Bitter Rivals
W. K. Stratton's new book, Backyard Brawl, dissects the football feud between the state's two largest universities.
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WKS: You know, a lot of people don't know that UT had a bonfire years and years ago. There's a section in Gary Shaw's book about a bonfire held down on Town Lake before the A&M game. I don't know, I didn't research this and it'd be hard to research, but I've heard people say that UT might have had the first bonfire. I don't know about that. But it went away in the early to mid-seventies. The reasons I kept coming across were that it was considered to be a pollution hazard. That would make sense that UT would want to get rid of it for that reason. But the UT bonfire was part of its tradition for a long time, and for whatever reason, they decided that it wasn't the best thing to keep going with. Obviously, UT football hasn't been hurt by it. I think A&M will find a way to go on. I personally don't think Bonfire will be back, and I'm not sure that it should be, it's just too dangerous.
texasmonthly.com: Definitely there were some heroes produced by this rivalry—Darrell K. Royal, D. X. Bible, Earl Campbell, and Bear Bryant. Do you think there are any heroes today, or maybe some guys with the real potential to become heroes?
WKS: I think R.C. Slocum is a hero, and I don't think his heroics are going to be appreciated until he's no longer coach. People are going to step back and look at what happened during the 29 years, I guess 30 years now, that he's been associated with A&M. R.C. and I talked quite a lot about Emory Bellard, another one of those heroic figures who has been credited with developing the wishbone. R.C. said that the first year he went to work with Emory there had been few black players at A&M. The first thing Emory did—and R.C. participated in this—was recruit six African American players, maybe nine. R.C. said it was not a popular decision at the time and at A&M, but R.C. was part of that. You go there now, and it's like most major college programs: You have African American athletes in leadership positions and holding down many places on the team and no one even thinks about that, it's just accepted. But at the time when R.C. Slocum was involved with Emory Bellard in doing this stuff, it was groundbreaking. And then A&M was an outlaw program when R.C. was an assistant, and he's done a lot to get that turned around. It's a pretty clean program these days. Given the kind of a reputation that they had when Jackie Sherrill was the coach, that's a pretty big turnaround. R.C. has been part of giving A&M consistent winning. UT went twenty years with Darrell and had a winning season every year. That kind of thing has just only recently happened at A&M; it was always in spurts, feast or famine, before. I think R.C. is gonna get a lot of kudos when he steps down at some point and people can look back and get a picture of what's going on. So yeah, I think R.C. is heroic. Mack Brown hasn't been around long enough yet. If he wins a national championship in the next year or two, that would seal that. I don't know what Mack's long-term goals are. I don't know if he's gonna be a guy who sticks around for twenty years or if he's gonna want to try his talents in the NFL at some point. But if he decides that Texas is it for the long term and keeps Texas back in national prominence and things like that, he'll be a hero. Major Applewhite is a hero. You know people talk about him in the same breath that they talk about James Street and others like that. He's never won a national title, but he had so many amazing games and saved himself from the fire so many times.
texasmonthly.com: Do you think that because Major Applewhite has gathered such a god-like following that Chris Simms has been given a bad rap?
WKS: That obviously can't be easy for Simms, but all Simms had to do was beat OU, or beat Colorado. Chris Simms is a wonderful athlete. He has a lot of talent, and he's very young. He started playing as a true freshman, right out of high school. If Chris had won some big games, it wouldn't have mattered what kind of legacy Major had or not, but he just hasn't done that yet. Maybe this is his year. He's gonna have plenty of opportunities.
texasmonthly.com: I was thinking about the different aspects of the rivalry and the things that have evolved from it. What do you think are the really great things that have evolved from this rivalry? And what do you think some of the bad things have been?
WKS: Obviously, there are bad things, even as recently as the mid-nineties when we had the last Southwest Conference Championship determined at a game over at Kyle Field. Who knows who acted or overreacted, but you know in a rivalry of this kind you've always got that potential of fisticuffs breaking out—and that seems to be the worst part.
texasmonthly.com: What about the good stuff?
WKS: There is this enormous good-natured kidding that goes on. I think that whole "EATME" thing and things like that are just a hoot. I don't think that too many Ags who'll read that will be horribly upset by it. In a bigger sense, I don't think that either school wants to let the other school get a leg up on 'em, and so that's going to prompt the alumni of both universities to keep the endowments up and make sure the faculty is outstanding. People from those schools like it when they come out in the U.S. News and World Report ahead of the other.
texasmonthly.com: This is your first book?
WKS: That's right, first book.
texasmonthly.com: Well, what prompted you to write this book, beyond simply wanting to create a sense-of-place book for Texas?
WKS: A year ago in April Jan Reid and I drove up to Dallas for a meeting of the Texas Institute of Letters. We were going into a banquet, and Jan was approached by this fellow, a literary agent from Dallas, who said, "Hey, listen Jan, are you interested in doing a book about UT and A&M?" He said, "Nah, I'm booked up right now." So Jan and I went in and sat down, and as we waited for the traditional rubberized chicken that you get at these things, Jan looked over at me and said, "Did you want to do this book?" I'd been thinking about it since that little conversation. I was in the process of changing agents, and I got hooked up with David McCormick. Jan was a good friend of David's, and he mentioned to David this book. So I got hooked up with David through that conversation, and we kicked around what would work and I wrote a proposal. So that's how it came to be, and I'm really glad that things worked out that way.
texasmonthly.com: Well, I think things worked out well. But are you worried at all? This is an emotionally charged rivalry. As you go into quite a bit in the book, this means a whole lot to a whole lot of people. Do you think you might piss off some of the wrong people?
WKS: It's always a possibility. I worked as a newspaper writer for ten years and I did probably a couple dozen magazine articles over the years, and I'm always amazed at what people like, what people completely ignore, and what pisses people off. Sometimes it's the most innocuous things. But when it was in manuscript, I had a number of Aggies and Longhorns read it and they came back saying, "Yeah, this tells the story, yeah." So I think I managed to keep from pissing too many people off.
texasmonthly.com: Despite the fact that you followed the 2001 season as the focus, this is a book with a great deal of history. What piece of that history did you find most fascinating?
WKS: Everybody knows the story of the branding of Bevo, the 13—0 and all that. But why did they choose the word "bevo"? It was possible to come up with some different combinations, but Anheuser-Busch had marketed successfully a light beer, called "Bevo," which was popular on the UT campus. And it was intentionally named Bevo so that it would be like Budweiser's take on "Pivo," which is what Czech Texans call their home brew. I thought that was wonderful. In fact, there's a building at the Busch Brewery in St. Louis called the Bevo Building, named for that product. I thought that was really interesting.
texasmonthly.com: I had never realized how big the branding was. When you described the way it took up one side of the bull, I had to wince a little at the thought.
WKS: That poor steer. He had a tough time of it—getting butchered at the end. A lot of people think all Bevos end up on the barbecue table, but the first was the only one.
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