by Asher Price
Many Heisman winners flame out as professionals. They just aren’t strong enough to compete against men much larger and faster, much more fearsome and desperate than the ones they faced in college. Any questions about how Earl Campbell would fare in the NFL were answered in that first month of his rookie year.
On his third professional carry, he took a pitchout and roared seventy-three yards for a touchdown against the Atlanta Falcons. In a game a couple of weeks later versus the Rams, Campbell took a handoff on second down at the Rams’ twenty-two-yard line. Just as the all-pro 225-pound linebacker Isiah Robertson appeared to have him trapped for a one-yard loss, Campbell ducked his helmet and trampled him. “Earl flat ran over him,” Pastorini said afterward, shaking his head. “He bleeping ran over him.” The run kept going—he resembled a rodeo bull tossing its rider while surrounded by clowns. A Ram safety, foolhardy enough to think he could stop Campbell, approached at the twelve-yard line but got nothing more than a handful of Campbell’s jersey. A couple of defenders managed to work together to pull him down at the six. Campbell, his jersey torn away, looked a little like the Incredible Hulk. (In 1979, following Campbell’s rookie season, the NFL chose to ban tear-away jerseys altogether.) “I’m glad that cat’s not in our division,” defensive end Jack Youngblood, a future Hall of Famer, said after the game. “Once a year with him is enough.” For weeks afterward, Youngblood and some Ram teammates nicknamed Robertson “Grauman’s Chinese Theater” because of the footprints all over him. The play stuck with him. A few years later, shortly after his retirement, Robertson, reminiscing to a reporter, wondered whether he could still play in the league. “At times I’ve said, to myself, ‘Could I play again? Should I?’ Then I think about Campbell. That’s when I go back to business.”
Later that season in a game in Massachusetts, Patriot defensive back Rick Sanford lunged at Campbell in an effort to arm-tackle him. The follow morning found Sanford sitting by himself in the Patriots’ training room, gently caressing his black and blue forearm. “I got Earled,” he explained.
Then came the Monday Night Football game pitting the 7–4 Oilers against Don Shula’s 8–3 Dolphins. Shula, Phillips had observed in a characteristic Bum-ism, “can take his’n and beat your’n or he can take your’n and beat his’n.” A full fifth of American households were tuning in each week to watch Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford call the NFL’s marquee matchup. Among the fans to see Campbell take over the game were Earl Christian Kinzie’s daughter and son-in-law; Erna Smith; and Brad Buchholz. Earl carried the team to victory with his four touchdowns, and suddenly the Houston Oilers, long football’s doormat, were considered contenders. Cosell said it was the greatest game he had ever broadcast. One Houston columnist wrote that Campbell “could run for mayor Tuesday and win.”
That Tuesday in 1978, as it happened, the last Republican to serve as Houston’s mayor was elected. He was chosen by a good-ol’-boy network of developers and business interests—he was a former head of the Houston homebuilders association—determined to keep Houston sprawling. Sixteen years earlier, in 1962, Houstonians had defeated, for the fourth time, an effort to adopt zoning restrictions, confirming it as the only major US city without a formal zoning code. The no-zoning argument has long rested on notions of vitality and openness, of a modern frontiersmanship, of architectural daring. It also opened the way to the development of vast suburbs—by 1980, Houston ranged over an area nearly half the size of Rhode Island. Thousands of Houstonians, seeking fresher air and more land—and, perhaps, more distance from minorities and integrated schools—moved out of the central part of the city.
Most of the new suburbanites were whites—but some were African Americans with newfound wealth. For those who could afford to participate, there was, at the time, a kind of migration out of Houston’s traditionally black areas into middle-class neighborhoods. Less than a fifth of African Americans lived in the suburbs of most American cities in 1960; by 1980, more than a quarter did, the historian Andrew Wiese writes in Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century. It was to members of this class of newfound black wealth and stability that The Cosby Show had special appeal when it first aired, in 1984. In a sense, Earl Campbell would be one of those new suburbanites.
Though Reuna had remained in Tyler while Earl was in Austin with the Longhorns and then in Houston with the Oilers—it was not an infrequent occurrence for women in Austin or Houston to ask him whether they could feel his legs—she said they never broke up or gave serious thought to a future without each other. Still, she was surprised by Campbell’s spur-of-the-moment return to Tyler on Valentine’s Day 1980. He had hired a car to drive him from Houston, and he was carrying a ring in his pocket when he asked Reuna’s father for his daughter’s hand in marriage.
“My mother said, ‘What are you doing home?’” Campbell once recounted. “And I said, ‘I left something here years ago, and I came back to get it. I want to ask Reuna if she’ll be my wife.’”
After they married in 1980 (because they thought “honor” was to be expected and “obey” was too subservient, he pledged to “love, cooperate with, and cherish” Reuna, and she promised to “love, support, and cherish” him), they bought a three-bedroom brick house in Fondren, an area of Southwest Houston, on what was then the city’s fringe, named for the oilman whose ranchland had been converted into apartments in the 1960s and 1970s.
Earl used to practice cradling the ball by clutching his shoe as he walked around the house or watched television. It was the sort of place furnished with high-gloss woods and king-size beds. There was a game room with a pool table, and out back a Jacuzzi. It was a far cry from the old Tyler plank house in which Campbell grew up, the one in which he shared a bed in the front room with his brothers Herbert and Alfred Ray. In the old house in Tyler, insulation consisted of quilts nailed to the splintered wood; now he had a home lined with fiberglass foam, a place heated and cooled with the sort of thermostats that had seemed novel when he stepped foot on the UT campus just a few years earlier. In a place like Houston, a city built on oil, whose chamber of commerce promoted the advent of “manufactured weather” in the city’s buildings and that branded itself as “the world’s most air-conditioned city,” the air conditioner was another demonstration of how Texans could domesticate nature. “One little thing, all by itself—AC—made the South go away overnight,” one character observes in Nell Zink’s 1960s-set comic novel Mislaid. An “unstoppable force” is “putting in central air everywhere until you don’t know whether it’s day or night.”
The Campbells’ life fell into a comfortable routine. With Earl asleep, Reuna rose at six to jog a mile or so with his teammate Tim Wilson’s wife, Valanda. Earl drove a humble Corolla to workouts (“I always wanted the Rolls-Royce,” he once said, “but my managers always talked me into a Toyota”) and then returned home for a nap. He might answer some fan mail or mow the lawn. Thrifty by upbringing, he blanched when a landscaper quoted him a price of $150 a month to weed and trim his lawn; he thanked the man for his time and instead decided to mow the lawn himself. “Earl isn’t going to waste any money,” the Oilers’ offensive backfield coach, Andy Bourgeois, once said. “He’s a most frugal young man.” As he did outdoor work, Campbell liked to wave hello to a neighbor and shout, “Que pasa?” He thought the man was Latino; the guy was Jewish, actually—apart from some athletes from the Rockets or the Oilers, it was a largely Jewish neighborhood, and neighbors brought chicken soup when Campbell was sick.
Afternoon practice lasted about two hours, and, according to a soft-touch profile in People in 1980, Earl was usually home for dinner by seven. “I’ve got a whole batch of cookbooks,” Reuna told the magazine’s reporter, “but Earl likes the same things at every meal—steak, broccoli, orange juice and a banana dessert.” The young couple liked to unwind to Dallas on TV or watch rented videocassettes of westerns.
In these ways, Earl Campbell was more of a piece with white middle-class Houston than working
-class black Houston. He was safely insulated from what the Houston sociologist Robert Bullard, who has long studied environmental justice issues, has described as the PIBBY policy of the all-white, all-male Houston government of the late 1970s: “In place of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) politics, Houston practiced a ‘PIBBY’ (Place in Blacks’ Back Yard) policy,” Bullard wrote in an article titled “The Mountains of Houston.” “Government and private industry targeted Houston’s black neighborhoods for landfills, incinerators, garbage dumps, and garbage transfer stations.” In the late 1970s, Bullard found that although African Americans made up about a quarter of Houston’s population, all five city-owned landfills and six of the eight city-owned incinerators were built in black neighborhoods. Many of the industrial sites that Bullard focused on were in northeastern Houston; Campbell lived a half-hour drive away, in Southwest Houston, the diametrically opposite part of town.
Even as Campbell, by nature reticent and inward-looking—and with his newfound celebrity, increasingly wary—cherished his privacy, Houston, an all-embracing city of sprawl, took to adoring Campbell. He was the city’s kind of Skoal brother: a pitchman for the tobacco brand, he was a hardworking, soft-spoken athlete who could wear jeans and a cowboy hat with a pinch between his cheek and his gum. (In the ads’ tagline, Campbell would urge, “Skoal, brother,” which ended up sounding like a play on “soul brother.”) In the late 1970s, the Bayou City was about half-white, a quarter black, nearly a fifth Hispanic, and the rest Asian. The city suited him and his upward trajectory. Campbell’s remove—appearing politically unengaged, geographically suburban—from the struggles of 1970s black Houstonians was part of his appeal; even his style of football, punishing as it was, drew white Houstonians to him.
“I think white Houston embraced him because, to generalize, white Americans reserve values like hard work for white people,” Joel Dinerstein, a Tulane historian who has written about the relationship between NFL running backs and black culture, said. “I think Campbell transcended all the standard profiles of the great black running back of that period. He was not a speedster with great moves—Mercury Morris, OJ or Walter Payton—but he was the workhorse of that offense. Between that and his sheer physical power and hard work, the embrace came, in a way, mediated by some sense of what makes up a black-and-white set of skills. He was a great white fullback, except he was black.”
The line is a provocative one, getting at the changing perception among Americans of what—or who—constitutes a certain type of football player. In Paper Lion, Plimpton tells a story about an encounter following a Detroit victory out on the West Coast. Plimpton and some of his former training-camp teammates dropped into a bar and found the opposing quarterback wallowing in drink.
He began criticizing the Negroes on his own team, and then he extended his criticism to the rest of the league. His idea was that the Negro backed away from contact, that he hadn’t the nerves for the game. The people along the bar began shouting at him.
“Look at this,” he said, weaving. “Listen! Take the linebackers. The search-and-destroy guys are the linebackers. How many Negro linebackers you got in the N.F.L.? Maybe one or two. They haven’t got it, I tell ya. They flinch. It’s the same with the running backs. My guys do, they flinch, I tell ya, and I’d rather hand off to a gimpy fullback who’s white druther than my guy, the guy they make me hand off to, who’s got mush for guts. You know why I got to hand the ball to a colored back? Because the NAACP says so, that’s why, and they’re calling the tune these days, not the coaches.”
Of course the observation is both racist and absurd—especially to twenty-first-century ears, when the prejudice has swung around in such a way that young African Americans are often slotted into the running back position—just as they’re often still steered clear of playing quarterback. And in a funny way, to the extent black players by dint of their skin color are now deemed to make excellent running backs, Jim Brown and Earl Campbell are to be thanked. In their wake, the position was redefined as a black one. When, in 2017, the Carolina Panthers drafted the Stanford speedster Christian McCaffrey, he became the first white running back selected in the first round since 1974; during his rookie year, he was one of only four white running backs in the league. “When you read about white athletes these days and white skill possession receivers specifically, one word you’ll always find is ‘tough,’” McCaffrey told reporters during the 2017 season. “You’ll rarely see ‘explosive,’ ‘athletic,’ stuff like that. People do the eye test and underestimate me.”
In a period when many white Americans bridled at the new independence of black athletes, Campbell’s modesty played in his favor. Dinerstein said the fact that Campbell was a “fairly quiet, hardworking, private guy—I have no memory of him being outspoken, or political, or racially engaged—helped his embrace by Houston.” The longtime Austin sports reporter John Maher said, “Campbell was almost like a Joe Frazier, a contrast to the flashier athletes who were, in some cases, beginning to flaunt their new wealth and fame.” In some sense, Campbell could perform quietly because the political struggles of the 1960s had removed some of the pressure on black athletes of the 1970s to speak out. As the broader civil rights movement subsided, the number of black athletic demonstrations on university campuses ebbed from 180 during the 1968–1969 school year to fewer than 30 in 1971–1972, the sociologist Douglas Hartmann observes in his book Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete.
As he had done in Tyler, in Earl Campbell’s own telling, he and his teammates helped bring Houston together in a way that dissolved racial anxieties. That was one way to tell the story. “The thing about Earl,” said Dale Robertson, the veteran Houston Post reporter on the Oiler beat, “was that performance-wise he never gave Houston fans anything other than to turn cartwheels over.” Robertson called the comity between whites and African Americans over Houston Oiler football “a false brotherhood.” The black quarterback Warren Moon, who went undrafted by the NFL out of college and was picked up by the Oilers in 1984 after a half-dozen successful years in the Canadian Football League, “wasn’t even immune within the walls of the stadium. Things got nasty down there,” Robertson told me, with Moon being called all sorts of racial slurs by the Houston Oiler faithful. “Earl was taken under this city’s wing like no African American athlete then could have been. Was it the Texas connection? He clearly didn’t have a ‘yappy mouth.’”
His talking, as it were, was done on the field. Rob Carpenter, who became his backup, once marveled that “Earl could hit the wrong hole and still gain four yards.” In Campbell’s rookie season, each time he ran for 100 yards or more, a Houston butcher gave the offensive line beefsteaks—it happened eleven times. (The following year, eager to limit his meat exposure, he changed the rules, agreeing to pay up only when the Oilers scored twenty-four or more points; it happened just twice.) Campbell, who became the first rookie to lead the NFL in rushing since Jim Brown did it in 1957, got requests for about three hundred autographed pictures a week. He was self-effacing about it all, typically crediting his teammates for his success. Shy of reporters, he took a corner locker, one next to Tim Wilson, his lead-blocking fullback. When he was asked about this play or that, he would often say: “Why don’t y’all talk to Tim? I’m nobody without Tim.” “That wasn’t bullshit,” said Robertson. “Never for a moment did I think that was bullshit. That was just Earl.”
The Oilers, perhaps because of Campbell’s bulldozing style, perhaps because of Pastorini’s long suffering, perhaps because their hardworking defense had long been the core of the team, perhaps because of those derricks on the sides of their helmets, perhaps, ultimately, because they were finally winning, were suddenly toasted in Houston beer halls. As the ’78 season drew to a close, the six-four 250-pound Mauck—who once, half jokingly, warned Earl Campbell, “Be careful, all sportswriters are Communists”—penned a song he called “Oiler Cannonball.” Naturally, he recorded it at Gilley’s. Its chorus, which includes calling Pastorini, his roommat
e on the road, a “fancy passin’ Dago,” was set to a rousing country-and-western march.
The Oiler Cannonball:
Now listen to the blockin’,
The ramblin’ and the roar,
As he glides by along the sidelines,
By the hashmarks then the score.
From the fancy passin’ Dago,
To the Tyler bowling ball.
Those Patriots can be taken,
By the Oiler Cannonball.
No one was going to mistake it for Merle Haggard, but despite Mauck’s off-key delivery, the song got plenty of airtime on KILT, the country-music station followed by all those roughnecks who spent their nights at Gilley’s and other honky-tonks. The Oilers were becoming the team of a certain kind of Texan: rough around the edges, blue collar, unpretentious. In a sign of the team’s popularity, Mauck’s single sold ten thousand copies.
In their enthusiasm, Astrodome fans started to resemble college football crowds: pep rallies before games, face painting, signs announcing: “Luv Ya Blue”—the new motto of the Oilers, coined by Campbell after the Monday Night Football game against Miami. “‘Luv Ya Blue’ was a chance for people of all races and backgrounds to come together as a city,” he said, in true Campbell-speak, about the enthusiasm of the crowd that night. “It was a feeling that the players and fans shared without even talking.”
The season ended on a miserable Sunday afternoon in Pittsburgh. An icy, slushy day, with freezing rain and sleet and a temperature of about 25 degrees. It was the AFC Championship Game—the winner would go on to the Super Bowl. This was far further along than anybody had thought the 1978 Houston Oilers would go. And this was where the road ended.