Rusk and Kimbro built no big houses and bought no extra cars, but they did almost desperately long for some way to express their wealth, and it was in this uneasy mood that they discovered football; not Texas A&M football or University of Texas football, but Larkin High School football, and in those years, once an oilman or a well-to-do rancher became alerted to the grandeur of Texas high school football, he was lost, for he developed a mania which lasted forever, growing each year more virulent.
It started because such men worked hard all week—Dewey Kimbro never ceased looking for oil—and longed for some vigorous relaxation on the weekends. There was hunting, and fishing, and breeding cattle and breaking horses, but in time these palled, and it was then that these men plunged into the Friday afternoon madness.
In those days Texas had no worthy professional football teams, or basketball, either, and good baseball teams played far to the north in St. Louis. Even the universities were far to the east, but there was always the local high school football team, and in time its partisans became as madly concerned with its fortunes as men elsewhere became involved emotionally with the New York Yankees or the Detroit Tigers. Competing area teams, like Wichita Falls, Jacksboro, Abilene and Breckenridge, became monsters who had to be subdued, fair means or foul, and the glorious days of autumn in Texas became heroic.
The mania started casually, with Rusk and Kimbro attending a Friday game in which Larkin’s small high school was playing Jacksboro, which had a slightly larger student body. It was a good game, nothing special, with scattered scoring in the first half and Larkin holding on to a 19–14 lead as the game drew to a close. Jacksboro had the ball and it looked as if they might score, for they had mounted a determined drive down the field, but as the seconds ticked away, both Rusk and Kimbro started shouting: ‘Hold that line! Get them!’ and the roar of the little hometown crowd must have taken effect, for the Larkin men—average age sixteen—did muster courage from somewhere and they did hold.
It was fourth down and nine, twenty seconds to go, with the crowd roaring encouragement, when the Jacksboro coach signaled his captain to call for time-out. Always alert in such situations, Rusk noticed that the coach was wigwagging frantically from the lines, and he whispered to Kimbro: ‘I don’t like this. Something’s up.’
It was a play which would be discussed for years on the oil fields, because just before the whistle blew to resume, Jacksboro made a last-second substitution. A tall end was taken out of the game, and a much shorter boy was inserted, a fact which caused Rusk to tell Kimbro: ‘Now that’s crazy. They have to pass. You’d think they’d keep the tall fellow in there.’
However, the tall end did not quite come off the field. With the attention of the Larkin team and most of the spectators focused on the kneeling linemen as they prepared for the last play, Rusk saw to his horror that the tall end had not left the field. He had run purposefully to the sidelines but had stopped one foot from the chalk, remaining legally in bounds. At that moment, on the far side, another player calmly stepped off the field, leaving the required eleven players eligible for the final play.
Rusk was one of few who saw the evil thing the Jacksboro coach was doing, and he began punching his seatmate in the arm and screaming ‘Pick him up,’ and Dewey bellowed ‘Hey, he’s eligible!’ But no one could hear the two oilmen, and when the ball was snapped, the Jacksboro quarterback coolly dropped back and lofted the ball easily across the field to his tall end, who caught it and ran untouched into the end zone: final score, Jacksboro 20, Larkin 19.
Rusk and Kimbro went berserk. Roaring out of the stands, they shouted that someone ought to shoot any sumbitch who would pull such a trick. They wanted the referee banned for life. And they shouted loudly that never again should a team from Jacksboro be allowed on that field. When Kimbro finally cooled Rusk down they sought some other oil-field men, with the proposition: ‘Let’s waylay their bus before it gets out of town and give that coach a thrashing,’ and they went in search of it, but the Jacksboro team, fearing just such action, had scuttled out before sunset.
In the angered days that followed, Rusk gave orders that no employee of his should ever purchase anything, no matter how small, from any outfit in Jacksboro, and when he was forced to go there on business, he spat on the sidewalks when no one was looking.
Of course, when Wichita Falls came down and administered a 31–7 drubbing, he gave the same orders about that infamous town, charging it with having brought in ringers who had never set foot in a Wichita Falls classroom, and Kimbro joined him in condemnation. In their new-found hatred for Jacksboro and Wichita Falls, the two former adversaries buried their suspicions of each other.
It was Dewey who had the bright idea: ‘Floyd, if Wichita Falls hires outsiders, why can’t we?’ Assembling the Larkin millionaires, they proposed that ‘we do something to restore the honor of this town,’ and Rusk threw himself into this project with all the energy he had once given to the Ku Klux Klan. He and his men gave the coach, a mild-mannered fellow, a hundred dollars a month in cash to spend as he deemed best. Rusk himself built a dressing room at the edge of the field so that, as he was fond of saying, ‘Larkin can go first class.’ The oilmen scouted the region for big, tough boys and moved their families into Larkin so that the lads could play on the local team, and when the next autumn came around, it was obvious that Larkin High had a fighting chance to become a football power.
One morning, when Rusk delivered his mother’s royalty check to her—more money than she and Earnshaw had spent in a dozen years—he found her playing with his son Ransom, a big-boned child, and he cried impulsively: ‘Damn, I wish he was old enough to play for Larkin!’ Catching the boy and throwing him high in the air, he caught him and started running through the room like a halfback. Dropping the child back in his crib, he shook his finger at him: ‘Son, you’re gonna see real greatness in this town. And maybe you’ll even be on the team yourself, some day.’
He then turned his attention to the serious problem of finding an appropriate name for what he now called ‘my team,’ and he found that the desirable names had been preempted: Lions, Tigers, Bears, Bearcats, Panthers, Pirates, Rebels, Gunslingers, Hawks. Any animal whose behavior was terrifying had been used, any role requiring violent or even murderous deportment had been adopted by some small school in the area. One town famous for its hunting called its team the Turkeys, an unfortunate name, but Larkin did little better. By a process of painful elimination it came up with the name of a beast once common in those parts, the antelope, and when this was reluctantly adopted, a more difficult problem arose, because every Texas team had to be the Fighting This or That: the Fighting Tigers, the Fighting Buffalo, the Fighting Wildcats. So it had to be the Fighting Antelopes, even though, as Rusk said: ‘There’s no man in Texas ever saw an antelope fight anything.’
Under their new leadership, and with a level of support from the oilmen that they had never known before, Larkin’s Fighting Antelopes had an autumn of glory, up to a point. The team played nine regular games, and won them all. As Rusk boasted at the morning breakfasts in the café: ‘We really crucified Jacksboro, thirty-seven to six.’ They manhandled Breckenridge, too, 41–3, and they even took much bigger Wichita Falls to the cleaners, 24–7. When they won the regional championship in a tight game against Abilene, 9–7, it became clear to Rusk and his associates that ‘our team can go all the way,’ and the heady prospect of a state championship began to be discussed seriously.
‘By God, if we can win our next game,’ Rusk bellowed in the café, ‘we’ll get a crack at Waco,’ but his enthusiasm for such a game distressed the coach of the Fighting Antelopes, for he knew the facts, which he tried to explain to Rusk and Kimbro: ‘We’ve played some good teams, yes. But Waco, they’re much different.’
‘Are you chicken?’ Rusk demanded, and the coach surprised him by saying: ‘Yes. Our little team would have no chance against Waco.’
‘You oughta be fired!’ Rusk bellowed. ‘What kind of talk is th
is, welshing on your own team?’
‘Mr. Rusk, Waco is coached by Paul Tyson. Does that mean anything?’
‘He puts his pants on one leg at a time, don’t he?’
‘Yes, but when he gets them on, he’s something special.’ Almost in awe the coach recited the fearsome accomplishments of that Waco powerhouse: ‘One year the Waco Tigers scored a total of seven hundred eighty-four points; opponents had thirty-three.’
‘Who did they play?’ Rusk asked. ‘The Sisters of Mercy?’
‘The best. Of course, there was one game with the Corsicana Orphans Home, one hundred nineteen to nothing.’
‘Did the Orphans have eleven men?’
‘Only thirteen, but they were a real team.’
‘No real team loses by a hundred points.’
‘Against Waco they do,’ the worried coach said, and he continued: ‘They brought down a team from Cleveland, Ohio. National championship. Waco, forty-four, Cleveland, twelve. And in their best year, Waco, five hundred sixty-seven, opponents, zero, with no opposing team ever moving the ball inside the Waco thirty-five-yard line. And you ask me if I’m scared.’
But Rusk and his optimistic oilmen were not, and when the Fighting Antelopes won their thirteenth straight game—for high schools played barbarous schedules—the big showdown with Waco for the state championship became inevitable. Most of Larkin and all of Waco found ways to get to Panther Park in Fort Worth that memorable Saturday afternoon. For a mere high school game, more than twenty thousand showed up; the newspapers had skillfully promulgated the myth that in this age of miracles, Antelopes had an outside chance of defeating Tigers.
It was a day Floyd Rusk would never forget; it eclipsed in significance even that wonderful morning when Rusk #3 came in with its verification of the Larkin Field, because this game would be remembered as one of the extraordinary events in the annals of Texas sporting history, but not in a way that Rusk would have wished: Waco Tigers 83, Larkin Antelopes o.
Before the excursion train left Fort Worth, copies of a Dallas newspaper with mocking headlines were available: IT REALLY WAS TIGERS EATING ANTELOPES, and during the train ride home, Rusk took an oath. Brandishing the offensive paper in the faces of his friends, he swore: ‘This will never happen again. If we have to chew mountains into sand, it will never happen again.’
Assembling any oilmen who had gone to the game, he extracted promises that Larkin would regain its honor, regardless of cost, and Dewey Kimbro supported him: ‘Whatever you need, Floyd. The dignity of our town must be restored.’
Prowling the train to locate the unfortunate coach whose prophecy of Waco invincibility had proved correct, the fat man snarled: ‘You’re fired. No team of mine loses by more than eighty points. Tomorrow we start searching for a real coach.’
Revenge for the dreadful humiliation in Panther Park became Rusk’s obsession, and as he roamed the state looking for what he called ‘my kind of coach,’ he kept hearing of a man in a small school near Austin, and men who knew football assured him: ‘This here Cotton Hamey, he’s a no-nonsense coach, knocks a kid on his ass if he don’t perform,’ so Rusk telegraphed three of his oilmen to come down from Larkin to look the young genius over.
As soon as the committee met Hamey they knew they had their man. He had gone to A&M to learn animal husbandry, but had been so good at football that he switched to coaching, with the not unreasonable hope that one day he might return to his alma mater in some capacity or other, line coach perhaps, or even head coach, for he had the intelligence to handle either job.
They met a man who stood only five feet eight but who was still a crop-headed bundle of muscle and aggression. In college he had been such a relentless opponent that sportswriters had started a legend, which still clung to him: ‘At the training table they feed him only raw meat, two pounds with lots of gristle at each sitting.’ Nicknamed Tiger, he told one sportswriter: ‘I like to play in the other team’s backfield,’ and this imaginative reporter produced a great line: ‘Tiger Hamey invades the opposition backfield, grabs three running backs, and sorts them out till he finds who has the ball.’
The oilmen got right down to cases: ‘Did you see the state championship?’ and Hamey said: ‘That’s my job,’ and Rusk asked: ‘What did you think?’ and Hamey said: ‘Your team had no right being on that field.’
‘If you had unlimited power, and I mean unlimited, could you build us a championship team for next December?’
Hamey rose and walked about the meeting room, flexing his muscles. He was an attractive young man, quick in his movements, intelligent in his responses to questions, and compact both physically and mentally. He wasted little time on nonessentials: ‘I can get you into the play-offs, and Waco is losing many of its best players. But I don’t think I could beat Paul Tyson next year.’
‘Could you beat him year after next?’ Rusk asked, and Hamey said: ‘You get me the horses, I’ll get you the championship.’
‘You’re hired,’ Rusk said. He had no authority to hire or fire anyone, for that was the prerogative of the school board, but when a Texas town set its heart on a state football championship, everything else had to give, and when the oilmen returned to Larkin, the board quickly confirmed the appointment of Cotton Hamey as teacher of Texas history. On the side he would also do some coaching.
Now it became the responsibility of the wealthy oilmen to provide the horses, and as soon as Hamey was relieved of his duties at the small school near Austin, he moved to Larkin. On his first day in town he gave Rusk a list of nine boys living in various parts of Texas whom he would like to see in Antelopes uniforms when the season opened in September. When Rusk visited these boys he found they all had certain characteristics: ‘They seem to have no neck. Their legs aren’t all that big, but their shoulders … carved in granite. And they all look about twenty-two years old.’ Rusk said on one return to Larkin: ‘Coach Hamey, I don’t think any of those boys can run,’ and Hamey explained a fact of life: ‘To produce a really good team, you have to have linemen. That’s where the battles are determined, in the trenches.’
‘But you will get some runners?’
‘I have a second list, almost as important.’ And when the oilmen went to scout these boys, they found quite a different set of characteristics: ‘None of them much over a hundred and sixty. But they are quick. And only half of them seem to be in their twenties.’
When they reported back to Hamey, Rusk asked: ‘Aren’t some of these boys a trifle old?’ and he said: ‘You move them in here. I’ll worry about their ages.’
So now the oilmen began prowling the country, visiting with the parents of these young fellows and offering the fathers good jobs in the oil field, the mothers employment in the local hospital or in stores. One widowed mother said she gave piano lessons, and Rusk said: ‘You get two pianos. One for you, one for your students.’
In some twenty visits the question of grades was never raised, for it was supposed that if a boy was good enough to play for Cotton Hamey, some way would be found to keep him eligible, and as July came, Rusk could boast: ‘Not one player on that pitiful team last year will even make the squad this time.’ He was wrong. Part of the greatness of Hamey as a coach was that he could take whatever material was available and forge it into something good, so he found a place for more than a dozen of last year’s Antelopes; but he also knew that if he wanted a championship team, he had better have an equal number of real horses, and when August practice started, he had them, brawny young men from various parts of Texas, practiced hands of twenty and twenty-one who had already played full terms at other schools, and two massive linemen who must have been at least twenty-two, with college experience. In this frontier period the rules governing eligibility in Texas high school football were somewhat flexible.
On the eve of the first game, Coach Hamey convened a meeting of his backers: ‘We have a unique problem. We must not win any of these early games by too big a score. I don’t want to alert teams like Abilene or Amarillo.
And I certainly don’t want to let Waco know we’re gunning for them.’
‘What are we goin’ to do?’ Rusk asked.
‘Fumble a lot. When we get the ball, we’ll run three, four powerhouse plays to see what our men can do.’ He never used the word boys. ‘And when we’re satisfied that we can run the ball pretty much as we wish, we’ll fumble and start over. I don’t want any Waco-type scores, eighty-three to nothing.’
‘I want to win,’ Rusk said, and Hamey snapped: ‘So do I. But in an orderly way. When we go into Fort Worth this year to face Waco, I want them to spend the entire first half catching their breath and asking: “What hit us?” ’
So in the first seven games against the smaller teams of the area, Coach Hamey kept his Fighting Antelopes under wraps; 19–6 was a typical score, but as the Jacksboro game approached, at Jacksboro, Rusk begged for his team to be unshackled: ‘Erase them. Leave grease spots on the field. I believe we could hammer them something like seventy to seven and I’d like to see it.’
Hamey would not permit this, and the game ended 21–7, enough to keep the record unblemished but not enough to alert the public that Cotton Hamey had a powerhouse. However, in the Wichita Falls game, everything clicked magically, and at the end of nine minutes the Antelopes led 27–0, and the first team was yanked. ‘It could of been a hundred and seven to nothing,’ Rusk said.
The Antelopes won their division, undefeated, and then swept the regional, which placed them once more in the big finals against the supermen from Waco.
The big newspapers ridiculed the match-up, pointing out that something was wrong with a system which allowed, in two successive years, a team as poorly qualified as Larkin to reach the finals against a superteam like Waco, and all papers had long articles about the disaster of the previous year, with speculation as to whether or not the Antelopes could keep Waco from once again scoring over eighty.
There were a few cautions: ‘We must remember that Cotton Hamey does not bring any team into a stadium expecting to lose. This game is not going to be any eighty-three-to-nothing runaway. I predict Waco by forty.’