Game Over 
Coming of Age in the Locker Room
What the players say about their life in the game.
(Page 3 of 6)
Is there a Texas town without its undisputed Superfan? In Midland it was a 300-pound janitorial supply salesman, in Odessa a police chief, in Rotan a black shoeshine “boy”: each boasted of not having missed a performance of their favorites in 30 years. In the late 1950s I knew a promising young Congressional aide who deserted Washington politics to retain his record of having never missed a home town game—as player or fan—since first grade. “They’ll be kicking off in two weeks,” he said. “Something just won’t let me miss it.” There was the Odessa citizen who rushed home at half-time to change clothes, after concluding his team’s poor showing might be connected with his abandonment of a threadbare suit he’d worn throughout a 22-game winning streak.
In Brownwood, Carlton Stowers relates, “A real scramble begins on Fridays when [there’s] an out-of-town game. People downtown start trying to figure out how they can get away from the store a little early. Shoot, they might as well close. Nobody does any business after people start thinking about getting to the ball game.” I.D. Dillard arrived in front of the Weakley-Watson Hardware at three a.m. to assure that for the third year he would buy the first season ticket; his reward included having his picture published in the Brownwood Bulletin and such intangibles as are known only to the Lord or to the ghost of Amos Alonzo Stagg.
But the prize—whether spun of pure gold or fool’s gold—is here awarded to one Wendell Morris, a 1942 Brownwood High grad. Morris, as the senior service representative of a concrete batching equipment company, travels to India, Australia, Spain, and Belgium. “In late August of each year he fills his desk top with itineraries, flight schedules, and a copy of the giveaway Lions football schedule printed by the Cross Drug Store. In a fashion he has almost reduced to a science, he works out his schedule so that he will be on hand whenever and wherever the Lions kick off. Year before last, flying a company plane, he was forced to make an instrument landing at the Brownwood Municipal Airport lest he miss the first series of downs against Weatherford. Twenty-four hours before he had been conducting business in downtown Brussels.”
Win and the town is yours. Midland in the 1940’s awarded its conquering gladiators cut-rate hamburgers at the Minute Inn, free haircuts on South Main, bargains in certain clothing stores; community leaders offered smiling accolades in hailing us as “Stud” or “Star” or “Toughy.” True to the breed, our fans were fickle. I’m sure there were those who provided friendly condolences. One most clearly remembers, however, those fans who informed us that in losing to San Angelo we’d played like maybe we had to squat to pee, or who groused that after they’d given twenty points our mere 13-7 squeaker over Cisco had cost them money.
We learned other values from our elders. A wealthy booster winked in handing out forbidden cash awards—$5 to $20 depending on the feat—to schoolboys who’d made key plays in winning games; break-neck losing efforts brought no profits. “Football Boys” could raise a little more hell in study hall or home room before the lash came down than could the average student. The year I was a sizeable sophomore thought to harbor promise, I learned with the opening of school—to my surprise—that I was not scholastically ineligible for football as I’d presumed an indifferent freshman academic performance had made me. An assistant coach revealed a grade book recording that I had successfully completed two courses in which I had never been enrolled. “Keep your mouth shut,” he grinned.
“When it comes to sports and education, I want a University the football team can be proud of.”
-Frank Erwin, former chairman of The University of Texas Board of Regents, and Longhorn hyper-fan.
If high school football knows its ignoble moments, they appear to multiply at the college level. Though I cannot recite personal examples, having been cut early in an abortive attempt to make Coach Dell Morgan’s Texas Tech squad, the world abounds with experienced ex-college jocks who tell horror-tales.
Gary Shaw’s Meat On The Hoof indites Darrell Royal’s program at Texas for everything but burglary and murder; if Shaw is to be trusted, then bright young men might better choose a stretch at Devil’s Island. George Sauer, Jr.—ex-Longhorn and New York Jet; son of the former Baylor coach—cautions in his preface: “Shaw makes the point that what he has written about does not exist only at The University of Texas but at other schools. I would have to think that true. From talking to various people from other schools over a period of years, the impression is that differences are only in degree, not kind. College football is big business and mustn’t be thought to be unlike most big business.” Lance Rentzel’s report on his days at Oklahoma under Bud Wilkinson, and much of what Giles Tippette permits to escape in his Rice story, would indicate that things are mean all over.
Since one cannot explore Saturday television without risking Wilkinson or Chris Schenkle interviewing some pious college coach with much to say of how the paramount concern at his institution is to graduate healthy, well-adjusted, well-prepared “student athletes” especially equipped to play The Game of Life, let us examine—through our authors who have been there—the other side of the “student athlete” coin.
Once Gary Shaw and his parents have been properly honey-talked by coach Royal, Shaw reports with other freshmen to Moore-Hill Hall, the UT athletic dorm. At the first meal, freshmen wait outside the dining room until varsity studs are seated: “Then finally an anonymous voice said, ‘You can come in now,’ and doors opened. Suddenly a low-pitched growl burst on us. We were in the midst of one hundred disembodied voices gone mad. We jumped back and hugged the walls while this jeering and growling kept steady for about five minutes. It was our first taste of one of the principles of football: intimidation.” Throughout the meal freshmen are required to pop up and sing; “student athletes” literally fight over meat platters, snarling and spearing and stabbing; to say “pass the potatoes” is to risk having the potato bowl itself thrown at you.
To aid their digestive processes, freshmen gridders were required to beat each other with tightly-rolled newspapers and to suffer the kicks or blows of upper classmen. Then came “record races,” yes: “ . . . they would strip several of us naked and divide us into two groups. Then they would bring out our ‘toy’—an old 45-rpm record. They placed the toy between the cracks of our asses. We had to carry it from one end of the hall to the other without using our hands. We would then have to—again without using our hands—place it in our teammate’s ass. If he happened to drop it, his partner had to pick it up with his mouth and put it back in place.” Just good clean fun, Mom. Just a little fellowship with the guys in the dorm . . .
Comes now Lance Rentzel to testify to the Oklahoma Sooner version: “Then came the ‘O’ Club initiation, for all who had lettered in a varsity sport. It began at five a.m. when we each put on a burlap sack—our clothing for the entire day including classes. A string was tied to the [penis, running] up the body and over the outside of the sack. Attached to the string was a pencil that dangled in front of a cardboard sign on one’s chest. We were obliged to get female signatures, the girls taking that pencil to sign the cardboard [and many] knowing what happened when they pulled on it—very embarrassing and sometimes painful . . ..
“We [then] lined up in military formation and marched to the girls’ dorms and sorority houses. Each of us was forced to sing romantic songs or recite nasty lyrics to the girls . . . and if the upperclassmen didn’t like our performances, they shocked the hell out of us with ‘hot shots’: battery-powered cattle prods that were used to move animals . . .
“But the climax of the terror was in the afternoon. At five p.m. we lined up outside the stadium for the finale. This began by getting limburger cheese stuffed up our noses and garlic bulbs shoved into our mouths. Then they stripped us down to our jock-straps and painted us completely with red paint, topped off with a big white ‘O’ on our chests. They poured glue into our hair and under our armpits. They sat us down before a dish full of urine and garbage with orders to eat it. And we ate it, just to avoid that hot shot . . .. We swallowed anything, Lydia Pinkham menstrual fluid, shaving cream, anything. They poured wintergreen on our [genitals] and made us rub it in, and it burned like hell.
“Then they put sacks on our heads, completely blinding us, which was the worst thing of all. They came at us from all sides with hot shots, driving us crazy because we couldn’t see anything. At this point many guys cracked, they couldn’t handle it. They started running wild, running into walls, running into the goalposts—or the hot shot. A friend of mine named Steve Davis had gotten mad at one of the ‘O’ Club members and took a swing at him; it was a fatal mistake. They shocked him so many times he passed out, so they carried him off like a dead tiger on a pole . . .
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