Frank Andre Guridy - The Sports Revolution

THE TEXAS BOOKSHELF

Other books in the series

Bill Minutaglio, A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles: A History of Politics and Race in Texas

Stephen Harrigan, Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas

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Christine and Charles Aubrey

Roger W. Fullington

Jeanne and Mickey Klein

Marsha and John Kleinheinz

Lowell H. Lebermann, Jr.

Joyce and Harvey Mitchell

Office of UT President William Powers, Jr.

Ellen and Ed Randall

Jean and Dan Rather

Tocker Foundation

Judith Willcott and Laurence Miller

Suzanne and Marc Winkelman

THE SPORTS REVOLUTION

How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics

FRANK ANDRE GURIDY

University of Texas Press

Austin

The Texas Bookshelf

Copyright 2021 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2021

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University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Guridy, Frank Andre, author.

Title: The sports revolution : how Texas changed the culture of American athletics / Frank Andre Guridy.

Other titles: Texas bookshelf.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2021. | Series: The Texas bookshelf | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020028196

ISBN 978-1-4773-2183-6 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2184-3 (library ebook)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2185-0 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Professional sportsSocial aspectsTexasHistory20th century. | Professional sportsPolitical aspectsTexasHistory20th century. | Professional sportsSocial aspectsUnited StatesHistory20th century. | Minorities in sportsTexasHistory20th century. | Feminism and sportsTexasHistory20th century. | Civil rights movementsUnited StatesHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC GV584.T4 G87 2021 | DDC 796.09764dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028196

doi:10.7560/321836

Contents

Introduction

THE CROWD BEHIND ME ROARING! POM-POMS ARE EVERYWHERE ON DISPLAY, bellowed sports announcer Howard Cosell to a national television audience at the beginning of what turned out to be a memorable ABC Monday Night Football telecast on November 20, 1978. The matchup that evening featured two of the top teams in the National Football League (NFL). The Houston Oilers, led by their popular coach O. A. Bum Phillips and their star rookie tailback Earl Campbell, faced off against the Miami Dolphins, led by their veteran quarterback Bob Griese and their legendary coach Don Shula. The two teams were fighting for a place in the NFL playoffs; the postseason tournament featured teams with the best regular season records to compete in the league championship game.

That championship game was dubbed the Super Bowl by Lamar Hunt, the son of a millionaire oilman who exemplified the profound impact of Texas sports entrepreneurs on the expansion of professional sports in the United States. Along with Oilers owner K. S. Bud Adams, Hunt founded the American Football League (AFL) in 1960, which successfully challenged the NFLs supremacy over professional football. In 1966, Hunt, along with Dallas Cowboy general manager Tex Schramm and Southern Californianative NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, negotiated the merger of the AFL and the NFL. This agreement created the new

The Oilers-Dolphins game on that Monday night in 1978 featured many of the elements that catapulted Texas to the forefront of US sporting culture. The setting was the Houston Astrodome, Americas first indoor stadium, which was the brainchild of the visionary political leader Roy Hofheinz. Hofheinz, often nicknamed the Judge, was a former Harris County judge and mayor of Houston who saw the Astrodome putting his city on the map for occasions just like this one. After it opened its doors in 1965, the Dome changed stadium architecture with its innovative climate-controlled environment, luxury boxes, and artificial turf: the perfect symbol of technology overcoming the hostile Texas climate.

The game was televised on Monday Night Football, the hit television series created by then head of ABC Sports, Roone Arledge. Arledges program, with its paradigm-shifting three-man announcing team of Frank Gifford, Howard Cosell, and Texan Don Meredith, made pro football on Monday nights must-see TV. Football, the sport that had long been a Texas obsession, became a national sensation during the 1960s and 70s, when the game overtook baseball as the countrys most popular spectator sport. This transformation was catalyzed by television and especially by networks like Arledges ABC Sports, which televised and dramatized the game for millions of viewers. Arledges Saturday NCAA college football and Monday Night Football telecasts frequently featured Texass collegiate and professional teams, such as the University of Texas Longhorns, the Dallas Cowboys NFL franchise, and, by the mid-1970s, another emerging pro football team from the Lone Star State, the Houston Oilers.

The game also featured Earl Campbell, arguably the first black Texan sports superstar in a state where most of its black athletes had previously left their home state to pursue possibilities in the North and West. Known as the Tyler Rose, Campbells easygoing demeanor, slow country drawl, and affinity for cowboy fashions made him undeniably black and Texan. He was part of a generation of talented African Americans who were able to play on racially integrated teams because civil rights activists in the state pushed for opportunities for black athletes in the 1960s. At the same time, a new generation of white coaches and team owners realized that they needed black male players to compete on the state and national levels. Some coaches were slower to ascertain where the arc of history was headed than others, but by the 1970s, black male athletes emerged as stars on integrated sports teams in a state where the sporting culture, like everything else, had been governed by legal and customary racial segregation, a system popularly known as Jim Crow. The fact that these newly emerging integrated teams were often on national television meant that this profound social and cultural revolution was televised for all the nation to see.

The technology of the Astrodome created a noise level that reverberated through the television set. Though the contest was a professional football game, the raucous Astrodome crowd of fifty thousand fans created an enthusiastic college-like setting in the words of play-by-play man Frank Gifford. The Oilers faithful shook the Dome with loud cheers and multiple renditions of the Oilers fight songWere the Houston Oilers! Houston Oilers! Houston Oilers, number one!after the home team scored touchdowns as fans waved Columbia blue-and-white pom-poms and Luv Ya Blue signs all night.

In the 1970s, Houston certainly felt like a place that was rising to the top of the heap of cities in the United States. It was arguably becoming the capital of the Sunbelt, the region of the country that was experiencing dramatic population expansion and economic growth. While the rest of the country was suffering through the oil crisis, Houston was in the midst of yet another oil boom, which produced money and good times for the rapidly growing city. The Oilers personified the possibilities Houston presented for upwardly mobile Texans during the 1970s, as did the cross-racial Anglo, black, and Mexican American crowd that was remaking the former Jim Crow city into a socially integrated, economically prosperous society. At one point in the telecast, Howard Cosell, in his characteristic hyperbolic fashion, exclaimed to the millions who watched the telecast, Look out, America, here comes Houston! Americas fastest growing city, and right now... in this arena... Americas football team!