by Asher Price
She offered a story about a ceremony to celebrate the students who made the dean’s list. Her parents came in from the country, and Norris Davis, the dean of the School of Communications, greeted them. “He didn’t know what to say to my parents. He was trying to be friendly, but all he could say was: ‘There are a lot of Smiths in the phone book.’ I remember my father smiled and said, ‘A lot of Davises, too.’” After Davis moved on to greet other guests, Smith’s father, Junious, a retired military colonel, turned to Erna: “I don’t want to hear your complaining again. You should feel sorry for them. They’re scared.” “He thought these people were so inferior—‘Why are you bothering to be upset?’”
Earl Campbell had been an object of fascination ever since appearing on campus—especially to his fellow incoming UT recruits. They had read about him in Dave Campbell’s Texas Football magazine or heard from cousins or friends who had squared off against him. “Anybody who played football knew of Earl Campbell,” his former teammate Randy McEachern, an undersized quarterback from Houston, told me. McEachern said the hardest hit he ever took was from Earl Campbell. One day in practice, he handed off to him and failed to get out of the way. A defensive lineman on those Longhorn teams remembered that Campbell’s body seemed “chiseled from stone.” Another teammate recalled his relentless perfectionism, the way he ran into the end zone on every play in practice. Heading into Campbell’s freshman year, Royal tried to tamp down expectations. “He’s got a lot of tools to work with and when he gets pointed in the right direction, he’s pointed with authority,” Royal said. Later, he admitted that Campbell was the only player he had coached who might have gone straight to the pros from high school.
On the practice field, said McEachern, coaches had to work with Campbell and other players on certain timing issues. Royal ran the wishbone, a highly choreographed affair that he and his offensive coordinator had dreamt up in the late 1960s to take advantage of a backfield stacked with talent. The formation called for three runners to line up in a V in the backfield, thus giving the quarterback a number of handoff options and leaving defenses befuddled about which person to tackle. The story goes that over breakfast with his quarterbacks in August 1968 at the varsity cafeteria, Royal used salt shakers, ketchup bottles, a sugar bowl, and water glasses to explain how the wishbone would work—and the team soon rattled off thirty straight victories. The creation of the wishbone, Willie Morris observed, was “a discovery more pleasing to some Longhorns than the vaccine against cholera.”
“When you get to college, there’s a little more detail about reading defenses and a lot of footwork that was not practiced in high school,” said McEachern. But, he added, “as far as teaching [Campbell] to run, they didn’t have to do anything.”
Earl Campbell might have remained isolated and, like many others before and after him, ended up as a highly touted recruit who flamed out amid the buffeting winds of the University of Texas campus. In Campbell’s first months in Austin, dislocated geographically and isolated racially, he was decidedly homesick. Royal observed that Campbell, like a Muslim genuflecting toward Mecca, “would sit on the curb and face in the direction of Tyler.” Only a few years earlier, Julius Whittier, the first UT black varsity player, had reported being ostracized on campus, and Gary Bledsoe, in his brief time on the team as a walk-on, had seen white teammates grow suddenly silent when he entered the locker room. Unbeknown to Campbell, Marty Akins, the starting quarterback during his freshman and sophomore years, was prone to writing verse with unironic titles such as “Our Lovely Dixie”—a copy of which is in the archive of the Darrell Royal Papers at UT:
Put that ole gray suit on your smooth, Southern body,
Then march out over your lovely Dixie to war.
Now fight for the land that you’ve known from a child,
Fight for the Confederate stars and stripes and your neighbors too.
The poem goes downhill from there.
But everyone loves a winner, and Campbell gained his footing, his identity, and wide admiration on the football field partly because of an unhappy injury suffered by one of the few African American forerunners on the squad. Coming into his freshman year, Campbell expected to defer to Roosevelt Leaks, the record-setting, widely-hailed senior. Teammate Lonnie Bennett said in 1973, “[Leaks] has provided an image of a black superstar for us. It may not help us in recruiting today, but kids are growing up who now idolize him. In five years it will make a big difference. That’s what he’s done for blacks here.” Campbell, despite his reputation, was still just settling into campus that fall—subjected to standard freshman hazing, he had to sing in the dining hall and shine the shoes of upperclassmen. On a questionnaire distributed to the players in the fall of 1974 by the university’s sports information department, Campbell answered a prompt about “Plans after college” with a single phrase: “Working on our farm.” “He was very modest, very quiet, didn’t make a big splash—he did all his work on the field,” McEachern said.
Leaks was injured in spring drills when a player’s helmet hit his knee, and he remained hobbled as the season got underway. Now he was drafted to help Campbell adapt to the college game. “During practice I was like a coach to him,” Leaks once said. “I’d show him the little things. I wasn’t quite ready to play again. Earl was better than me, no question about it. He was bigger and faster, and he had that natural instinct.” Campbell ended up taking the lion’s share of the carries that season—and lived up to the hype, averaging 5.7 yards per rush and becoming the first UT freshman to start his first six varsity games. He helped out on special teams, too, just as he had done in high school. Against Arkansas, introducing himself to a national television audience, he lined up against the noseguard and stormed through the middle of the line to block a punt for a score. “That shows how smart coaches are. The first time he tries to block a punt he got one, and we quit doing it,” Royal said. “You can win a game with a blocked punt. We chose to win the easy way, by running Earl 30 times.” Sure enough, Campbell also went for 109 yards on eight carries in that Arkansas game, including one sixty-eight-yarder through a hole on the right side that included the sort of stuff-your-face-in-the-turf stiff-arm that he had patented in high school.
In an upset of eighth-ranked Texas A&M that season—UT won 32–3—Campbell ran for 130 yards on twenty-eight carries, including hauling a piggybacking defender with him for much of a twenty-six-yard gain. Aggie linebacker Ed Simonini held such deep antipathy toward the University of Texas Longhorns and yet such reverence for their star running back that he shook hands only with Earl Campbell. “He’s the only one I think is a man,” he explained, “coaches included.”
Campbell cut another figure in private, with his teammates. In the locker room of Memorial Stadium following the upset of A&M, as Royal finished a postgame talk, Earl asked whether he could say something. “He got up on a bench and asked for silence,” Robert Butler, a defensive back, told a reporter in 1975. “I thought, ‘Here comes a rah-rah, gung-ho speech.’ He suddenly struck a silly pose and yelled, ‘Ain’t I cute? Ain’t I cute?’ It broke everyone up.”
In Campbell’s sophomore year, he bullied his way to 1,118 yards and 13 touchdowns. He was now a black folk hero, fast becoming beloved on a mostly white campus. An Austin band had put together a song in praise of Ann Campbell—“Lord Don’t Let It Rain on Mrs. Campbell’s Roses”—and limericks were written in Earl’s honor:
There once was a Texan named Campbell,
The monster can certainly amble;
They point to the goal,
And open a hole,
And he’s off on a 60-yard ramble.
In the team’s season-ending 38–21 Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl win over Colorado, he was picked as the game’s outstanding offensive player. Presented with the award, he said, in his genuine, golly-gee-willikers way: “I would like to put in a vote for Ann Campbell.”
Black students had turned their backs on the Longhorns. At basketball games in the early 1970s, they cha
nted, “More black students, more black students” every time an African American made a free throw. And when an integrated UCLA football team visited in 1970, Gary Bledsoe remembered cheering for them over the Horns. But now, in the late period of Royal’s reign, they voiced full-throated approval. “He was special,” said Bledsoe. “We were rooting for Earl because he was a symbol.” Erna Smith remembered that people back home would cut to the chase when welcoming her back from UT: “I’m so proud of you—but baby, have you met Earl?”
The experience of seeing Earl Campbell, an African American man, run roughshod over opponents in the recently desegregated Southwest Conference, was therapeutic. “Earl was like a buffalo out there. It was like thunder, the night train was coming—you could see it in their eyes,” Erna Smith said. “He was running downhill for all of us—and it was lovely.” The black sociology professor John Sibley Butler, who mentored Campbell, put it similarly: “Earl didn’t come here to say, ‘I’m a minority.’ Earl came here to say, ‘I’m going to put my foot in your damn face and run over you.’”
“Earl was an activist, but not that kind of activist,” said Ron Wilson in a conversation at the Million Air Club, a high-end private hangar at Houston’s Hobby Airport. He was wearing blue jeans and white sneakers and a navy University of Texas shirt, and picked at a small bag of pretzels. As a person, he remembered, his former classmate was quiet. “But when he got the football, he was a monster. I guess that’s kind of an activism. Earl exhibited who he was by the way he entered the field, the way he carried the ball, the way he got up. Earl was Earl. He was a monster. Earl wasn’t this”—he broke off here—“fuck you, man, fuck you.” He directed this at no one in particular, more as emotional venting. And he started, suddenly, to cry as he recalled the catharsis he felt, as a black man, while watching Campbell run: “Shit, whew. They would take these films of Earl, they’d show him running, catching the ball. The way he’d run, run over people, man, just flatten them. And you’d go, ‘Fuck you, motherfucker.’ You hit those motherfuckers the way he does, run over the son of a bitch, and give the ball to the referee after he finishes. That to me was the ultimate—what’s the right word?—the ultimate sacrifice for his people and for him.”
White fans, too, were pleased to root for a winner, no matter his color. Only a few years earlier, many of the older white alums at Memorial Stadium hadn’t been able to countenance the idea of a black Longhorn. But white fans, the sports sociologist Erin Tarver has observed, “are content to identify with black football players for as long as they are useful on the field, to imaginatively project themselves into the physical power and hypermasculinity that (fans imagine) they embody.” Texans were not sending in the sort of hateful letters they had posted only a decade earlier, when the regents had mulled over integrating the football team. (They still were happy to indulge in racist cheers. Through at least the mid-1970s, a common cry from the stands during games against Rice went: “What came out of the Chinaman’s ass? Rice, rice, rice.” And Gary Bledsoe remembered that when UT finally played a black quarterback, in the late 1970s, and the player faltered, the team’s rooting section jeered him with the taunt “Go back to Africa.”)
For all the self-assuredness of these black athletes on the field, going to class at the University of Texas, especially at the beginning of their undergraduate years, could be frightening. “I don’t think anyone convinced Earl or myself coming here to play that we were not going to face any type of discrimination and that that was not going to exist—including from other members of the team,” Campbell’s teammate and roommate Alfred Jackson said. “Sometimes, you can be shackled down without actual handcuffs on.”
Still, Earl Campbell, beloved football player, had a very different UT experience from that of Ron Wilson or Michael Hurd—or probably from that of any other black student on campus, including other Longhorns. “You might hear things about white and black people down here, but I don’t see it on this campus,” Campbell told a reporter at the outset of his sophomore year. “The players play football like we’re all one color, and we try to reach out to each other afterwards. I’m the kind of guy who says ‘Come on, take a ride with me,’ no matter who it is.”
The boosters set him and his twin brothers up with jobs—working, of all places, at Don Weedon’s Conoco station, the one that only eight years earlier had been the site of protests after Weedon had used the n-word and challenged a black undergraduate to a fight. But now, with the Longhorns integrated, Weedon’s impulse to support the football team was apparently greater than his aversion to African Americans. “I worked on him till black athletes got free gas,” Bill Lyons said with a Cheshire grin.
To explain how jarring it felt to enter a classroom for the first time at UT as a young black man from rural Texas, Jackson observed, “If you grew up black you had luggage.”
You had luggage that was real: you grew up poor, you grew up unexposed, you had certain feelings about being black and knowing you were black, and there were discriminatory views about you because of how you were treated in everyday life. That was real luggage. Then you had perceived luggage, too. We perceived and I perceived when I was going to be discriminated against . . . The reason most Anglos have no perception of that, of the internal strength it takes to deal with that, is they’ve never had to deal with it. My first class was a liberal arts class. Five hundred people in the class. I walked into that class and I was absolutely horrified. First of all, I had never been in a classroom that size, and to be in it with five hundred people that I thought disliked, hated me—I was there, but inside, the feeling was a scared, terrified feeling.
The Longhorns’ “brain coach,” Lan Hewlett, a former science teacher, once described the added burden athletes faced in the classroom: “If a guy works in a bookstore, he puts in his hours and that’s it. But a player on scholarship is always full of anxiety. He is constantly preparing like an actor to perform before thousands of people.”
Schoolwork didn’t come naturally to Earl Campbell, and his decision to dedicate himself to passing courses at UT was tied up in his on-campus isolation.
I was sitting in front of Gregory Gym all mad, thinking, here I am at this big, old school going into my second year, and I’m kinda like the big hit, you know? But I have no money in my pocket except for 15 bucks a month from the NC-two-A. That was my laundry money. By the time I worked during the summer, tried to save some money, tried to send Mom some money, I didn’t have any. I didn’t have a car. The girls never really came around because I didn’t have anything to offer them. So I tried to position myself to look toward Tyler—whenever I got lonesome I would think about what was going on at home. Out of the blue, this voice said, “Yes, you will get a degree from here.” From that day I started working at it, and working at it.
To teachers and classmates, he made an impression as countrified and genuine. A young professor, Betty Fine, who taught Campbell in a 1975 class on speech and communication, remembers being “impressed with his gentleness and his sincerity.” For an assignment on how to execute a task, he gave a talk, naturally, on running the football. He had been an indifferent student in high school, but now, recognizing his challenge, and determined not to return to the rose fields back in Tyler, he found himself thinking about college strategically. He began sitting in the front row so his professors would see he was in attendance. And he never missed a class, according to Butler, the sociology professor. “Not only did he never miss a class, he made all his teammates go,” Butler said. (After Campbell declined, his senior year, to attend a television special to honor all-Americans, Bob Hope offered to send a jet for him. “I can’t,” Campbell said. “I have a test.”)
In Earl’s junior year, it fell to Gary Gallagher, an American history graduate student, to tutor him in a course from the colonial period to Reconstruction. He was a slight white guy who had left his native Colorado as a twenty-two-year-old in January 1973, the temperature thirty-seven below zero, only to drive into Austin and see people p
lay tennis. “Lots of graduate students tutored jocks back then,” said Gallagher—though not many were in one-on-one sessions with the university’s greatest athlete and the city’s most popular person. One evening a week, Gallagher met with Campbell in his undergraduate dorm room. Earl favored cutoffs, and four decades later, Gallagher, who would become a noted Civil War historian, still remembers Campbell’s physique with some astonishment. “He told me he never lifted weights, but he was hard—just sculpted. You could have bounced a dime off his thighs.”
Gallagher was equally impressed with Campbell’s modesty and easy manner: “There was no artifice whatsoever about him. He seemed absolutely comfortable in his own skin.” As a student, Campbell struggled with language and writing, Gallagher said. “He talked a lot about how—and he kind of resented it—once they figured out how great he was at John Tyler, all he had to do was show up Friday night and do nothing else, and that put him behind the curve. He knew that football was his way out, and he knew that football was the reason he was never held to account for anything.”