The man who put La Vega on the map
WACO — In a state where football reigns as a religion, Waco La Vega High School, my alma mater, has never found itself among royalty. It’s no Katy, no Austin Westlake or Southlake Carroll. I can’t think of one La Vega football player who’s ever made it big on a college team.
Despite its humble gridiron heritage — to which I humbly contributed during my years wearing the blue and gold — the La Vega Pirates are state champs for the first time in the school’s 86-year history. Under the tutelage of veteran coach Willie Williams (also an alumnus), the Pirates beat the favored Argyle Eagles 33-31 at NRG Stadium last month, coming from behind with 11 seconds to play to claim the state’s 4-A title.
Yet another alumnus, perhaps La Vega’s most distinguished, couldn’t have been more pleased. That La Vegan, by the way, is not country-music legend Billy Joe Shaver,
who would have been in the running for most distinguished had he not dropped out in the ninth grade because his football coach wouldn’t let him keep his mohawk. Instead, it’s a Texan with a football heritage all his own.
“Being a huge sports fan from reading what Waco sports writer Jinx Tucker wrote and hearing people talk about the Waco Tigers and how many state championships they had won, I naturally kept waiting for the La Vega Pirates to do likewise,” La Vega grad Dave Campbell wrote in the Waco Tribune-Herald a few days ago. “And I waited and waited and waited. For 82 years I have waited.”
For many of those years Campbell was producing a magazine he founded 56 years ago. Texas Football — aka “the Bible of Texas football” — is still going strong, even in the Internet age. The man who surely knows more about the sport, Texas-style, than anyone anywhere sold his ownership stake in the mid-1980s, but at 90 retains the largely ceremonial title of editor-in-chief. He still writes a popular column and is working on a new project: Dave Campbell Presents Texas Basketball. Former Houston Astros owner Drayton McLane is the current Texas Football owner.
The experience
I don’t know how it is these days, but in years past many a pimply-faced teenager from towns large and small had the Texas Football experience: It’s August, and it’s beastly hot (maybe two-a-days have started) and the kid drops by a 7-11 or the pharmacy on the square, eager to see whether the new Texas Football is in. He spots the distinctive cover, usually featuring a Southwest Conference star, when there was a SWC. He flips through the fat publication past the college roundups, past the pros, until he gets to the back pages, where the magazine previews every high school team in the state, from the largest big-city schools to the six-man teams in far West Texas. He scans his own team summary, hoping he’ll see his name listed in bold type, or, better yet, his own face, tough-looking and resolute, staring back at him.
Campbell never had that experience at La Vega. His father died in 1932, in the midst of the Depression, and his mother took her 7-year-old son and infant daughter Jo to a 5-acre plot of land she had inherited just outside Bellmead, the blue-collar suburb of Waco where La Vega is actually located. She used a $1,000 insurance policy to build a farmhouse.
“We planted cotton, planted corn, had a cow I had to milk, a pig I had to slop, we had chickens. My mother always had a good garden, always tomatoes,” Campbell recalled by phone earlier this week. “My uncles kept telling me I couldn’t put any more burden on my mother by playing sports. We didn’t even have electricity, so I had to chop wood when I got home from school.”
Nothing like this idea
He enjoyed reading about sports, though, particularly the daily columns by the legendary Tucker. The Monday after graduating from La Vega in the spring of 1942, the 17-year-old went to work as a copy boy in the sports department of the Waco Times-Herald. That fall, he also enrolled at Baylor, studying journalism and history. Two years later he was slogging through the ravaged forests of France and Germany with the Army’s 14th Armored Division. He came home with a Bronze Star.
He never really tells people what he did to receive the medal, just that his unit was passing through a strategic area on the Franco-German border called Wissembourg Gap when a mortar shell obliterated a buddy walking about 30 yards ahead of him. “He’s the guy who should have gotten the medal,” Campbell says. “I didn’t do anything but survive.”
After the war, he came back to Waco. “My mother was still living,” he said. “I had to go back and help her.”
He took up where he left off at the newspaper, moving up in the ranks until he became sports editor after Tucker died in December 1953. In addition to his editing chores, he was writing five or six columns a week, and after the minor-league Waco Pirates baseball team left town for Longview, there wasn’t much to write about. He remembers walking across the street to a news stand one afternoon to buy a couple of national football magazines to see what they had to say about the Southwest Conference. Not much, he discovered. “Surely somebody can do better than this,” he remembers thinking.
With a growing family, he also needed more money than he was making at the paper. He thought about starting a bowling magazine or maybe buying a small-town newspaper — before the Texas Football idea hit him. He knew there was nothing like it in football-mad Texas, and he thought he could make a go of it, despite knowing next to nothing about magazine publishing. With editorial help from buddies at the TimesHerald and backing from a couple of local bankers, he plunged in.
High schools ‘eternal’
The inaugural issue, 50 cents a copy, hit the news stands in August 1960, with Texas Longhorns running back Jack Collins on the cover. (If you’ve got one stashed away in a closet somewhere, it’s probably worth at least $1,000.) In the early days he and his wife Reba, a former Waco TimesHerald reporter, pasted up the magazine on the kitchen table after work and peddled it out of the trunk of their car. It didn’t break even until the third year. Even as the magazine became a Texas staple, Campbell continued to hold down his day job, retiring as sports editor in 1994.
Last fall’s issue previewed some 1,400 high school teams, and that coverage is key to its continuing success, says Chronicle sportswriter David Barron, Texas Football’s managing editor from 1990 through 2004. “High schools are as close to eternal as you can get in this state,” he said. “They’re part of our shared experience here.”
Another key is the man himself. He inspires allegiance. “I’ve tried to mold my life to be more like him than anyone I’ve ever met,” said David McHam, a retired University of Houston journalism professor who worked under Campbell at the Waco paper in the late 1950s.
Barron was just as complimentary. “He’s always been very generous,” he said. “We always felt we worked with him, not for him.”
A member of the Texas Sports Hall of Fame since 2010, Campbell will be honored again Monday night at a Waco banquet for the state champs. Chances are the young La Vegans won’t know who he is, but he’ll know them, just as he still knows every name in the Pirates’ starting lineup 75 years ago.