Whatever Happened to Ronnie Littleton?
In 1969 he helped the Wichita Falls Coyotes win the state football championship and went on to become one of the greatest high school players in Texas history. Then he disappeared. Twenty-five years later, I set out to find him.
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In 1969 boys my age who followed the Coyotes had one and only one hero: a handsome, stocky running back named Joey Aboussie. With a running start, he would lower his head and steamroll linebackers flat onto their backs, ABC broadcaster Chris Schenkel was so impressed with Aboussie that he later pronounced him the best high school player in the country. Off the field, Aboussie was the all-American teenager—an honor student in school, a persuasive speaker at Fellowship of Christian Athletes banquets, a polite star who always took the time to sign autographs or throw us his chin strap at the end of games. “Are you boys going to grow up to become Coyotes some day?” Aboussie would ask us. “Oh, yes, sir, Joey,” we’d all reply. If someone had told me that another running back—and a black one at that—was about to take Aboussie’s place as my idol, I would have told him that he just didn’t understand football in Wichita Falls.
For years the Coyotes had been made up of toughened white boys, the sons of oilmen or oil-field workers who had been taught that football was meant to be played ferociously. On cement-hard practice fields, unsmiling coaches shouting, “Hit! Hit! Hit!” made the Coyotes go from one tackling drill to another. “Put the hurt on him!” the coaches would yell, blowing their whistles. Coyotes were not allowed to speak to coaches unless spoken to, and they were certainly not allowed to spike the ball and dance when they scored a touchdown. The Coyotes were so well-disciplined and so brutal that other teams dreaded playing them. In the late fifties and early sixties the Coyotes went to the state championship game four straight times.
In those days Wichita Falls High School was the only white high school in town. In the sixties its stockpile of talent was diluted as the city grew and other white high schools opened. By 1969, even with Aboussie, the Coyotes were expected only to win their district championship and then get beaten in the playoffs. Nor did it seem that integration was going to help. Many of the former Booker T. stars were so angry about the closing of their own school that they hadn’t even tried out for the Coyotes. Others had quit in disgust a few days into practice because, they said, they weren’t being given a chance to make the starting squad. The quarterback from the Booker T. team, Lulanger Washington, who was considered a major college talent with his powerful arm, and wide receiver Eddie Bagby were relegated to the bench because, the coaches said, their pass-oriented style didn’t fit into the Coyotes’ run-oriented wishbone offense.
But in a move that could be likened to Branch Rickey’s signing Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, the cigarette-smoking, burr-headed coach of the Coyotes, Donnell Crosslin, put another black player, Lawrence Williams, at quarterback. The speedy Williams’ runs around the end were the perfect complement to Joey Aboussie’s inside blasts. Williams was a confident, thoughtful young man who never raised his voice or lost his cool. Still, installing him at quarterback was a huge gamble for Crosslin. At the time, there were no black quarterbacks starting for big white schools anywhere in the state, and there were plenty of Coyote fans who would have preferred a white quarterback, even if it meant another average season. But Crosslin told me years later, “My job was to go with the best player for the position, and that was that.”
Crosslin also named James Reed, a quiet black teenager, his middle linebacker, the central figure for the defense. Reed stood by his locker, sullen and glowering, saying little to the white players. Just before the August two-a-day practices, Reed’s father had been shot to death on an East Side street. No one was sure whether Reed would even want to play that season. But when he stepped onto the practice field, he turned into the epitome of the Coyote player—a vicious hitter who seemed to channel his anger into one punishing tackle after another.
Then there was Ronnie Littleton. Because Crollin rarely played sophomores, everyone assumed that Littleton would spend the 1969 season doing mop-up work late in the second half of games. During one of those early practices, leaning against the practice field fence with a pack of other boys my age, I got to watch him run with the ball. Littleton started toward one hole in the line and then, with a little shake of his hips, slid toward another hole. He took a few more steps, made an impossible whirling move, and slipped like a wet bar of soap through the rest of the defense.
But that was not the part that amazed me. As Littleton trotted back to the huddle, he held the ball above his head and squealed, “Ooh, that feels good!” The white players looked at one another: Coyotes weren’t supposed to talk like that. He was a football player, not Flip Wilson. On the next play, I watched my hero Aboussie plunge into the line with his rock-‘em-sock-‘em body. Then, up came Littleton again, moving faster than anyone else on the field, flicking right, flicking left, running so deftly that his shoulder pads didn’t even rattle. “Ooh, uh-huh!” Littleton shouted. The coaches just bit their lips. As Crosslin told me, “I knew that I was going to have to loosen up our typical disciplinary attitudes so the black players could feel more welcome.”
But he could not possibly have known that with the arrival of Ronnie Littleton, the Coyotes would never be the same. At the end of practice, some other boys and I hustled to the locker room door to get a good look at Littleton’s frizzed-out Afro. We waited in silence as he approached, unsure of what to expect. I remembered someone had told me that the reason blacks grew big Afros was so they could hide their switchblades in them. Then Littleton turned and gave us a huge grin.
“It’s the little honky brothers!” he said, giving each of us a soul shake—the first time anyone had shaken our hands like that. No one knew what to say. This cocky, muscled teenager was not like the older black men we knew who worked in our yards and spoke in soft voices. Finally, one boy asked him for his autograph. “Say, little honks, you know us black boys don’t know how to spell,” Littleton said, looking as serious as he could. Then, with a loud high-pitched laugh, he grabbed the sheet of paper and wrote his name.
From the day he arrived on “The Hill” (the phrase blacks used for the white part of town), Littleton became a one-man demonstration of black style. He wore flyaway shirts unbuttoned down to his chest and two-toned pants made of red leather in the front and black leather in the back. He was the first to wear sunglasses inside the high school (“My shades,” he called them), and he wore silky see-through socks as a fashion statement. For his school picture, he wore a white tie with a black shirt. “I will never forget changing clothes in the locker room at one of our first practices,” said Craig Womble, a Dallas businessman who played on the 1969 team. “Here were all the white boys putting on our white Jockey briefs. And all of a sudden, up jumps Ronnie onto a locker room bench, wearing a red silk undershirt and matching red silk boxers that went down to his knees. He starts singing while he’s combing his Afro with one of those big cake-cutter combs. Finally someone says, ‘What in the hell are you doing?’ And Littleton says, ‘Baby, I’m stylin’ and profilin’.’”
In the hallways Littleton was always holding out his hand and giving someone “five” (which to white people was still a perplexing form of physical greeting). When he’d see a pretty girl, black or white, he’d say, “Ooh, baby, you butter my popcorn!” He used certain phrases—“getting some trim,” for example, when referring to sex—that whites had never heard before. While my friends and I cussed through abbreviations—we said things like, “Hey, that’s BS” or “I’m getting PO’d”—Littleton made profanity sound like a glorious language. “Hello, you old poop-butt, jive-ass, booty head,” I once heard him say to another black friend as a cheerful greeting.
Back in my neighborhood, the word was that these “loud and boisterous blacks” were ruining things at the high school. It was true that some black students were so upset about the closing of Booker T. that they sat in the back of the classrooms refusing to study, telling teachers their lessons were full of “boool-shit.” Others walked through the hallways and said, ”Ooh, smells bad in here. Smells like a whitey.” Though the whites were mostly intimidated by the black students, they had their own ways of making the black students feel unwanted. During a Black History Week assembly in the auditorium, for example, some students shouted, “What about White History Week?” As tensions increased, many citizens, black and white, were convinced that integration would never succeed. Then the Coyotes started winning football games.
“I heard he was arrested for carrying a weapon,” said a former running back.
“He had a gun?”
“The way I heard it, a state trooper had pulled Ronnie over and told him to get out of the car. Ronnie started leaning down like he was going for something under the front seat, but then he came back up.”
“What was under there?”
“A .357 magnum. The trooper was about to shoot him, but then he took his finger off the trigger. He recognized Ronnie’s face.”
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