the new season than an appearance from a beloved star of yesteryear?

  And yet: while nothing could be more trivial than a pregame coin flip, the invitation posed a flesh-and-blood problem for Campbell. Decades earlier, getting to midfield as a crowd of nearly 80,000 people cheered him on was something that Campbell could do while dragging defenders along like a father with his child wrapped around his trouser leg. But at only fifty-three, his legs beaten from a career of football, his back in terrible pain from a series of spinal surgeries, Campbell couldn’t even stand in the shower. Walking the thirty-odd yards from the sideline to midfield—a distance likely not much farther than the one from your front door to your backdoor—might as well have been a hot-asphalt stroll across the entire state of Texas.

  Campbell, naturally, was nostalgic about the prospect of appearing once more before the Longhorn faithful. On this field, on sweltering Saturday nights before throngs of fans making the “Hook ’Em” sign as if signaling devotion to some football divinity, Earl Campbell regularly accomplished heroics—sprinting past chaps-wearing Texas cheerleaders and the lined-up cannons ready to be lit on his way to the end zone. The brassy sound of the Longhorn Band—young men and women in short-brimmed white Stetsons and sequined burnt orange trousers, white leather fringe flying about their shoulders as they played—sang in his ears. Here, in this stadium, now named for the coach who recruited Earl Campbell from that modest home in East Texas, he once had such momentum following a long touchdown run that he ran into—and knocked down—Bevo, the 2,000-pound cud-chewing longhorn and team mascot. In videos, you can see him hit Bevo in the left flank, taking down a cameraman at the same time; the mascot, which had been mindlessly staring into space and was now half rolled over and clearly startled, yanked his head around toward Campbell. “Before I knew it, I was all up on Bevo,” he later told the reporter Jan Reid. “I didn’t mean to; I couldn’t stop.” He paused before laughing at the end of the story: “He said, ‘Moooo.’”

  But those days were gone. “For a long time everything was still attached pretty good,” he once said. “But all those years of knocking and banging—there are some things you ain’t supposed to do to that body. And when you get older, it comes back and says, ‘Hey, remember me? How you did all that to me?’ That’s flesh and bone, man.”

  Any sentimentality triggered by Mack Brown’s invitation was tempered with trepidation. The coach—a keen reader of athletes, and mindful of the once-rugged running back’s ailments—gently suggested many months before the New Mexico game that Earl could simply take a golf cart to midfield. But Earl Campbell, whose vulnerability was matched only by his pride, did not want the fans, a whirlpool of burnt orange, to see him golf-carted anywhere.

  But his friend and Longhorn lead blocker Rick Ingraham counseled him to participate: “This state wants to see you out on the field doing the Hook ’Em.” And so, that March, six months before the New Mexico game, Earl Campbell showed up at the UT athletic facility to undertake private, early-morning workouts. He was forcing himself, effectively, to lace up his cleats once more. It fell to Caesar Martinez, a bright-faced onetime third-string college running back, to retrain Campbell, the human cyclone, to do the elementary work of walking.

  Martinez and his team wondered what sort of discipline, what sort of consistency, to expect from their newest trainee. The answer came quickly: “I really want it bad,” Campbell told them, and it was as if
he had invited them back into a huddle in 1977, a time when, in his country way, his polite way, he would demand the ball. His athlete’s perfectionism began to reassert itself. After finishing a tenrep set of an exercise—stepping up and down from a little platform, for instance—he would turn to Martinez and say, “I’m going to do a couple of those again; I didn’t like one of those reps.”

  Soon, in an empty stadium, he and Martinez began walking those thirty yards. No cheerleaders, no band, no fans. Had they seen him just then, they might have wondered what had happened to Earl Campbell. At first, in the baking heat of the early Austin summer, he walked that modest distance haltingly. But as September approached, he gained something of his old footing, his thick-legged gait coming back. He appeared no longer diminished, but formidable.

  Come game day, Martinez was nervous with pregame jitters. Campbell, though, was ready for his big entrance. The public-address announcer welcomed the Heisman winner to midfield, and suddenly the crowd, whose members had been busy with the usual pregame rituals, snapped to attention. Like an orange flag unfurling, they rose. Their old god had once more alighted.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  From the very first time he and I chatted about my ideas for this book, Casey Kittrell, my editor at the University of Texas Press, lent a bright-eyed, infectious enthusiasm to the project. Casey was a true collaborator, joining me, at a variety of coffee shops around Austin, to hash out the shape and framing of the book. And once the drafts rolled in, his shrewd line edits improved the manuscript that much more. I am lucky to count the Press—and especially Casey—as a partner.

  David Halpern, my funny and elegant agent, planted the seed for the whole thing—it was his idea that I embark on a biography. Shrewd and personable, he is everything you could want in an advocate.

  My editors at the Austin American-Statesman—Debbie Hiott, John Bridges, Andy Alford, and Bob Gee—had enough faith in the project to give me an extended leave to work on the book. Thanks to them and to all my colleagues who picked up the slack while I was gone.

  I am grateful to the dozens of people in Tyler, Austin, and Houston who were kind enough to welcome me into their homes and offices and sit for interviews, chief among them Earl Campbell and members of his family—including three of his brothers, two sisters, and his aunt.

  The librarians at the University of Texas, especially Cindy Slater at the Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports and archivists at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, were generous with their time—and strong of limb, lifting, as they did, heavy boxes of clippings and memos for me to examine. In Tyler, Tiffany Wright at the Smith County Historical Society was enormously helpful, thoughtful about further avenues of inquiry, and tolerant of all my questions. Scott Fitzgerald of the East Texas Genealogical Society hunted down some background material about the Campbell family. John Anderson, in Tyler, and Michael Gillette at Humanities Texas also offered handy guidance. Nell Carroll, Austin American-Statesman photo editor, patiently walked me through the process of scanning old images. Phil Hicks in Tyler and Joel Draut in Houston were nice enough to burrow through photo morgues and send me some choice images. Mark O’English at Washington State University kindly e-mailed me copies of letters from the 1950s from that university’s president to his counterpart at UT regarding African American football players. My former Statesman colleague Bruce Hight dug up from his garage a 1970 Atlantic piece about Darrell Royal that proved very useful. Speaking of garages: in August 2017, Dale Robertson kindly lent me a half-dozen bulging spiral notebooks filled with clips from his time covering the Houston Oilers. They turned out to be extremely useful for re-creating life in the Oiler locker room. I was lucky: a week later Hurricane Harvey struck, and his entire garage was flooded.

  John Maher, Vicki Betts, Michael Hurd, David Barron, Cedric Golden, Leslie Blair, and Brian Sweany, as well as Aimée Brown Price, Monroe Price, Josh Price, and Gabe Price, read all or parts of drafts and gave crucial feedback. A very special thanks goes to copy editor extraordinaire Kip Keller for the enormous care with which he reviewed the manuscript. He and UT Press managing editor Robert Kimzey read the work with eyes of which eagles would be envious.

  My friend and consigliore Jim Phillips, a contemporary of Earl Campbell’s who grew up in Huntsville and attended UT, served as an invaluable guide through the landscape of 1970s East Texas. Over regular lunches at our favorite strip-mall Chinese restaurant, ones that inevitably spilled over to slurping tapioca at the bubble tea spot next door, Jim, elucidating the indecipherable scrawls he had left on my manuscript, set me straight on the particulars of that faraway time and place.

  This book is dedicated to my parents and my brothers—Aimée and Monroe, Josh and Gabe—my earliest teachers and deepest influences. Having a little kid now myself makes me appreciate all they did to raise me. To whatever extent I have a sense of humor about the world, with whatever thoughtfulness I might examine it, I have the four of them to thank for the early example they set. I continue to learn from them, and while I feel keenly the geographic distance that separates us, I am grateful for the resiliency and intimacy of our relationships.

  But my deepest gratitude is reserved for Rebecca Markovits. She drove with me to Tyler and helped me sort through old archives. She helped me bake linzer torte cookies for an initial interview with Earl Campbell’s brothers—and every time I got in touch with them thereafter, they asked whether I was going to bring along some more. The writing of this book came as she conceived, nourished, and delivered (and nourished some more) our child—and yet even as she returned to her own work, editing a literary magazine, she patiently read over and advised me on one draft after another. It is she who cuts my hair (and, now, our daughter’s hair), and like an experienced barber, she neatened my prose as if clip-clipping away with a pair of expert shears. In football terms, I’m not sure whether to describe Rebecca as the ever-dependable quarterback or the all-protecting left guard or the eyes-in-the-sky offensive coordinator. In any case, she gets my vote for MVP.

  NOTES

  Most of the material in this book comes from interviews I conducted or from contemporaneous accounts: memos, letters, newspaper clippings, and the like.

  Further research was conducted at five institutional archives: the Austin History Center (AHC); the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas (DBCAH); the Houston Public Library’s African American Library at the Gregory School (Gregory); the Smith County Historical Society (SCHS); and the H. J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas (Stark Center). I also called on the clipping files belonging to the Houston reporter Dale Robertson (DRCF) and the Austin American-Statesman.

  INTRODUCTION

  Interviews for this section were conducted with Tim Alexander (Mar. 2018), Earl Campbell (Feb. 2016), Herbert Campbell (Dec. 2015), Willie Campbell (Dec. 2015), Donald Hamilton (Apr. 2017), Alfred Jackson (July 2017), Carl Mauck (Aug. 2016), Dan Pastorini (Aug. 2017), Wally Scott (March 2018), Mike Trope (Oct. 2016), and Ron Wilson (Aug. 2017). Quoted material from these interviews is generally not documented further in the notes.

  Crunching power: for Cosell’s comments throughout the second half of the game between Houston and Miami, Nov. 20, 1978, see the recording of the game on YouTube, youtube.com/watch?v=HKYJcH4GjpU.

  Earl Campbell had some head-on collisions: Kevin Cook, The Last Headbangers: NFL Football in the Rowdy, Reckless ’70s—The Era That Created Modern Sports (New York: Norton, 2013), 183.

  Big fellow, you got: John P. Lopez, “Tyler Rose’s Run on ‘MNF’ Set Standard,” Houston Chronicle, Dec. 27, 2005, Sports, 1; see also Barry Lorge, “The Earl of Campbell,” Washington Post, Dec. 27, 1978, D1, and Bruce Newman, “The Roots of Greatness,” Sports Illustrated, Sept. 3, 1979.

  I swear, his eyes were closed: Bill Sullivan, “Former Teammates Remain in Awe,” Houston Chronicle, July 29, 1991, 1C.

  We make four sizes of thigh pads: Brian Hewitt, “Ear
l’s Thigh Pads Legal ‘Weapons,’” Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 16, 1980, quoting the equipment maker Byron Donzis.

  When that ball got in my hands: Brad Buchholz, “Rock of Ages,” Austin American-Statesman, Dec. 9, 2007, A1.

  the quality of potentiality: Willie Morris, The Courting of Marcus Dupree (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), 80.

  You could always tell: Kirk Bohls, “Campbell Was Unstoppable at Texas,” Austin American-Statesman, July 28, 1991; Earl Campbell player file, Stark Center.

  Then I saw pure sideline: Newman, “Roots of Greatness,” 106.

  Don’t you just love him?: Dale Robertson, “Never a Rookie like Earl,” Dave Campbell’s Arkansas Football, Winter 1979, 62.

  My career with the Dolphins: Harvey Greene, “Where Are They Now: Steve Towle,” Miami Dolphins website, June 30, 2016, miamidolphins.com/news/article-1/Where-Are-They-Now-Steve-Towle/a21f4fdf-ac5a-4ebf8f76-a4e103528e61.

  We trained in southern California: Peter Gent, North Dallas Forty, New York: Open Road, 2003, unpaginated foreword.

  One Orangeblood, as diehard fans: Author interview with Wally Scott, Mar. 2018.

  only one African American had ever: Al Reinert, “Closing Down La Grange,” Texas Monthly, Oct. 1973, texasmonthly.com/the-culture/closing-down-la-grange.

  all ass and thighs: Lee Jenkins, “Life’s Roses (and Sausages),” Sports Illustrated, July 9, 2012, 70.

  Campbell’s running style: Lou Maysel, “Clayborn Talent Noted by Some,” Austin American-Statesman, Dec. 23, 1976, E1. Assistant coach Mike Campbell made the observation.

  Every time Earl carried the football: Mickey Herskowitz, “Campbell Earned Respect of All,” Houston Post, July 28, 1991.

  played offense like he was playing defense: Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Tony Dorsett has CTE,” Atlantic, Nov. 8, 2013, theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/tony-dorsett-has-cte/281279.