Texas

by James A. Michener

  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 times, 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 Hamey, who also had tears in his eyes, he said: ‘I 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,’ Hamey 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 Fort 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 cows, 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?’ the federal men asked ten minutes after they saw Emma Rusk’s Longhorns.

  ‘You 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?’

  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: ‘You can’t restore a breed with that stock.’

  ‘We know,’ the men said, allowing the logical conclusion to formulate in her mind.
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br />   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. J. 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 can accomplish.’ His eyes sparkled; his Marine haircut was a clean iron-gray; and his voice had a lively crackle.

  He launched our three-hour discussion on a high philosophical note: ‘The essential character of Texas, at least in this century, has been formed by three experiences, but before I say what they are, let me remind you of this essential truth about things Texan. The significant ones have never been determined by the big cities. Houston, Dallas, San Antone, they’ve never defined what a Texan is. That insight comes only from the small towns. Always has and I’m convinced always will. The good ol’ boy with his pickup, his six-pack and his rifle slung in the rack behind his head, he’s a small-town creation. Limited to places of under eight thousand, I’d say.’

  Miss Cobb would not accept this: ‘Do you mean to say the pickup and the six-pack define Texans?’

  ‘I do not. What I intended to point out was that even these modern characteristics are predominantly small-town.’

  ‘What are the essentials?’ she asked.

  ‘I was about to say,’ Hatfield said, with just the slightest irritation at having been interrupted on the subject of football by a woman, ‘that my significant characteristics derived from the small town, and I think you’ll agree that they account for most of the Texas legend as it exists today: the ranch, the oil well, Friday night football.

  ‘Now, it’s curious and I think particularly Texan that books and plays and movies and television shows galore have idealized the first two. How many cowboy films have we had? How many television shows about Texas oil people? You ever see that great Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Claudette Colbert picture Boom Town? Or the best Texas picture made so far, Red River, or the second best, Giant? All oil and ranching, and I could name a dozen other goodies.

  ‘That’s because outsiders made the pictures. That’s because outsiders were defining how we should look at ourselves. But there’s never been a really first-rate book or play or dramatic presentation of Friday night football. And why not? Because people outside of Texas don’t appreciate the total grandeur of that tradition.

  ‘I never met a single stranger to Texas who had any appreciation of what high school football means to a Texan. Closest were those clowns in the Pennsylvania coal regions. They started boasting that they were the hotbed of high school football, and I do admit they sent a lot of their graduates to colleges all over America, like Joe Namath to Alabama, but I started a movement to send an All-Texas high school team north to play the All-Pennsylvanians. You know what happened. A slaughter. Texas won every game.’ He rattled off the scores as if the games had occurred yesterday—26–10, 34–2, 45–14—and he could do this with all the statistics of his chosen field. He needed no notes.

  ‘So after we’d clobbered Pennsylvania three times, they called off the game. Too humiliating. And if we’d played any other state on the same basis, our scores would have been higher. Texas high school football is unbelievable. We have about a thousand schools playing each weekend. Five hundred fascinating games. In a year, maybe half a million spectators will see the eight Dallas Cowboys’ home games. Eight million will see their favorite high school teams.’

  He now dropped his voice to that whispered, seriotragic level which clergymen use when conducting funeral services for people they had never known while living: ‘As you know, an All-Oklahoma high school team beat an All-Texas the last two years. We didn’t send our best players, but you just can’t explain it,’ and he sighed.

  ‘But let’s get back to fundamentals of the Texas character. The ranch gives us the cowboy, and now that there are hardly any of them left, what’s more important, the cowboy clothes. You ever see that great picture of Bum Phillips walking across the football field in his Stetson hat and his General Quimper boots? That’s Texas. Or the Marlboro man herding his steers in a Panhandle blizzard? That’s Texas.’

  ‘I thought the Marlboro man was from Wyoming,’ Garza said, and Pepper dismissed him: ‘They shoot all the photos out on the 6666 Ranch in Guthrie, King County. Keep the Marlboro store right on the ranch.

  ‘And the same goes for the oilman. He may no longer be the dominant economic factor, what with OPEC misbehavior and the rise of Silicon Valley over in Dallas, but emotionally he is still emperor of the Texas plains. Best thing ever happened to oil, it moved from being a monopoly of East Texas out to C
entral Texas, where I grew up, and then on to the Permian Basin, real out west. Made it universal Texan the way cattle never were, and gave us some powerful imagery, not only in the production of the oil well itself, that wonderful gusher blackening the sky, but in the oilman, too. Best cartoon on Texas I ever saw showed a typical West Texas wildcatter, living in this shack with his bedraggled wife. Behind them you see a gusher coming in on their pasture, and the old woman is yelling to her husband “Call Neiman-Marcus and see how late they stay open on Thursdays!” ’

  ‘You seem to incline always toward the cheapest view of our state, Mr. Hatfield,’ Miss Cobb protested, and Pepper replied, with never a pause: ‘I don’t do the choosing, ma’am, the people do, and one of the best things I ever heard about any state came from Hawaii. Group of local politicians there, about 1960, awoke to the fact that their new state was no longer a bunch of hoolie-hoolie girls waving their hips. It was a modern state, with a sugar industry and pineapple and a good university. So they started advertising such things in mainland magazines, and tourism dropped forty percent. Right quick they went back to the hoolie-hoolies, and there they stay, with tourism way up. Texas, ma’am, is ranches and oil and Friday night football, and you people in command better not try to sell anything else.’

  Pepper was at his best when reminiscing about the great high school teams and players he had known: ‘I started as a boy, watching Coach Cotton Hamey’s immortal teams at Larkin: they won three state championships. As some of you may remember, I got my big break as a sports writer by a romantic piece I submitted to a Dallas newspaper about the five awesome linemen Coach Hamey brought with him to Larkin. I called them the Five Oil Derricks, and the name caught on.’

  He smiled, recalling that lucky shot: Three papers spoke to me about jobs, so I prepared a second article about my Five Derricks, because they awed me. They all seemed older than my pop, because eligibility rules were a little looser then. Well, my second article proved that when those five men enrolled as freshmen at Larkin, they’d already played a total of twenty-three years in high school or beyond.