by Texas
The oilmen got right down to cases: 'Did you see the state championship?' and Harney said: 'That's my job,' and Rusk asked: 'What did you think?' and Harney said: 'Your team had no right being on that field.'
if you had unlimited power, and I mean unlimited, could you build us a championship team for next December?'
Harney rose and walked about the meeting room, flexing his
muscles. He was an attractive young man, quick in his movements, intelligent in his responses to questions, and compact both physically and mentally. He wasted little time on nonessentials: i can get you into the play-offs, and Waco is losing many of its best players. But I don't think I could beat Paul Tyson next year.'
'Could you beat him year after next?' Rusk asked, and Harney said: 'You get me the horses, I'll get you the championship.'
'You're hired,' Rusk said. He had no authority to hire or fire anyone, for that was the prerogative of the school board, but when a Texas town set its heart on a state football championship, everything else had to give, and when the oilmen returned to Larkin, the board quickly confirmed the appointment of Cotton Harney as teacher of Texas history. On the side he would also do some coaching.
Now it became the responsibility of the wealthy oilmen to provide the horses, and as soon as Harney was relieved of his duties at the small school near Austin, he moved to Larkin. On his first day in town he gave Rusk a list of nine boys living in various parts of Texas whom he would like to see in Antelopes uniforms when the season opened in September. When Rusk visited these boys he found they all had certain characteristics: 'They seem to have no neck. Their legs aren't all that big, but their shoulders . . . carved in granite. And they all look about twenty-two years old.' Rusk said on one return to Larkin: 'Coach Harney, I don't think any of those boys can run,' and Harney explained a fact of life: 'To produce a really good team, you have to have linemen. That's where the battles are determined, in the trenches.'
'But you will get some runners?'
'I have a second list, almost as important.' And when the oilmen went to scout these boys, they found quite a different set of characteristics: 'None of them much over a hundred and sixty. But they are quick. And only half of them seem to be in their twenties.'
When they reported back to Harney, Rusk asked: 'Aren't some of these boys a trifle old?' and he said: 'You move them in here. I'll worry about their ages.'
So now the oilmen began prowling the country, visiting with the parents of these young fellows and offering the fathers good jobs in the oil field, the mothers employment in the local hospital 01 in stores. One widowed mother said she gave piano lessons, and Rusk said: 'You get two pianos. One for you, one for your students.'
In some twenty visits the question of grades was never raised, for it was supposed that if a boy was good enough to play foi Cotton Harney, some way would be found to keep him eligible
and as July came. Rusk could boast: 'Not one player on that pitiful team last year will even make the squad this time ' 1 le was wrong. Part of the greatness of Harney as a coach was that he could take whatever material was available and forge it into something good, so he found a place for more than a dozen of last year's Antelopes; but he also knew that if he wanted a championship team, he had better have an equal number of real horses, and when August practice started, he had them, brawny young men from various parts of Texas, practiced hands of twenty and twenty-one who had already played full terms at other schools, and two massive linemen who must have been at least twenty-two, with college experience In this frontier period the rules governing eligibility in Texas high school football were somewhat flexible.
On the eve of the first game, Coach Harney convened a meeting of his backers: 'We have a unique problem. We must not win any of these early games by too big a score. I don't want to alert teams like Abilene or Amarillo. And I certainly don't want to let Waco know we're gunning for them.'
'What are we goin' to do?' Rusk asked.
'Fumble a lot. When we get the ball, we'll run three, four powerhouse plays to see what our men can do.' He never used the word boys. 'And when we're satisfied that we can run the ball pretty much as we wish, we'll fumble and start over. I don't want any Waco-type scores, eighty-three to nothing.'
'I want to win,' Rusk said, and Harney snapped: 'So do I. But in an orderly way. When we go into Fort Worth this year to face W'aco, I want them to spend the entire first half catching their breath and asking: "What hit us?" '
So in the first seven games against the smaller teams of the area, Coach Harney kept his Fighting Antelopes under wraps; 19-6 was a typical score, but as the Jacksboro game approached, at Jacksboro, Rusk begged for his team to be unshackled: 'Erase them. Leave grease spots on the field. I believe we could hammer them something like seventy to seven and I'd like to see it.'
Harney would not permit this, and the game ended 21-7, enough to keep the record unblemished but not enough to alert the public that Cotton Harney had a powerhouse. However, in the Wichita Falls game, everything clicked magically, and at the end of nine minutes the Antelopes led 27-0, and the first team was yanked. 'It could of been a hundred and seven to nothing,' Rusk said.
The Antelopes won their division, undefeated, and then swept the regionals, which placed them once more in the big finals against the supermen from Waco.
The big newspapers ridiculed the match-up, pointing out that something was wrong with a system which allowed, in two successive years, a team as poorly qualified as Larkin to reach the finals against a superteam like Waco, and all papers had long articles about the disaster of the previous year, with speculation as to whether or not the Antelopes could keep Waco from once again scoring over eighty.
There were a few cautions: 'We must remember that Cotton Harney does not bring any team into a stadium expecting to lose. This game is not going to be any eighty-three-to-nothing runaway. I predict Waco by forty.'
Because the Larkin Antelopes appeared to be so weak, the crowd in Fort Worth was not so large as the previous year, but those who stayed home missed one of the epic games of Texas football, because when Waco received the opening kickoff and started confidently down the field, they were suddenly struck by a front line which tore their orderly plays apart, and before the startled champions could punt, a huge Antelope with no neck had tackled a running back so hard that he fumbled. Larkin recovered; and in four plays had its first touchdown.
On the next kickoff almost the same thing happened. Larkin linemen simply devoured the Waco backfield, again there was a fumble on third down, and once more the rampaging Antelopes carried the ball into the end zone: Larkin 13, Waco 0.
But Paul Tyson, considered by many to be the best high school coach ever, was not one to accept such a verdict, and before the next kickoff he made several adjustments, the principal one being that against that awesome Antelope line, his men would pass more, depending upon the speed of their backs to outwit the slower Larkin men.
Now the game developed into a mighty test of contrasting skills, and for the remainder of this half the Waco men predominated, so that when the whistle blew to end the second quarter, the score was Larkin 13, Waco 7.
But the power of the new Larkin team was obvious to everyone in the stands, and people who had tired of Waco's domination during the Tyson years began to cheer in the third period for the Antelopes to score again, and this they did: Larkin 19, Waco 7.
That was the last of the Antelope scoring, for now the superb coaching of the Waco Tigers began to tell, pound at the line and get nowhere; a quick pass for nineteen yards, deceptive hand-off. a deft run for seventeen yards. Three times in that third quarter the Tigers approached the Larkin goal line, and three times the Fighting Antelopes turned them back in last-inch stands, but at
the start of the fourth quarter the Waco quarterback pulled a daring play. Faking passes to his ends and hand-offs to his running backs, he spun around twice and literally walked into the end zone: Larkin 19, Waco 13.
The fourth quarter would
often be referred to as 'the greatest last quarter in high school history,' because the Waco team, smelling a chance for victory, came down the field four glorious tunes, bedazzling the Antelopes with fancy running and lightning passes, but always near the goal, the Antelope line would stiffen and the drive fail. After a few futile rushes, the Larkin kicker would send long punts zooming down the field, and the inexorable Waco drive would restart. Four times Coach Tyson's men came close to scoring, four times they were denied, and from the stands a leather-lunged spectator cried: 'They sure are Fightin' Antelopes.' But on the fifth try, with only minutes on the clock, the Waco team could not be stopped, and the score became Larkin 19, Waco 19.
Then one of those beautiful-tragic episodes unfolded which make football such a marvelous sport, beautiful to the victors, tragic to the losers. With little more than a minute to play, Waco fielded a punt deep in its own territory, and instead of playing out the clock, unleashed three swift plays that carried the ball to the Larkin eleven. Time-out was called, with only seconds left, and Waco prepared for a field-goal attempt. 'Dear God, let it fail!' Rusk prayed and he could see around him other oilmen voicing the same supplication: 'Just this once, God, let it fail.'
The stadium was hushed. The teams lined up. The ball was snapped. The kicker dropped the ball perfectly, swung his foot, and sent the pigskin on its way. With never a waver, the ball sped through the middle of the uprights: Waco 22, Larkin 19.
On the train trip home, Floyd Rusk surprised himself, for he could feel no bitterness over the loss; passing back and forth through the train, he embraced everyone, spectators, team members, his fellow oilmen, and to all he said: 'This is the proudest day in my life.' Then he would begin to blubber: 'Who said our Antelopes couldn't fight.'
But when he reached Coach Harney, who also had tears in his eyes, he said: '1 want the names of fifteen more men we could use next autumn. I want to crush Waco. I want to tear 'em apart, shred by shred.'
'So do I,' Harney said grimly, and within a week of their return home he had given Rusk eighteen names of high school players whose presence in Larkin would reinforce the already good team. Before the first of January, Rusk and his oilmen had more than a dozen of these fellows transferred into the Larkin district, where
their parents were given jobs in the local businesses. Score that following year: Larkin 26, Waco 6.
These were the years when the Fighting Antelopes met in Homeric struggle with teams from much larger towns like Abilene, Amarillo, Lubbock and Forth Worth. With one winning streak of thirty-one regular games and two additional state championships, the team attracted national attention, and when a Chicago sportswriter asked Cotton how he accounted for that record, the coach replied: Two things. Attention to detail. And character building.'
While Floyd Rusk was enjoying his victories with the imaginary Antelopes, and they were his victories because he had purchased most of the players, his mother was having her own victories with her real Longhorns.
In 1927 the federal government became aware that on its Western plains the Longhorn breed was about to become extinct, like the passenger pigeon and the buffalo. When agitation by lovers of nature awakened national attention, a bill sponsored by Wyoming Senator John B. Kendrick was passed, allocating $3,000 to be used in an attempt to save the breed.
A large buffalo refuge in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma, not far from the Texas border, was set aside for such pure stock as could be found, but then it was discovered that in all the United States there seemed to be less than three dozen verified Longhorn cows and no good bull. Even when these were located, most were found to be of a degenerative quality, untended for generations and bred only by chance. Loss of horn was especially noted, for the famous rocking chairs were being produced no more.
Often the federal research team would hear of 'them real Longhorns down to the Tucker place,' only to find six miserable beasts not qualified to serve as breeding stock. Better luck was found in the rural ranches of Old Mexico, where unspoiled cattle that retained the characteristics of the Texas Longhorn could occasionally be found. Some ranchers objected to basing the revived strain of what was essentially a Texas breed on imports from Mexico, but the U. S. experts stifled that complaint with two sharp observations: 'Mexico is where they came from in the first place' and 'When you Texas people did have them, you didn't take care of them.' So the famous Texas cattle were saved in Oklahoma by a senator from Wyoming importing cattle from Mexico.
However, late in their search the federal men heard of a magical enclave near the town of Larkin, Texas, where a feisty old woman with no nose had been rearing Longhorns for as long as anyone could remember. In great excitement they hurried down from the
Wichita Refuge to see what Emma Larkin had stashed away in her own little refuge, and when they first saw Mean Moses VI grazing peacefully among his eows, his horns big and heavy and with never a twist, they actually shouted with joy: 'We've found a real Longhorn!' And what made this bull additionally attractive were the cows and steers sired by him, their horns showing the Texas twist, some to such an exaggerated degree that they were museum pieces.
'Can we buy your entire herd 7 ' the federal men asked ten minutes after they saw Emma Rusk's Longhorns.
Tou cannot,' she snapped.
'Can we have that great bull you call Mean Moses VI?'
'Not if you came at me with guns.'
'What can we have? For a national project? To save the breed 7 '
When she sat with them and heard the admirable thing they were trying to do, and when she saw the photographs of the terrain at the Wildlife Refuge, she became interested, but when they showed her the scrawny animals they had been able to collect so far, she became disgusted: Tou can't restore a breed with that stock.'
'We know,' the men said, allowing the logical conclusion to formulate in her mind.
She said nothing, just sat rocking back and forth, a little old woman whose mind was filled with visions of the vast plains she had loved. She saw her father and his brothers probing into the Larkin area and deciding to establish their homestead on the Brazos. She saw scenes from her life with the Comanche, when she and they galloped over terrain from Kansas to Chihuahua. But most of all she saw R. }. Poteet droving his immense herds of Longhorns to market at Dodge City, and from that herd of swirling animals emerged the creatures she had identified as worth saving. Lovingly she recalled the morning when Earnshaw cried: Thy bull has gored my bull!' And then she visualized that first Mean Moses striding through strands of barbed wire. The wire had kept him away from the hay when he wasn't really hungry, but when he knew his cows needed him, he had pushed it aside as if it were cobwebs on a frosty morning.
She knew what she must do: 'I'll let you have Mean Moses VI and any four of his bull calves you prefer. But of greater importance, I suspect, will be the cows in direct line from Bathtub Bertha. I've always thought that the tremendous horns we find in our Longhorns can be traced to Bathtub. Have you ever seen a photograph of her?'
From her mementos she produced two photographs of the extraordinary cow, and when the visitors saw those incredible horns,
the tips almost touching before the cow's eyes, they realized that they had found something spectacular, something Texan. At Wichita the Larkin strain would become known as MM/BB, and wherever in the United States men attentive to history sought to reinstitute the Longhorn breed, they would start first with a good MM/BB bull from the Wichita surplus and a score of cows descended from Bathtub.
Emma was not content to have the federal people load her animals into trucks and haul them into Oklahoma; she wanted to deliver them personally, and when she saw Moses fight his way down the ramp and make a series of lunges at everything around him, she felt assured that in the dozen good years he still had ahead of him, he would get his line firmly established. As she watched her animals disperse into the grasslands of their new home, one of the federal men asked: 'Are you sorry to lose your great bull?' and she snapped: 'What you didn'
t see at Larkin was his son, the one I hid aside to be Mean Moses VII. That one's going to be twice the bull his father was.'
She was not allowed to see this prediction come true, for on the trip home she began to feel a heavy constriction across her chest. 'Would you drive a little faster?' she asked, and each time the pain became greater she called for greater speed.
The car was now near the Texas border. Ahead lay the Red River, that shallow, wandering stream which had always protected Texas on the north, and she was eager to cross it. 'Could you please drive a little faster?' she pleaded in her customary whisper, and only later did the occupants of the car realize that she had been determined to get back to Texas before she died.
TASK FORCE
Because our members were always striving to identify which special agencies produced the uniqueness of Texas, we invited the dean of writers on high school football to address us at our October meeting in Waco, and although he said he had no time to prepare a formal paper, since this was the height of the football season, he would be honored to join us on any Monday or Tuesday when the high schools were not holding important practices. We informed
him that we would adjust our schedule to his and that he had things backward: we were the ones who would be honored.
He was Pepper Hatfield of the Larkin Defender, and when Miss Cobb and I met him at the airport we saw a man of seventy-three who retained the same lively joy in things he'd had at forty: They gave me the best job in the world. Still love it. Still amazed by what young boys ean accomplish.' His eyes sparkled; his Marine haircut was a clean iron-gray; and his voice had a lively crackle.
