Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

Once upon a time, in their early going, the Oilers had been a top-notch squad, winning, in 1960 and 1961, the first two American Football League championships. Team owner Bud Adams, fleshy faced, oleaginous, with layers of skin—he was once described as a hippopotamus of a man—had named the team after the family business. His father, Boots Adams, was chairman of Phillips Petroleum, and at age twenty-three, with a stake to his name, Bud had formed the Ada Oil Company. By 1959, when, in quixotic fancy, he formed the AFL with Lamar Hunt, another oilman’s son, his was one of the largest gas distributors in the country. His office, modern in the way of a midcentury American executive, was cluttered with Native American artifacts and a Japanese rock garden.

  There was something inscrutable about him. In the early 1960s, the franchise played its games outdoors, and no one could ever figure out why he wore a full-length leather coat in the muggy Houston heat. Eager to ingratiate himself with his players, he served lavish feasts with Black Forest stag and barbecued goat. “When we’d win,” Dan Pastorini, his long-suffering quarterback told me, “he’d drag his rich political guys or rich rancher friends or rich oil friends, drag them down to the locker room and show us off like prize bulls—which is what we were.” And yet he turned hard-hearted when topnotch, popular, homegrown players—players like Pastorini, who would get so beaten up behind a creaky offensive line that some Sunday evenings he couldn’t lug himself to his second-floor bedroom—sought a contract renegotiation. After one of his best years, the outstanding Oilers receiver Ken Burrough approached the executive: “Mr. Adams, can we talk about me getting a raise right now?” “I think I pay you enough to do what you’re doing,” came the reply. “Let me know when you get married.” A capricious man, he was free with his cash one day—he made a splash with his new team in 1959 by luring the Heisman winner Billy Cannon away from the NFL—miserly with it the next. During the salad days of the early 1960s, the team played at a high school football stadium, one so beaten up that the dirt had to be painted green on game day to make it look acceptable on television.

  By the time of the 1970 NFL-AFL merger, the Oilers had spiraled into mediocrity, and then into something much worse. With its glory days seemingly in the past, the most notable thing about the team, apart from its perennial lousiness, was the stadium in which it now played. The Astrodome, which opened in 1965 and looked like something dropped from the cosmos, was a space-age temple to a peculiarly Houstonian vision of modernity. The world’s first air-conditioned stadium, a feat of engineering known as the Eighth Wonder of the World, it stood as a testament to the singular capability of Texans to defy Mother Nature in favor of their own creature comforts. The stretched-out dome hovered over nine acres; a twenty-story building could have been built beneath its apex. Massive condensers moved two million cubic feet of air through the stadium every minute. Beyond wanting to cool what amounted to a giant solar oven plopped down among a cluster of highways, designers had worried particularly about the prospect of a cloud of tobacco smoke hanging in the air—not for health reasons as much as for the haze it might cast over the field.

  Events hosted in the dome reflected something about the late-1960s, early-1970s moment: Muhammad Ali defended his heavyweight belt in 1967; the University of Houston snipped the UCLA Bruins’ forty-seven-game winning streak in 1968 in basketball’s Game of the Century; Sinatra emceed an event in 1969 to celebrate the return of the moon-landing Apollo 11 astronauts; Elvis performed in 1970; Evel Knievel jumped thirteen cars in 1971; and two years later Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in tennis’s Battle of the Sexes.

  But by the late 1970s, what had seemed newfangled was cavernous, empty feeling, and pitiable. The dome, for example, was originally built with large glass windows to allow in sunlight for the natural grass. Yet baseball players found that the bright sun rays, in an otherwise artificially lit building, made it nearly impossible to locate a fly ball. Reflective panels to block out the sun were added, and in the place of the grass, the Monsanto Corporation created Astroturf. The problem, said Curley Culp, a former Houston Oiler defensive end, was that the turf was installed in fourteen-foot-wide ribbons, which was meant to make it easier to pick up and take down when the football field made way for a baseball field or a rodeo or a car show or any one of the thousands of events at the Astrodome. By the late 1970s, the decade-old seams between those ribbons of artificial turf had grown ragged, and players sometimes found themselves tripping over the carpet—and tearing knee and ankle ligaments. In a 1977 survey of players across the league, the Astrodome’s playing surface was a nearly unanimous choice as the worst among the league’s twenty-eight stadiums. Cincinnati’s coach once threatened to pull the Bengals off the field if improvements weren’t made. Compounding the problem was the lack of padding between the thin carpet and the concrete subfloor, making each hard collision with the ground feel bone crunching. “In the condition the field is in now,” the beloved, Stetson-wearing Oiler coach Bum Phillips said in 1977, “a player could break his arm by simply falling on it.”

  If the Astrodome was space-age, the team’s nearby practice facility was decidedly down-to-earth. A badly air-conditioned, drafty metal-frame building housed the weight equipment, dressing room, and training room. The floor was barely covered by a mangy, rotting carpet. Insulation hung out loosely from one wall. The coaching staff shared one shower stall. At least six players split lockers. And for more than fifty players there were three toilets and one whirlpool.

  “To be real honest, when I first saw this place I couldn’t believe it was where we really practiced,” Tim Wilson, the team’s fullback, said. “I’d say 50 percent of the high schools I’ve seen have better facilities than we do.” The grass practice field was sometimes no better than packed dirt. “The Dolphins practiced here before the Super Bowl five years ago and I’m still taking abuse for it,” another player, Carl Mauck, the center, said in 1979. “This place is a joke, the laughingstock of pro football.”

  In 1979, one month after Adams pledged to build a new practice facility that would be second to none, he backtracked with the unromantic argument that interest rates were too high. “I smelled a rat from the start,” said the Oiler linebacker and resident motormouth Gregg Bingham. Upon hearing Adams’s decision, Bethea, the team’s longtime defensive end, turned to first-year Oiler Leon Gray, lying on the next table: “Leon, you’re gonna be right there, on that same table, in 1984.”

  And to non-football-playing elites on the coasts, Houston itself, less than 150 years old, appeared to be a nouveau riche backwater—a hard-hat, roughneck town whose Stetson-wearing oilmen and their wives tried to acquire respect the fast way, with some of the best art, universities, and medical centers that crude could buy. At Cutter Bill, a western wear store frequented by the flush-of-cash crowd, browsing customers snacked on “Texas Crude,” black-licorice-flavored jelly beans. Plied with cocktails by the staff—“It’s 5 o’clock somewhere,” they would murmur as they poured another drink—patrons might buy a fringed “Indian princess dress” with painted flowers and brass beads for $1,700. Or a “ceremonial warrior coat,” laced with golden antelope fringe, with natural bone and beaded trim: “Just like Tonto!” trumpeted the catalogue.

  Oil derricks were more than a red-and-blue decal on the team’s helmets. They were like talismans, as popular as four-leaf-clover merchandise in Dublin. At Cutter Bill, named for the owner’s champion cutting horse, you could buy, for $750, a fourteen-carat-gold ring ornamented by a derrick with three diamonds spurting from the top. There were oil-derrick-shaped table lamps and oil-derrick-embossed poker chips. They were a symbol of Texas industry and, perhaps, without too much imagination, manliness—the team’s cheerleaders were known as the Derrick Dolls.

  Houston in those go-go days couldn’t elude the label of tacky. But in 1978, the year the Oilers, a team of sad sacks and misfits, managed to draft Earl Campbell, Houston found chic. Or, perhaps, chic found Houston. The oil derrick suddenly became cool. The very honky-tonks and down-market western wear
emporiums, which Campbell, in his jock, authentically Texas way, patronized, suddenly zoomed to the forefront of the zeitgeist—cowboy became couture, country-and-western tunes reached the top of the charts. No one was more country than Earl Campbell, and at decade’s end, the nation’s tastemasters decided country was it.

  The seeds of chic had been planted a couple of years earlier. The Johnny Appleseed was a twenty-nine-year-old from Itasca, Texas, south of Dallas–Fort Worth, who had moved to New York City to work in television and found herself striking out as a fashion photographer. On a visit to her hometown in 1975, Judi Buie asked her parents to buy her a pair of boots for Christmas. “Absolutely no one was wearing cowboy boots in New York back then. But I just felt they’d look great with my gypsy skirts,” she said in 1982. Models, intrigued by the look, asked the photographer snapping their pictures to bring back boots from her next trip in Texas. By the following November, just about a year before Earl Campbell showed up in Manhattan to collect his Heisman Trophy, she threw a party at the newly opened Lone Star Café in New York City, a kind of Texas cultural embassy near Washington Square Park that sported a sculpture of a forty-foot iguana. The evening’s motto was “Too Much Ain’t Enough”; Andy Warhol and Halston showed up, and Texas chic was born. The café booked Willie Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel, and Buie started selling boots as fast as she could get her hands on them: Liza Minnelli, Barbra Streisand, Catherine Deneuve, and a young Brooke Shields were seen sporting her wares. Soon cowboy boots were selling for $2,000 a pop on Madison Avenue; Buie was pulling down $300,000 a year.

  The man who managed to bring Earl Campbell from Austin to Houston was himself the quintessential urban cowboy. Bum Phillips’s parents had saddled him with the first name Oail—“Can’t anybody spell it or pronounce it or anything,” he said—and his nickname was coined after his three-year-old sister Edrina, with her stabbing efforts at “brother,” kept saying “Bumble,” soon shortened to plain old “Bum.” “As long as it’s a name and not a description,” he once quipped. In Beaumont, the site of Spindletop, the first great gusher in Texas, his father ran an auto repair business and kept some dairy cows on the side. At the outbreak of World War II, Bum joined the marine corps—and found, quickly, that he didn’t care for that style of discipline and groupthink: “I never joined anything else the rest of my life. I went in as a private and 31 months later, I came out as a private. I thought they couldn’t win that war without me. Then I got in there and they couldn’t win because of me. The Marine Corps was real spit ’n polish. I wasn’t.” He continued: “I never have liked anything where a guy tried to make me do something. I don’t mind somebody asking me to do something, but the Marines prided themselves on the fact that, ‘By God, you’re gonna do it because we told you to.’ I just don’t like for somebody to be bitchin’ at me all the time.”

  Like many Beaumont boys during the postwar period of massive industrial expansion in that part of Texas, he found himself working at a refinery. That didn’t last long either. He was told to contribute to a charity—one not of his choice, but of the company’s. Chafing at the order, he told the foreman to have his check ready for him at the front gate and not to expect to see him back. That very day, driving home, newly unemployed, he passed Lamar College, saw players practicing football, and stuck around to watch. A coach came over, chatted him up, and suggested he try out. And so, even while riding in a rodeo on the side for spending money, he more or less majored in football.

  A couple of decades later, having embarked on a nomadic, highly successful coaching career that included stops at no fewer than sixteen high schools and colleges, he won a big break when Sid Gillman hired him in the late 1960s as his defensive coordinator in San Diego. Gillman, who as a nerdy kid in Minneapolis working as a movie theater usher removed football segments from newsreels so he could play them backward and forward on a projector he had set up at home, was a cherished mentor to a whole cadre of coaches. And when Gillman took the job in Houston—the post came up frequently—Phillips went with him.

  Gillman, who favored bow ties and smoked a pipe, stabilized the club, finishing with a 7–7 record in 1974, but that wasn’t good enough for Bud Adams. Suddenly Phillips, who looked like an old rodeo clown—folksy, potbellied, and crew-cut, with an affinity for feather-banded cowboy hats, wide-collared western shirts, and thick-lensed, oversized eyeglasses—was the top man. Willie Nelson tapes cluttered the cab of his pickup. He could play a tune or two on the harmonica. Coors or Budweiser in hand, he convened his coaches for Thursday-night strategy sessions at tiny rural barbecue joint called The Swinging Door. On the sidelines on game day, he wore pressed jeans and spat tobacco.

  His mama had told him never to wear his hat inside his own house, so he never wore his Stetson in the Astrodome. He favored hand-tooled boots, and in 1978 his boots of choice were a powder-blue pair made of anteater and ostrich skin. He got them from Sanders Bootmakers, a firm in El Paso that had its factory across the border in Juarez. His one piece of instruction: make the toes as pointy as possible. The toe had to be sharp enough, in cowboy parlance, to kill a cockroach in a corner.

  “I’d like to get him into a more rounded toe, but he won’t hear of it,” the firm’s owner, Reginald Sanders, said the summer before the 1978 season. And then he made a crack about Bud Adams’s penchant for firing coaches: “I guess I don’t blame him: You can’t climb fences real fast with a rounded toe, and someday he’s gonna be in a hell of a hurry to get out of the Astrodome.”

  During all those years as a high school football coach—in the East Texas town of Nederland, in neighboring Port Neches, and in the Panhandle city of Amarillo—he had refined a blunt, simple style of football, which made it easy to pack up your Xs and Os and teach them to the next group of youngsters. But would it translate to the pros? For eight seasons the Oilers had been shut out of the playoffs. Now, as the fall of 1977 came to a close with Phillips’s team finishing 8–6—an improvement over the previous year’s record of 5–9—and with his career hanging by a thread, the coach needed a vehicle for his style.

  Earl Campbell, all power and speed, a physically candid runner, appeared to be the perfect match. But there was a problem: the Oilers were slated to pick seventeenth in the draft in the spring of 1978, and to be sure of getting Campbell, the newly minted Heisman winner, they had to have a much higher pick.

  The Longhorns’ big loss to Notre Dame in the national championship game worked in the Oilers’ favor. Some in football thought perhaps Campbell wasn’t as good as advertised. But Bum’s son, Wade Phillips, who had studied the film, still thought the Oilers should go after Campbell. “Texas wasn’t blocking well,” said Wade Phillips, then a young assistant coach. “Campbell made some of the most impressive 3- or 4-yard runs I’d ever seen.” Outmaneuvering the Los Angeles Rams, also keen to draft Campbell, Bum Phillips convinced Tampa Bay to trade its number one overall pick for the Oilers’ tight end and four draft picks.

  It was a steal, and the Oilers camp was giddy. “You know the old cliché about the kind of player who comes around only once every five or ten years?” one Oilers scout said. “Well Earl Campbell is the kind that comes around once every 25 years.”

  Seldom has an athlete been so closely associated with a particular moment in a particular state. In April 1978, less than two years after Buie started selling Texas boots in the Big Apple, a month before Earl Campbell was drafted by the Oilers, a soap opera about a wealthy feuding Texas family—the Ewings—premiered in prime time. That summer saw the Broadway opening of the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. (Commenting on the sudden national fascination with the Lone Star State, the journalist Gary Cartwright quipped: “Somehow, The Best Little Whorehouse in New Jersey just doesn’t sound right.”) Off-Broadway, Kathy Bates was starring in Vanities, a play about three former Texas cheerleaders who find their adult friendships dissolving—and at the Pussycat Theater in Times Square, you could catch the new movie Debbie Does Dallas. Ralph Lauren that year unveile
d his western line—“It’s not fashion, it’s life,” he announced, explaining that while traveling out west in search of cowboy clothes, he found none he liked and so decided to create his own. The cowboy, it seemed, was as much fantasy as reality.

  Even in Texas: in Pasadena, on the industrial southeastern fringe of Houston, out on the concrete prairie, an area broken up by round, squat chemical silos lit up like gaudy Christmas trees at night, was a massive warehouse of a nightclub that catered to the marooned cowboy. The spot was Gilley’s—named after the country-and-western star Mickey Gilley, a part owner of the club, a frequent performer there, and a cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis. It could hold at least 4,500 people for a Willie Nelson concert. It had a few dozen pool tables, shuffleboard tables, and booths selling ropes and saddles, T-shirts, and custom-made boots. It had a monthly magazine and a couple of recording studios. In this cathedral to country, cigarette smoke hung in the air and tobacco juice and used chewing gum soiled the asphalt floor.

  More than anything, it had ways of geysering pent-up energy, of the physical or sexual nature. It was a place where steel-toe boots were traded for leather ones, where cheap Lone Star beer flowed fast, where aggressions were easily settled. A local Monopoly-like game had a card that said not “Go directly to jail” but “Go to Gilley’s and get stomped.” It had a whole bunch of punching bags, to keep the shitkickers from kicking the shit out of one another—and, famously, a mechanical bull. Mattresses, dozens of them, lay around the bull. Any time Gilley’s customers saw a mattress put out on the curb, they would pull over and throw it in the bed of their pickup, for delivery to the club. Seven nights a week, country acts were on the live bill, the music loud enough to drown out the fists hitting the bags, the churning of the bull, and the sliding of the two-steppers.

  When the house lights came up at 2:15 a.m. and the Mexican-American cleanup crews got to work, they found wooden chairs half flung about, great pools of liquid on the floor, broken bottles, glasses strewn everywhere, and huge pyramids of beer cans. The two trough-style urinals in one of the men’s rooms were inevitably stopped up and nearly brimming.