Game Over 
Legends of the Fall
Before I spent the day with football old-timers Sammy Baugh, Darrell Royal, Doak Walker, and John David Crow, I figured they’d left the game behind. But they still know how to play.
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The old-timers whoop and rattle silverware and pound their fists, and for the next hour this genteel joint is roaring. Their lives were all shaped by the Depression and World War II. Baugh had a campus job sweeping out a music room when he led the Frogs to a national championship in 1935. He played sixteen seasons with the Redskins and led them to NFL titles in 1937 and 1942. (The only other quarterbacks who have claimed both college and pro titles are Joe Namath and Joe Montana.) Royal grew up in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl town of Hollis and watched caravans of the luckless rolling west with mattresses roped on the car roofs; his own family went out to California as fruit pickers for a while. During the war he played football in the Air Force and, on the strength of that performance, hitchhiked around the country reviewing his scholarship offers, pocketing the travel cash. “Those days, if you had on a uniform, you had no trouble getting a ride.” He signed with Oklahoma and starred as a halfback and quarterback in the next offense that revolutionized the game—Bud Wilkinson’s split T.
The blue collar Highland Park of Walker’s upbringing scarcely resembles the kind of privilege and assumption found in that posh enclave today. Both Walker and Bobby Layne had dazzling high school careers there, worked for a while, then went to college. Layne signed with Texas to play baseball and suited up for football only because his baseball scholarship was good for just one semester. Walker signed with SMU because his dad convinced him it would help him make a living in Dallas later on. They played against each other in November 1945. Both played offense and defense, and both played all sixty minutes. “I intercepted one of his passes,” remembers Walker, “and he intercepted one of mine. I scored my first collegiate touchdown in the first half, but they beat us 12—7. Still don’t know how we did it.”
Layne, who died in 1986 and will be the subject of one of the books in this series, was an All-American pitcher and an All-Pro quarterback. He was also a legendary drunk and rounder. That wasn’t Walker’s style, but from boyhood on he counted Layne as his best friend.
“Baseball scholarship,” marvels Royal, who was a rival Oklahoma Sooner in those years and then, as a young UT coach, reinvigorated the Longhorn program while Layne was in the pros. “I’ll be damned.”
As we’re eating our salads, Royal starts talking about something that has always amused him. “I wasn’t near as anti-pass as my reputation made me out to be. We worked hard on it, and every big game we won—every one—the turning point was a completed forward pass. All that got started one day when I was kidding around with the press. Some guy said, ‘Well, when are you going to start throwing the ball?’ I made a flippant remark: ‘When you pass, three things can happen, and two of them are bad.’ After that, I was so conservative I had to look two ways before I’d cross a one-way street. And I kind of enjoyed the banter. But at the time the guy asked the question, we were leading the nation in scoring! I thought that’s how they measured offense.”
His legacy as an innovator began in 1968, when he and his staff invented the wishbone formation. They did it because they had three great running backs and didn’t want any of them on the bench, and for years after that the quarterback’s triple option of handoff, pitchout, or keep was the rage of the game. Oklahoma and Barry Switzer copied it precisely so they could stay on the field with Texas. Even Bear Bryant, who had enjoyed great success in the sixties with passing teams built around quarterbacks like Joe Namath and Ken Stabler, switched to the wishbone after guidance from Royal.
But Royal’s greatest wishbone team in 1969 was ultimately tainted by the stigma of being the last national champion with an all-white roster. Texas lagged behind other conference schools in integrating its athletic programs, and rival recruiters quietly condemned Royal as a racist, taking what advantage they could get. Royal put all that to rest by successfully courting Texas’ all-time high school football star, Tyler’s Earl Campbell. Royal won the confidence of the youth and his mother because the coach clearly knew what it was like to live in rural poverty. Campbell won his Heisman in 1978, the year after Royal retired.
The infusion of remarkable talent that had come with integration in the sixties and seventies failed to breathe sufficient life into the Southwest Conference. By the eighties its best teams still ranked high in the polls and sent a parade of players to the pros, but it had become a league of haves and have-nots, with the small private schools unable to compete against the big public institutions. Unscrupulous recruiters and alums brought the conference to shame trying to restore competitive balance within the league, and the cheating became a sorry game of macho one-upmanship. Because of repeated violations, SMU became the first college in the country forbidden to put a team on the field, and Rice and Baylor were the only Texas members not in hot water with the NCAA. (Baylor got in serious trouble because of its basketball program.) I ask the legends if the recruiting scandals of the eighties were the coup de grace.
To a man, they dismiss that theory. They insist that the death of the Southwest Conference was inevitable and even merciful. “It was television and money,” Royal proclaims. “And I don’t see the evil in that. If you’re not making money, you’re out of business.”
“It got to where some of us were beating the others every year,” says Crow. “A&M didn’t play many games that appealed to a TV audience. Before the conference broke up, I remember talking to an alum about the need to move the A&M-Texas game from Thanksgiving to the next Saturday so it could be on TV. Fellow said, ‘You mean to tell me, John, it’s gotten to where the bottom line is the dollar.’ I said, ‘I guess that’s the reason I got up and went to work this morning. How about you?’”
But can football survive at TCU, SMU, Rice, and Houston—the schools that weren’t invited to the Big 12 party?
“Gonna be hard,” Baugh says mournfully.
Having finished our salads, we move through the buffet line; Baugh passes on that in favor of his Red Man chewing tobacco. One of the pleasant surprises for me is that they don’t endorse their editor’s tacit premise that the NFL variety is less worthy than the game they knew as collegians. Football is football to these guys.
Baugh raises his sharp chin and tells them: “Fellow wrote me a letter a while back. Said he had discovered that pro quarterbacks today make more money in one game than I did playing sixteen goddam years! I couldn’t believe it. But good for them. I was born too soon.”
Crow agrees. “When I got drafted, the Cardinals offered me a thousand dollars to sign and a fifteen-thousand-dollar salary—if I made the team. It was every nickel I could get.”
They do take pride in some things of their era though. They all played offense and defense. “I just had to play defense in practice,” Crow says of his NFL years, “because the squads were so small. I guess [Philadelphia linebacker and center] Chuck Bednarik was the last one who really played both ways. Except for this hot dog [cornerback, receiver, and kick returner Deion Sanders] they got in Dallas.”
For all the vaudeville and flash Sanders brings to the pro game, he logs almost all of his time covering pass receivers, and the delicacy with which he approaches other defensive chores—such as tackling—inspires grumbles and jibes from this crowd. “He don’t play contact,” Crow growls.
Someone observes that Baugh led the NFL one year in passing, punting, and interceptions. “Yeah, ’cause I had the chances. I played safety and had two great cornerbacks on either side of me. They threw at me all day long.”
Baugh releases brown juice from his lip into a cup. “Talk about making money—ranching sure ain’t the way to do it. I bought my place in 1941. There was an old man named Mr. Kennedy. I had to go through three of his gates and by his house to get to mine. I stopped one day and got to talking to him on the porch. He was in a rocking chair. ‘Mr. Kennedy,’ I told him, ‘this is the rainiest goddam country I’ve ever seen, and the grass is tall, and the wind’s blowing, and it’s pretty. I’ve never seen such grass.’ He said, ‘Well, I came here in ’03, and it’s as good as I’ve ever seen. And you’ll never live long enough to see it this good again.’ Appears he’s gonna be right.”
Baugh’s wife passed away several years ago. A daughter and a grandchild live with him on the ranch, and one of his sons—Snyder’s high school football coach—helps him keep it going. He doesn’t ride horses anymore. In the warm months he seldom goes outside the house at night because the rattlesnakes are moving around. He reads a lot. He’s got a TV satellite dish, and during the fall he starts watching football on Saturday morning and keeps on till Monday night. “I like to see what they’re doing,” he tells me. “It’s a better game now. You know who I’d like to play for? [University of Florida coach] Steve Spurrier.”
Our lunch is over, and we head for the cars. “Oh, I don’t get to see you guys much anymore,” Baugh says in farewell, and his friends embrace him.
“I never told you this,” Royal says. “When my first son was born, I named him Sammy Mack Royal.”
“Shouldn’t oughta done that to him,” the legend replies.
As we watch him amble through the lobby, I ask Royal, “You named your son after him? Did you know him?”
“No, I didn’t know him. And I never saw him play. But he was my hero.”
“He was the only quarterback I ever heard of,” says Walker, blue eyes gleaming.
Maybe that’s the worth of it, I think, while the others go on and I stop at the office to settle our account. The game’s the bond that enables them to stay in reach of that time when the stadium grass was fragrant and pretty and they were fleet and honored boys.
Moving around the office as I wait for my change is the manager of the country club. “Football,” he says with disdain to workers in the office. “I don’t care a thing about it. I’ll tell you what I do when it comes on. I cook. I do the laundry. I’d never heard of any one of those guys.”
It’s your misfortune, mister. And none of my own.
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