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.
"I don't know if Ronnie will talk to you," one of his former Coyote teammates told me. "He's different these days."
"Different? In what way?"
There was a pause. "Well, I think you'll understand when you see him."
In the autumn of 1969, when i was in the seventh grade in the North Texas city of Wichita Falls, I used to get on my bicycle at the end of the school day and race to the Wichita Falls High School practice field to watch Ronnie Littleton, one of the five black players on the varsity football team. It was the first year of forced busing in Wichita Falls, which had a population of 96,265, 11 percent of which was black. The school administration had shut down the black high school on the east side of town and sent the black students to one of three high schools on my side of town. School integration brought the same tensions to Wichita Falls that had afflicted most Texas cities that were integrating during the civil rights movement. There were heated speeches before the school board, and some parents tried to organize an all-white private school. Hysterical rumors ran rampant through my neighborhood about what the black students had in store for us. One was that they all carried switchblades and would stab us in the bathrooms. "They hate us because we're white," I remember one of the parents in our neighborhood telling me and my friends. "They think we've ruined their lived. And now they're going to try to ruin ours."
But in December—25 years ago this month—those five black players helped lead the Wichita Falls Coyotes to the state football championship in a victory that one local sportswriter likened to the stunning World Series win that same year by the underdog New York Mets. In the process, that championship season produced a new local hero for many white kids like myself—a mouthy, street-smart black teenager named Ronnie Littleton, the very type of person we had been warned against by our parents. To those of us who spent Saturday nights watching My Three Sons and Green Acres, Littleton was simply exotic. In the late sixties, no player from the conservative Texas high school powerhouses dared to do what Littleton did on the football field. Bored with the black football shoes issued to all Coyotes, he wrapped white tape around his. He wore half a dozen red and white wristbands on his arms. On the sidelines, when he took off his helmet, his Afro, the biggest at school, would mushroom straight up like an atomic bomb explosion. Each time he scored a touchdown, he performed a wild gyrating dance in the end zone, causing some parents to look away in embarrassment as if they had seen a sex act. Opposing coaches designed their game plans purely to stop him—and still he slipped around them, taunting would-be tacklers by holding the ball loosely in one hand. Playing almost every down of a game on both offense and defense, Littleton was one of the last great all-around players in Texas' high school ranks. In 1971, his senior year, he single-handedly led an average Coyote team back to the state championship game.
Today flashy athletes are so common in sports that we hardly notice them. But after all this time, I still cannot shake the memories of those years that Ronnie Littleton spent on the white side of town. It was his ability to move on a football field that amazed me. It was his brassy charm and unbridled confidence, his ability to move through life in such free-spirited fashion. In many ways Littleton affected me more than anyone else I had known in my youth. This past fall, I decided to return to Wichita Falls and see him again.
"He's got an unlisted phone number," said a former Coyote quarterback.
"Is he still that famous around town?"
"Oh, man, nothing like that," the old quarterback chuckled.
"So why the unlisted number?"
"I don't think he wants people calling him up to remind him what his life used to be like."
When i was growing up, Wichita Falls was so segregated that the only black people I ever spoke to were maids. Blacks rarely came to our side of town, and I was afraid to venture into the East Side, which literally was across the railroad tracks, in the bottomland. I lived in the Country Club subdivision, parts of which rivaled the finest streets in Dallas' Highland Park or Houston's River Oaks. Because of the area's vast oil fields that lay under the treeless plains, some extraordinarily wealthy people made their homes in Wichita Falls. A small frame home on the East Side—the kind Ronnie Littleton grew up in, for example—was smaller than the garages of the Country Club mansions.
For sheltered kids like me, the East Side was a place of deep mystery. I heard stories about prostitutes and bootleggers who stood along Flood Street peddling their wares. I was told that if whites ever drove through the East Side at night, they would be snatched out of their cars by black men and robbed. Although I didn't consider myself prejudiced in the slightest, the fact was that my knowledge of Wichita Falls' blacks was gleaned mostly from the local folklore passed around my part of town. About the only time I ever read about black people in our local newspaper was when I came across a story—always placed toward the bottom of the sports page—about the East Side's high school football team, the Booker T. Washington Leopards. My friends and I had always wanted to see the Leopards play—they had won the all-black school state football championship in 1965 and barely lost in the finals the next year—but a trip to a Booker T. game was deemed too dangerous by our parents. The adults I knew who did attend would joke about the old uniforms the black players had to wear, the silly pitchouts and reverses in the offensive game plans, and the quarterbacks who would drop back and let fly with wild sixty-yard bombs. They reported that throughout the game the black fans would stomp on the wooden bleachers and do rhythmic chants like, "Ooh! Oongowah! We got the power!" I remember one friend's father saying after he got back from a game, "It's like being in Africa." When I once asked why the Wichita Falls Coyotes never played Booker T., I was told the Booker T. players illegally stuck golf-shoe spikes in their football shoes so that they could puncture opponents' stomachs when they stepped on them.
In 1967, when Booker T. was finally allowed to enter a white football district (a 3A district, one division lower than the 4A Coyotes), it turned out that the only controversy regarding Booker T. involved the white referees. Against all-white Brownwood High, a perennial football power in the sixties coached by the legendary Gordon Wood, Booker T. had two touchdowns nullified by penalties. Finally, after a Booker T. player ran back a kickoff untouched, all four officials reluctantly signaled a touchdown. "But their county sheriff, who was at the game, suddenly walked out on the field and called the officials over," recalled Ervin Garnett, then the Booker T. football coach. "He pointed to the sidelines and said our runner had stepped out of bounds on the 35-yard line. So the officials called that one back too." Booker T. lost to Brownwood, 21-14.
Garnett was convinced that his Leopards, given an even playing field, would eventually prove to be a better team than those from the white high schools. But in the late sixties, Wichita Falls' white school administrators realized that if they did not come up with an integration plan soon, a federal judge would come up with one for them—one that could possibly force white students to be bused to the East Side. So in due haste they decided to shut down Booker T. as the start of the 1969 school year and send its seven hundred black students to the white high schools. The Booker T. faculty and staff were shuffled to other Wichita Falls schools; Garnett, the great football coach, was named principal at a junior high school. It was a devastating time for black parents, who said the busing plan was no different from what the slaves went through when they were shipped against their will to America. We don't have much, black parents said, but at least we should have our own school to nurture our kids, guide them, and give them black teachers and coaches who could serve as role models. "At Booker T., the black kids knew the whole community was watching after them," said Garnett. "Even the marginal students were put in positions of responsibility to showcase their talents and give them confidence. One of my great fears was that those kids would be lost at a white school. They would be looking at mostly white teachers who were happy to pass them with a C and get them out of their classrooms."
But to the football coaches of the white high schools, integration was a godsend. They couldn't wait to get their hands on some of that East Side talent. Just imagine how far the Coyotes could go, the Wichita High coaches said, if they only had that young teenage son of Faye Littleton's, the sweet waitress who worked at the whites-only Wichita Club on top of the First Wichita Bank building. (She had raised him alone; Ronnie first met his father when he turned sixteen.) Rumor had it that Ronnie was so skilled that he could run the forty-yard dash backward as fast as he could run it forward. The kid had even installed a makeshift weight room in his mother's garage. Everyone said he was destined for professional football.
According to local lore, when the East Side was originally divided up for school busing, Littleton’s home had been placed in the Rider High School district, the archrival of the Coyotes. But a former Wichita Falls High School coach who had become athletic director for the school system just happened to get the boundaries redrawn to land the Littletons’ street just inside the Coyotes’ territory. Although Ronnie Littleton had no way of knowing it, he was already part of a plan to take Wichita Falls High School to the state championship.
“When he came back to Wichita Falls, I’d see him driving up and down the highway, his music cranked up loud,” said a former teammate. “I’d wave at him.”
“Did he ever stop?”
“Well, he’d pretend not to notice you.”
FACEBOOK
RSS
TUMBLR
TM
Read Later