Dave Campbell's Insider Notepad - 1/31/01

Dave Campbell's Insider Notepad -- 1/31/01
Campbell looks back at Baylor coaches.

Jan. 31, 2001

Editor's Note: Dave Campbell's column appears in each edition of the Baylor Bear Insider Report, available upon membership in the Baylor Bear Foundation. For information on joining the Bear Foundation, click here. For an archive of his other columns, click here.

There is an organization known as the Retired Baylor Professors and Administrators and it meets four or five times a year for lunch and an opportunity to renew old friendships and talk over old times (or new times). It currently is directed by Rufus Spain who was a longtime member of the Baylor History Department.

At a luncheon held last week Dr. Spain invited a number of former Baylor coaches to be special guests, and he included me, retired Baylor radio voice Frank Fallon, Baylor super fan Bill Logue and Baylor photograher Chris Hansen on his guest list. For that particular occasion, Rufus obviously was interpreting the word "coach" very loosely, for which I am appreciative. But it is true, of course, that over the years I have been accused a number of times of trying to coach the team. Understand, I reject the charge totally, especially when the Bears lose.

But seeing some of those old coaching faces did bring back memories. There is a saying among press box pundits that just about every coach leaves something behind for which to remember him fondly. Listening to the introductions at the luncheon, I had to agree that the statement is true.

For example, some will look at Baylor's won-loss record during the Bill Beall years and maintain that Beall left us nothing.

That's not true. Beall left us Roger Goree, who in his senior season in 1972, playing for Grant Teaff and winning consensus All-America recognition, established himself as one of the two best defensive ends Baylor has ever had. (I would rank Jack Russell, a 1940-41 standout, as Baylor's other all-timer at defensive end.)

Bill Beall, now residing in Tennessee (I think), was not present for the luncheon. But Teaff was there. So were two of his longtime assistants, Cotton Davidson and Bill Lane. So were a number of other familiar faces -- basketball's Bill Menefee, Jim Haller, Sonja Hogg and Olga Fallen, baseball's Dutch Schroeder and golf's Gene Shields, football's Ken Casner, Jack Thomas and Scott Smith (a star player under Teaff and now a member of Kevin Steele's Baylor staff), also Marie Abel and June Jarvis of the athletic front office, also current Baylor coaches Steve Smith (baseball) and Clyde Hart (track and field), also former Baylor pitching coach (and major league star) Sid Hudson.

And also Sam Boyd.

SEEING SAM AFTER all these years, tall and ramrod straight, not in the greatest of health now, not as firm of step as in his salad days but refusing to surrender to time itself, was a special treat. He lives these days on the yonder side of Lake Granbury. At the luncheon he stood out in his bright green blazer, no one could have doubted he was a Baylor man. Oldtimers came over to shake his hand, to let him know they still remembered.

Where Sam Boyd is concerned, there is much to remember.

Sam was a star in the first college football game I ever saw -- Oct. 9, 1937: Baylor 20, Arkansas 14 at old Muny Stadium in Waco. Arkansas was the SWC defending champion, armed with the likes of the great Jim Benton at end and Jack Robbins throwing the ball. But Sam and Billy Patterson and Carl Brazell and Bubba Gernand and the other Bears were too much for them.

Sam was even more the standout a few weeks later (Oct. 30) when Baylor beat TCU, 6-0 -- still remembered here as one of the greatest games I ever saw. Patterson threw a long pass to Boyd rather early in the contest to enable the Bears to score the only touchdown of the game. For the remainder of the afternoon the Bears fought off the million short passes little Davey O'Brien threw that day, completing many of them but none that reached the pay window.

That was a terrific TCU team, destined to be undefeated and untied and win the national title the next season as O'Brien became the first player from west of the Mississippi River to win the Heisman Trophy. But it couldn't beat coach Morley Jennings' Baylor Bears in 1937.

Sam was in the third class enshrined in the Baylor Sports Hall of Fame, a singular honor he shared in 1962 with such Baylor immortals as Jack Sisco and Lloyd Russell. He even got there a year ahead of his great battery mate, the do-it-all Patterson. And he was a must selection on Baylor's All-Decade Team for the Thirties.

YES, SAM LEFT US plenty to remember as a Baylor football star. He did the same as Baylor's head football coach (1956-58). His Bears in 1956 did not win the SWC championship. They were unable to break that long title drought that was already becoming a special Baylor albatross. A 6-point loss to A&M and a one-point loss to defending champion TCU cost them the title.

But that 1956 team is still firmly placed in this memory as one of the greatest Baylor teams of all time, ranking up there with Grant Teaff's two championship teams (1972 and 1980), Bob Woodruff's 1949 Bears, George Sauer's 1951 Bears, John Bridgers' 1963 Bears, and Teaff's 1985-86 Bears.

And apart from those two championship teams, Boyd's 1956 Bears might have been the best of all although the '51 Bears will argue that suggestion all night.

Certainly the '56 Bears left us with a treasure trove of memories. For example, there was that bloody knockdown and drag-out battle (which they lost, 19-13) with Bear Bryant's title-winning Aggies. Bryant on numerous occasions later termed it "the bloodiest, meanest, most vicious, most bitterly fought game one of my teams was ever in," and both Jack Pardee and John David Crow have echoed the thought. Baylor people will tell you to this day that a horrendous decision by a game official cost them a late-game fumble recovery and consequently the victory. That A&M team, undefeated, wound up No. 5 in the AP poll.

Another favorite memory centers on the end-of-season 46-13 crushing of Jess Neely's Owls (and in those days, teams just didn't do that to a Neely-coached team, that was the most points anyone had scored against Neely's Owls since World War II). Still another: Baylor's 26-7 victory over Nebraska in Lincoln, and while it is true that Nebraska in those days was not the powerhouse it is today, such a victory in Lincoln nonetheless was no small feat.

And, of course, there was the granddaddy of all delicious memories involving that '56 team, the 13-7 victory over undefeaged, No. 2-ranked Tennessee in the Sugar Bowl. That still stands as Baylor's greatest bowl victory ever, and Baylor's greatest conquest of a team that commanded such a lofty ranking.

Sam's Bears were the talk of the country after that game, and they were the pride of Waco after they flew home to take center stage in a hastily-arranged parade attended by the multitude.

SEEING SAM AT THE LUNCHEON brought back fond memories of those banner afternoons, and also of the great players Boyd recruited and left behind for his successor, John Bridgers. Their names are now among the Baylor favorites: Ronnie Bull, Ronnie Stanley, Bobby Ply, Bill Hicks, Herby Adkins, Sonny Davis.

Certainly Jim Haller left us some great memories. Who could ever forget Vinnie Johnson and Terry Teagle, Haller's two superstars of an exciting era when all roads in basketball season led to the old Heart O' Texas Coliseum.

Cotton Davidson was the centerpiece of George Sauer's "Fearsome Foursome" backfield (Davidson, Jerry Coody, L.G. Dupre and Allen Jones) of 1953 when the Bears won their first six games and got up to No. 3 in the AP poll before losing by a single point to Texas in Austin. You talk about excitement, those Bears could stir it.

Cotton could run, pass and throw, as he proved the first night I ever saw him play -- in a hard-fought high school playoff game that his Gatesville team lost to La Vega, in 1948 or '49. He had a fine career in the NFL and AFL (he was always one of Al Davis' favorites), and then returned to tutor Baylor passers and receivers for years. And now, if the rumors are correct, he's raking in the greenbacks as Gatesville's foremost undertaker.

The presence of Bill Menefee takes us back to those unforgettable years in the late 1940s when Baylor basketball with Bill Henderson as head coach and Menefee as his assistant won the conference crown in 1948 and co-titles the next two seasons. But what Baylor fans could never forget was that the '48 team emerged as the second best team in the entire U.S. of A., yielding only to a mighty Kentucky team in the NCAA championship game. And then the 1950 team finished fourth in the national playoff.

Listen, in those glory years, you counted yourself more than lucky if you could get a ticket to watch the Bears play at old Rena Marrs-McLean gymnasium. Jackie Robinson, Bill Johnson, Bill DeWitt, Don Heathington and those guys were the toast of the town. I remember one day the late Johnny Fort, a prominent Waco insurance man, brought a tall young man to the Waco Tribune-Herald editorial offices (I think Fort later admitted he had picked up the guy as a hitchhiker), introduced him as "the next Don Heathington," said he was taking him out to Baylor to meet Bill Henderson, and the entire office went crazy. Such was the hold that Baylor basketball had on Waco residents at that time.

Menefee later (1961) became Baylor's head basketball coach and gave us a number of outstanding teams that left us with plenty of fond memories, just as Olga Fallen did as Baylor's first women's hoops coach, just as Sonja Hogg did in 1998 when the Lady Bears came within three points of winning the WNIT.

Dutch Schroeder? Only recently inducted into the Baylor Sports Hall of Fame, Dutch coached Bruin baseball teams with great distinction for years. When I was sports editor of the TRIB I received a phone call one day from Darrell Royal at Texas. As UT athletic director, Royal was looking for a new baseball coach for the Longhorns. He said he was highly impressed with Schroeder. Would Dutch be available for a move to UT? In our conversation we agreed that Dutch certainly had the right stuff. But Dutch never made the move, and I'm guessing he was just too green and gold to leave.

Next month, Clyde Hart will be enshrined in the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, and the word I get is that Michael Johnson will be in Waco to cheer Clyde as he joins those select ranks (Johnson is already a member). Clyde was a track standout himself in the early years of the Jack Patterson era, and as Baylor's track and field mentor over more than three decades he has been even more of a standout. If he shows any signs of slowing down, I haven't detected it.

What I will always remember most about Clyde is his uncanny ability to find unknowns and nurture them to stardom at Baylor. In all truth, Michael Johnson was such an unknown. Now he is the best known track performer in the world, a multiple Olympic gold medal winner and world record holder, the non pareil of 200- and 400-meter runners.

My favorite memory of the Johnson-Hart team: that special night in Atlanta in the 1996 Olympics when all the flash bulbs were flashing in the stands and Michael, freshly tutored by Clyde, was down on the track, running the fastest 200 meters in history, and the guy commenting on the event on TV was groping for words that could properly measure up to Michael's epic performance -- and coming up empty.

STEVE SMITH DIRECTED the Baylor baseball team last spring to its first conference championship since 1923, and the great thing about Steve is he's just getting started. His track record at Baylor is such that he's spoiling us. We've grown accustomed to seeing his Bears win big.

Judging by Baylor's won-loss record in football in the recent past, Grant Teaff spoiled us, too. Grant arrived at Baylor, unheralded and surely unsung, in 1972 and stayed around through the 1992 campaign -- 21 seasons of memorable football, not always great but always memorable.

And certainly there was enough of the great to set Grant apart as a coach among coaches: two conference championships, eight bowl trips, a covey of All-Americans, gobs of All-SWC guys, a number of high draft picks, five or six or seven conference coach-of-the-year accolades and one national coach-of-the-year selection, that 1974 Cinderella season, that "blessed event" game against Texas in '74, 50-7 over Texas in Austin in '89 . . . hey, along in there somewhere he even "swallowed" a worm, remember?

Through it all, the good times and the not-so-good, Grant proved himself to be a man of class, honor and distinction, a great representative of Baylor University, a highly-respected spokesman for his game, his school and his profession.

Rufus Spain asked Grant to speak for all the coaches who were present for the luncheon last week, which he did with his usual eloquence. Thanks, Rufus, for inviting me. And thanks, all you guys, for the memories.