Embarrassment of Riches
Attending Westlake High meant never having to apologize for being wealthy or successful. And if other towns hated us, it surely wasn’t our fault.
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The coolest kid in the school had one of those names that preordain junior high greatness: Dallas Allison. He was a head taller than everybody else and, despite being dramatically pigeon-toed, was by far the best athlete. He was so admired, in fact, that instead of being teased about his feet, he inspired half the guys in the grade to ape his walk, myself included. Between classes, the halls swarmed with boys who looked as if they were walking with swim fins on. But that was as far as the imitation went. Nobody could pitch or rebound like Dallas, and once he got his hardship license and started driving a maroon Porsche 924 to school—in the eighth grade—the cool gap widened.
Our envy of Dallas probably helped set the bar on our own expectations unreasonably high. If it had been only us kids confusing our wants with our needs, the Rev might have chalked it up to the muddied priorities of youth. But as Westlake’s ranks absorbed the offspring of Austin’s upwardly mobilizing professional class, the faculty came to expect such investment. When I got to high school, I sang in the ninth-grade boys’ choir. It wasn’t quite the social stigma one might expect; our honors choir perennially received perfect scores at state competition, and the student body was genuinely proud of all the school’s victories. But the choir director told me that for our performances, I’d need to buy a tuxedo. He explained it with a phrase—“Everyone has one”—that I tried to convince him had regularly failed to impress the Rev and my mom. Sure enough, when I passed the tux requirement on to the Rev, he made that familiar face and then seethed, “There are no fifteen-year-old boys who sing so well that they need a tuxedo to do it in.”
AS CONSCIOUS AS WE WERE of what one another had, we paid no mind to anyone else. Our only meaningful exchanges with other schools were at athletic events, where our opponents’ purpose was merely to be ground down and beaten. But we meant much more to them, becoming the most hated rival of every school we played. Our enrollment was too small to play against the Austin schools, so our district opponents were scattered around Central Texas, in small towns like Taylor, Georgetown, Leander, and Bastrop. Those schools had been friendly enemies for decades, but now their whole seasons could be made by beating “the Cadillac Kids.” And they built solidarity in the cause. When we played basketball games in Leander, the bleachers swelled with Taylor and Georgetown fans. The post-game walks to the parking lot grew increasingly tense.
There were plenty of reasons those rivalries grew. We were sure they didn’t like us because they didn’t like to lose. Westlake was becoming a state powerhouse, and the first step each season was winning district. Typically we did.
The wins were accompanied by a cockiness we considered our right. We’d won our first state championship in a major sport, baseball, in 1980. The team was anchored by future major leaguers Kelly Gruber and Calvin Schiraldi, true world-class athletes who played with the swagger of kids who knew they were destined for pro sports. The other schools noticed, and when Gruber quarterbacked the football team, it wasn’t unusual to see our opponents bust through a sign that read, “Kill #5!”—Gruber’s number—when they ran onto the field.
And then there was money. When other schools visited us, they had to drive past our houses. The year I graduated, new Westlake homes sold for an average of $242,000, while in Austin the number was just under $100,000. (A longtime Taylor realtor I recently spoke with—who told me “I’m sorry for you” when I admitted where I was from—said he had still never sold a house for $250,000.) And when our rivals got to our parking lot, they had to drive past our cars. The guys we called the Trans Am Clan parked in a pack by the entrance, and jacked-up pickups and Jeeps had been bounced up curbs to a grassy area under some trees. Scattered throughout the rest of the lot was every sports car imaginable—Corvettes, Porsches, 280ZXs, BMWs, and the occasional Benz. It was as rarefied and stratified as the middle-school cafeteria had been. So when we played at other schools, of course we were greeted with signs reading, “We$tlake: Your Money’s No Good Here!”
There was no reason to be ashamed of (some of) our parents’ wealth, but there were other displays that should have been rethought. The homecoming football game during my senior year was played against Del Valle, an area where the primary industries were an Air Force base and a prison. The Cardinals were eight games into a 0-10 season; our ninth-ranked football team had yet to lose, and we beat Del Valle 37—0. But the worst insult came when the visitors had to watch our homecoming queen nominees parade around the track at halftime in Mercedes convertibles.
Three months later, when we played a basketball game in Del Valle’s gym, the Cardinals fans waved dollar bills at us from their side of the court. Those of us whose parents had entrusted us with credit cards responded by waving plastic back. Then we started a chant. “We’ve got Ronny, yes we do. We’ve got Ronny, how ’bout you?”—a reference to one of our star players, a high-scoring forward who’d transferred from Del Valle to play his junior and senior years with us. (Recruiting other school’s athletes was another accusation we frequently heard.) When the Del Valle side, whose racial makeup looked much more like the rest of the state’s, responded by chanting, “We’ve got niggers, yes we do . . .,” our fans actually shut up. Then we went on to win the game.
It was an especially tumultuous basketball campaign, new levels of bad blood having bubbled up during our undefeated regular season in football. Just before the playoffs, Leander, Georgetown, and Taylor had sued the University Interscholastic League, arguing that one of those schools should be going to the playoffs instead of us because the quarterback who led us to all those victories had been ineligible. The time it would have taken to try the suit would have meant the cancellation of the entire slate of 4A playoffs, and feeling the scornful eyes of the whole state upon us, Westlake agreed to a compromise: a qualifying playoff game against Taylor at the University of Texas’s Memorial Stadium.
The Austin American-Statesman called it the Injunction Bowl and ran stories every day for almost two weeks leading up to the game. When Friday night finally came, we sat on the visitors’ side, across the field from what looked like all of Taylor, Georgetown, and Leander. Some enterprising fans had flipped the appropriate seats in the empty upper deck to spell out “Taylor Ducks.” By the end of the first quarter, a Westlake kid had snuck up there and changed the D to an S.
On the field we were treated to what baseball fans call a pitchers’ duel. The source of all the controversy, our quarterback Todd Maroney, had broken the thumb on his throwing hand in practice that week, and without him we were incapable of moving the ball. The score was knotted 7—7 at halftime, and as our offense bogged down further in the second half, the Chaps fans grew frantic.
For most of the game, I sat far from the student section, with some buddies who’d already gone off to college, guys who now thought the whole high school thing was a joke. After Taylor went up 14—7 with six minutes to play, I moved down with the kids. There, things were different, with girls crying and guys cussing. We still trailed by 7 when, with 35 seconds left and the Chaps at midfield, our coach finally sent in Maroney.
I saw the Chaps faithful erupt, everyone babbling loudly about salvation and justice. With two quick plays, Maroney moved us inside the Ducks’ 30-yard line. Then he dropped back to pass and threw straight into the hands of a small Taylor defensive back.
The next few events seemed to unfold in slow motion. The Taylor player had a clear path down the near sideline. As he ran for the end zone, he started to taunt us. Then the biggest, meanest linebacker we had jumped from the bench and laid a shoulder into the kid, picking him up like a sock monkey in a pit bull’s mouth. We thought the kid might be dead. A free-for-all brawl broke out between the players. The Taylor stands emptied while we sat in shock. A Westlake player threw his helmet across the field at a circle of Taylor coaches. It could have killed someone. After order was restored, Taylor ran out the clock, and we drove back to Westlake as losers.
Our coach handled the situation as a gentleman should, promising his players that he’d resign if they ever broke down that way again. But the cement was already dry on what was now our statewide reputation.
A BUDDY WHO PLAYED in that game later won a football scholarship to Austin College, in Sherman, where he had a teammate who’d been an opponent in high school. They became friends, and the old opponent liked to joke that when he lined up against us, our offensive line smelled like Polo cologne.
I stayed in Austin for college, attending UT and making friends with some Taylor High exes. High school was over, and we got along great, though they did give me hell when Westlake made the papers for things like installing artificial turf on the football field, wrecking a hotel on prom night, and writing unforgivable racial slurs on the visitors’ bleachers at a homecoming game.
Westlake’s official response was to circle the wagons, and the common refrain thrown up in defense was one I’d heard often: “We’re in a fishbowl here, and everybody’s waiting to take a shot at us.” It was true. The papers didn’t give the same space to our football team’s wins or our National Merit Scholars. But it’s also true that the Chaps seldom bothered to look out of that fishbowl glass at the rest of the world, and that was a part of the problem.
My own reaction was a mix of embarrassment and regret. I’d been part of the problem as well. And though I never went so far as to say “Austin” instead of “Westlake” when people asked where I was from, I did occasionally catch myself wearing my dad’s old expression.
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