Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  That sort of mentality served Earl Campbell brilliantly on the gridiron. He won a Texas high school football championship in 1973. In 1977, at the University of Texas, he won the Heisman Trophy, given to the best collegiate player, carrying his team to the brink of a national championship. He was Rookie of the Year and an MVP for the NFL’s upstart Houston Oilers, the anti–Dallas Cowboys, lifting an otherwise workaday pro football team to greatness. Opponents dreaded having to tackle him: “Every time you hit him,” the linebacker Pete Wysocki observed, “you lower your own I.Q.”

  Football strategy changed because of Campbell. When he was in college, the Longhorns shifted from the wishbone formation, which emphasized finesse, to the power-I, which basically announced that the quarterback would give the ball to Campbell, and just see what you can do to stop him. The stories about Campbell’s physical sacrifices are legion, and nearly mythic. How, as far back as middle school, having suffered a broken arm, Campbell told a friend in shop class to saw off the cast so that he could play in a rivalry game—he played, scored touchdowns, and almost passed out from the ache in his forearm; or how in a game against the University of Houston Cougars he played with a 101-degree fever and a stomach flu—and ran for 173 yards.

  As with other great professional athletes, there was no off switch—even in the twilight of his career. The safety Bo Eason, facing Campbell in the great running back’s final season, decided to challenge him in a goal-line stand.

  I hit him square. I mean I popped him face-to-face. After I hit him, I couldn’t see anything. All I could see was black. I thought I was blind. Then I opened my eyes, and I was lying on my back in the end zone, and I could make out the lights on the ceiling. They were all fuzzy and blurry and spinning. I thought I was in heaven. Then I turned my head, and Earl was lying right next to me. He reached his hand over to help me up, and I said, “Earl, I’ve got to lie here awhile; I think you knocked out my eyes.”

  Eason realized later in the game, he said, that Campbell had “hit me so hard that both my contacts flew out. The next day we were watching film with our defensive coordinator, Jerry Glanville, and he asked me why I was running the wrong direction the rest of the game. I told him, ‘Coach, I couldn’t see shit. Earl Campbell knocked my contacts out of my head.’”

  “You want to know what it was like blocking for Earl Campbell?” Carl Mauck, an offensive lineman for the Oilers in the late 1970s, asked. “Go down to the railroad track at night where the freight train comes through every evening at 9 p.m. Close your eyes and get within ten feet: That’s what it was like blocking for Campbell. You hear that train coming and you better get the hell out of the way.”

  Campbell sums up his career this way: “I truly believed I was invincible on the football field.” He convinced himself that a third-and-three was actually third-and-six so that he would run with an anxious abandon to get that first down. And so the strategy for his coaches became plain: pound Earl. “To appreciate Campbell,” Bum Phillips explained in the fall of 1978, Campbell’s rookie year as a pro, “you’ve got to give him the ball 20, 25 times a game. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t let up. He’ll turn a four-yard run into a 12, or a one-yarder into a four, which is a heck of an accomplishment in this league. I think most of his yardage in college was made after he got hit. Most backs, you block two yards for them and that’s what they’ll make. But you block two yards for Earl and he’ll get four. Do that three times and you’ve got a first down.”

  Look at Earl Campbell now and those are wince-worthy words. Sometimes, he says about the simple act of walking, “it seems like something in my body won’t let me put my left leg up to the right one and just keep going.”

  This was his Faustian bargain, trading long-term health for money, fame, and greatness. This book, in a sense, is about why Earl Campbell struck that bargain. Earl Campbell and his wife, Reuna (pronounced Renée), live amid the Spanish-tile-roofed and ranch-style houses in the rolling hills west of Austin. Their kids went to a virtually all-white public school, in one of those districts that became a haven for white suburbanites aiming to insulate themselves after the sort of integration orders that propelled Earl Campbell into the football career that eluded his older brothers, the ones who attended—and went unrecruited at—all-black schools. He has a sinecure from the University of Texas and has licensed his name to a popular brand of smoked sausage.

  The arc, from shack to suburbia, reflects a central tension in Earl Campbell. By the time he hit his stride, the major civil rights struggles had ended—fists had been raised in Mexico City, and Martin Luther King had been assassinated. During his junior season in high school, the Vietnam draft ended. And so he occupies a seldom written-about period for black athletes. Nonetheless, as an eighteen-year-old who came of age in desegregating East Texas, he had a profound enough sense of history to tell college recruiters offering bribes: “My people were bought and sold when they didn’t have a choice; Earl Campbell is not for sale.” In 2017, one of Earl’s friends, Ron Wilson, who was in Campbell’s class at UT before going on to be a state lawmaker, broke into sobs while recalling the cathartic feeling of watching him trounce anyone in his way. Absorbing all that contact and dishing out that punishment, Campbell, Wilson said, performed “the ultimate sacrifice for his people.” But Earl Campbell didn’t preach revolt: he genuinely saw himself as a catalyst for racial conciliation, as a messenger handling a football in place of a Bible to bring people of different stripes together. “I was raised not to have negative racial feelings towards the white people of Tyler,” he told me. In his optimism, Earl Campbell is classically American, with a deeply felt faith in redemption. One of his sons, after all, goes by the name Christian, and the other Earl named Tyler, for the town in which he grew up, the one with a fraught racial history.

  Perhaps Ralph Wallace, a Houston lawmaker and former trucker, best put his finger on the wonder of Earl Campbell’s trajectory, that of a man both unloosed and somehow never quite free. Back in 1981, when Earl Campbell, a fourth-year pro at the peak of his powers, was entertaining thoughts about leaving the state for another team, the Texas Legislature did what it could to intervene, decreeing Campbell a Texas hero, an official designation granted previously only to Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, and Stephen F. Austin. Campbell, Wallace told reporters, is “a kind of Horatio Alger, a black man who came out of poverty in Tyler, Texas, out of a segregated community, and he’s broken all the chains.”

  PART I

  TYLER

  Earl Christian Campbell, who would become the most famous running back in America and the most beloved man in Texas, was born with a white man’s name.

  Like nearly all the five siblings born before him and the five siblings after him, he was born in the same bed in which he was conceived, delivered in his parents’ tin-roofed home. It was March 1955. Less than a year earlier, the US Supreme Court had struck down as unconstitutional the principle of separate but equal as it applied to public education. But because Earl’s parents were poor and black, on the rural outskirts of the deeply segregated East Texas town of Tyler, in a part of the state said to be so retrograde that it has its own time zone—“Set your clock fifty years back,” goes the joke—they deferred to the white doctor who delivered their son when it came to the child’s name: Dr. Earl Christian Kinzie recommended naming the kid after himself.

  Two years after Campbell’s birth, when his mother bore identical twins, they met a similar fate. Ann Campbell had wanted to name her sons “Jay” and “James,” but Kinzie wrote the names Timothy and Steven—“Bible names,” Kinzie later explained—on their birth certificates. When Ann Campbell was well enough recovered from the delivery, she went down to the county clerk’s office to have the certificates changed. She returned home, exasperated, announcing to the family: “They wanted to charge me one hundred dollars to change each name on the birth certificate”—a cost the rose-farming family couldn’t afford. “So from now on, your brothers will be known as Timothy Bob and Steven Rob.”


  The story of Kinzie and his forebears says much about the Texas into which Campbell was born. Christian was a family name, handed down through the doctor’s clan from as long ago as the 1740s, when Christian Küntzi, a Swiss émigré seeking the freedom to practice his religious pacifism, settled in the Shenandoah Valley. Nearly two centuries later, Earl Christian Kinzie grew up in Kansas in the 1920s, athletic enough to play college basketball. Aiming to escape the Dust Bowl, he trained as an osteopath and eventually moved his family to Texas, to a small town just up the road from Tyler.

  Medical care then was still largely segregated. At Tyler’s East Texas Tuberculosis Sanatorium, for example, whites and blacks were treated separately into the 1950s. But having come from Kansas, a free state at the outbreak of the Civil War, Earl Christian Kinzie “was kind of galled that he had to have a separate waiting room for black people,” his son, Bill Kinzie, a retired doctor, said. Long after the medical practice had integrated, Kinzie plastered one wall of his waiting room with photographs of Earl Campbell.

  It’s a peculiar fact of the South that the relationships between African Americans and whites, even ones in which African Americans are invariably subordinate, are in many ways more intimate than those in the North, despite the North’s sense of self, even today—after its own troubled history of school busing and white flight and racism—as abolitionist and integrationist territory. The adage holds that if you’re African American in the South, you can get closer, but not higher; in the North you can get higher, but not closer. It’s a central paradox that Tyler and East Texas, a place of deep generosity, general unpretentiousness, and friendliness, could be fairly described by the NAACP’s regional counsel, U. Simpson Tate, in 1956, the year after Earl Campbell’s birth, as “the meanest part of the state.”

  “The whole South has a deeper relationship with blacks” than the North, said Henry Bell III, who is white and hails from a leading banking family in Tyler—one that employed Ann Campbell as a maid—and who counted Earl as a teenage friend. “We fished with them,” said Bell, now an official at the Tyler Chamber of Commerce who helps organize its annual Earl Campbell football banquet. “We were raised that way.”

  Sam Kidd, whose family ran a nursery and was just prosperous enough to have a black maid—Zephyr Fears—come in each day to air out the place, tidy up, cook breakfast, and fix dinner, reports that when his parents went out of town, he and his sister slept in her house and went to her church. “It was no big deal whatsoever—everyone knew that those two white children, she takes care of their family,” he said.

  From the perspective of a black kid, though, the relationship could seem unsettling. “We were in the country when my great-aunt died,” remembered Erna Smith, a contemporary of Campbell’s at the University of Texas who grew up in the rural Central Texas town of Caldwell. “Anytime you go to a funeral, you see some white people there—that’s who they worked for. I was always really creeped out by that. They’d call them by their first name. Everyone else saw it as a sign of respect, and they’d say, ‘She was like a member of the family’—and I’d be like, ‘Really?’ They’d say: ‘Your grandmother never stole. There was never anything missing.’ And you’d think to yourself: ‘Am I supposed to say thank you?’”

  In the doctor’s telling of the day in 1955 that Earl Campbell was born, “the family was wondering ‘Well, what are we going to call the baby?’ I said, ‘Why don’t you give him my name—Earl Christian?’ ‘Well, that sounds real good!’ And that’s the name that went on the birth certificate.” But the Campbells owned little: Would they have given away so cheaply the name of their child? Did they worry at all about contradicting the white doctor they obviously liked but also needed?

  No less an authority than Andrew Melontree, an African American who formed the civil rights group the Tyler Organization of Men in the late 1960s and who served as a Smith County commissioner, describes Kinzie, whom he met when they served together on a Smith County grand jury, as “a congenial person” in whom he had the “ultimate trust.” And yet this story carries inescapable echoes of slavery—of a white man’s privilege to name the children of the black men and women he owned. The name Campbell itself was the legacy of slavery. Some time in the past, an ancestor of Campbell’s had, like many enslaved people, taken—or, perhaps, been given—the name of his owner. In the book Tomlinson Hill, the journalist Chris Tomlinson, who is white, writes about his family’s long, intertwined relationship with the family of LaDainian Tomlinson, who is black and whose heyday as an NFL running back came three decades after Campbell’s. On property about 140 miles from Tyler, the white Tomlinsons at one point owned the black Tomlinsons. At the time of emancipation, some of the former slave families took the name Tomlinson as their own, he writes. But that was about all they got: “The (white) family retained ownership of their land and had some key advantages. The most important was the color of their skin.”

  Even the more forgiving explanations of Earl Campbell’s naming carry with them a whiff of buying and selling. “My feeling has always been that it was part of a forgiveness of fees,” said John A. Anderson, a Tyler historian who had gotten to know Kinzie through fund-raising efforts for a regional hospital. Kinzie “was very generous with his patients, and this was long before Medicaid and Medicare and all of that sort of stuff.”

  And yet Earl Christian Kinzie, the man who bestowed his white name on a black child, became a friend of the Campbell family. He had delivered two of the kids born before Earl and at least four others that came after—one of whom the Campbells (or, perhaps, Kinzie) named Margaret, after Kinzie’s late wife. Each year on Ann Campbell’s birthday or over Christmas, he dropped by bread that he had baked—honestly, it wasn’t good bread, laughed Martha, another Campbell sister—and Ann, in reciprocity, baked him a sweet potato pie. Earl Campbell has only warm feelings about his namesake. As he prepared to enter the University of Texas, Kinzie administered his physical. When Earl married his junior-high sweetheart, Reuna, Kinzie was a guest at the wedding. When he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he invited the Kinzies as official guests, and when Earl Christian Kinzie died in 2005, Campbell attended his funeral.

  The story of Earl Campbell’s name carries a peculiar coda: Earl and Reuna Campbell named their eldest son Earl Christian, after his father—and in a way, after the white doctor who delivered him and the Swiss man who settled in this country so long ago.

  Tyler, famously perfumed with roses, carries a lingering scent of its sordid history. Just eighty miles west of Louisiana and, thus, in Piney Woods territory, in catfish-and-bass country, in plantation-home country, it is a city connected by diet and heritage with the darkly forested belt of the Deep South, a city with its roots in slavery—a planters’ paradise where a little over a third of the population at the outbreak of the Civil War was enslaved.

  If Texas as a whole might be characterized as keen to have joined the Confederacy, Smith County, where Earl Campbell was born, was downright zealous about the prospect. In February 1861, Texans voted by a roughly 3–1 margin to secede from the Union; but in Smith County, home to Tyler, the margin was about 25–1. So eager were Smith County citizens to break with the Union, they sent envoys to Montgomery, Alabama, to help organize the Confederate States of America even before Texas officially recognized secession.

  Racial freedom has always come late to Texas, and maybe especially to Tyler. The Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in January 1863, and Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House two years later, in April 1865. But as if news ambled to Texas on an armadillo’s back, it was not until that summer that Confederate forces in East Texas put down their arms—and blacks in Texas were not officially informed that they were free until June 19, 1865.

  In theory, Juneteenth, as that date is now known in celebrations in Texas and other parts of the country, meant for African Americans like Earl Campbell’s family, which had been in Tyler at least as long ago as 1863, not only freedom but
also equality and a suite of personal rights. Not so much in Smith County, a territory where subjugation was endemic, where just over a third of households had been slaveholding, including at least fifty families that had owned more than twenty slaves. The freed slaves were barred from walking on public roads or congregating in public without passes from their former owners. And when they were hired to work, they frequently, at the end of the day, found themselves deprived of their wages. The criminal justice system offered little succor. Whites often ignored summonses in disputes involving African Americans. The Smith County sheriff’s office refused to serve warrants in such matters.

  In one case, a Tyler freedwoman testified that she had witnessed a white employer rape another freedwoman who worked for him. Suggesting that the man’s conviction would lead to a race riot in Tyler, his lawyer convinced the all-white jury “not to take the testimony of the Negro”—and the man was acquitted. During his 1868 stint in Tyler, Gregory Barrett, an agent of the US Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal office meant to keep the postwar peace, wrote headquarters that whites were overseeing a “reign of terror” and that they threatened to “clean the blacks out.” That summer, whites stoned and clubbed black schoolchildren—forcing school to be suspended because the children were afraid to attend. Only the federal presence, Barrett wrote, prevented the freed blacks from facing “a worse condition than slavery.”