Storied coach was ahead of his time
The news that Alabama Coach Nick Saban tested positive for the novel coronavirus a week before the second-ranked Crimson Tide took on thirdranked Georgia wasn’t all that surprising. In a star-crossed season that probably should have been canceled, the pandemic has played havoc with college football. Unable to do the typical coach’s caged-tiger sideline prowl, Saban was thinking he might try to coach long dis tance, maybe via Zoom. His dilemma reminded me of a Texas football coach in years past who happily coached from a distance. And who, like Saban, won. His name was Gil Steinke. Head football coach and athletic director for 23 seasons at his alma mater, then-Texas A&I (now Texas A&M UniversityKingsville), Steinke and his Javelinas won 10 Lone Star Conference championships and six NAIA national championships. When he retired at the end of the 1976 season, the Javs were on a 39-game winning streak. Steinke (pronounced STANKee) also sent an outsized num-
ber of players to the pros, including running back Sid Blanks, who played for the Houston Oilers in the mid‘60s, and the late Gene Upshaw, who after his playing days ended became executive director of the NFL Players’ Association. Steinke’s teams played in Hawaii and in Mexico and were the first American team to play exhibition games in Europe.
In a classic Sports Illustrated story from 1975, the great Bud Shrake reported on A&I’s 50th-anniversary homecoming game before 12,000 fans at Javelina Stadium. The locals, defending national champions, were hosting the Rams from Angelo State. A norther had blown in a couple of hours before game time, so the field was soaked. So were the fans.
In the 12th row of the student section, at about the 20-yard line, Shrake observed a man wearing a hooded poncho, water dripping from his brow, one hand over the other as he tried to shield a lit cigarette. Seated beside him in the rain was a man wearing a blue cap and blue plastic jacket. Both men squinted at smudged ink blotches on a clipboard.
Here’s Shrake: “‘Tell that son of a buck to move his tail fast when he sees that guy start out of the backfield,’ said the man in the hood. The other jumped up, trotted down the concrete steps through the crowd, leaped over the fence, sloshed through water on the track and began to speak to A&I coaches and players near the bench.
“Then the man in the hood had another thought: ‘The son of a buck ought to get right in his face.’ He rushed down the steps in the rain and ran to the sideline, waving his arms and shouting, his cigarette stuck to his chin in a mush of wet paper and tobacco.”
The Kingsville people knew the man in the poncho. Steinke had decided the season before that he could see the game better up in the stands than down on the field.
“The sideline is the worst possible place to watch a game,” he told Shrake. “You can’t tell what the devil is going on from the sideline. I try to sit about 12 rows up where it’s high enough that I can see and low enough so it’s not too far to run down to the field.”
“He was a character,” said Fred Nuesch, a sports information administrator at the Kingsville school since 1968. Nuesch knew Steinke well.
Nuesch said that at away games Steinke occasionally would have to sit among the home team’s fans, but he didn’t mind. “He got to meet people, got to talk to them,” he said. “He thoroughly enjoyed it.”
Steinke grew up in the small South Texas town of Ganado. After starring as a running back at A&I during the early years ofWorld War II, he became a gunnery officer in the Navy and was aboard the USS Canberra in the Pacific when it was torpedoed. The blast burned off his eyebrows. Released by the Navy in Boston in 1945, Steinke signed with the Philadelphia Eagles. He led the NFL in punt returns in 1946 and was the starting safety on the Eagles’ 1948 NFL championship team. He got into coaching after an injury ended his playing career.
Like Don Haskins, the legendary basketball coach at UT-El Paso, Steinke was a pioneer. He recruited African-American players years before the Longhorns, the
Aggies and their Southwest Conference brethren even dared. His prime recruiting areawas fromHouston westward to San Antonio, plus all of South Texas.
Nuesch recalled that the team ran into trouble on occasion when they played in small towns like Huntsville, Commerce and Nacogdoches (as well as in Houston). Restaurant owners would tell Steinke, “Y’all can eat here, but your black players have to eat in the kitchen.” The coach would lead his players back to the bus.
Years later, when integrated teams were the norm in Texas, Steinke continued to take his team to modest eateries and less-than-luxury motels when they traveled to small East Texas towns. He stayed loyal to those business owners who had defied the bigots.
In the Sports Illustrated article, Steinke tells Shrake that the Javs had experienced something of a down year in ’74, so he reluctantly switched to the veer offense and handed the reins to an undersized sophomore quarterback named Richard Ritchie. The Javs had not lost since.
“That man probably did more for race relations than anybody I’ve ever known personally,” Ritchie said.
Ritchie, who had never read his old coach’s laudatory words in Shrakes’s SI article, had another thought. “I loved the man,” he said. “I think about him all the time.”
Gilbert Erwin Steinke died in 1995 at age 76. He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame the next year.