McElroy’s electric TD still crazy after 49 years
First black player to start and score for school beat LSU with 79-yard catch and run in 1970
COLLEGE STATION — Fifty years ago this fall, Hugh McElroy made history by walking on at Texas A&M and eventually becoming the school’s first African American football player to earn a scholarship.
Forty-nine years ago this fall, McElroy made history as the first black player to start an A&M game and score a touchdown for the Aggies
on a legendary catch and run at LSU’s Tiger Stadium. McElroy raced 79 yards for the game-winning score on Sept. 19, 1970, a sprint unforgettable among A&M and LSU old-timers.
“To this day, I have people tell me they remember where they were when John F. Kennedy died, and where they were when we won that day,” McElroy said Tuesday. “The level of importance and the place that holds in people’s minds is flattering and humbling.”
He added with a chuckle, “And a little weird.”
Two years after his game-winner silenced nearly 68,000 crazed fans in Tiger Stadium, McElroy tried visiting LSU’s home field for the first time. Fabled A&M trainer and facilities boss Billy Pickard had given McElroy a sideline pass for another A&M-LSU showdown.
“Last time I was in that stadium was 1972, and I was working in Morgan City, La., in the oil fields at the time,” McElroy recalled. “I wore a three-piece suit to the game, and as the Aggies and the A&M entourage were getting ready to go out on the
field, the gatekeeper recognized me.”
Based on the Aggies beating the Tigers for the first time in eleven tries in 1970, McElroy had become a bit of a bad guy around Baton Rouge.
“The gatekeeper said there was no way he was going to be responsible for letting me get out on the field and then change into a uniform,” McElroy said with a laugh. “I told him, ‘I assure you, that’s the furthest thing from my mind.’ Nonetheless, it wasn’t until the second half that I got to the field.”
The anecdote is amusing to McElroy now, not so much then. It’s one more reason why he’ll watch Saturday night’s A&M at No. 2 LSU game from the comforts of his College Station home instead of the craziness of Tiger Stadium.
A newspaper in 1970 claimed Tiger Stadium “is the only place in the country where you can walk out onto the field at halftime and get stoned just by breathing the air.”
McElroy said the setting at LSU was wild back then, but he expects an even crazier atmosphere Saturday, thanks in part to the tribalism brought about by social media.
“In general, society is more in your face now than it was then,”
McElroy said before referencing the classic LSU-A&M game at Kyle Field last year. “So I suspect after LSU getting its butt whooped in seven overtimes, and prematurely dousing your coach in Gatorade, that will provoke all kinds of craziness on Saturday.”
McElroy, 69 and retired from a respected working career at A&M, remembers well what happened in 1969, when he walked on the football team at the urging of his some of his fellow A&M track and field teammates and football buddies. He’s quick to point out he was not the first black football player at A&M, or even the second.
In 1967, walk-ons J.T. Reynolds and Sam Williams suited up for the Aggies, and each played sparingly, mostly on special teams. Neither was on the squad when McElroy tried out under coach Gene Stallings in 1969.
“My part was easy, because I got to play for my practice,” McElroy said of following Reynolds and Williams. “They had the tough part. They toiled in anonymity.”
In truth, nothing about what McElroy endured as the team’s lone black player was easy, but the 5-8 receiver persevered with the tenacity he was raised on in Houston by his grandmother, Bessie Chapman.
“I was always smaller than everyone else physically, but my grandmother instilled in me that you’re only smaller than everyone else if you measure from the outside in,” McElroy said. “If you measure from the inside out, it’s a different story.”
In the 1960s, then-A&M president Earl Rudder pushed for the admittance of both women and African Americans to attend A&M full-scale in the still widely segregated South. Women and blacks both began going to class at the former all-male military institute in 1964, and a year later Stallings, an A&M player under coach Paul “Bear” Bryant a decade prior, came onboard.
“I tried to recruit minority players to A&M, but that was sort of hard to do in those days,” Stallings once said of why he didn’t have a black player on scholarship until 1970.
Calm and collected, McElroy seemed the perfect player to stick with a daunting task — and become an all-time icon for Aggies.
“You just (took an ugly situation) and turned it the other way around, instead of jumping up and down and going crazy,” McElroy said of keeping his cool in dealing with racism on the A&M football team and beyond.
As for his trailblazing role for Aggies in the decades since and to come?
“I used to be more reluctant, because I didn’t want the focus to be on me,” McElroy said. “In some ways, I’m still learning how to be gracious and accept compliments. I recognize it means a lot to a lot of people. I’m conscious of that and try to carry myself in a way that doesn’t change anyone’s mind.”
The Aggies were mostly mediocre under Stallings and were bad for the rest of 1970 in finishing 2-9. But for one special night in Baton Rouge, McElroy laid the foundation for black players to come in College Station. Stallings’ successor, Emory Bellard, began recruiting African Americans to A&M en masse starting in 1972.
With less than a minute remaining in the 1970 game at LSU and the Aggies trailing, A&M quarterback Lex James hurriedly tossed the ball to McElroy under a heavy rush.
“My number hadn’t even been called in the huddle,” McElroy remembered of A&M’s 20-18 upset. “I just ran a half-baked decoy pattern and turned around about 10 yards inside the sideline. I caught (the ball) and spun to the outside. From there, it was just a race to the end zone. There was no way they were going to catch me at that point. We’d played too hard, and come too far.”