Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  The tutor and the pupil chatted about sports, about country music—Gallagher had never really listened to country music—and about recruiting. “I’d never understood the degree to which big-time college athletics was a job,” he said. As the semester wound down, Gallagher invited Campbell to his apartment, in married student housing, for a dinner of enchiladas. He had no expectation that his famous pupil would accept.

  But Earl said he would make it.

  “It was amazing. When word got out Earl was coming, all these little boys from married student housing lined up and watched Earl come up. We had our enchiladas, Earl signed a football for Will, Earl Campbell #20”—Gallagher’s son, Will, was eight years old. “It was an incredibly generous thing. He didn’t rush in and rush out; he ate a bunch of enchiladas and greeted all the little kids.”

  That was the last time Gallagher saw Campbell off the field. In the end, Gallagher said, Campbell got a hard-won C in the course. “He wrote the essays and took all the exams. When he wrote, he wrote slowly. He did everything slowly. He’d think about stuff. He was a very deliberate, cautious guy.”

  Royal and Campbell were suddenly close. They had come together over, of all things, music. Under the tutelage of Darrell Royal, Campbell said he went from being a Marvin Gaye fan to a Tanya Tucker fan. At an intimate Willie Nelson concert organized by Royal, Campbell was the only black player who showed up. “It was kind of strange at first,” Campbell once remembered. “Willie, he had this big old beard—and I know him well enough now that I can say this—he looked like a tramp. Darrell Royal was trying to tell us that as athletes we needed to be clean-shaven, we needed to do this and that. And we were thinking, ‘Man, how in the hell can he tell anyone to be clean-shaven when he’s got this hippie with him all the time?’”

  For most of his players, Royal was both beloved and unknowable. “Despite its impersonal nature, the relationship between the players and Royal was tied in a multitude of powerful knots,” Gary Shaw observed in his 1972 book. “For us, Daddy D was in part the authoritarian father of whom our fear, awe, and respect were ever-present.” He continued: “This detachment of Royal’s increased his power. He was more unknown, more untouchable, yet still had the final word. The other coaches did nearly all of the individual coaching so we could at least see them sweat a little, but Royal saved his role and words for selective moments which increased their significance.” Chachie Owens, a Longhorn fullback in the mid-1960s, told Shaw that he “respected [Royal] as a coach and a judge of athletic ability, but he was totally impersonal. We were so many head of cattle and he was going to milk us for all he could. It was a business proposition and they ought to admit it.” James Street, Royal’s onetime star quarterback, put it this way: “We sure never went to him for fatherly advice.”

  Partly, undoubtedly, Campbell’s relationship with Royal had to do with fatherlessness: “I lost my mom three years ago,” Campbell wrote in a kind of eulogy for Royal in Sports Illustrated in 2012. “Now I’ve lost a father figure.” Campbell himself observed the singularity of their relationship: “I’m one of the only players who really got close to him.” Maybe that was because he was one of Royal’s few black players, and their relationship was built on racial reconciliation. “I just remember people saying, ‘Darrell Royal hates blacks. It’s a prejudiced school. You’re not going to make it,’” Campbell said. “I felt the one person I was going to have most of my dealings with was Darrell Royal. I made up my mind when I was 18 years old, that if he’s prejudiced, he’s going to have to respect me because I’m going to respect him.”

  Heading into his junior year, Campbell appeared poised to lead the Longhorns to another national championship for Darrell Royal. His first two years had been fabulous, and he acknowledged that he had come to Texas with a lot of publicity and that “it is a relief to have sort of lived up to it.” But then something happened: Horsing around the first day of spring practice in 1975—a few months removed from the Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl—he challenged some teammates to a forty-yard dash. They hadn’t yet warmed up and stretched, and halfway through the sprint, just as he got to top gear, he felt the back of his right thigh twinge. A hamstring pull. Normally, such an injury would be treated simply with rest and patience, as well as mild physical therapy. But this was Campbell’s first real leg problem, and he was unready for the setback. The injury ended up dooming his season, and with it that of the Longhorns. Ultimately, it would spell the end of Royal’s coaching career.

  That summer in Tyler, loading trucks in a warehouse for $2.60 an hour, he exercised sparingly and ate poorly. He put on twenty-five pounds. Any time he tried working out his legs, he seemed to reaggravate the problem. Back at school in the fall, the whole thing left him befuddled and disaffected: “I kept reinjuring it. I’d never been hurt like that before, so I didn’t know how it was supposed to feel. I’d go out and push myself too soon and hurt it again.”

  His junior season began inauspiciously. Against Boston College, an underdog, Campbell carried only five times for twenty-three yards. Boston College won in a 14–13 upset. Over the next five games he appeared uncomfortable. During a 208-yard performance against North Texas State, he broke loose for an eighty-three-yard run—but in trying to avoid stretching his ailing leg, he ran the distance with a hobble. Earl Campbell was rarely caught from behind; this time he was tackled on the four-yard line.

  Royal tried to put a sunny face on it—“He was running under wraps but he was still outstanding”—but acknowledged that his star player had been hamstrung. “He wasn’t the old slashing, quick Earl he’s been,” Royal said.

  The next game, the annual Red River Shootout against Oklahoma, broadcast on national television, was one Royal wanted badly. He had owned the series against his alma mater until the impish, rapscallious Barry Switzer had shown up to coach the Sooners. In his first three seasons, Switzer lost only one game and won two national titles. And he dominated the Longhorns. Royal was often good-natured enough to make light of it. Once, after a loss to Oklahoma, Royal was pressed on his weekly television show about what went wrong. “Darrell, we brought you down here to Texas to beat Oklahoma. Now we have suffered yet another defeat by the Sooners. What do you have to say about that?” The camera zoomed in for a close-up of the coach’s face. Softly and earnestly, he said: “I’ve done a lot of thinking about this situation. And I’ve turned to that famed scholar Oliver Wendell Holmes, who once said, ‘As I look back on the days of my life I appreciated my defeats more than my victories, because I have learned more from my losses.’ Well, I’ve been thinking about those words of that great man and I’d just like to say, ‘Screw Oliver Wendell Holmes!’”

  But for all the joking, Switzer had gotten under Royal’s skin. In many ways, Switzer’s success stemmed from his willingness to take risks on players that Royal wouldn’t approach—including some black players. (Oklahoma was the first college team in the South or Southwest to integrate.) For his part, Switzer liked to crow about how Royal had become obsolete. In 1975, Switzer told a group of Oklahoma alumni that the careers of some coaches faltered because they spent too much time hanging out with country-and-western musicians. “Some coaches don’t want to coach anymore. They would rather sit home and listen to guitar pickers,” he said, in a bit of Royal baiting. He boasted: “I know exactly why we had so much recruiting success. We outwork ’em. I’m young. My staff is young. Our hair is still growing. We can jive with the kids, dance with them.” To some extent, this was true: Royal had trouble relating to kids, especially black kids, from Texas’s big cities. And as the game integrated, football coaches in the Southwest Conference had to recruit those kids to remain competitive. But Royal found high schoolers increasingly brash and was uncomfortable courting them. How much of that was wrapped up in race in hard to say. He appeared more at ease when recruiting African Americans from small towns in rural areas—Campbell from Tyler, Leaks from Brenham, a place best known as the home of Blue Bell ice cream—than from urban areas.

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bsp; “I don’t care if a coach is on vacation in Greece, sometime every day he’s thinking about some sophomore back home,” Royal told Jan Reid in 1982.

  I’ve gone on vacation and spent two or three hours a day talking to recruits on the phone. Sure, we ruin ’em. Every year I read where the top prospects say, “I’ll be glad when this is all over. This is some pressure. I can’t even turn around.” Well, Earl Campbell didn’t suffer all that pressure. He didn’t feel the need to yank all those old men around. They make appointments with you and not show up. So you think maybe he forgot, maybe he misunderstood. They keep you jangling at the end of their string. And then when it’s all over, they say, “I never was interested in Texas in the first place.” I just decided I didn’t need that anymore.

  There’s a story that the final straw came when he tried to recruit Eric Dickerson. When Royal arrived at the Dickerson home, probably sometime in 1976, Eric was out, and so, as he had with many other relatives in many recruits’ living rooms over the years, Royal sat down with the kid’s grandmother and told her about the Texas program and about the education Eric would receive. Just then, Eric came home, walked into the living room, stared at Royal, and said to him: “You’re sitting in my chair.” Humiliated and angry, Royal stood up, said, simply, “Here you are, son,” and wished the family good luck before walking out the door—never to return again.

  In the lead-up to the game against OU, smarting from more pronouncements by Switzer that the UT coach was growing old and obsolete, Royal announced that his staff had collared an OU spy in Memorial Stadium during a closed Longhorn workout. The coach challenged Switzer, an OU assistant, and the supposed spy to take polygraph tests, offering them each $10,000 if they passed. The Oklahoma crew, Royal told an AP reporter, were a bunch of “sorry bastards.” Switzer gleefully struck back. “This is Secret Agent Aught-aught-six,” he told a Dallas Times Herald columnist. “Six, because we’re fixing to strap it on them for the sixth straight year. If they ever catch an OU spy, (Royal) has got my permission to castrate and assassinate him,” Switzer said. (Later, it turned out Oklahoma had indeed spied on UT practices, likely giving it an advantage in certain crucial situations—including the blocking of a UT punt. No one was castrated.) The night before the game, OU fans gathered outside Royal’s Dallas hotel chanting, “Sorry bastard, sorry bastard.”

  Underlying the matchup was a mutual enmity between Texas and Oklahoma. The proving ground for their ongoing dispute about who was better was the territory both sides thought they knew best: the football field. In the early 1950s, OU’s president had promised to “build a university the football team can be proud of.” The night before the Red River Shootout each year, dozens—sometimes hundreds—of partisans from each side were arrested in downtown Dallas following the predictable drunken brawls. After someone started throwing desks and tables out of the windows of the Baker Hotel, one such eve went down in the annals as “The Night It Rained Furniture.” “They are like tribes connected by a common hatred, two people who look on one another with the special loathing usually reserved for cannibalism,” Gary Cartwright once wrote. “Oil and football prescribe the characters of the two universities, and to a degree the states. Longhorns see themselves as big, fast, wealthy, wily, capable, cultured and anointed by the Almighty. The good guys. They see Okies as poor, ignorant, Bible-thumping outlaws. Okies see Texans as loud, arrogant, smartass bullies. They see themselves as big, fast, wealthy, wily Bible-thumping outlaws.”

  The ensuing game, recalled Stephen Ross, who was then the sports director for the Austin ABC affiliate, was “easily the most bizarre, brutal and vicious athletic event I have ever witnessed.” In the stroll out to midfield for the pregame coin toss, President Gerald Ford walked between Switzer and Royal—not a word, not even eye contact, was shared between the two men. With OU stacking the line of scrimmage with defenders, Campbell was ineffective, and UT clung to a 6–0 lead late in the game. After recovering a fumble, Oklahoma ended up scoring a last-minute touchdown. It was left to Uwe Von Schamann, the OU placekicker, who had nailed 140 consecutive extra points, to ice the game. But OU also had a walk-on deep snapper, one who had bounced at least one snap earlier in the day to the punter. Right before the snap, Ross reported, Longhorn linebacker Lionell Johnson leaned across the line of scrimmage to the walk-on and hissed, “I bet you snap this over his head.” Von Schamann, his head down, remembered Ross, “never saw the ball as it sailed almost all the way to Waxahachie.” The game ended in a 6–6 tie, and pretty much everyone afterward was angry. Royal could be found, in his misery, dry heaving in the tunnel leading to the locker rooms as an unhappy crowd of seventy thousand people made their way out of the Cotton Bowl. The coach, observed Ross, “looked like he had aged ten years in three hours.”

  Among the correspondence Royal received after the game was a handwritten note from Tyler, one that suggested how genuinely tight he had become with his star pupil’s family—as well as the deep level of empathy felt by that pupil’s mother: “Coach Royal, I want you to hold your head up . . . As long as the world stands there is going to be some body that’s going (to) want to be out front without paying the price . . . You have friends and lots of them. One is Ann Campbell. . . . Every time I waked up last night after looking at Sun. paper with your head down, it (did) something to me. Always remember that you are not out there alone . . . Love, Ann Campbell.”

  With a 3–1–1 record, UT journeyed to Lubbock to play Texas Tech. Royal later confided that after the OU game, he had lost some of the fundamental urge to continue coaching. “We finally have Earl back in shape,” he remembered. “He’s ready to go, the team’s ready to go, I feel like we’re well prepared. We have a sell-out crowd, a national television audience: All the ingredients that should excite a coach. And I’m sitting in my hotel room thinking, ‘Why am I continuing to do this?’” Earl was indeed back in shape, but only briefly: He went out for sixty-five yards on just seven carries, and then, just as it appeared UT had a favorable wind, he pulled the hamstring in his left leg. The Longhorns lost the game, and with Campbell watching from the sidelines, three of its next four as well, including a 30–0 thrashing at the hands of the University of Houston, Texas’s first loss in its home stadium in forty-three games. It was a dreary time for a Texas football team accustomed to winning. “I wanted everything to go my way, and it didn’t, and I got disgusted,” Campbell said. “I felt sorry for myself. I got down on myself. There were mornings when I hated to see daylight.” One reporter joked that Campbell “spent the entire frustrating season wondering whether he could just get from the vegetables to the desserts without pulling up lame with a nagging hamstring injury.”

  Previously, Campbell had appeared indestructible; now his commitment was questioned in barely disguised racial terms. Columnists wondered whether he was “dogging it”—a term Earl found insulting. Another columnist likened Campbell to Duane Thomas, the black Dallas Cowboy running back once nicknamed the “Sphinx” after refusing to talk to management or reporters following a contract dispute. Thomas had been quite clever—a sportswriter once recalled asking him, before Thomas’s first Super Bowl, in 1970, how it felt to be playing as a rookie in the ultimate game. Thomas replied, “If this is the ultimate game, how come they play it every year?” But his new silence drove people batty, in a way that was wrapped up in words like “removed” and “sullen”—and that foreshadowed the criticism of Colin Kaepernick after he famously took a knee during the national anthem. “Everyone from the Black Muslims to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes—lawyers, agents, Lions Club program chairmen, women with indecent proposals—wanted a piece of him,” Gary Cartwright wrote of Thomas in 1973. “Here was this handsome studhorse black kid fresh out of the ghetto, running like crazy, and now they wanted to hear it from his own lips. Hear how grateful he was. They wanted him to say it so they could hear.”

  To the extent Campbell did pick himself up slowly after a tackle, or take his time getting back to the huddle—that was not
laziness, said Golden, the Austin sports columnist. “He picked that up from Jim Brown: He’d work you over, and get up slowly—that’s how he got his rest. And then he’d give you the business again.” Writing in the early 1980s about the black high school phenom Marcus Dupree, Willie Morris deflected a similar charge: “Even the criticisms of his ‘laziness’ had a certain logic for me; I perceived from this first game that whenever he got up slowly from a tackle, or moved indolently into a huddle or off the field, or dallied between plays, he was—in the words of the Gershwin brothers—merely biding his time, awaiting that instant flickering of time when he was free, open, and gone.” The notion, now, that Campbell was slow coming back from injury was, like the charge of laziness, freighted with a kind of racist impatience.

  With Campbell sidelined, Royal, so long approaching sainthood in Texas, was vulnerable. He had a falling-out with two key patrons. The first was Frank Erwin, who, during his second six-year term as the chair of board of regents, had amassed more power than anyone else on campus, and who, in 1975, after Texas’s new governor declined to name him to a third term for fear of giving him even more, convinced the UT System to hire him as a special counsel for $1 a year. In a nod to his clout and his uncanny ability to loosen purse strings at the Capitol, the board wanted him handling its legislative program. Erwin had long considered the Forty Acres his fiefdom. “Whatever you say anywhere on the University of Texas, you are saying on my territory,” he once said. “I’ve got your balls in the palm of my hand. If I don’t like what you say, I’ll squeeze. And if you don’t shut up, I’ll rip ’em off.” The single thing that mattered most to him was a victorious football team. “For all his bluster and his cold-hearted politicking,” Ronnie Dugger observed in his 1973 book Our Invaded Universities, “Erwin has never quite outgrown being the jock-sniffing undergraduate who wrote in his 1937 Texas yellbook: ‘A university is a benevolent association for the preservation of football.’” But now he and Royal were on the outs. Once Royal’s champion when the coach was crushing the opposition through the 1960s, Erwin had grown restless about his commitment to winning. He was upset, said Jenna Hays McEachern, a former Longhorn cheerleader who is married to Randy McEachern and is a sort of unofficial historian of the football team, that Royal was unwilling to participate in the sorts of unsavory recruiting practices that were becoming common in big-time college football. More darkly, and perhaps accurately, he suspected Royal, in the wake of his daughter’s death, of having lost his competitive drive.