Looking back at 12-6-69 in gratitude
Some of the people remembered that day did not gain a yard or make a tackle. They merely formed the backdrop to the greatest college-football game ever played in Arkansas.
That clarinet player in the Texas band, for instance. If you’ve watched ABC’s telecast of the 1969 Arkansas-Texas game, she was pictured prominently before and after Texas faced fourth and three from its
43-yard line, trailing 14-8 with less than five minutes remaining on a cold, wet afternoon in Fayetteville. Razorback Stadium, as it was then called, had no lights and they kicked off at 12:20 p.m. That was before teams passed 50 times a game, yet under gray skies, darkness was not long off when they neared the finish.
Texas coach Darrell Royal is remembered for the most daring play call of his career. Sensing that time would expire before Texas could drive for a tying touchdown against a tiring, but ever game Arkansas defense, Royal ordered a deep pass. Only one man would go long, yet James Street was instructed to look for tight end Randy Peschel instead of clutch receiver Cotton Speyrer.
Street, having presided over 18 consecutive Longhorn victories, looked at his coach, who had one national title in the bag and would win two more in Austin, like Royal had lost his mind.
The play wasn’t in the Texas game plan, prompting Street to ask Royal during a sideline chat, “Are you sure that’s the call you want?” Royal, famous for saying that three things can happen when a team passes and only one outcome is good, told his quarterback, “Damn right I’m sure.”
Wisely, Street took precautions in the huddle not to give the Arkansas defense a clue. Fixing his gaze on Speyrer while explaining the play to Peschel, Street reminded the tight end, “Randy, I’m looking and pointing at Cotton, but I’m talking to you.”
Right 53 Veer Pass, the play that Royal sent in, worked like a charm. Street, a star pitcher for the Longhorn baseball team, never threw a prettier ball than the one Peschel pulled in over his shoulder in double coverage.
“Sometimes you just have to suck it up and pick a number,” Royal said.
A Texas cheerleader did a cartwheel along the sideline and the Longhorn Band played “Texas Fight” over and over, trombones drowning out the clarinet players, but no matter. The play gained
44 yards to the Arkansas 13. The Longhorns scored in two plays, Wisconsin native Jim Bertlesen going over, and Happy Feller kicked the Longhorns ahead 15-14.
There was still 3:58 on the clock, and neither President Richard Nixon, sitting high on the west side, could know which team he would crown as the national champion: No.
1 Texas and No. 2 Arkansas arrived with 9- 0 records for what ABC, switching the kickoff from October, thought it might be: a collegiate Super Bowl.
Arkansas fans regret the outcome, but think what might have happened. There were no provisions to play an overtime period if the regulation
60 minutes ended in a tie score. Like the 1966 “Game of the Century,” Notre Dame vs. Michigan State, which ended
10-10, the teams could settle for kissing sisters. This much was sure: Notre Dame, ending its tradition of not playing a bowl game, would face one Southwest Conference team or the other on New Year’s Day in the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.
Arkansas, which for three quarters in one writer’s opinion stopped the Longhorns’ Wishbone offense “unthinkably dead,” had time to rewrite the rough-draft ending penned by James Street.
Bill Montgomery, like
Street a Texas native, whipped the Razorbacks downfield to the Texas 40. Another Montgomery completion or two would put the Hogs squarely in the range of deluxe field-goal kicker Bill McClard. Arkansas was moving from right to left, driving to the north end zone, where earlier coach Frank Broyles, in Royal-like fashion, gambled on third and goal rather than ensure kicking for a field goal that would have made it 17-8 early in the fourth quarter.
Instead, in the one play of his Razorback career the quarterback said years later he would like to have back, Montgomery underthrew Chuck Dicus and Texas defender Danny Lester broke on the ball for an end-zone interception.
Texas’ defense, which kept the Longhorns in range until Street ran for a touchdown and two-point conversion opening the fourth quarter, put it on ice. Linebacker Tom Campbell, son of Longhorns defensive coordinator Mike Campbell, intercepted Montgomery on the Texas 21 with less than a minute left.
In his first year in the White House, Nixon surely had greater concerns than the outcome of a football game. But not only was he a politician but a football fan. And at the risk of losing Pennsylvania’s electoral votes in the 1972 election (Joe Paterno’s Nittany Lions also were unbeaten that year), Nixon visited both dressing rooms and crowned Texas the champion.
A former football player at Callifornia’s Whittier College, Nixon commended Arkansas for a great performance and likened Dicus to “that fellow Alworth,” a former Razorback then racing under rainbow passes in the NFL.
Nixon milked the moment, drawing a parallel between Texas’ fourth- quarter comeback and his own political resurgence after losing a 1960 squeaker against John F. Kennedy. If nothing else, it made for good television.
With the Vietnam War then raging, Nixon was generally unwelcome on college campuses. In May 1970, coinciding with the United States’ invasion of Cambodia, four students were shot dead while changing classes at Kent State University. A planned campus protest of Nixon’s Fayetteville visit fell through.
In a sign of the times, one youth was stabbed to death and three died accidentally hours later during an outdoor concert of the Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway in northern California. Rolling Stone magazine called it “rock and roll’s all-time worst day … a day when everything went perfectly wrong.” Filmmakers Albert and David Maysles captured the carnage on film in the 1970 documentary “Gimme Shelter,” the title coming from a Rolling Stones composition.
It was Saturday, Dec. 6, 1969. ABC followed the Arkansas-Texas game with a heavyweight boxing match from Stockholm. Arkansas- born former champion Charles “Sonny” Liston was knocked out by Leotis Martin. Liston would be dead within a year, his cause of death — like the day of his birth — wrapped in mystery.
Like Nixon and Liston, along with coaches Royal and Broyles, many leading players in what came to be called “The Big Shootout” are dead. It was the last game for Texas safety Freddie Steinmark. Trying to cover Dicus, Steinmark complained of soreness in his left leg. He lost the limb to cancer the following week and died two years later. The movie “Everybody’s All-American” details Steinmark’s UT career and devotes several minutes to the ‘ 69 Arkansas-Texas game.
ABC carried the game with its No. 1 team of Chris Schenkel, ex-coach Bud Wilkinson and sideline reporter Bill Flemming. Dr. Vincent R. DiNino (Texas) led the combined bands in the national anthem, and the Rev. Billy Graham delivered the invocation. And for the last time, two all-white teams played a major college-football game. It is a story that I never tire of retelling, memories alternating between painful and poignant.
Some 35 years later, Street, who has since passed on, attended the
2004 Texas-Arkansas game in Fayetteville. He said it was his first trip back since the Shootout. We shook hands outside the stadium and I told him, “You broke a lot of hearts that day.”
Arkansas people are slow to give Texas due credit. One man who understood the ramifications immediately was Dan Jenkins, a native Texan (TCU graduate) who wrote the game for Sports illustrated (Street on the cover). Texas, he said, won the biggest game of the season far from home, with “few friends about”, and under tremendous pressure. Never underestimate Longhorn football arrogance, but even UT knows that it could have lost that one easily. Then a kid of 14, I watched from section M on the east side (no sun in one’s eyes that day). It ranks with the first Ali-Frazier fight and the only defeats of racehorses Smarty Jones and Zenyatta as the transcending sporting events of my lifetime.
On that day, wearing red and white, orange- trimmed uniforms, one team with a razorback logo on its helmets and the other with stickers of a longhorn and the 100-year anniversary of college football, giants truly walked the earth. And the Longhorn band, one happy clarinet player in its midst, played on.