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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Littleton left TCU and moved back to Wichita Falls—and that is where I lost track of him. He had gone back to his East Side homies, guys who had also experienced their share of failures. Joey Aboussie, after a respectable career as a running back for the Longhorns and a few years as a CPA in Fort Worth, had also returned to Wichita Falls, to start an oil-drilling company with his in-laws. When Lawrence Williams’ three-year pro career was over, he came back, moved into a neighborhood away from the East Side, and sold cars and then worked as a retail ad salesman for the Wichita Falls newspaper. It was Aboussie and Williams who were asked to give speeches at the high school sports banquets or at the Coyotes’ pep rallies. But people didn’t see Littleton. He had become an invisible man—which is exactly the way he wanted it.
“Oh, I guess I saw him a few years ago,” said a former lineman, ‘at a Coyotes game.”
“A Coyotes game?”
“I didn’t have much of a conversation with him. I didn’t know what to say.”
“Why not?”
“He was drunk. Completely drunk.”
For weeks I made calls to the AC Delco plant where Littleton worked building oxygen sensors for GMC cars and trucks. I called his close friends, asking if they could persuade him to talk. For a few minutes we actually had a polite chat on the phone. (Ronnie: “Why do you want to see me? Me: “Because I think it’s important to talk about those days.” Ronnie: “Why?” Me: “Because none of us can stop thinking about them.”)
Finally, this past September, forty-year-old Ronnie Littleton whipped his red pickup truck with oversized tires and mag wheels into the Ramada Inn parking lot in Wichita Falls. He got out, ran a hand through his shoulder-length hair, adjusted his wraparound sunglasses, then headed toward the hotel with the same bowlegged strut that I used to imitate years ago. In my years as a journalist, I have interviewed many people, but I cannot remember ever being as nervous as I was at that moment.
“I remember you,” Littleton said, although I could tell he didn’t. We went into the hotel restaurant, where he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and ordered coffee. He took off his sunglasses and squinted at me. “You know, I’ve given away all those clippings, the trophies, even my letter jacket,” he said. “It’s long, long gone.” He was wearing blue jeans and an athletic T-shirt that didn’t quite hide his soft belly. “Man, I don’t even know what I can tell you.”
I wasn’t sure what he’d want to talk about. I asked him about his wife, Bobbie, a nurse whom he married in 1981. “She’s gone through some shit with me,” he said, giving a faint smile. We talked about why the most recent Coyote teams were lucky to have winning seasons. “I don’t know if those kids are dedicated to winning like we were,” he said. “We got up every morning wanting to win. It was our life then. We were united, black players and white players, to get to that state championship.” His voice trailed off, and he sipped some coffee. Despite the dark circles under his eyes, he was still as handsome as a I remembered from high school. “Go on, my man, ask me anything,” he said in a quiet voice. He knew I wanted to hear as much about the downfall as I did about the glory days.
I had already picked up bits and pieces about what had happened to him. I had heard that when he came back to Wichita Falls, he began stopping by a liquor store on East Side Drive, where he’d purchase a half-pint of Jack Daniel’s and a tall can of malt liquor. I had heard he would drive out to a farm-to-market road beyond the city limit signs and drink alone. I had heard about the one time he tried to prove himself as football player again. He had joined a small semi-pro football team, the Wichita Falls Roughnecks, coached by James Reed, one of the five original black Coyotes. After graduating from college, Reed too had come back to Wichita Falls. (Today he lives in the Dallas suburb of Arlington, where he owns a small construction-cleanup business.) Littleton told Reed that he wanted to see if he could still run past people. But there were times when Reed didn’t let Littleton play, because he showed up drunk. After one Roughnecks loss, in which Littleton wasn’t allowed to play, Reed looked along the sideline and saw Littleton weeping at the end of the bench.
“So I heard you did some drinking,” I said.
He took a drag on his cigarette. “Yeah,” he said. “Oh, yeah.”
“Actually,” I said, “this happens to a lot of guys in sports whose careers are cut short.”
“But it wasn’t supposed to happen to me.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and lit another. “I know I was drinking to cover up the pain. But maybe I was mad at God too. Oh, yeah. Everything I had dreamed of for my life was gone.”
For a long time, he said, he didn’t want to talk about football. He had difficulty talking to his old teammates. He would start drinking on Sundays when he’d watch the NFL games, and he’d drink on Friday nights, about the time the Coyotes’ games started. He did attend some games, but he kept noticing the way the white people gave him double takes—the same people who used to cheer him, who now could not believe that the young man they had once elevated to such prominence was hiding a flask under his coat. He hated it when someone came up to him and said, ‘So, hey, Ronnie, what are you doing with yourself now?”
The years passed, he said. He started drinking from his bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the mornings. The police pulled him over for DWIs, and yes, he did get arrested for keeping a .357 magnum in his car. But he had no intention of slowing down. He tried crack. He let his hair grown down to his shoulders. Soon the East Side was full of stories of Littleton acting crazy and looking for a fight. “If he thought you said something to him the wrong way, he would explode,” said a woman who knew him well. “You just learned to get away from him.” Ronnie Littleton had gone from the beloved schoolboy football hero to the bad black dude.
In 1988, to keep from being fired after missing too many days of work, he went to the rehabilitation center at Red River Hospital in Wichita Falls. Thirty days later he was back out drinking. He went a second time, yet quickly returned to the bottle. His life spiraling downward, he could not imagine what he could do to raise himself back up. On the streets one day, he happened to run into Lulanger Washington, the backup quarterback from that 1969 team. As it turned out, after Washington graduated from high school, he was so angry at whites for closing down Booker T. and ruining his chance for success in college that he decided to get even. He bought a pistol and learned to stick people up., Wearing a nylon stocking over his face, Washington would wait for white people to come out of a downtown bank after cashing their paychecks, and he’d slip up behind them, aiming a gun at the backs of their heads. But by the early eighties, Washington had given up his life of crime and became a street preacher on the East Side. “There are so many of us over here who grew up with this suppressed anger at our positions in life,” he said. “Some of us felt we had never had a chance to show what we could do, and we wanted someone to pay. What I told Ronnie was that we have got to make the best of our lives, whatever our lives turn out to be.”
Even as Washington said those words, he knew it was harder than ever for black people in Wichita Falls. The East Side had rapidly deteriorated since he and Ronnie were boys. With few higher-paying jobs available, residents found it harder to escape the undertow of poverty. Crack had arrived, and soon after came the gangs and the violence. A few years ago a police officer was assigned to walk the hallways of Wichita Falls High School to keep gang members from other schools from causing trouble. “You remember how you used to be scared of coming over to the East Side?” Washington asked me. “I’m telling you, it was a church picnic back then. Now even the black folks are scared of the East Side, all those guns and bullets. I hate to say I told you so, but a lot of life went out of the East Side when Booker T. Washington High School closed. The community lost pride in itself. The adults stopped watching over these kids, making sure they didn’t fail. The streets just got too tempting.”
But there are still many success stories coming out of the East Side. Some of them are the most unexpected. In September 1991, after he realized he could no longer remember the Lord’s Prayer, Ronnie Littleton tried rehabilitation for a third time. “This time,” he told me, “I was ready to make it work.” He said he had remained sober for the past three years, even though there are moments when his body craves liquor. “It’s a battle, my man, one day at a time—but I’m not giving up,” Littleton said. And to my astonishment, he gave me that same cheerful grin that I first saw by the Coyotes’ locker room door.
I wanted to tell Ronnie Littleton how I could still do a perfect imitation of his walk, and that a quarter of a century later, I was still using words and phrases that I had first heard him say. I wanted him to know how his jivey hilarious attitude had really changed my life. He had helped usher Wichita Falls through those first painful days of integration, and he had also taught many of us white kids to loosen up. But he waved me off. “That was a long time ago, and I’m a different person now,” he said. “I’ve been given a second chance, and I just want to say, ‘Thank you, God.’”
As we walked to the hotel door, he put on his wraparound sunglasses and suddenly said, “You know what’s strange? Sometimes I think about the way my body moved back then, all the moved I’d make to get free. Oh, Lord, man, if I could just get around a little like that today.” He laughed in his familiar high-pitched way, gave me an old-fashioned soul handshake, and got in his red pickup with the mag wheels and drove off. For an instant I thought I was back in high school, watching him in his pimp-mobile with the blue shag on the dash. I remembered how he’d stick his head out of the window, shout, “Good-bye, little honks,” then lay rubber for his home on the East Side. In my mind, he will always be that glorious teenager, uncatchable, moving like a stunning burst of light.
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