by Asher Price
The good news was that he would be reunited with Bum Phillips. It was a classic Bum move—trading a coveted first-round pick out of loyalty to a veteran player—one that spoke to how much affection they had for each other. “He had to have known Earl was done,” Dale Robertson told me. “He thought because of the magic they might be able to do something great again. There was nothing Bum could have done to make it right.”
Campbell played behind George Rogers, the Saints’ young Heisman winner, and never got into a real rhythm with the team. The 1984 team finished 7–9. The Saints kept losing into the next season, and Bum’s acquisition of Earl looked like a real blunder. As Bum left the field from home games at the Superdome, a Saints’ regular leaning over the tunnel made a point of pouring beer on his head. “Lady,” he told her after she showered him a third time during the 1985 season, “you’re never gonna have a chance to do that again.” He knew he was about to be fired. In the final game of the season, against the Atlanta Falcons in a half-empty Louisiana Superdome, Campbell broke into the open and surged forward. About twenty yards from the end zone, something popped in his leg and he grabbed his hamstring. He was caught from behind by a Falcon defensive back short of the goal line. It was the last run of his career.
Campbell was now bereft of his pro ball mentor, and no longer playing in the state that meant so much to him. He reported trim and fit for the 1986 training camp, but a carry in a preseason game against the Patriots in Boston in mid-August made his mind up for him: “Everything seemed right,” he said about that moment, after he had gotten a clean handoff and a huge hole opened up before him. “I made my cut, I followed my blockers, but I only gained six yards.” His old burst of speed, the one that would have gained him clusters of yards, as if biting luxuriantly into a bunch of little grapes, seemed no longer to be there. In its place, a strange sensation: he wanted to get off the field without getting hurt.
The feeling followed him back down to the Saints’ camp in southeastern Louisiana. And there, in his dorm room in the small town of Hammond, his body so bruised that he had to practically crawl to the bathroom, he told his thirty-one-year-old self that he was finished. “Son,” he has said he told himself, “you gave them a good fight. Earl, that’s enough.” He had played in twenty-four games with the Saints and scored exactly one touchdown.
He called his mother and Darrell Royal to tell them the news, spoke to Reuna, and then, after a brief press conference that saw him quoting a Merle Haggard song—“Everything changes except what you choose to recall”—he was out the door on a Southwestern Airlines flight to Houston, making sure to order a few beers from a flight attendant.
He was just shy of 10,000 yards rushing as a pro—but as he noted, “10,000 yards weren’t going to do any more for me than 9,000.”
A year later, the Oilers announced they would retire Campbell’s no. 34 jersey. “If I had it to do all over again,” he said, before a series of medical maladies took hold, “I’d run the ball that same way. I’d probably even do it harder on certain plays. And I want Bum to give me the ball 30 more times. I believe the more a guy runs as a running back, the better he gets. I loved every minute of it. I loved looking that guy in the eye who was across from me because I know deep down in my heart I’m telling him, ‘I’m the best. I’ve got something to prove on third down.’”
EPILOGUE
One afternoon in the spring of 1990, four years after retiring from football, Earl Campbell and a couple of young assistants, both white, were driving from Tyler to Austin. He had traveled back to his hometown to promote his sports camp and to make commercials for the US Census Bureau. Back on the road, stomachs rumbling, they stopped at a roadside restaurant for a late lunch.
Having been hired as special assistant to the president of the University of Texas, Earl now lived with Reuna in a 3,500-square-foot two-story house in Westlake, a suburb just to the west of Austin. With kindergarten on the horizon for Christian, their older boy, the family was ensconced in the Eanes Independent School District, an upscale, suburban, virtually all-white district in the Hill Country. On the night he won the Heisman Trophy in 1977, he said he didn’t think of himself as a black man. At first blush, looking at his situation, he appeared to have escaped the fate of poor African Americans in Texas. But sheared of his celebrity, the world apparently still thought of him that way.
A waitress came to check on them, and Campbell started asking a few questions about whether the place sold chicken breasts. He was starting a hot-link business, the Earl Campbell Meat Co., one that would soon grow to $10 million in sales annually. This was his custom now, to do informal business research as he roamed Texas’s byways. He was, arguably, the most famous black man in Texas, widely beloved, but perhaps she didn’t recognize him behind his sunglasses. She grew agitated by his questions, he could tell, and suddenly she threw a salad bowl at him.
“I never felt so bad, so much like crying,” he told the reporter David Maraniss not long after the incident.
If I hadn’t had the sunshades on, that salad bowl probably wouldn’t have come flying across the table. If she had known I was Earl Campbell and not just some black guy. That’s the only way I can look at it. Until three or four months ago, I thought things were getting a lot better. Now it just looks to me like all the things that people our age and before us worked for, what the great Dr. Martin Luther King and other people worked for, is being forgotten. People are forgetting how to treat other human beings with respect.
Though Earl Campbell tried, through carrying the football, to transcend race, race, exhaustingly, remained the prism through which Texans, and Americans generally, saw one another. After facing off against Campbell’s John Tyler team in the 1973, the coach of Conroe, which had gamely stacked the line to try to stop him, talked about Superman being black and wearing number 20. Now, in his post-football journey, his cape retired, Earl Campbell observed what could be called a series of disappointments. His narrative was one of reconciliation and success through hard work; he had, in his religious-minded, Ann Campbell–oriented way, been open-minded regarding the world and had expected the same back. But he found the world didn’t possess that ecumenical quality.
The late journalist Robert Heard, one of the two Associated Press reporters who penned the series in the early 1970s on racism on the UT football team, said of the university in the early 1990s, “Earl has done far more for them than they have done for him. Some members of the athletic hierarchy consider him just another dumb jock. There is some deep-seated and, in some cases, unconscious racism over there.”
At the time, of the dozens of coaches, administrators, and secretaries who occupied the athletic department’s corridors on the second floor of Bellmont Hall, Earl Campbell was one of only two black staffers—the other was a wide receiver coach.
“I think at this point UT has to start hiring some assistant athletic directors who are black or Hispanic,” he said in 1990. “It’s time to start saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got to change it over for a while.’ Even all the secretaries are white.”
There had been several racist incidents involving fraternities on the Texas campus around that time. Some frat boys tattooed a black student’s car with racial slurs; another fraternity printed T-shirts with the face of Little Black Sambo superimposed on Michael Jordan’s body. Campbell found himself backing minority students who organized protests against the administration—including against his boss, university president William Cunningham. Campbell told Maraniss that he thought Cunningham had not responded quickly or forcefully enough to the fraternities’ actions. “To be very honest, I’m very embarrassed by the situation,” Campbell said.
It may cost me my job, but Dr. Cunningham, being president of a major university, in a key position like that, I was surprised by the way he handled things. I think if he had gone on stage immediately after the incident and said (to the fraternity), “Don’t come around this university anymore.” Just kick them off. Take a tough stand. I’m the president and
I will not stand for this. That’s what I would have done. Instead, he gave a speech like he was talking at a commencement exercise.
It was not the last time he found himself ambivalently defending the university. A few years later, Lino Graglia, a sixty-seven-year-old constitutional law scholar at the university, told students that African Americans and Hispanics were “not academically competitive with whites” and that they had “a culture that seems not to encourage achievement. Failure is not looked upon with disgrace.”
Campbell, a shy person who had suffered from panic attacks in the late 1980s and early 1990s, found his voice to speak up against Graglia. “I think that the University of Texas is a first-class university, and to have a person on our campus with the stupidity to do and say as he pleases—I don’t think that is fair for any student,” Campbell said. “We need to get together and prove him wrong.”
Recalling the hard truth that Royal had learned, and making perhaps the most practical argument against the comments on a football-obsessed campus, he said Graglia’s words would hurt recruiting. Speaking of his own children, he said: “If they were going to come to the University of Texas as minority students, it would be a big problem for me to let my kids come here.”
And yet, back in Westlake, the Campbell kids were in one of the whitest districts in Texas. When Christian was in elementary school, issues of racism swirled around the high school. Ahead of a 1989 home game against largely black LBJ High School, located on Austin’s East Side, someone had painted a racial slur on the visitors’ seats. A black effigy was hanged. During the game, Westlake fans reportedly shouted a racial epithet at the LBJ band, and one supporter supposedly held a go-home sign repeating the slur. Westlake’s principal at the time said he did not see it as a racial issue, and the Eanes superintendent called the episode a “minor thing.” (Eventually three students were suspended for the graffiti, and the Westlake football team was reprimanded by the University Interscholastic League, placed on probation for the next school year, and ordered to come up with a racial-sensitivity plan.) Even into the late 1990s, well after Campbell had complained about the homogeneity of the UT athletic department, Westlake High had only one black teacher and one black assistant principal out of 235 staff members.
It was at about this time, as he approached his midforties, that Campbell’s body and career began faltering, in a dizzying downward spiral signposted by one diagnosis after another. His knees grew balky and his back shaky—the discs in his spine were worn out like dusty mortar in an old brick wall. In the late 1990s, doctors discovered three large bone spurs on his spinal column and installed screws in his back. Then, when that didn’t work out, he had the screws removed. One doctor announced that he had been born with an abnormally narrow spinal canal, one that could put pressure on the spinal cord—and had been lucky to get out of football without paralyzing himself. Another physician later told him it wasn’t a congenital defect; the doctor told him there was “a Pittsburgh helmet on your back.”
After a few successful years, the meat business became overextended. A restaurant he opened in 1999 closed quickly, and Earl Campbell Meat Products went bankrupt. His arthritis was soon bad enough that he could not make a fist or wear any of his trophy rings or even his wedding band. Nerve damage in his legs meant he could not raise the front of his feet to take a step. Doctors called it drop foot, a clumsy-sounding diagnosis for one of the world’s great athletes. He began retreating, making fewer outings among an ever-adoring public. “Sometimes it gets to the point that I can’t stand the pain, like when I’ve got to walk a lot,” he once told a reporter. “Thank God I’m with people who understand me: ‘Take all the time you need.’ It’s embarrassing when I’ve got to hop onto the back of a pickup and I need help.” To use a bathroom upstairs from his office, Campbell, unable to grip with his hands or bend his knees, had to lean his forearms on the railings to drag himself up. By 2001, when he was forty-six years old, doctors told him he needed a knee replaced. He told a reporter he didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for him. “It’s like Merle Haggard said: ‘I don’t pull off the road long enough to bog down in the mud; anybody say I give a damn, they damn sure told you wrong.’”
He had played professionally only seven years, about average for an NFL running back, but by the age of fifty, beaten up by the wear and tear of a brutal football career, broken by knee and back surgeries, he could no longer get himself into bed, instead resigning himself to sleeping in his wheelchair. He found himself, at times, medicating his pain away—taking up to ten Oxycontin pills a day, washed down with cans of Budweiser. In 2007, at a thirtieth-anniversary celebration of his Heisman Trophy victory, held at an Austin golf resort, Campbell stumbled over names and dates, even after being gently corrected, and he asked a reporter to help him get a car deal with a BWM dealership.
A group of Heisman winners, gathered to celebrate Earl, were shaken. “I stay focused and prayerful that I won’t have to deal with the situation of Earl Campbell one day,” said former Tennessee Titans running back Eddie George, who had won the Heisman at Ohio State in 1995. Tony Dorsett, the great Cowboy running back, said that Earl, his former rival, was the “biggest, baddest player in the game. He was my Skoal brother”—they both had endorsements with Skoal tobacco—“but no matter how big or strong you are, the game ultimately wins.”
“It reached the point that I began slurring my speech, pushing my family away, struggling to remember things and allowing important business opportunities to slip away,” Campbell wrote in a 2013 essay for Yahoo! that encouraged athletes to head to rehab. A few years earlier he had called the orthopedist who had performed his fifth back surgery. “I need to have more medicine,” he told Stan Jones, the director of spine care at the Houston Orthopedic and Spine Hospital. “He wasn’t communicating clearly,” said Jones, who called Campbell’s family. “We need to help your dad,” he told them.
There was a you-tell-him, no you-tell-him moment between Earl’s two sons before Christian sat down the family patriarch and said: “Do whatever you want to this day, tomorrow you’re going to get help.” “The thing that got me,” Campbell said, “was when they said, ‘Dad, did you see what happened to Michael Jackson? You keep doing this, that’s going to happen to you.’”
Instead of the usual twenty-eight days at a rehab center, Campbell voluntarily pulled forty-four—he was a hard worker even at overcoming addiction.
His reformation lent him time to rethink the bargain he had struck to play the game that had given him so much. He once said that most black men growing up in his circumstances would have never made it past the Tyler city limits. Thanks largely to his prowess at football, he and Reuna had made it; from poverty, his siblings had climbed into a working-class, even middle-class life; and his mother had lived out her last thirty years in a comfortable house. But now, he wondered, whether the style of play that had given him such success was worth it.
For so many years, he had dismissed talk that football was somehow to blame for his ailments. “The most serious injury I got from football was a broken finger and broken ribs,” Campbell had insisted. It started to sound like a kind of a cognitive dissonance. Loyal to the sport and proud of his reputation, he had long luxuriated in stories of his toughness, like his 1979 goal-line run against the Oakland Raiders and their all-pro defensive back Jack Tatum, nicknamed the Assassin for his brutal tackling. Tatum, making like a human torpedo, launched all his weight and power into a helmet-first tackle. Pastorini said the noise of their collision sounded like a train wreck. “He put a hit on me I will never forget,” Campbell told a Sports Illustrated reporter. “He knocked the hell out of me. My neck popped out. My sternum shot back. But, you know, he forgot to wrap up, so I spun out of there and backed into the end zone.” Tatum had fallen on his backside, dazed. He said he thought to himself: “How did I get here? Where is this?” “Jack came up to me after that game,” Campbell liked to recall, “and said, ‘I gave you the best I got.’ I told him, ‘That’s the b
est I got too.’” Listeners used to grin as he told the Tatum story; now it seemed sad.
A constellation of players whom Earl played with and against have also limped into middle age. Telling a reporter in 2014, “I guarantee I have CTE,” former NFL defensive back Doug Beaudoin especially remembered trying to stop Earl Campbell: “It’s you and him, and you just go like a heat-seeking missile and hit whatever’s moving and you take a knee. As his knee’s coming up, to the crown of your head, it knocks you silly.” An examination of the brain tissue of the late Frank Gifford, the former player and velvet-voiced partner of Howard Cosell who was in the broadcast booth for that 1978 Monday Night Football game between Houston and Miami, revealed the telltale neuronal degeneration of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Postmortem tests on the brain of Ken Stabler, the quarterback who handed Campbell the ball during the back half of his Oiler career, showed that he, too, had suffered from the disease. The running back with whom Campbell was most often compared, the lightning-quick Dorsett, has had the sort of memory loss associated with CTE. At the time of his death, in 2018, Julius Whittier, the first black football letterman at the University of Texas, who had become a longtime criminal prosecutor before being forced to retire from early-onset Alzheimer’s, was suing the NCAA over brain injuries he had sustained. Even the footnote players who bookended Earl Campbell’s professional career—the player for whom he was traded on draft day and the backfield mate with whom he finished his career—have suffered CTE-associated symptoms.
“I will 100 percent tell you that Earl Campbell was the target,” Gregg Bingham, his former Oiler teammate, said. “He was constantly beaten to death. All his issues come directly from football. No doubt in my mind. Earl would get hit ten times in one play. He just took an ass-whoopin’. And there was a price for that. You give up your life for something. You want to look at it and say, ‘I did it damn well.’ And Earl can. But he paid a price for it.”