Sports
Earl Campbell
Is Campbell about running a business? Take your hits and keep moving forward.
(Page 2 of 2)
“I was always afraid that if a running back lifted weights he wouldn’t be loose,” Campbell says now. “But I didn’t tell Bum that. Those were just my beliefs. He said, ‘Well, I’m gonna have to fine you five thousand dollars if you don’t, so from now on, you go in there and do something.’ After that I’d mess around in there, but I didn’t really lift weights. I didn’t like it.”
When Campbell joined them, the Oilers were a talented team dogged by past failures. Any doubts about the value of their number one draft choice vanished in an early game against the playoff-seasoned Los Angeles Rams. Campbell has bowlegs, and in his tailback’s stance, he planted his feet wide, hands on his knees. He looked like a miniature tank. He took a pitchout and started left, then seemed to dislike what he saw, for he shifted direction and weight, his right foot coming far off the ground. The Rams had a proud star linebacker named Isiah Robertson, and he had a straight shot at Campbell. Somehow, in two steps, the running back gathered the power of his immense legs and, like a charging rhino, drove headfirst into Robertson’s chest. The linebacker landed on his back. Campbell stormed on through heavy traffic, switching the ball to his left hand and waving it around as he tried to land a stiff-arm with the right—which he threw with the shock and power of a George Foreman jab—while another Ram bumped along behind him and tried to hang on, tearing off his jersey.
Campbell looks sad when I bring up that play. He sighs and says, “I don’t talk about that play much. It was a fair play, but every way I could, I have let it be known to Isiah Robertson that I was doing my job, he was doing his job, and there was nothing personal between us. Sometimes the media can take a play and run it over and over so much. I think that damaged his life a little bit.”
Luv Ya Blue: The sea of powder blue pom-poms and echoed bedlam in the Astrodome were born the November night in 1978 when Campbell ran for four touchdowns and 199 yards as the Oilers beat the powerful Miami Dolphins, 35 30. Howard Cosell later called it the best of all of ABC’s Monday night games, and with that performance a Texas reputation went nationwide—Campbell was destined to rank as one of the all-time greats. It’s hard to explain the near-hysteria of Houston’s adoration of its football heroes then, for it was so evanescent. (Over the years, the Oilers would build a record as such heartbreakers and losers that they would scarcely be mourned when Adams moved the franchise to Tennessee in 1997.) He fired Bum Phillips in 1980, and just like that, Luv Ya Blue was over. Campbell banged on through the Oilers’ decline, losing a step or two and taking a beating. As the coach of the New Orleans Saints, Phillips traded for Campbell in mid-1984. Campbell didn’t deliver, and Phillips again got fired. In 1986 Campbell reported in top shape, but one night at training camp he told a coach, “Listen, I’m not very interested in football.” He’d given the pros eight years, and that was enough. He made calls to alert his mom and his two father figures, Royal and Phillips. Suddenly he was on a plane, going home to Texas. “I told this stewardess, ‘Bring me a six-pack of beer,’” Campbell recalls.
“She said, ‘Sir, we’re just going to Houston.’
‘I don’t care. How much does a six-pack cost?’”
“I never looked back,” he says. “That’s why I got those beers, to help me keep it right in my mind. I didn’t look out the window at New Orleans or nothing else. I looked straight ahead, thinking, ‘I am an ex-football player. I got a college education, and I’m gonna do my thing.’”
But of course he does look back. The press release about his bankruptcy begins: “As an NFL Hall-of-Fame running back, Earl Campbell was known for being able to take a direct hit, regain his balance, and keep going forward. In football it’s called ‘yards after contact.’ Now Campbell is displaying the same ability on the playing field of big business.”
The allusion is to Campbell’s greatest hit, or at least his favorite. In 1979, on the goal line against the Oakland Raiders, he drove off-tackle. All-pro defensive back Jack Tatum, nicknamed “the Assassin” for his brutal tackling, got lower than Campbell and launched all his weight and power in a helmet-first tackle. Houston quarterback Dan Pastorini said the noise of their collision was like a train wreck. Tatum fell on his backside, stunned. Campbell bent far back, but the strength of his back, hamstrings, and will jerked him upright, and he staggered in for the touchdown. “Jack came up to me after that game,” he recalls, “and said, ‘I gave you the best I got.’ I told him, ‘That’s the best I got too.’”
Campbell knows his physical condition today is the accumulation of such impacts. “For a long time everything was still attached pretty good,” he says. “But all those years of knocking and banging—there are some things you ain’t supposed to do to that body. And when you get older, it comes back and says, ‘Hey, remember me? How you did all that to me? That’s flesh and bone, man.’”
And he has learned that force of will can come up short too. For years his line of sausages, sauces, and other barbecue products seemed to thrive. Then in October 1999 he and his partners opened his Austin restaurant, Earl Campbell’s, on Sixth Street. The place was well furnished with Texas decor and memorabilia, including his Heisman trophy. The food got decent reviews, and the restaurant usually had a good crowd at lunchtime. But overheads are high on Sixth Street, and the location is not kind to dinner revenue—the roving kids want booze, music, jostle. This February, brown paper went up over the windows, and the landlord announced that the restaurant was locked up for failure to pay the rent. Campbell’s name was on the failure.
“I don’t know that business,” he says of the restaurant trade, shaking his head. “This was the first time in my life I ran up against a wall, that I ran up on something I just couldn’t do.” So he had to seek protection in bankruptcy court. In business it happens all the time. It’s just not supposed to happen to an Official State Hero of Texas.
“I went to church one Sunday,” he says, “and our reverend said, ‘When you’re in the pits of life, God knows. He’ll let you get down there, because maybe you forgot a little bit, but then He’ll come get you out of that pit. He just says, “Step,” and you rise on up.’ I think that guy knew I needed to hear that.”
A friend of many years named Danny Janecka helped Campbell start over and get back to doing what he knows—persuading retailers to give shelf space to his line of food products. And Campbell’s spirits have rebounded. He helps entertain families of recruits at UT games, and as a special assistant to the president, he counsels Longhorn athletes. He’s still married to the woman who caught his eye when he was in the ninth grade. “We’ve been together ‘most all our lives,” he says, then tilts his head and smiles. “It ain’t been easy.” He dotes on his sons, one a college freshman who runs track, the other a high school freshman who loves football. He talks on the phone to Royal and sees him at games. He goes fishing and plays dominoes with Bum Phillips. “Y’all can watch him in the movies,” Phillips said at Campbell’s induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1991. “I can watch him in my memory.”
Campbell knows that nostalgia can be a cage in the past. Not all of his decisions have been wise, and some memories hurt like his hands and knees. “That number twenty on the University of Texas, he’s no more,” he says. “That number thirty-four on the Houston Oilers, he’s gone too. But the guy who wore those numbers, he’s still the same. God just gave him something else to do. I’m nothing but a simple man.”
Pages: 1 2
My Library
