Michener, James A. (171 page)

■ school or beyond.

'Do you know what that means? Four years of high school in some place far distant for each man, with three of them having

; Dne year beyond that. The oldest man was married, had two

; :hildren and had played for an Oklahoma college. Now he had four more years with us. Ten years in all and still in high school.'

! ; 'I never read that story,' Rusk said, 'and as you know, my father

: .vas crazy about Larkin football.'

- 'There was good reason you didn't read it. Someone warned

j; |70ur father about my story before I finished it, and he came to me

■ l pne night: "Son, you're not going to print that pack of lies, are

you?" I showed him my documentation, and he brushed it aside: "Son, would you pee on your mother's grave? To befoul Texas football is the same thing." He grabbed my story and tore it up, my notes too. And next day the editor of the Larkin Defender called and said: "Mr. Rusk has recommended you highly for a job on our paper." I've never left.'

He smiled at Ransom Rusk, then said. 'Other sportswriters didn't have the same high regard for the welfare of the game. During the year of our second championship, maybe the best high school team Texas ever produced, a cynical writer on a Dallas newspaper did a famous column in which he wrote: "My All-Texas high school team for this year is the Larkin Fighting Antelopes, because each player on that team comes from a different town in Texas and is the state's best in his position." I never stooped to cheap shots like that.

'But certain fundamental facts must be remembered if you're searching for the true Texas character. The population of Larkin in those days after the oil boom had retreated to its natural level, leaving just a little boost, thirty-six hundred. But when the Antelopes played at home in the golden years, forty-two hundred attended each game, and when they played at some nearby bitter rival like Ranger, Cisco, Breckenridge or jacksboro, nineteen hundred of our thirty-six hundred would travel to the other town.

it was mass mania. Nothing in life was bigger than Friday football, and when lights made it possible to play at night, even more people could attend and the field became a kind of cathedral under the stars. Now it was Friday Night Football, as grand an invention as man has made, with the entire community meeting for spiritual warmth.

'A storekeeper who wasn't a hundred percent behind the team, his business would go bust. A bank would have to close shop if its manager wasn't at every game, and putting up money on the side to pay for uniforms, and paying for training tables and other goodies. Every man in town had to root for the Antelopes, or else. And that still applies throughout this state.'

it sounds to me,' said Miss Cobb, 'like the birth of the macho image. A lot of grown men playing like boys and no women! allowed.'

'Ah, now there's where you make your great mistake, ma'am! Because the genius of Texas football was that early on, it realized it must also involve the girls. So in Larkin we started the cheer- ] leader tradition, and the drill team, and the rifle exhibition, and the baton twirlers, and the marchers in their fluffy uniforms. On a good Friday night now a big high school may have two hundred

boys doing something, what with the squad and the band, but it'll have three hundred pretty girls in one guise or another So girls I play almost as important a role as the boys. Otherwise, the spec-I tacle might have lost its grip on the public '

Like all Texas football coaches and sportswriters. Pepper aspired to be the perfect gentleman, and now he smiled at Miss Cobb: 'You were right on one thing, though, ma'am. Football does carry a strong macho image. One of the reasons why Texans distrust Mexicans, or even despise them at times, they can't play football. Quite pitiful, really. Put them on a horse, they can swagger. But the one game that matters, they can't play '

'Aren't you stressing the values rather strongly, Mr. Hatfield 7 '

'Not at all! Texans identify honest values quickly. They can't be fooled, not for long. That's why seventy-eight percent of our high ■ school administrators are ex-football coaches.'

'That may account for the sad condition of Texas education,' Miss Cobb said.

'Wait a minute! Back up! School boards hire football coaches to be their administrators because they know that anyone connected with football has his head screwed on right. He understands the important priorities, and he isn't going to be befuddled by poetry and algebra and all that. He knows that if he can get his students involved in a good football program, girls and boys alike, the other things will take care of themselves.'

Miss Cobb had a penetrating question: i read that last year Texas colleges graduated five hundred football coaches and only > two people qualified to teach calculus. Is that the balance you recommend?'

'For many Texas boys high school football will be the biggest, noblest thing they'll ever experience. Calculus teachers you can ? hire from those colleges in Massachusetts.'

He was especially ingenious in outlining the symbiotic relationship between oil and football. 'Never underestimate the importance of oil. That's where the extra money came from. Great teams like Breckenridge and Larkin and Ranger were fanatically supported by oilmen. Odessa Permian, too, in a way. You see, each stresses the big gamble. If you're in oil, you wildcat and lose everything. If you're that first Larkin team, you go up against Waco and lose eighty-three to nothing. You don't give a damn. You come back with another try. Oilmen and football heroes were made for each other.

'But there was another aspect, equally strong. An oil millionaire in a place like Larkin had damned little to spend his money on. No opera, no theater, no museums, no interest in books, and when

you've had one Cadillac you've had them all. What was left? The high school football team. You cannot imagine how possessive the oilmen of Ranger and Breckenridge and Larkin became over their football teams. Most of them hadn't gone to college, so they didn't become agitated over SMU or A&M. The high school team was all they had. And they supported it—boy, did they support it! I know high school teams right now that have a head coach and ten assistants. Yes, a coach for tight ends, one for wide ends. Two coaches for interior linemen, offensive and defensive. Quarterback, running backs, linebacker, defensive backs, a coach for each. Special-teams coach, kicking coach. The four top Texas high school teams could lick the bottom fifty percent of college teams up north.'

The highlight of his comments came toward the end of the afternoon, when he said, with his eyes half closed: 'I can see them now, those legions of immortal boys who got their lives started on the right track through Friday night football. They were enabled to go on to college, and some to big money in the pros, and there wasn't a hophead or a drunk or a bum among them: Sammy Baugh, Davey O'Brien, Big John Kimbrough, Doak Walker, Don Meredith, Kyle Rote, Earl Campbell. And add the two who were famed only in high school, they may have been the best of the bunch—Boody Johnson of Waco, and Kenny Hall, the Sugar Land Express.'

His eyes misted over. He was an old man now, but he could recall each critical game he had attended, each golden boy whose exploits he had described as if they had been fighting not on the football fields of Texas but at the gates of Troy or on the plains of Megiddo.

Thank you, Mr. Hatfield,' Miss Cobb said in closing. 'We, needed to be reminded of the values you represent. You see, I wasj sent north to school.'

'Ma'am, you missed the heart of Texas.'

rejas 1722-1835

Incorporated into Texas finally

Claimed b\ Texas. 1836. but ceded to United States. 1850

Greer Count) claimed by Texas and Oklahoma.

awarded to latter by U S Supreme Court. 1906

N THE FOUR DECADES FOLLOWING THE LARKIN ANTELOPES

last football championship, 1928-1968, that little oil town witnessed many changes, as did the state. In World War II, Texas fighting men performed with customary valor: one native son, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was leading the Allied armies to victory in Europe while another, Chester W. Nimitz, was doing the same with the fleet in the Pacific; and still another, Ira Eaker, was sending his Eighth Air Force planes to devastate Nazi military production. One tough little Texas G.I., Audie Murphy, was so eager to get into combat that he lied about his age, and won so many medals that he leaned forward when he walked.

Equally important was the emergence of Texas politicians as powers in Washington, because previous Texans with leadership possibilities had usually seen Texas politics as more important than national. For example, John Reagan, Postmaster General of the Confederacy and one of the very greatest Texans, had served in the national Congress for many years and was a United States senator when an appointment to the Texas Railroad Commission opened in 1891. Without hesitation he surrendered his Senate seat to help regulate this important aspect of Texas life, apparently in the belief that what happened in Texas was what really mattered. Under the principles laid down by his prudent leadership, this commission became the arbiter not only of railroads so essential to the state's development, but eventually, also of trucks, utilities and particularly the oil business, including the transport in pipe lines of petroleum products to the rest of the country. Insofar as his career was concerned, Texas was more important than the nation.

This provincialism denied Texas the voice in national affairs to which it was entitled. But now a trio of ornery, capable, arm-twisting Democratic politicians came on the scene, to become three of the most capable public servants our nation has had. In 1931, Cactus Jack Garner became Speaker of the House of Representatives in Washington, and soon after, a powerful Vice-Presi-'dent. In 1940, Sam Rayburn became one of the most effective Speakers of the House, a job he held, with two short breaks, till

his death in 1961. And tall, gregarious and able Lyndon Johnson became a congressman, later, majority leader of the Senate, then Vice-President and, finally, on 22 November 1963, in an airplane standing on Love Field in Dallas, the thirty-sixth President of the United States.

Coincident with these accomplishments in war and politics, Texas surged to the fore in another aspect of American life, which sometimes seemed to have equal importance. Motion pictures of striking originality and power began to depict life in Texas in such a compelling way that the grandeur and the power of the state had to be recognized. Audiences by the millions swarmed to see movies like Giant, The Alamo, and the various John Wayne cowboy epics, especially the excellent Red River. Other good westerns involved Texas in no specific way but did help keep alive the legend: Cimarron (1931), Stagecoach (1939), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), and the film of his which Wayne preferred above all others, The Searchers (1956). Even in faraway Italy, the 'spaghetti western' created an alluring vision of the West, and Texas reaped the benefit. The state was seen as heroic, colorful and authentic. Its men were tall, its women beautiful, its Longhorns compelling. Even its Mexican villains displayed uniqueness, if not charm, and each year the legend grew.

Of course, there were disadvantages. Many thoughtful people in other parts of the nation began to resent this emphasis on Texas and saw the state as a haven for broken-down cowboys, rustlers and prairie misfits, men who treated Indians, Mexicans and women with contempt. Jokes about Texas braggadocio became popular, one of the most imaginative concerning the Connecticut river expert who was hired by Dallas to determine whether the Trinity River could be deepened so as to give the city shipping access to the sea. 'Very simple,' the engineer said. 'Dig a canal from Dallas to the Gulf, and if you characters can suck half as hard as you blow, you'll have a river here in no time.'

Thousands of Americans developed a love-hate relationship with the state, with the love predominating, and starting in the mid-sixties, citizens in what Texans called 'the less favored parts of our nation' began to drift toward Texas, attracted by the myth, the availability of good jobs, the pleasant winter climate and the relaxed pattern of life. Men wrote to friends back in Minnesota: 'Down here I can wear the same outfit winter and summer.'