Play by Play

by Verne Lundquist

  That didn’t make it on-air.

  I was undeterred by that early stumble and kept my nose to the grindstone. I had a long-term relationship with UT that I cherished then and now. It went all the way back to when I was in seventh and eighth grade. I spent home football game Saturdays walking up and down the steep steps of Memorial Stadium lugging a tray of sodas while working concessions. I’ll always associate Longhorn football and the fervid nature of its fans with the sensation of a crowd’s roar working its way up from my sneakered feet to my spine. Those lovely afternoons were workdays, but they felt more like play days for me, adventures. I’d cast a glance at the field now and then, and the green grass against that backdrop of mostly white shirts was stark and beautiful. The 1952 season, the Longhorns came out of the gate strong, but after going 2-0, back-to-back losses to Notre Dame and Oklahoma made things look bleak as the team dropped out of the national rankings entirely. That Notre Dame game was the first college football game I saw in person. The 14–3 loss to the Fighting Irish reduced the raucous throng to a silent procession filing out of the stadium. Fortunately the 49–20 shellacking they suffered the following week against hated Oklahoma took place in Dallas and so I wasn’t there to witness it. Fans always took losses hard, and I remember someone at school muttering that week that the bronze statue of Democracy atop the north end of the stadium had leaked a few tears. Can’t say I blamed her. The team recovered, winning its next seven, including a shutout of Tennessee in the Cotton Bowl. They wound up ranked tenth in the nation. Good but not great.

  By the time I came on board at KTBC in the summer of 1963, UT football fans were about to celebrate a national championship—their first. That 1963 team went undefeated and capped the season with a titanic matchup of number one (Texas) versus number two (Navy) in the Cotton Bowl. I have to admit that the sentimental side of me wouldn’t let me have ill feelings toward Navy. After all, the Cotton Bowl in Dallas that year was held a few weeks after President Kennedy, a naval veteran himself, had been shot in that same city. The games go on, as they should, but at least in my mind, some of the joy of the 28–6 victory over Roger Staubach and the rest of the Midshipmen diminished a touch.

  Later on, Roger and I would have a long association; eventually the two of us talked about that game. I’d watched it on TV with the great Lindsey Nelson doing the play-by-play. I can’t remember the name of the fellow who did the pregame show, but he had both coaches on before kickoff. Navy’s Wayne Hardin got the first question and he rambled on and on, clearly relishing having a national TV audience. The poor interviewer kept looking into the camera and back at Coach Hardin. Darrell Royal was in the shot also, and he stood there politely, though his arms-folded posture suggested he wanted no part of the deal. When he was asked for his comment, instead of addressing his remarks to the man with the microphone, he faced the camera head-on and said, “We’re ready!” He trotted out of shot and I truly appreciated his brevity.

  Roger Staubach wasn’t crushed by that defeat and the loss of a possible national championship. He felt that Texas was the better team and deserved its victory. He was more disappointed by an earlier loss that season to SMU. He felt the Midshipmen had underperformed against an inferior opponent. He could accept losing, but a loss resulting from underpreparedness was unacceptable. I’m sure that many players who haven’t attended a military academy feel the same way. Knowing Roger, and seeing how he prepared and performed later on, I think that there is a special flavor of work ethic that military guys cook up. They seem a breed apart, imbued with an ethical sense of duty that I can relate to.

  Darrell Royal was cut from the same cloth. As much as I admired him instantly, he gave me a reason not to very early in my career at KTBC. One evening, three of his players went to the Villa Capri hotel in Austin. That hotel, now closed, looms large in UT football lore. It was the site of a weekly postgame gathering for the media, fans, and staff. Somehow these three guys got it into their drunken minds that it would be fun to go to the Villa Capri and run along the hallway knocking on doors well into the night. One poor hotel guest opened up his door and got smashed in the face with a punch or punches and was fairly seriously injured. The players were arrested and charged with assault. The story was headline news.

  The day after the incident, I was instructed to run the story at the top of the broadcast. I did what I was told to do. After that six o’clock show, I went home. I was living with my family then. The phone rang and my mother picked it up and told me the call was for me. I got on the line and a woman asked me if I was Verne Lundquist. I replied affirmatively.

  “Hold on, please. Coach would like to speak with you.”

  What followed was Darrell Royal engaging in a five-minute harangue in which my suitability as a journalist was questioned. I also came under attack for undermining the coach’s program, sullying its reputation, and rumormongering. I may have even been accused of anti-American activities and communist leanings. I was still very much a young pup in the business but I wasn’t going to back down, especially after Coach Royal said that the story wasn’t newsworthy. I told him that I disagreed strongly. I did. That kind of assault may not have led the news if it were Joe Schmoe who’d done the attacking, but these were three UT Longhorns. If you were in a prominent position in that town, you were going to get treated a bit different from so-called nobodies. That’s just how it was. If you wanted the fame and the glory and the notoriety, you had to accept some of the downside of that.

  A slammed phone was the only reply I received.

  Fast-forward to the off-season, following that Cotton Bowl victory. The three alleged assaulters had a pretrial hearing of some sort. We dutifully reported on that. The show ended; I went back home. The phone rang. Mother answered. I got on the line when informed that the call was for me. The same woman’s voice that I vaguely recognized from before. Coach Royal spoke, his tone even. He told me that he’d been wrong the first time we’d spoken. He owed me an apology and he made good on that debt. I don’t think it was winning the national championship that softened him. He was a good man at heart and it was inevitable that his sensible and caring nature would even poke its head up through the cracked earth of a stressful incident and season. I thanked him and in later years developed a nice friendship with him. In fact, he would eventually become one of the dozens and dozens of broadcast partners I’d have.

  The Longhorns entered the 1964 season ranked number four in the nation. Ole Miss earned the top honors but by week one they’d dropped out of the polls and Texas had climbed to number one. Then came a heartbreaking 14–13 loss in a rivalry game that had national championship repercussions. Those border war games are always intriguing. Though Texas dominated the series between the two, the interstate rivalry gives it an added dimension. Arkansas was the only team outside of the state of Texas in the Southwest Conference. They used that outsider status to their advantage as a motivational tool. Texas was uppity. Arkansas got no respect.

  The 1964 game was a classic. Led by head coach Frank Broyles, the Razorbacks beat the Longhorns in Austin. Arkansas fans remember Ken Hatfield’s long punt returns. I was in the press box for them, and like a lot of Texas fans, I remember a two-point conversion failure that was the difference in the 14–13 game. Many say that victory was the turning point in Arkansas’s football program. I don’t know about that, but it still boggles my mind that following that epic win, Arkansas did not allow another point the remainder of the season—five straight shutouts! Under their brilliant coach, Frank Broyles, Arkansas finished the regular season undefeated. So did Alabama, thanks to the exploits of its quarterback Joe Namath. Texas rebounded from that loss to the Razorbacks and faced Alabama in the Orange Bowl. Most fans remember that game because of Tommy Nobis’s stop of a Joe Namath fourth-and-inches run near the goal line with the team holding on to a 21–17 lead. Some Texas fans say, and I agree, that that tackle was the greatest in the history of the Texas program. Others will debate that, and that’s part of the fun of b
eing a fan. I also know this: sports fans love to have these kinds of arguments and make these kinds of proclamations. They also love trivia. Can you guess two prominent figures in Dallas Cowboys history who were on that Arkansas squad? Future owner Jerry Jones and future coach Jimmy Johnson.

  That being the case, the 1964 season was a veritable feeding frenzy. With its loss, Alabama was no longer undefeated. Arkansas went on to win the Cotton Bowl 10–7 over Nebraska to stay undefeated. The final polls were a jumble. The Associated Press named Alabama number one based on its regular season results. The Football Writers Association of America, voting after the bowl games, gave their Grantland Rice Trophy to Arkansas. The National Football Foundation named a 9–1 Notre Dame team, which did not allow its teams to participate in bowl games from 1925 to 1968, its number one selection. Pick your poison, I suppose. For college football fans, this scenario will sound all too familiar and like too much fun.

  For me, and for Texas Longhorn football, even better days were ahead, including back-to-back national championships and the kind of national notoriety every program longs for. Those were great times to be on the campus and covering those great teams.

  Not even driving to work that awful day in 1966 and hearing gunshots ring out as Charles Whitman fired from atop the Main Building tower on campus could diminish my appreciation for what the UT offered.

  But I had my ambitions beyond Austin. Some of my desire to move on to a bigger stage had to do with an experience I had in the summer of 1964. This was shortly before I got the full-time sports director job. Three former college roommates and I planned a road trip out east. J. C. Kellam, the general manager of the station, was okay with the trip. He even offered to make some calls to set us up for a few fun stops. I was earning enough money to afford a flashy white Chevrolet convertible with a red leather interior. We headed out of Austin with a plan to make a large loop taking us as far north as Niagara Falls.

  One of our early stops, on June 21, 1964, was in Meridian, Mississippi. That same night, three young men who were helping the cause of civil rights and who had traveled south during what became known as the Freedom Summer were abducted. They were kidnapped and murdered after leaving Meridian to speak to congregants in nearby Longdale whose church had been burned. Three days after we pulled out of Meridian, the bodies were discovered in an earthen dam in Philadelphia, Mississippi. When we heard radio reports of their murders we grew somber. Still, we recognized how fortunate we were to have the opportunity we did, to enjoy the kind of freedom denied to so many others.

  Because LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson owned the station, we were told we’d be given a private tour of the White House. LBJ’s press secretary, a former UT student and KTBC radio guy, Bill Moyers, met us outside the West Wing to apologize. Neither the president nor he was going to be able to spend any real time with us. Instead, he turned us over to LBJ’s trusted aide, Walter Jenkins. That same day, we toured FBI headquarters. J. Edgar Hoover still reigned over the office, but his number two man, Cartha Libby, led us around the facility. The real highlight of all of this was a complete surprise. I was given a number to call at CBS in New York City. I found a pay phone and dialed the number. At first I thought that the traffic noise and the general hubbub that is the streets of Manhattan were playing tricks with me. The female voice on the end of the line said, “Walter Cronkite’s office, how may I help you?”

  Well, you can start by picking my jaw up from the sidewalk.

  Once I identified myself, she told me that he was expecting my call. A moment later that familiar voice nestled in my ear.

  A few hours later, we all stood and watched as he strode out of his office, got his makeup done, and then sat behind his desk. An enormous black-and-white camera was wheeled out in front of him. We watched as he intoned, “And good evening, I’m Walter Cronkite.”

  The lead that evening was the story out of Meridian, Mississippi.

  That trip pushed me once again to set my sights to bigger horizons. Hoping to make a real name for myself, I twice auditioned for a job at WFAA in Dallas, the ABC affiliate there. Both times I didn’t get it. I was pleased that for the first time in my career, in 1966, someone came calling to offer me a job. WOAI, the NBC affiliate in San Antonio was looking for a newsman, someone to anchor the six and ten shows. I would also have to cohost an afternoon show called, somewhat oddly, The Early Evening Report. I looked forward to the challenge of making the transition from sports to hard news. It was also better money. Each year I’d been at KTBC I’d gotten $25 per month raises, but I knew that wasn’t enough. I wasn’t a great negotiator and had no agent, so I accepted what I was given. But at age twenty-six I had a kind of tunnel vision, imagining a parade of $25 a month raises until I was in my fifties.

  In 1966, when I walked in to my boss’s office to let him know that I was leaving for San Antonio, he nodded and asked me, “What are they paying you?”

  “Seven hundred and fifty a month.”

  He pursed his lips and said blandly, “You’re making the right move. No future in this business for a four-eyed sportscaster.”

  Yikes. That was my going-away party.

  The highlight of my time in San Antonio, in retrospect, was interviewing a Texas state congressman by the name of George Herbert Walker Bush. The lowlights? Well, almost all the rest of it. WOAI was my first real exposure to the “if it bleeds it leads” style of reporting. Many evenings and nights we led with a story of a horrific car crash, complete with images from the scene. I didn’t have the heart for it. Instead of images of higher ratings and burgeoning advertising dollars, my mind filled with visions of the broken bodies of the victims, their shattered families, hospital rooms, and tearful scenes at funeral parlors. Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I can get sentimental on occasion. That’s true. Tears will well up in my eyes at the first sign of emotion. That was the case to a lesser extent when I was a younger man, but I’ve always had that vulnerability. I recognized even then that I ran the risk of hardening my heart. If that was the price of doing hard news instead of sports in order to advance my career, well, then that was a price I wasn’t willing to pay.

  Sure, I wanted to tell stories, but I always hoped that they would uplift people, not make them fearful or sad.

  After a while, I thought if we led with one more car crash and horrific images from the scene, I was going to have to get out of there. And I did, eleven months into a twelve-month contract. I had learned a lot at WOAI about video production and writing and delivery. I was grateful for the opportunity to learn what I didn’t want to do as well. I suppose that it was a case of being careful what you wish for but I also learned that you had to be true to yourself and who you are. That’s been one of the guiding principles of my professional career. If you tried to fake it; if you tried to create a false image of who you weren’t, then you were doomed to eventual failure if not as a television personality but certainly then as a person. I didn’t know it then but later on I began to see that my ethos would serve me well at times and hold me back at others.

  I was going to have to learn to be okay with that.

  Chapter Three

  Cowboy Days

  If you ask me, the old saw about the third time being the charm is true. I’ve been happily married to my third wife, Nancy, since 1982. The previous two marriages were far more brief and only checkered with good moments. Life with Nancy has been as wonderful as could be. I don’t know about the expression “my better half,” but the two of us form a whole that is pretty damn near unbeatably reliable and pleasurable. I had to pursue her pretty diligently, but I persevered, as you will eventually see.

  Similarly, in 1966, the third time I applied to WFAA in Dallas, I punched my ticket to what I then defined as the big dance. Dave Lane, who’d beaten me out for the job six months earlier, had a change of mind and life circumstance. He and his wife, Jeannie, were expecting their first child. He wanted to move into sales with hopes of next stepping into management. He let me know about the
opening and I got an audition after contacting the station’s GM, Mike Shapiro. I drove to Dallas and stayed with a friend.

  At the time, WFAA had a poor man’s version of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand that they broadcast every afternoon. They had a studio set up at one of the first shopping malls in the country, a place called North Park. The studio was nearly entirely glass-walled so that shoppers could watch the kids dancing to the latest rock-and-roll tunes. That was where they taped my audition. While I waited for the crew to finish their setup, I took in the scene. I felt a bit like a Scandinavian goldfish in a bowl. I tried my best to ignore the younger women strolling by in their Summer of Love miniskirts. Disapproving matronly types clicked past in high heels, noses high while flying the flag of Jackie Kennedy. Moms with kids in tow sailed by like dazzling camouflaged ships, tentatively toeing the psychedelic waters in bold splashes of paisley and other bold prints. I was in my broadcaster’s uniform—a solid navy blazer, white shirt, and striped tie. Despite what J. C. Kellam had said about four eyes, I edged my wire-rimmed glasses back into place and began, “Good afternoon. I’m Verne Lundquist.”

  After we wrapped, I headed to the downtown office and studio to await my fate. I sat there anxious and fretting. I eyed the Lincoln Continentals and Cadillac Coup de Villes parked out in front of the building, gave in to driving daydreams. Finally, after an hour, I got summoned to Mike Shapiro’s office. I sat down and Mike told me that they were offering me the job. I felt my cheeks give me a standing ovation as I raised my glasses in toast. A moment later, reality spilled across Mike’s desk.

  “You’ll make one hundred fifty a week,” he said.

  He went on as I did some quick math. That was $150 a month less than what I’d been making in San Antonio. Visions of a Cadillac transformed into an Impala.