Darrell K Royal longtime coach of University of Texas that led them to 3 national championships, died today in Austin after suffering from a long bout of alzheimers.
The eyes of Texas are upon you!
Woah, I had no idea he was that close. Daddy Royal was HUGE back in the day. Those of us rooting for other SWC teams despised him for their success but you couldn’t help but grudgingly admire him for the same reason. One helluva coach and beloved by UT. That’s going to be one large funeral.
Maybe they’ll name a stadium after him…
I know it’s considered bad form to speak ill of the dead, but somebody has to.
Darrell Royal won several championships at Texas, but he left the team in bad shape, for a reason that it’s taken decades to rectify: the guy would not or could not recruit black players.
Here’s a trivial tidbit for sport fans- the 1969 Texas Longhorns were the last all-white team to win an NCAA football championship!
Was Royal a racist? Probably not- the black men who DID finally get to play for him (like Roosevelt Leaks and Lawrence Sampleton) thought and spoke highly of him. More likely,
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The top administrators and richest alumni at UT were racists who didn’t want an integrated team, and Royal didn’t have the guts to fight them on that point.
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Royal was WINNING, which sort of dampens the sense that changes are needed urgently. If the Longhorns had gotten some butt-kickings from a few integrated teams, Royal might have gotten the message sooner.
Ah, but speaking of “Sooner”…
The University of Oklahoma was more than happy to come into Texas and woo the great black athletes Darrell Royal couldn’t be bothered recruiting. Barry Switzer made Norman, Oklahoma, the most popular destination for the best black footall players in Texas, and it STAYED that way for decades, even after Texas saw the error of their ways and started TRYING to recruit black players.Switzer could tell Texan Greg Pruitt, “Texas doesn’t want you, but I do. I’ll treat you right and I’ll give you every opportunity you deserve.”
Black families in Texas have long memories, and decades after Royal was gone, they still often told their kids that Texas is a racist school and that they’d be better off at Oklahoma.
The moral: racism isn’t just evil, it’s STUPID!
astorian, there’s so much unfactual information in your post it’s funny.
I had not heard those allegations as that was a little before my time. Here’s an Austin Chronicle article from '96 that provides a bit of reflection.
Funny? Good- explain where I’m wrong and crack up everybody else.
Do you deny that Texas had an all-white football team as late as 1969?
Do you deny that Barry Switzer scooped up most of Texas’ best black players for years afterward?
Do you deny that Texas had a losing record when Royal resigned?
But you’re going to imply that he was anyway. :rolleyes:
Texas football integrated in 1969. Barry Switzer was not head coach of OU until 1973. Your timeline makes no sense. From '67 to '73 Chuck Fairbanks was OU’s head coach. Greg Pruitt graduated from high school in 1968. Switzer did not recruit Pruitt to OU.
For the 20 years after DKR retired 1977-1996, in the Red River Rivalry the record between UT against OU was 10-8-2. During the first 11 years of those two decades while Switzer was OU’s head coach the record was 5-5-1. Doesn’t look like UT was outshined by OU after Royal retired.
Nice try at revisionist history.
Fact: Texas was filled with outstanding black football players.
Fact: Darrell Royal knew they were there and waited until the last possible minute to recruit any of them.
Fact: Oklahoma stepped in to take the players Darrell Royal turned up his nose at.
You haven’t even tried to refute that, because you can’t.
As I said earlier, Darrell Royal PROBABLY wasn’t a racist. The black players he DID eventually recruit liked him. The fact remains, he didn’t rock the boat. He had the standing and the clout to tell the regents and the boosters, “Come on, boys, we HAVE to integrate if we want to succeed in the long run.”
Racist or not, he DIDN’T do that. He didn’t even try. His biggest rivals took full advantage, and were able to paint Texas as a racist school for decades afterward.
As for my timeline, Barry Switzer started working at Oklahoma in 1966. He wasn’t head coach until much later, but he was Oklahoma’s #1 recruiter. NOBODY has ever been better at recrutiing and bonding with black players than Switzer.
Not being a follower of college football, I had never heard of the guy, but I guess to those who do this was pretty big news. So big, that of the three hour-long boxing matches I had recorded on ESPN Classic last night, every single one of them was preempted by the same Royal retrospective.
Go read “Meat on the Hoof” by Gary Shaw, and you may develop a different opinion of Royal than the common semi-heroic one.
Although only a kid, I read that when it first came out. Sure helped put my own seemingly long and hot football practices in perspective.
Reading more on Royal than I had before I’m left with the sense that while there certainly were a number of things he could have been more exemplary in, he was in large part a product of his time and should be judged in that context. And while Switzer may have embraced intergration earlier, knowing him it wasn’t out of any sense of fairness, altruism or because it was just.
You’re right- Barry Switzer should not be confused with Martin Luther King. He was a charming cheater who ran a famously corrupt program.
That said, Switzer really DID bond with black players in a way few white coaches in any sport ever have. And that’s partly because he was very loyal to them. Black head coaches in NCAA football are rare. John Blake is one of the few black men who’ve ever gotten to coach an elite colllege football program (he didn’t do a very good job when he had it, obviously), and he got that oppportunity because Barry Switzer went to bat for him!
In sports, idealism AND self-interest should BOTH have led teams to seek out the best players they could find, regardless of color!
My favorite baseball team, the Yankees, were extremely slow to sign black players. They kept an all-white roster for 8 years after the Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson. Why? Partly because GM George Weiss was a racist, but partly because the Yankees were winning the World Series every year! As long as you’re winning with an all-white team, you don’t feel much pressure to change.
BOTH the Yankees and the Longhorns were so successful for so long with all-white teams that they waited much too long to integrate, and in the long run, it cost them dearly.
Overall University of Texas athletics began to integrate in 1963. The football team had a couple of black players on the Freshman team in 1967. The first black player to play on varsity wasn’t until 1970 though. Here’s what Royal had to say.
[QUOTE=DKR]
If you’re saying we should have done it sooner, I agree with you. All of us should have, not just the University of Texas. When LeVias hit in 1966, that was when people began to change their attitudes, and let me say a lot of us needed some attitude changes…. Some people did question the old ways, and that’s the reason we had the change. Now, today, I can look back and wonder why I didn’t question it.
[/QUOTE]
Considering Texas’s generally liberal social attitude compared to other schools in the region, they should have been the first to integrate. Royal no doubt had the clout to make it happen.
Texas certainly has nothing to brag about when it comes to integration, but they integrated right around the same time as every other big school in the region. LSU was in 1972, Alabama was in 1971, Arkansas was in 1970.
astorian, your post still is laughable, threadshitting and all.
I got no loyalty to UT, but your angst over UT’s recruiting policies in the 60’s is a bit misplaced. And however you want to slam it, it didn’t have the negative impact on Texas’ program through the 80’ and 90’s as you claim.
I’m glad I gave you a laugh on such a tragic occasion.
Nobody else is laughing, I’m still right, and you’re still wrong.
Darrell Royal, like Adolph Rupp, was a great, brilliant coach in his heyday, but their legacies are at least partly tarnished by their refusal to see the obvious and to act on what they saw.
Last time: can you possibly deny that Barry Switzer won national championships in 1974 and 1975, largely with Texas-born players that Darrell Royal didn’t bother to pursue?
And if you think the Longhorns DIDN’T collapse in the Eighties and the Nineties, you’re out of your mind (I’m surrounded right now by Longhorn fans who are terrified of their apparent return to the dismal days of David McWilliams and John Mackovic).
The problem is that you are attributing the down turn in the '80s and '90s to the wrong reason. It comes down to: 1) Poor head coaching; and 2) rise of their rivals. The only periods of any real success that Texas A&M had was during their cheating heyday of the '80s and '90s. SMU rose to be good as a result of cheating in the '80s. Houston became good as a result of an innovative offense in the late '80s. Oklahoma was always good but their cheating was absolutely rampant during the '80s. Meanwhile, Texas had two absolute duds as head coaches in McWilliams and Mackovic. Recruiting black players has not been a problem. There probably wasn’t a less friendly school to black players than Texas A&M but they did just fine in the '80s.
Just don’t say that UT didn’t cheat just as horribly as the rest of the SWC and Big 12, because that would be absurd.
Yes, absurd unless you actually look at objective facts such as seasons on probation or post-season bans. Of the SWC schools plus Oklahoma, no school has spent less time on NCAA probation than Texas, and Texas has never been banned from post-season play. Contrast that with the records of SMU, Oklahoma, and A&M and there is no contest. It is one thing to say that everybody cheats to some degree. It is another to try to make it seem like everybody has a record like SMU. Simply put, there is a difference between buying a kid a hamburger on a recruiting visit versus buying them a Trans Am. There is a difference between self-reporting a violation and stonewalling an investigation.
The only way to equate them is to somehow believe that Texas just never gets investigated because of how powerful they are. That falls apart when you consider the other big powerful schools like Alabama, Florida, Ohio State, Oklahoma, and USC all have significantly more infractions than Texas.
So, I guess the question would be, if they are all equally bad, why doesn’t Texas get sanctioned when other similar schools do?
My suspicions are that the Austin media is so UT-friendly, that they don’t go digging dirt.
It just seems very, very suspicious that most of the decent SWC teams of the 1980s and 1990s seem to have been caught up in some kind of recruiting scandal at some point, and so have most other perennially good programs in the past 30 years, with the exception of UT, who seems to be squeaky clean, despite being in a state as prone to athletic crookery as Texas is.