Bitter Rivals
W. K. Stratton's new book, Backyard Brawl, dissects the football feud between the state's two largest universities.
texasmonthly.com: I really enjoyed the book; I thought it was excellent. It made me laugh, it made me cry, all the fun stuff.
W. K. Stratton: Are you allied with one school or the other?
texasmonthly.com: Nah, I'm an Austinite, a transplanted Austinite, but an Austinite nonetheless. So it's UT by proxy. How about you?
WKS: Well, obviously, as you know, I'm from Oklahoma originally so I really have no personal ties, except my wife and my stepdaughter are both Longhorns. So I have the orange flag that flies outside my house on game day, and things like that. But I'm nonpartisan.
texasmonthly.com: As you probably should be.
WKS: When I talked to Ray Bowen, the president of A&M—outgoing president now—I said, "How would a student decide one way or the other?" He said, "Well, obviously, Austin is a little more of a liberal environment and UT is a little more of a liberal school, and it's an urban school. A&M is in a small town. It's a college town environment, and it's not really close to the city. But, the big thing other than that is if you want to get the full enjoyment out of an education at A&M you need to be someone who likes to join groups and enjoys being part of organizations and group activities. If you're more of a loner," he added, "you'd probably be happier at UT." So based on that, I would say the kind of people I grew up around are more likely to turn up at A&M than at UT, but I've never been much of a joiner or anything like that, so if I had to make the decision, I probably would have gone to UT.
texasmonthly.com: Do you think your general perceptions of A&M and UT before you researched and wrote this book skewed the way it came across?
WKS: Let me put it this way, as a writer, the overwhelmingly compelling story was A&M. If you look at where it came from and how it has accomplished what it has over the past thirty years, that's the kind of thing that writers are interested in. UT is obviously different, but in many ways it's similar to a place like the University of Michigan, maybe Cal Berkeley. It's a big school that has outstanding students from all around the world. It's kind of in this urban environment, and there are some fine points that set it aside, but it's not that much different than a lot of these other places. But A&M, there's no place like it. So from a writer's perspective, I think it's fascinating. My Longhorn wife might kick me in the butt for saying that.
texasmonthly.com: I came away from this book having a deep-seated and profound respect for A&M.
WKS: My take is that Texas is a lucky place to have both of these schools and to have this kind of rivalry go on. Before I got into this project, I was thinking, "How could I write a sense-of-place book?" Then some circumstances occurred, and I found out that there was interest in this kind of book. And I said, "Well if I could write this book and not make it the typical go in and hang out with jocks and get that real narrow focus and if I could write about the bigger rivalry and what's going on in Texas and what this place is like, it could be a good book to do." So it worked out, I think, pretty well.
texasmonthly.com: Do you think that writing about Texas is daunting?
WKS: It is. I wasn't born in it and I didn't spend my formative years here, but I belong here. I've known that for a long time. To get things just right—the cultural mixes, the lay of the land, the priorities, all of those sorts of things—is pretty daunting. And especially trying to put football in terms of where it belongs here. There's a Texas writer named Jay Milner. He grew up in Lubbock, and in the late thirties he was on a football team that has been known in Texas football history as the Cinderella Kids. They lost their first three games, and then their coach fell over dead with a heart attack. So here is this football team gathered around a grave—an open grave—as they're lowering the casket, and the members of the team make this pledge that they're going to win the state championship even though they are already three games in the hole. They never lost another game, and they won the state championship. These stories are everywhere in Texas.
texasmonthly.com: It's Texas, football is religion. If you grow up here, you play football at some point in your life. Did you play football?
WKS: No.
texasmonthly.com: How about growing up, were you always a fan of the sport?
WKS: Yeah, I was always a fan. I started working as a newspaper reporter as a senior in high school. On Friday nights I had to become a sports writer. I'd go out to these little towns that had six-man football, or some places they had a variant of that called eight-man football. Often these football fields would have one section of bleachers, and people would drive their pick-up trucks up and circle the rest of the field and watch the football game. Whenever the home team won, everybody'd flash their lights and honk their horns. So I was around all of that stuff. I went to a lot of OU games when I was in college, dated some Tri-Delts down at OU. If nothing else, I got to see one of my favorite football players—if for no other reason than his name—a running back OU had in the seventies called Elvis Peacock.
texasmonthly.com: You definitely have a sense of place for Texas, and it struck me that this book isn't as much about the rivalry as it is about Texas itself and how football plays into that. You also opened my eyes to just how intermingled UT and A&M really are. Many of my friends are either Aggies or Longhorns, but I never realized what the camaraderie between the two is like. The rivalry itself though, it doesn't seem to have the same intensity it did in years past . . .
WKS: I guess it depends on what you call the rivalry. Right now, on the football field, Texas has moved to a place that A&M has not. When they play this fall, given the talent that A&M has and given what Texas has and barring a bunch of injuries, I think Texas should win this game handily on its home field. It's really not going to be a competitive game, in my opinion. Unless there are some flukes that come along. But I think the rivalry has changed somewhat since the Bonfire incident. I think that caused a lot of people to take a pretty sober reflection about what's going on, what matters, and what doesn't. On the other hand, the last figure I saw stated that A&M is the number four school in size in the nation and UT is number one. Last year, U.S. News and World Report rated them tied for fifteenth. These are pretty impressive things. My home state, Oklahoma, has nothing to compare with that. And so the cultural rivalry, I think, is as intense as ever because of the numbers. Dan Jenkins told me—this is a line that they suggested I take out of the book but I thought I should leave it in—he'd never met a Longhorn in his life who thought the A&M rivalry was as important as the Oklahoma rivalry. I agree. So it's kind of weird that Texas has these two big rivalries. A&M's whole focus through the whole season is Texas. Texas is a huge rivalry from the A&M perspective, it is the thing every year. They get all cranked up about it, it's an interesting place to be, College Station, that week before the game.
texasmonthly.com: What do you think about the future of the UT-A&M game in light of Bonfire? You wrote a few moving chapters about Bonfire and what happened surrounding that. It seems like you have good insight because you are kind of on the fence about whether you think it should be reinstated.
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