Outdoor Adventures 
The Family That Played Together
It isn’t every day that South Texas produces an NFL quarterback, let alone two, let alone two who are brothers. For their athletic feats, Ty and Koy Detmer have one man to thank: their father, a high school coaching whiz everyone calls Sonny.
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At WCJC Detmer met and courted Betty, a sixth-generation Texan from El Campo who was descended from original settlers named Woods. And he prospered on the gridiron, becoming an All-American wide receiver. But he turned down a chance to transfer to Division I Tulsa in favor of a basketball scholarship at Florida State in 1965 (he continued to play baseball as well). The playing time on the hard court never materialized, so later that year Sonny headed for San Marcos to be with Betty, who had transferred from Wharton to Southwest Texas State.
After a year of playing pinball, Sonny took a coaching and teaching job at South San Antonio High School. Soon the San Antonio Toros of the Continental Football League came calling. Detmer spent two and a half seasons playing wide receiver with them, clearing about $150 a game while still coaching and teaching at the high school. He was then traded to the West Texas Roughnecks, where he cleared a little more by driving from San Antonio to Odessa and back every week, pocketing the $60 the team provided as plane fare. At one point Detmer passed on an NFL tryout because the $22,000 minimum salary would have meant a pay cut compared with his combined income from teaching, coaching, and playing.
When he was with the Roughnecks, Sonny almost took a job at the heart of Texas high school football, as the junior varsity coach for Odessa Permian. Instead, with the CFL floundering, he stayed in San Antonio with his family. From 1969 to 1982 he held jobs at Churchhill, Somerset, Roosevelt, and Central Catholic high schools. He spent a year coaching in Laredo before returning to San Antonio and coaching at Southwest High School—where Ty made his mark—until 1988. The Detmers then spent a year in Arizona before settling in Mission, where Koy made his mark.
Sonny says he never planned on making his teams a family affair. Sure, both Ty and Koy had footballs pretty much from the crib, and both spent their childhood toddling around while Sonny watched game films, but he says he never forced the issue. “You probably push them to a certain extent in that you provide everything that you can for them to play,” he says. Both boys were natural athletes, with Koy eagerly doing everything his older brother did. But once, at the age of six, Koy decided to quit football. Sonny let him, figuring that teaching him a lesson about persistence was less important than letting him play for the right reason—because he liked it. Koy came back to it on his own.
“He never told us, ‘You need to play football,’” Koy says. “He has always just let us be what we are and encouraged us to be the best that we can at whatever we want to do. It has always been just me playing football or basketball or golf because I enjoy doin’ it. He always says if you don’t enjoy doin’ it anymore, you need to quit. That’s one thing that Sonny has been real good about.” (Ty and Koy have called their father “Sonny” pretty much since they could speak. Ty began the custom because that’s what he heard his grandparents call him.)
Even after it was clear that his kids loved the game, Sonny says he didn’t want the dual father-coach role: “I wasn’t gonna coach them. But I kept watchin’ them play and I said, ‘They’re too good not to play for me.’ There are some kids that you have to push a little bit harder to make them better players. These guys wanted to be players. You just put them out there and teach them and they have an inner drive, a fire to play.” That fire went beyond the football field: Ty excelled at basketball and baseball, and Koy starred at basketball and golf. Their obvious talent circumvented any resentment team members might have felt about the coach’s son playing quarterback. It’s hard to resent future Texas high school hall of famers—Ty is already there, Koy will be. At Southwest, Betty recalls, Ty’s black teammates nicknamed him Whip, “because he was white and smooth like Miracle Whip.”
Koy has never had to follow directly in Ty’s footsteps—they are six years apart and played at different schools. Metaphorically speaking, however, Ty was Koy’s blocking back. Ty was not heavily recruited by Texas universities—at nearly six feet even he was small, and the passing game was not yet a priority in the Southwest Conference. But after Ty set 59 NCAA records and won the Heisman at Brigham Young University, the inch-taller Koy found things easier, especially when he put up even bigger high school numbers while taking the 10—1 Mission Eagles to the state semifinals in 1990. Former University of Texas coach John Mackovic went after Koy but lost him to Colorado after Shea Morenz signed with the Longhorns. Ty and Koy also share a star-crossed history with Texas A&M. In the 1990 Holiday Bowl Ty suffered not one but two separated shoulders in a loss to the Aggies. And in 1995 Koy blew out his knee in College Station and missed the rest of the season.
Now both Detmers are in Philadelphia, where it’s unlikely they will ever compete for a job. According to Sonny, though, Koy would be the perfect backup for Ty, and vice versa. Most parents take great pains to treat their children as individuals, but from a football perspective, Sonny talks as if he has only one son. “If you like Ty, then you like Koy,” he says. “If something happens to the first one, you don’t have to change anything because they see things alike. They have the same feel for the game, so your quarterback would basically be the same guy.” The brothers are aware of this, at least subconsciously. Ty describes Koy, on and off the field, as “easygoing. Nothing gets to him; he can handle anything.” Koy on Ty: “Nothing gets to him really. He’s pretty thick-skinned about things.”
Jon Gruden, the Eagles’ offensive coordinator, says Koy was drafted on his own merits, but “we had the feeling that he would have some of the intangibles his brother had.” Gruden is an unabashed Ty fan, having first coached him when he and Eagles head coach Ray Rhodes (a Mexia native) were assistants at Green Bay. “Ty is a quality person,” Gruden says. “He has an innate feel for the position that is rare, and he has physical ability, which a lot of people don’t realize because he’s not the biggest or the strongest guy.” Sonny remains grateful to Gruden and Rhodes for allowing his son a shot at starting: “Rhodes is one of the few guys who gave him a chance, who said he could play in this league.”
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