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 their first game, the newly integrated Coyotes squeaked by Lubbock Coronado, 10-3. But then they demolished Amarillo, 54-0, and in their third game, against state-ranked Sherman, the victorious Coyotes made nineteen first downs and scored 41 points in the first half alone. Wichitans began pouring into the Coyotes’ stadium to watch this collection of rich boys from the Country Club subdivision, gruff lineman from the city’s blue-collar neighborhoods, and the five East Side blacks. Ted Buss, the sportswriter for the local paper, nicknamed Lawrence Williams “Mr. Outside” and Joey Aboussie “Mr. Inside” because they were such a powerful one-two combination. But for me, the best moment in a game came when Ronnie Littleton scored a touchdown. He’d raise the ball high above his head and make back-and-forth movements with his pelvis while running in place. Then he’d spike the ball behind his back. I cheered for him like a lunatic. The irrepressible Buss nicknamed the dance the Littleton Limbo.
For a few hours on those fall Friday nights, two cultures came together. In the Coyotes’ locker room, after Crosslin had given his standard halftime speech (“Men, you can do what you want to do—if you want to do it bad enough”), one of the black players would start a chant: “Gotta get rollin’, rollin’, rollin’.” As the coaches cast sideways glances at one another, the rest of the Coyotes picked up the chant. Meanwhile, we whites in the stands would be singing our dirge of a school song (“Hail to our colors. Hail to our school. We’ll back you forever. That is our rule”). Bored black fans would wait for the song to end and then initiate a chant of their own: “Whup. . . up. . . side. . . the. . . head. Say, whup ‘em upside the head.” Before long, our whole side of the stadium had joined in.
Although Aboussie remained the mainstay of the Coyotes, even he would later admit that integration made the 1969 team great. After four victories in the playoffs, the Coyotes made it to the state championship game against heavily favored San Antonio Lee. In the first quarter Aboussie scored two quick touchdowns, then the Coyotes fell behind late in the game, 20-14. With only minutes left in the game, Lawrence Williams headed left with the ball on a critical fourth-down play, and finding nothing there, went back to the right and ran 62 yards for the game-tying touchdown. Then Aboussie scored another touchdown to give the Coyotes a 28-20 win.
Although the Coyotes were picked to win the state title again the next year, they were upset by Odessa Permian in a playoff game. Five white Coyotes from the 1969 championship team, including Aboussie, were signed by Darrell Royal to play for the University of Texas. Lawrence Williams, who thought Royal was too racist to start a black quarterback, went to Texas Tech, where ironically he became a wide receiver (Williams made the All Southwest Conference team at that position anyway). James Reed accepted a scholarship to a small Oklahoma college. Backup wide receiver Eddie Bagby, who did not get a college scholarship, moved to California and never returned to Wichita Falls. Also quickly dropping out of sight after graduation was the embittered backup quarterback Lulanger Washington, who believed he would have received a college scholarship if he had been able to stay at Booker T. and display his passing skills.
In 1971 the only player left from the 1969 team was Littleton. By then, he was the most famous high school football player in Texas. Crosslin had created an offense that ensured Littleton would have his hands on the ball on almost every play. Littleton spent most of the game at quarterback, but he sometimes moved to tailback to take better advantage of his running skills and to catch passes. He also played his usual cornerback position on defense and returned all kicks and punts. As quarterback, Littleton would saunter up to the line of scrimmage, look over the defense, take the snap, and then start scrambling around the field for what seemed like minutes until he found an opening. Against Highland Park High School, he caught a kickoff on his own 12-yard line and stood there patiently until the kickoff team got close to him. Suddenly, as tacklers charged in, he zigged one way, zagged another, and then jitterbugged down the field for an 88-yard touchdown.
The more flamboyant that Littleton acted with his lengthy touchdown dances, the more the other teams hated him. They dove at his knees. They tackled him after he had run out of bounds. To the Coyotes’ mostly white opponents, he was an uppity black. But to us in Wichita Falls, he was our own Muhammad Ali. Unfazed by the whites around him and unaffected by any racist attitude, Littleton loved to celebrate his blackness, to poke fun at whites, and even to poke fun at himself. He occasionally walked up and down the sidelines at practice with an exaggerated roosterlike stride. “My brothers,” he dead-panned to those white players who were giving him puzzled looks, “if you want to have soul, you got to have a glide in your stride, a dip in your hip.” He started coming to school in a jacked-up blue Ford Fairlane that had an extra large engine and Super Stock Formula One tires on the back wheels. He replaced the gas pedal with a chrome replica of a human foot, he put blue shag carpet on the dash, and he had a variety of beads and chains hanging from the rearview mirror. He joked to whites that it was his pimp-mobile. With his eight-track tape blaring out Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys, Littleton would roar up to the school and hit his brakes about thirty feet from the parking lot, laying rubber, scattering rocks and pigeons. “Watch out, honks!” he’s yell, hopping out of the car.
As a freshman that year, I learned Littleton’s class schedule just so I could stare at him in the hallways. “Hi, Ronnie,” I’d say in my voice that had not yet begun to crack. “Hey, little brother,” he’d occasionally reply. One day, during an interracial-understanding seminar I attended, in which black and white students sat side by side and talked about everyone being exactly the same deep down inside, I was asked by a teacher if I had any black friends. “Yes, Ronnie Littleton,” I said as the black students around the room snickered. I realize today that it must have seemed absurd to them that a white kid could believe he could ever get close to their lives. The blacks might have spent seven hours a day with whites at the high school, but at the end of the day, they got on the school buses and went back to their separate world. Despite the promises made to them about integration, they already knew how difficult it would be for them to be accepted into white society. Only someone of Littleton’s talent could overcome the barriers of race.
He rushed for 1,807 yards in 1971, passed for more than 400, and scored 26 touchdowns. He was named all-state on both offense and defense and was also named a high school all-American. Littleton took the Coyotes straight to the state championship game, once more against San Antonio Lee. When he was on defense, the San Antonio receivers he covered ran deep patterns on every play just to wear him out. Still, on offense, Littleton rushed for 181 yards and scored 2 touchdowns. But with two and a half minutes to play, San Antonio Lee quarterback Tommy Kramer fired a 35-yard touchdown pass just over Littleton’s outstretched hands to wide receiver Richard Osborne. The Coyotes lost, 28-27—and Littleton lay on the field and wept. We Coyotes fans wept with him. If we had only known that we had just seen him play the last great game of his career, we probably would have wept even more.
“I remember he’d watch all the pro games on television,” said another former offensive back. “He’d see Tommy Kramer playing for the Vikings and Richard Osborne playing for the Eagles.”
“The two guys who beat him in the state championship game?”
“Oh, yeah. And he’d see his friend Lawrence Williams, who played a few years for the Chiefs and the Browns. And Ronnie would get so upset that he would have to turn the television off.”
The college coaches came fromaround the country. The University of Nebraska wanted him as its lead tailback. The University of Oklahoma promised him a position in its wishbone, then the most powerful offense in the nation. But in a stunning announcement, Littleton said he would be attending lowly Texas Christian University, in Fort Worth, a perennial Southwest Conference underdog with a weak offensive line. For three years the NCAA investigated the recruiting of Littleton, wanting to know why, after signing with TCU, he suddenly began driving a black Cutlass with a 455-horsepower engine. But the NCAA finally gave up, unable to disprove Littleton’s story that his godmother had provided the car along with a monthly spending allowance.
Whatever the case, in the second game of his freshman year, Littleton found himself playing quarterback against mighty Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Confident as ever, Littleton strutted to the line, looked over the Fighting Irish defense, got the ball, and was demolished. On each play, Notre Dame swarmed him from the blind side while his knee was planted. As the game progressed, he improvised desperately, trying to outrun the defenders around the end. And still he kept getting hit. After one vicious tackle, he felt something rip in his leg. Although he finished the game with magnificent courage, his future in football was already over.
Because of his bad knee, he rushed for only 133 yards and two touchdowns his freshman year. He reinjured the knee and then injured his other knee during his sophomore year. In the off-season he had operations, and by his junior year, he was being shot up with painkillers before most practices and games. But Littleton could no longer make those spit-on-a-griddle moves. Linebackers were able to catch up to him when he tried to run outside. The pro scouts stopped keeping files on him. By 1975, his senior year, his biography in the TCU football media guide devoted more space to his high school career than to his college years. He was seen by TCU students as much in the off-campus bars as he was on the field. When coaches learned he had broken curfew the night before the game against UT—he had been out partying with his friends—he was told not to suit up for the game.
The story of what happened to Littleton would soon become a familiar one as American sports became more integrated. It is the storey of the kid from the poor black neighborhood, devoting himself to a game only to discover, too late, that the game has betrayed him. For Coach Garnett, who never got to fulfill his own dream of coaching Littleton at Booker T., the end of Littleton’s career was a tragedy. “He never really had anyone to guide him about college or about how to handle his life,” said Garnett. “No one even sat down and told him who he was outside of his life as an athlete. No one taught him what it meant to survive in the world if there was no football. And no one told him that he would be a star in the white world only as long as he kept being a star athlete.”
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