Senator who beat unbeatable opponent
Football coaches who run for high office tend to guard every word as though it were a prize recruit.
Tommy Tuberville is doing just that in his campaign for the U.S. Senate in Alabama. He is the Republican Party’s surest bet this fall to pick up a seat held by a Democrat.
Knowing this, Tuberville is running one of the duller campaigns ever.
He sticks to generalities, praises President Donald Trump at every chance and hopes his celebrity status as a former coach of Auburn University will reel in voters.
That’s been the game plan for every coach or athlete who’s run for public office since 1964.
What was pivotal about that year? It’s when legendary football coach Bud Wilkinson lost in a stunning upset to 33-year-old lawyer Fred Harris for an open U.S. Senate seat in Oklahoma.
Wilkinson was a coaching legend who’d retired after winning three national championships at the University of Oklahoma. He was the most popular man in his state, or so he thought.
Harris, now 89 and a professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico, knew his only chance was to force Wilkinson to reveal his political positions. Wilkinson finally did, a decision that cost the old coach a victory.
Harris, a Democrat, said he supported the sitting president, Lyndon Johnson. He challenged Wilkinson to disclose his choice for president.
Wilkinson ignored the advice of his strategists and said he backed fellow Republican Barry Goldwater, whose campaign was tanking.
Wilkinson figured he would lose some voters who disliked Goldwater, but believed he would still defeat Harris with ease.
The coach was a household name. Harris had to clutch at Johnson’s coattails. What else did the kid have going for him?
But then Wilkinson miscalculated on the simmering issue of race.
Black people, often denied the right to vote, were making gains in registration by 1964. Harris knew he needed overwhelming support from Black voters to have any chance of beating Wilkinson.
To Harris’ astonishment, Wilkinson made a risky move. The coach asked segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina to campaign for Wilkinson in a section of Oklahoma known as “Little Dixie.”
“He brought in the strongest racist in the Senate when we
were splitting the Black vote 50-50,” Harris said. “By the end, I was getting nine of every 10 of those votes.”
Wilkinson’s association with Thurmond seemed peculiar. Wilkinson in 1956 had desegregated his Oklahoma team by recruiting Prentice Gautt, a Black running back. Many big football schools, including LSU, Texas and Alabama, did not suit up a Black player until the 1970s.
Wilkinson had seemed more enlightened, or at least more conscious of the advantage Black talent could provide.
Wilkinson’s decision to stand with Thurmond helped Harris win the Senate race by 21,000 votes. Johnson defeated Goldwater in Oklahoma by 107,000 votes.
It had been Wilkinson’s race to lose, and somehow that’s what he managed to do. Political handlers said Wilkinson talked too much, creating openings for Harris where none should have existed.
Tuberville knows the history. He is trying to win by sticking close to Trump but otherwise being nondescript.
Trump in 2016 won Alabama by almost 28 percentage points over Hillary Clinton. Democratic Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama took a special election by 2 percentage points in 2017 against a weak candidate, Republican Roy Moore.
Republican Tuberville believes he can defeat Jones without having to do or say much. Tuberville’s approach is to emphasize that he’s no Roy Moore while fawning over Trump.
In matters of race relations, Tuberville once forced a change that should be applauded but still might be denounced in parts of the South.
Sticking with the script, Tuberville keeps quiet about how he took a stand against the Confederate flag.
It was 1997, and Tuberville was head coach of the University of Mississippi Rebels. Tuberville stepped onto a trembling limb by asking students to stop waving Confederate flags at home games.
Many Ole Miss graduates and members of the student body shrieked in protest. Tuberville didn’t appreciate tradition, they said.
No, Tuberville saw the Confederate flag as destructive to building a winner.
College coaches bring high school prospects to the campus stadium to let them drink in the atmosphere of a football Saturday. Black players considering scholarship offers from Ole Miss told Tuberville they didn’t like seeing a symbol of slavery splashed across the stadium.
Ole Miss already had a bad record on desegregation. It did not admit a Black student until 1962, and it had no Black football players until 1971.
Robert Khayat, the Ole Miss chancellor in 1997, banned Confederate flags at games after a conversation with Tuberville.
In his memoir, Khayat quoted the coach as saying, “We can’t recruit against the Confederate flag.”
Tuberville is never that candid on the campaign trail. He avoids speaking up unless he can squeeze in commentary about how the opposition is trying to destroy a great and benevolent president in Trump.
Blame Fred Harris. He changed the jockocracy and its freewheeling campaigns.
Until Harris came along, every top coach and every storied athlete running for office thought there was such a thing as the unbeatable foe.