Longhorn Nation: Texas' Greatest Players Talk About Longhorns Football

By Bill Little and Jenna Hays McEachern

Firsthand accounts of the legends and lore of Texas football

The most outstanding voices of the University of Texas football tradition come together in this decade-by-decade collection of more than 40 stories. Texas fans will relish the intimate stories told by Darrell Royal, Mack Brown, Earl Campbell, Ricky Williams, and other figures they have come to cherish. This collection of interviews with student athletes and coaches captures the true essence of Texas football, making it the perfect book for any Longhorn fan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781633193994

Book preview

Contents

Foreword by Darrell Royal

Foreword by Mack Brown

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Thirties and Forties

Howard Terry • Noble Doss • Rooster Andrews • Keifer Marshall • Bill Sansing

2. The Fifties

James Carroll T Jones • Tom Stolhandske • Delano Womack • Walter Fondren • Bobby Lackey • Bobby Gurwitz

3. The Sixties

Jack Collins • Mike Cotten • Bobby Moses • James Saxton • Don Talbert • Duke Carlisle • David McWilliams • Tommy Nobis • Bill Bradley • Chris Gilbert • Bob McKay • Tom Campbell • James Street • Ted Koy • Happy Feller

4. The Seventies

Eddie Phillips • Jerry Sisemore • Julius Whittier • Jay Arnold • Pat Kelly • Doug English • Roosevelt Leaks • Keith Moreland • Earl Campbell • Alfred Jackson • Brad Shearer • Randy McEachern • Glenn Blackwood • Dwight Jefferson • Johnnie Johnson • Johnny Lam Jones

5. The Eighties

Mike Baab • Donnie Little • Kenneth Sims • William Graham • Mike Hatchett • Bryan Millard • Robert Brewer • Jerry Gray • Tony Degrate • Todd Dodge • John Hagy • Eric Metcalf • Oscar Giles • Chris Samuels

6. The Nineties

Peter Gardere • Stonie Clark • Tony Brackens • James Brown • Phil Dawson • Derek Lewis • Ricky Williams

7. The New Millennium

Major Applewhite • Cory Redding • Chris Simms • Michael Huff • David Thomas • Vince Young

Foreword by Darrell Royal

It was a long list, and I wasn’t on it.

The University of Texas was looking for a new head football coach in December of 1956. We were in our first year at the University of Washington, and I had never been mentioned as a candidate for the Texas job. I remember once that Edith and I were driving through Austin, and we drove around the campus. I thought at the time, This sure would be a nice place to coach.

Ed Price had resigned after the 1956 season after Texas had finished 1–9. They had interviewed some high-profile coaches, including Bobby Dodd from Georgia Tech and Duffy Daugherty from Michigan State, but both had turned the job down.

After a few more unsuccessful inquiries, the athletics council and the regents wanted so much to change that they came around to the thinking of, Who’s the young coach out there who’s on the rise? It’s not working to go for the old, established coach, so let’s find some young coach.

So they called Duffy, and he gave them my name; and they called Bobby Dodd, and he gave them my name. They placed the calls so that the coaches wouldn’t have time to consult with one another and decide on a pick. They got individual opinions, and both of them recommended me. Prior to their calling those two coaches, I wasn’t on the list. I was nowhere to be found. My name had never come up, and I just wasn’t a candidate.

But Coach Dodd knew me when I was at Mississippi State; and Duffy had always been a good friend of Coach Bud Wilkinson’s at Oklahoma, and I had met him at the national conventions. It just so happened that both of them thought of me.

Edith and I were in bed in Seattle, Washington. I’d been talking about the Texas job and that it sure would be nice if we could land down here. Seattle was so far away. Coaches didn’t make the money then that they make today. We couldn’t afford to pay for a trip to take the kids on an airplane to visit their grandparents in Oklahoma, and it was too far to drive because the vacation would be half over by the time we drove down there. So I was hoping Texas would call, but I wasn’t full of myself enough to throw my name out there.

We were just going to sleep when the phone rang. The voice said, Hello, Darrell, this is D.X. Bible from The University of Texas calling. I covered up the end of the phone and said, Edith, this is it, this is The University of Texas. Just the fact that he was calling made me think maybe they were thinking of me, and of course, he invited me to come in for an interview.

A young Darrell Royal was only 32 when he became the Texas Longhorns’ head football coach in 1957.

Just as I supposed, The University of Texas was a great place to come to. But we had a lot of work to do. The guy who walks into a 1–9 record does not inherit a warm bed. Mr. Bible was on his last days as athletics director, and a lot of things needed to change. The dressing rooms hadn’t had anything done to them in a long time. The facilities were subpar for The University of Texas, or at least for what I had in mind. They had all of the assistant coaches in one room, and each had a phone on his desk. They had to try to carry on recruiting conversations with all of them talking at the same time, in the same room. I didn’t have a secretary, we had just one for all the football coaches.

But the changes we needed were obvious. I knew that any time I made a correction in the dormitory, or the facilities, or the working conditions, I was on the correct side. I wasn’t overbearing…we just couldn’t tolerate it the way it was.

I understood that. I kind of welcomed those things I saw that were run-down and not up-to-date, because it was a change that could be made to better The University of Texas athletics program. It was discouraging in a way, but it was encouraging in another.

I started asking questions. I remember going to the stadium and seeing it surrounded by barbed wire and a chain-link fence with grass growing up it. I asked what purpose it served, and they told me that it was where they took up tickets. I asked if we couldn’t move the gates back to the stadium and make it look nicer. They said they didn’t know, that it had just always been there. We had to find new ways to do things, on the field, in the dorm, and with the program. The important thing was, they wanted it to be different, and so did I.

In perhaps the most famous picture of the Darrell Royal era, Royal gives James Street the play that led to the Longhorns’ 21–17 victory over Notre Dame in the 1970 Cotton Bowl game. The scoreboard tells the story.

The University of Texas has never been satisfied with second or third place. The people who have gone to school here demand better than that. A lot of them have had great success after they got out of here, and they couldn’t understand why The University of Texas wasn’t winning consistently, why they couldn’t occasionally win the conference. The conference was the thing when I got here. The national championship was way out of sight. We were fighting for lone victories, which would lead us into the conference championship. And then when we got the conference championship, the goal was to win it all.

To go through undefeated, you have to escape from a very, very tight trap where you are going to be beaten if something doesn’t happen. It’s the same way with winning close. You have to be careful that those adverse things don’t happen to you. And you are just lucky if you go through the season undefeated, because later you can look back and see where you could have lost a couple of games.

That really is what happened to us. In the 1960s we had a tremendous run. From 1961 through 1970, we finished in the top five seven times, won seven Southwest Conference championships, and had three national championships. We had great coaches and great players, and, as I’ve said, the ball bounced right for us a whole lot of times.

When I think of what it means to be a Longhorn, I would define it in three words: It’s a chance.

Darrell Royal addresses Mack Brown’s team during practice; Brown had welcomed the legendary Darrell Royal back to his program.

It’s an honor to be a Longhorn, but to me, it has always stood for a chance. If we make the right moves, we’ve got a chance to be with the people at the top. That same thing isn’t true of every school. Some of them just have no chance to go to the top. The University of Texas certainly provides that chance. It’s a good recruiting tool to talk about the history of The University, and to explain that to young prospects. It’s about being the state university, and it’s about pride, but it is always about opportunity. Mr. Bible set a standard for coaches that has been lived up to several times. You have a chance to do it here, and that chance is what makes it a great coaching job.

And it is always important to maintain your integrity. I grew up in a time where we were sometimes dirt poor, and the only thing you really had was your character and your integrity. The University of Texas has always stressed that. I tried to do the right thing in recruiting by the rules and in graduating kids, and I had it explained to me when I was hired that anything shy of that would not be tolerated at The University of Texas. But they didn’t have to tell me; that’s what I was going to do, anyway.

I was 52 years old when I stepped away from coaching, and I have now spent 50 years of my life in association with The University of Texas. It’s a great reunion when I run across the old players, and the memories are strong.

People have often asked me how I would like to be remembered, and my answer is pretty simple. I tell them that, on my tombstone, I don’t want it to say that I never made a mistake.

I’d like for it to say, He meant well.

—Darrell Royal

Fall 2007

Foreword by Mack Brown

I grew up in the 1960s in Cookeville, Tennessee, surrounded by male role models who played football and were football coaches and high school administrators. At that time, Texas was one of the more popular teams on TV, and in our home we all took coaches like Wally Butts at Georgia, Bear Bryant at Alabama, and Darrell Royal at Texas as examples of what college football coaches should be and what we wanted to be like.

I was a running back, so I liked watching Steve Worster and Chris Gilbert and Jim Bertelsen and James Street. The Longhorns were the best team in the country at running the ball. After I decided to be a coach, it was natural for me to go back and look at the people I wanted to be like, and I wanted to be like Coach Royal.

When I became the head football coach and athletics director at Tulane University, our president brought in a consulting team to look at our athletics program. The group included Don Canham, the athletics director at Michigan; Gene Corrigan, who was with the Atlantic Coast Conference at the time; Chuck Neinas, who was head of the College Football Association; and Coach Royal.

Several of those guys would become my close friends later, but at the time, I spent most of my time enjoying Coach Royal and asking him about what he saw that he liked, why he was successful as a coach, where were the things we needed to improve, and where he saw us going. We continued that friendship at gatherings like the College Football Hall of Fame dinner in New York. The Hall of Fame is something that all coaches dream about being in, and Coach Royal is a prominent member of that group. I even talked to him a couple of times by phone when we were at the University of North Carolina.

During the season of 1997, things were going really well for us there. My wife, Sally, was the most successful land developer in the Chapel Hill area, and our football team was ranked in the nation’s top five. That was our home, and we were happy there. In 1994 we had played Texas in the Sun Bowl in El Paso, and I remember Sally being so impressed with Bevo, the band, and the spirit Texas showed.

Still, when DeLoss Dodds called me about an interview after John Mackovic was reassigned, Texas was a long way from our minds. I agreed to talk to the committee when I learned that Coach Royal would be there because one of my first thoughts was, What a life’s dream to coach where Darrell Royal coached. It wasn’t only about Texas at the time, it was about him and what he had built here. Also, I knew that I would not take the job without talking to him and having his endorsement. It was important to me that he came because it showed that he was interested in me, and he was the one person who could make some sense out of why Texas hadn’t been a consistent winner for more than 20 years.

Mack Brown

I did not want to come to Texas and fail, and I had to know what we needed to do to move forward and get it fixed. I asked him for his help, and he told me, I’m too old for a regular job, but I’ll help you where I can.

He introduced me to people who cared about the program. Soon, not only was he a role model, he had become one of the great friends of my life. He had that ability to take complicated things and make them simple, and so many of the things that he told me that day in Atlanta have come true. He said The University of Texas was like a bunch of BBs that had been dropped from a box and scattered all over the floor. He said my job was to get the BBs back in the box. The University, he said, is a powerful place, but it has to be the power of one. It can’t be scattered and disjointed. There are so many allegiances; it has to come back to being Texas.

When Sally and I came to Texas, we had many great friends and memories in North Carolina. But the way we looked at it, we weren’t leaving North Carolina, we were going to Texas.

Sally and I had never seen more passionate people. They are very proud.They are the most hospitable people you could ever imagine being around, and they do an amazing job of raising their families.

Another thing that we liked about The University of Texas is that it stands for integrity. Academics here are hard, and a young man must be a student in order to be an athlete, so when he gets out of here, he can be successful. As a player, you can win all the games because everything is first class, but when you graduate, you know you’ve paid your dues and can reap benefits from all you’ve learned here.

We’ve come to understand some basic things about Texans. What some people think is arrogance is really pride, and it’s a pride that goes deep to the roots of where the state itself came from. A lot of people have talked about the pressure that is put on the head coach at Texas. I see that as passion, rather than pressure. Texas people are passionate about their football. Whether you like The University of Texas or not, being a Longhorn means that everybody in this state has an opinion of what happens in Texas football, every single day. Coach Royal told me that, and I didn’t realize it. But being a Longhorn means that there’s a tremendous amount of scrutiny. There’s a standard that is set higher than most places in the country.

Mack Brown and his Texas Longhorns won the 2005 BCS National Championship.

Our goal when we came to Texas was to win championships with nice kids who graduate. Because of our school and some great assistant coaches, we were able to recruit players who did that. One of the first things Coach Royal told me was that to succeed, we needed to rebuild a bond with Texas high school coaches. Those are the men who help form kids way before we ever see them. They are the heroes of our game of college football. High school football in Texas is part of the fiber of the state. In every small town on Friday nights, the whole town is involved. Kids either have a football uniform or a cheerleader’s outfit from the time they are born.

History has always been important to me, and that’s why we taught our players about the great tradition of Texas football. In our football trophy room, we proudly displayed the crystal ball national championship trophy of our 2005 team, but we also purchased replicas to honor the national champions of 1963, 1969, and 1970. A football program has no greater treasure than the men who have played the game before.

With a lot of help, we were able to collect those BBs. Everybody in the athletics department, the alums, the lettermen, the administrators, the faculty, the grass roots fans of the state of Texas, and the high school coaches were all pulling for us to win because we were one of the faces for this state—not only in Austin and at The University but across the country.

Our unique colors, the burnt orange and white, our wonderful songs, and our hand signal—the Hook ’em Horns sign—are recognizable worldwide. When you travel to an area not expecting to see someone from home, you can readily pick out the person who’s associated with The University of Texas. Traditionally, that’s something that every other place in America is trying to be. It goes back to pride in who you are.

Finally, to be a Longhorn means, as Sally and I discovered when we got to Texas, you don’t have to say, Hello. Just say, Hook ’em.

—Mack Brown

Acknowledgments

By its nature, this project is unique in that the true authors are the 70 or so men whose stories you find within. Without them, this book would not exist. We were simply the keepers of their thoughts. Our job was to find them, secure interviews, transcribe those interviews, and then put their words into chapter form. It was, frankly, more of a challenge than simply writing a story; it was also tremendously rewarding.

To begin our thanks, we’d have to mention our spouses, Kim Scofield and Randy McEachern, and our families, for their love, support, and patience during the more than six months it took to finish this project.

We’d like to thank Triumph Books, specifically Tom Bast, for having the faith in us to accomplish this. And Alex Lubertozzi with Prologue Publishing Services, for his editing. Tony Barnhart of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution gave us the blueprint and great advice on how to approach the interviews.

Special appreciation goes to Mack Brown and the late Darrell Royal, for their participation and support of the idea, as well as to DeLoss Dodds, Chris Plonsky, and Nick Voinis of the UT Athletics Department Administration.

John Bianco provided great insight to the more recent years of Texas football. His assistants Jeremy Sharpe and Thomas Stepp and administrative associate Margaret Tiedeken in the UT Media Relations area and Kasey Johnson in Mack Brown’s office picked up the slack when Bill was on leave working on the book.

Also, thanks to Susan and Jim Sigmon and Joy Lawrence of the UT Sports Photography division for their efforts on the pictures, and to Carol Hastings of the Longhorn Letter Winners Association for providing addresses and phone numbers.

And we would be remiss without thanking Coach Greg Davis as well as the numerous administrative assistants and family members who helped connect us with the players who participated.

Finally, there were a few individuals, who because of communication glitches or availability issues, were not included because we simply ran out of time. Our thanks to them—Johnny Walker, Britt Hager, Lance Gunn, Nathan Vasher, Cedric Benson, and Derrick Johnson—all of whom agreed to participate.

Introduction

So much has changed since Jenna McEachern and I agreed to do the original What It Means to Be a Longhorn in 2007. In truth, I am not sure either of us understood the depth of the undertaking, or the impact the personal accounts would have on the Longhorn Nation.

Both of us knew that personally, and professionally, we were immensely qualified for it. My love affair with Texas football spans more than 50 years, from the time my parents first brought me to Austin from our home in Winters, Texas, to see a Longhorn football game. As a writer for The Daily Texan, the Austin American Statesman, and as an employee in the media relations area of the UT athletics department, I had written stories of the teams and the people of Texas football since 1961.

Jenna brought a wonderful perspective to the book. She was the daughter of a coach, the wife of a Longhorn quarterback, and a mother who had always been involved in sports. In the mid-1970s, she was a Texas cheerleader. She used her degree in journalism to become an excellent editor, and with that book she went on to become a published author in her own right—the most extensive project being DKR: The Royal Scrapbook, as well Triumph Books’ 100 Things Longhorn Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die.

Together, we agreed in the early part of the 21st century to become the gatekeepers of the personal memories of 70 or so former Longhorn football players who would span the history of the sport at The University of Texas.

In the years that have followed, we have been left with stark reminders of the passage of time. Several of the participants, including Coach Royal, have died. Mack Brown, who led the Longhorns to nine consecutive 10-win seasons, and whose teams played in four BCS games and two BCS National Championship Games in a six-year span between 2004 and 2009, was forced out as the Texas head coach following the 2013 season.

Where our original book began with the memories of the late Howard Terry from the 1930s, many bright new stars have entered the annals of Texas Longhorn history less than a decade after the original publication.

All are worthy of one day telling their story. But for now, space allows just a mention. Colt McCoy became the winningest quarterback in NCAA history in his four-year career from 2006 through 2009. His younger brother, Case, etched his name in Longhorn immortality in 2011 by leading Texas to a come-from-behind, 27–25 win over Texas A&M in the final game played (for the foreseeable future) between the two old rivals.

The Shipley family, with brothers Jordan and Jaxon, provided thrills as receivers for more than a decade between them in an era that began in 2004 and ended with the 2014 season. Jamaal Charles, Quan Cosby, Earl Thomas, Brian Orakpo, and the Acho brothers (Sam and Emmanuel) were just a few of the stars of the era.

Justin Tucker, who kicked the winning field goal for what many Longhorn faithful termed The Eternal Scoreboard in the victory in that 2011 game over Texas A&M in College Station, went on to help the Baltimore Ravens win a Super Bowl as a rookie a year later. And then there was Nate Boyer, a decorated war hero as a Bronze Star–winning Green Beret who walked onto the team and into the hearts of all of America as a deep snapper from 2010 through 2014.

Our original book began with Terry, who gave back way more than he received from The University. Terry came to Texas as a freshman in 1934, the year that rookie coach Jack Chevigny led the Longhorns to a historic victory over Notre Dame. Chevigny had played for the Irish under Knute Rockne.

From Terry’s freshman season in 1934, through the 2005 BCS national championship stories of David Thomas, Michael Huff, and Vince Young, there is at least one voice that speaks to every single year of Texas football for more than 70 years.

Bill Sansing, who was hired by D.X. Bible as the first sports information director at Texas in 1946, brings an invaluable look at such Longhorn legends as Bobby Layne and Blair Cherry, who are gone now, and were pivotal figures in the late 1940s. John Bianco, who 60 years later would serve in the same job Sansing held, provided a view of the modern Longhorn.

Forty years separated the arrivals of Darrell Royal and Mack Brown, and yet the blending of their philosophy and friendship until Royal’s passing in November of 2012 was a major part of the history of Texas football.

In their individual stories, the former Longhorns who are featured told compelling stories of life as a Texas athlete. But more than that, they also capture a picture of the history of The University of Texas. That is because universities are much more than bricks and mortar, and teams are much more than those portrayed in the latest computer-generated DVD.

These stories chronicled the lives of men who came from small towns and big cities, who played quarterback or linebacker or lineman or back or kicker. Some earned the highest level of accolades as a player, others went on to great professional success away from the game. There are All-Americans and philanthropists.

There was the late Rooster Andrews, who cried because his draft board said he was too short to go when most of his classmates left in 1941 to fight in World War II. And Keifer Marshall, who played every down at center in the 1943 Cotton Bowl, and then became a distinguished Marine who survived the Battle of Iwo Jima.

And as each decade is packed with more former Longhorns, their stories mark the passages of Texas football, from coach to coach, from era to era. Names long forgotten live again through the reminiscences of their teammates, and the memories of their youth.

The answers to the question What does it mean to be a Longhorn? are as diverse as the people who share them. So are the memories.

It is important to understand that the men who speak to us here are but a few of the legends of Texas football. To adequately reflect all of those living Longhorns would require volumes, even libraries. Instead, this group gives us a capsule look at a total picture. Hopefully, each will in some way touch the story of all of those we wish we would have had room to include.

So often, as time passes, we are left with no one to tell the story. It is then that historians and writers offer what they think happened. In the chapters of this book, we learned, from the men themselves, what they know happened. The history of Texas football has been well-chronicled. We know what, and in this book, we learn who.

The quarterbacks of the four national championship teams gave insight to what brought them to that pinnacle. Pioneers and pathfinders speak to the historical significance of racial integration as a force in college football in the Southwest. Moments on and off the field paint a picture of college life; its hopes, and its dreams.

At the pinnacle of it all were the two coaches, Royal and Brown. Where Royal’s teams dominated the 1960s, Brown built a powerhouse without peer during the first decade of the 21st century.

Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium at Joe Jamail Field itself has undergone a metamorphosis, with the new Red McCombs North End Zone representing the most significant reconstruction in stadium history. Sellout crowds reach over 100,000 to see the new versions of Texas Longhorns, those who one day will fill the pages of another book, in another time.

But, as we are reminded in these pages, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Kids are still just 18 years old when they come to campus, and while they may be more tech savvy and bigger and stronger than their predecessors, their fears, hopes, and dreams remain the same.

That, in the end, is the beauty of college football. It is the spirit of Texas, and the excellence of goals reached for, and attained. Encapsulated in basic four-year increments, these stories are a little piece of history, and a little piece of life.

All of which make up the grand mosaic of the Longhorn Nation, and what it means to be a Texas Longhorn.

—Bill Little

* * *

I watched my first Longhorn football game in 1964, sitting in the Knothole section, where a ticket was 50 cents. I was nine years old and had no particular loyalty to Texas football, but after family friend and Longhorn fanatic Phil Zlotnick introduced me to the spectacle of college football at its finest—Big Bertha and Bevo, the Longhorn Band as it spelled out Texas in script, the expectation of victory, the fringe on the cheerleaders’ uniforms—I was hooked. From that day forward, I set my sights on being a cheerleader at The University of Texas. There was no other school for me.

When I arrived in Austin, at long last, to attend The University, I was exhilarated by the variety of opinions and lifestyles and political ideologies and music to which I’d never been exposed. I was also pretty excited to get to know and work with men whose names were synonymous with The University and with excellence—Darrell Royal, Bill Ellington, Jones Ramsey, Cliff Gustafson, Mike Campbell, Frank Medina, Leon Black, and Leon Manley.

To work on this project with Bill Little, my friend for 40 years, was a delight. It was also humbling, for he is, without doubt, the singular authority on UT sports history. And as I talked with these former players, many of whom were friends from my college days, hearing their stories rekindled my own feelings of pride and awe at having been part of the Longhorn tradition. It was an honor to be the one to hear these men express their unabashed love for their teammates and coaches and to see their tears as they recounted just what it means to them to be a Longhorn.

Each story is unique, yet there is a common thread that runs through all of them. When faced with a choice of colleges, each of these boys had the courage to challenge himself to compete with the best and against the best. They courageously trusted their coaches to push them to their limits and beyond. They had the guts to step in front of 80,000 screaming fans to represent a school with impossibly high standards. They stoically subjugated their personal desires and goals in order to achieve success as a team.

To a man, they were challenged and changed forever by this tradition, this place, this University of the first order. As Happy Feller noted, Once you are exposed to the best, you never return to your old form. It’s my privilege to present a snapshot of this continuum of excellence.

—Jenna Hays McEachern

1. The Thirties and Forties

Howard Terry | Lineman/Linebacker | 1935–1937

Looking back, I guess I was lucky. I was born and raised in Cameron, Texas, and I played high school football. I was not all that great a player, but I wanted to go to college. I had been invited by the Rice Institute line coach to come down and work out with the varsity in the spring of 1934.

They had me work out with the varsity, but the only thing I had resembling an offer for a chance to go to school was that if I would go to a junior college for two years, they would take me back at Rice. In hindsight, I can certainly see their thinking. I did have a visit to Texas A&M, but that wasn’t productive, either.

Then, in the spring, one of our local teachers took me down to Austin to the C&S Sporting Goods Company. The teacher’s friend there called Jack Chevigny. He had been the coach at St. Edward’s University, south of the Colorado River in Austin, and he had just gotten the head coaching job at Texas. He came down to C&S Sporting Goods and met me. He