Darrell Royal: 1924-2012

The University of Texas lost one of the pillars of its football foundation Tuesday when former coach and AD Darrell Royal passed away at the age of 88.
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2005 edition of the Inside Texas Magazine.

At the end of the day, it may not be his three national championships, his 10 Top Ten finishes, 11 conference titles or 16 bowl games that will most impress college football enthusiasts. It won’t be his 17-3 record against the Aggies, or that his program fell to Oklahoma just seven times in two decades.

If anything, it should be this: the incredulous notion that a Dust Bowl-era, OU letterman would come to personify all that is excellent about Texas football must begin with the simple fact that Darrell K Royal accepted the near-sacred trust of shepherding the Longhorn program, that he was suddenly thrust into the Lone Star State’s most high profile position, that he assumed the head-swimming responsibility as head coach of The University-of-by-God-Texas, and that he laid the groundwork for those glorious championship seasons… at age 32.

“Just think about it: you’re 32-years old and you’re the head coach at a major university,” marvels Joe Dixon, a former All-Southwest Conference defensive halfback on Royal’s 1963 national champion. “I’m 62, and I don’t know that I could handle that kind of pressure and that kind of commitment.”

Not many could. But Royal did. And he began the task of reconstructing a once-proud program that, in 1956, had sunk to its lowest ebb: a 1-9 mark that signaled the end of coach Ed Price’s six-year tenure. In early December, the five-member Texas Athletics Council was looking not just for a quick fix but a hire for the ages. That’s why the list of applicants read like a Who’s Who of college football, including Bobby Dodd of Georgia Tech and Duffy Daugherty of Michigan State. Both declined the Texas job, but both recommended an up-and-comer in the coaching ranks: Darrell Royal.

Who?

“I hadn’t been in coaching long,” Royal said. “I had just coached seven years.”

Yet, so meteoric was Royal’s ascent that he was on the payroll of five different programs during that stretch. He was an assistant at North Carolina State, Tulsa and Mississippi State before securing his first head coaching job with the Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League. He returned to Mississippi State in 1955 for his first collegiate head coaching stint, a one-year venture that ended when Washington snapped him up to fill a coaching vacancy.

By the end of 1956, Royal had restored winning football to the Huskies program while the Longhorn faithful were desperate to revive the glory days of legendary UT coach Dana X. Bible. Price was not right at Texas while his predecessor (Blair Cherry) forged the school’s first undefeated SWC season. Cherry never lost to the Aggies and finished as high as No. 3 nationally. Yet he tendered his resignation, under considerable pressure, primarily because the otherwise successful coach with a 75 percent winning percentage had the audacity to lose three straight to Oklahoma during his four-year tenure.

Royal, with a modest 17-13 head coaching record, was a somewhat unlikely candidate to restore greatness to the once-proud Longhorn program. After all, in the eyes of Texans, he was not only an Okie but a 32-year old Okie. It didn’t matter that he had been an All-American quarterback for the Sooners and that he had been on the front-line of college football’s most intense border war. It didn’t matter that both his parents were native Texans, that his home town (Hollis) in southwestern Oklahoma was just a stone’s throw from the Texas border and that he probably would have played his college ball in Austin had there been an offer. It’s just that you didn’t hire a 32-year old, not even in those days, who hadn’t stayed in one place long enough to establish a proven track record.

But then late one night, the telephone rang at Royal’s residence. Half asleep, the young man whose wildest dream was once to coach high school in Oklahoma picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

It was not only Dana X. Bible who had come calling; it was the future of University of Texas football.

And so, this is an account of how he did it. The spotlight, here, isn’t upon the three national championship years (any self-respecting Orangeblood should be able to recount the game-by-game chronology of those seasons at the drop of a ten-gallon hat). The focus isn’t so much upon the wonder years but rather Royal’s early years, a time when the Longhorn tradition was on life-support and the practice field was in such sorry shape that UT officials had to import grass from Texas A&M.

This isn’t about the Coach Royal who once had a hot line to the White House, who’s on a first-name basis with Hollywood actors and Grammy Award-winning recording artists, whose legend grows with each passing autumn, and whose very entrance into a crowded press room still results in a reverent silence even among the most seasoned and cynical of sports reporters.

Before there was the devastating Wishbone offense, before there was Right 53 Veer Pass on fourth-and-three in Fayetteville, before the Tyler Rose ever took a deep handoff in Austin, there was a 32-year old man who went looking for work. And so, this is about a driven, uncompromising young coach who possessed an intangible quality that cannot be adequately defined but which ultimately set him apart from his peers.

But, on December 18, 1956, he is still a relatively unknown commodity whose one desire is that the very school that didn’t offer an athletic scholarship ten years ago would now make him its next head coach.——————————————————————————At the end of the day, those who poured out their blood and sweat for him will swear up and down that he took nothing for granted, that he left as little to chance as humanly possible, and that his commitment to preparation bordered on obsessive. And that’s why Darrell K Royal usually got what he wanted.

“His preparation was just superb,” recalls former FB Tom Stockton. “It’s the same thing that great doctors have in getting ready for that operation, or great lawyers have in getting ready for that trial. It’s the same with anyone who gets so totally involved in what they’re doing; they’re prepared, and they know that they’ve done everything they could possibly do. Then they go in and produce.”

Royal was prepared for his job interview at The University of Texas. On the way over, he asked Bible to describe each Regent so he could address them by name. Who should be referenced as “Doctor”? What is his academic discipline? How long has he been with The University? Heck, earlier in the week, he even went to see the movie “Giant” to get him into a Lone Star state of mind. As such, the last thing on Royal’s mind, the most inconceivable flight of fancy that he absolutely never could have entertained on that December day, was that the stadium in which he entered for the interview would some day bear his name.

“All I was thinking about was trying to be around for a while,” Royal said. “I was just trying to win enough games to keep from being chased off.”

Instead, it was the most important hire in the history of University of Texas athletics — and perhaps in the history of the entire school. Royal was offered the job four hours after his arrival in Austin. He was also offered a $500 raise, bringing his annual salary up to a whopping $15,000.

“It’s a little different today,” Royal laughs.

But, at the Forty Acres, some things never change.

“The day I was hired, the people who had just hired me asked, ‘Now what’s the first game you’re going to win?'” Royal recalled. I said, ”I think we open with Georgia.'”

Indeed, Texas would open with a 26-7 win over the Bulldogs. When the Horns came from behind the following weekend to upend Tulane, the program had doubled its win column total from the previous season and found itself perched at No. 20 when the Associated Press rankings were released. But it was not quite what the regents wanted to hear at the conclusion of the interview. The question was repeated: what’s the first game Texas is going to win?

“I knew what they were talking about,” Royal said, “but I wasn’t going to take the job during my first year and say we were going to beat Oklahoma.”

No, reversing an excruciating skid — Texas had dropped nine of ten to its Red River rivals — would have to wait. For now, there was just a tremendous amount of work to be done. The football facilities — from the head coach’s office to the practice field — reflected the recent downward spiral of the program. There were across-the-board upgrades that had to be made if Texas was going to be competitive again. Yet, the single most important first steps were to hire a firebrand staff, recruit like hell, and try to get between the ears of his players who were already on campus.

Royal got inside of his players’ heads in more ways than one. That year, Texas became the first public university in the country to require entrance exams. Royal responded by creating what became the forerunner of modern-day academic advisor when he hired a science teacher from nearby Lockhart to work with his players.

“We called him the ‘brain coach’, but we called him some other things, too,” laughs legendary Longhorn Tommy Nobis, whom Royal recruited in 1962. “I looked for the easy courses but there weren’t many at The University of Texas. Study hall was a new thing. Coach Royal knew that if his guys weren’t eligible, then they weren’t going to play. Skipping class wasn’t tolerated, and it didn’t matter if you were All-American. No slack was cut for anybody.”

Sure, eligibility was a concern. But Royal was not one to separate the “student” from “student-athlete.”

“You go to college, first and foremost, to learn and to have a chance to better yourself,” Royal said. At the same time, players that lacked the discipline and commitment to attend class regularly were probably also those who did not consistently put forth the effort on the field. That’s why there was one constant for those who missed class: a 5:30 a.m. session with trainer Frank Medina.

“You had to go get a pretty big blocking dummy, throw that thing on your back and run the stadium stands,” Nobis said. “Before all this renovation, the lower deck was 79 rows up. [Chuckling] I know that because I had to run the stadium steps several times. I had reasons for missing class, but they didn’t care. There was no excuse for missing it; therefore, you had to run the stadium stairs. You had to do it 20 times, and you had to do it within a certain time frame. I mean, you’d see guys fall out, throw up or whatever. But that was the Royal-Medina discipline-push, character-building.”

There would be no reviving the Longhorn program unless Royal could restore discipline, conditioning and the requisite attitude for his teams to have a chance to win every Saturday. The development of these qualities was frequently delegated to Medina. Aspects of the off-season conditioning program (known as ‘Medina Sessions’) were later made public in 1972 when former Longhorn Gary Shaw authored a best-selling book titled Meat On The Hoof. It alleged that Medina conducted (with Royal’s approval) dehumanizing attempts to force less talented, less respected players to surrender their scholarships.

“He would drive you to where some guys would quit,” Nobis said of Medina, noting that the intent was not so much to thin the ranks but to prepare the team for game day. The grueling regimen represented a widespread practice indicative of a bygone era, Nobis conceded, adding that ‘Medina Sessions’ were not much of a departure from what he had previously experienced at San Antonio Jefferson High School.

“Next to Coach Royal, Frank Medina was the most important person in my whole career,” Nobis said. “We did feel that we were being pushed, but we were pushing ourselves so that we would be better… You’d like to think that you worked harder than the Oklahoma Sooners did in the off-season, and that you’re better prepared, and that your game plan will work if you execute it.”

But how involved was Royal with the off-season conditioning program?

“Coach Royal would not interfere with the ‘Medina Sessions’ because, from afar, Coach Royal liked it,” Nobis said. “He knew his teachings were being carried on by Medina. When we put those pads on to go back out for the spring, we all had smiles on our faces. We were just glad to get out of those ‘Medina Sessions’ so we could play football. If you made it through those ‘Medina Sessions’, spring practice — from a physical perspective — was a piece of cake.”

Then again, Longhorn practices were no cakewalk. The pace of practice “was brutal”, Nobis said, but those who toughed it out had a distinct advantage over any and all challengers.

“You just felt like you were better than the people over in College Station, or the people in Lubbock, or the people in Arkansas,” Nobis said. “You felt like you were better prepared. You felt like you had a better group of individuals. Coach Royal sold that. His program was to have people who paid the price to become better than the other young men that were on the other team. Believing is so important. It’s important to believe that you are part of something’s that’s the best. He never shortchanged it. You couldn’t just think it, you couldn’t just believe it, you practiced it.”

It wasn’t just the physical nature of Longhorn practices that made them “brutal” (although Nobis recalls times when All-SWC defender Pat Culpepper hit teammates so hard that the impact rendered both players unconscious). Practices had as much to do with the mind-numbing repetition of a relatively small set of plays, combined with the constant state of mental alertness required of players given Royal’s relentless attention to detail.

“One thing a lot of people don’t realize is that Coach Royal was just meticulous,” Stockton said. “His coaching with the linemen, for example, if you were off by one inch he would jump in there and change it. Everything was that precise. He was very, very meticulous in how he wanted things done. You never knew when the eye was on you. You had to always make sure you were doing the right thing. He was very hands-on. Coach Royal made sure that everything, down to the smallest detail, was looked at and taken care of.”

Royal’s playbook would look downright flimsy compared to some of its voluminous contemporaries. It led to criticism that some of his offenses were conservative and predictable. But it had more to do with a ‘ Keep It Simple, Stupid’ coaching philosophy, Dixon said.

“A confused player can’t be aggressive,” said Dixon. “He’d rather you have five plays and know them well than have 25 plays and be confused.”

Fewer plays, of course, did not necessarily result in shorter practices.

“I remember having to go out there with the offense and having to run the same play over, and over, and over!, until each of us got our assignments right,” Nobis recalled. “It might have been the way we were blocking, or whether we didn’t stay with a block, or if the ball carrier didn’t take the handoff correctly: if you didn’t do it right, you’d go back to the huddle and do it again.”

Royal’s attention to the minutia of game-day details extended to his complete oversight of special teams play, Nobis said.

“You would think that a head coach would turn the kicking game responsibility, as most of them do, over to an assistant. But Coach Royal would personally conduct that meeting. The reason was that there is a certain percentage of games that are won on special teams play: a punt return, a dropped punt, a fumbled snap, a long field goal that was made, a blocked field goal, a blocked extra point. He knew how important it was, he sold it to us, and we were always good on special teams. We would make one or two big (special teams) plays that would have some impact on the result of that game.”

Yet, even special teams drills were so repetitious that players knew in advance what Royal was going to say during those meetings, Nobis added.

“Let’s face it: there are just a certain amount of things you can do on a punt, or on a kickoff, or an a kickoff return. But what he did was repetition, repetition, repetition! We heard the same thing over and over. We drilled constantly. It was rehearsed in practice, over and over again. The special teams, under Coach Royal, were some of the best. It looked like a machine.”

And, across the board, “the machine” was beginning to roll quicker than most would expect. The barometer for success, however, was measured the second Saturday in October. Five years before Nobis set foot on campus, there was still the little matter of the Oklahoma Sooners.

OU coach Bud Wilkinson created a monster program in the 1950s, as the Sooners reeled off 47 straight wins from early 1953 to late 1957. During Royal’s first trip to Dallas as Longhorn coach, his team was facing a two-time defending national champ which entered as a three-touchdown favorite. It would be the first time one of Wilkinson’s former players had coached against him and, for the first time since 1954, Texas scored first. (Heck, it was the first time since 1954 that Texas even crossed the goal line, as the Sooners outscored Texas 65-0 in the two previous mismatches.) It was 7-7 at half time. The Sooners scored on their fourth possession of the third quarter and added a third and final touchdown, following a Texas turnover, in the closing minutes of the ballgame. The result was a school-record sixth-straight loss to the Sooners but there was plenty to indicate that the Longhorn program was on the rise.

Texas would upset No. 10 Arkansas the following Saturday and tie pre-season SWC favorite Baylor 7-7 before traveling to College Station to face Coach Paul Bryant and an A&M team that had been ranked No. 1 before losing to Rice the week before. Just as he did against Oklahoma, Royal played for field position by ordering a quick-kick on second down. It led to Texas’ only touchdown as the Horns clipped the Aggies, 9-7. Under Royal, Texas would defeat its in-state rivals 16 of the next 17 years.

With a No. 11 final ranking on his resume, Royal could turn his attention to the lifeblood of any big-time college program: recruiting. One of the seismic shifts in college football is that recruiting is now a year-round process whereas, during Royal’s early years, contact between coaches and prospects was severely limited.

“We didn’t recruit year-round like they do now,” Royal said. “They have summer camps (on campus for prep athletes), and we never had summer camps. The (University) Interscholastic League wouldn’t allow it in those days. They have summer camps now where you can evaluate, where you can see the guys run and do things, and maybe get people to commit. Before, you had to study some pretty bad film.”

The flip side is that, before, the NCAA did not impose scholarship limits. An athletic department could sign as many players as it had tuition money for them. Texas alumni “could come up with the funds to have enough for the number of players that (Royal) wanted to recruit,” Nobis said. “Sometimes you were trying to get a player just so somebody else wouldn’t get him, and vice versa. They were all doing it.”

That’s why when Nobis reported in the summer of 1962, there were more than 60 scholarship athletes in his freshman class alone! The number of incoming studs competing for his position (linebacker, guard) totaled more than he cared to remember.

“I was second-team all-state but, heck, I might have had three or four all-staters in front of me,” Nobis said. “It was unbelievable. My freshman year, I was concerned with whether or not I was going to make it just because of the sheer numbers. You knew that if you didn’t get a coach’s attention, you weren’t going to make it. You’d better know how that coach wanted you to fire out, or how that coach wanted you to tackle, or how you were supposed to do that drill. Too many mental mistakes could really cost you. A lot of guys would get discouraged; a lot of guys would leave on their own and go to smaller schools. You couldn’t cut a scholarship guy but players could see the handwriting on the wall.”

Royal’s late arrival to the recruiting process resulted in a weak 1958 class. His second squad consisted of only 14 returning lettermen but Texas began the season ranked No. 16. For the first time since 1951, Texas entered the OU game undefeated but still a two-touchdown underdog. ———————————————————————At the end of the day, one win looms largest in Royal’s vast memory of twenty years at the Forty Acres. One superlative victory, out of all of those championship seasons that led to ABC Sports naming him Coach of the Decade for the 1960s, shapes up as the most pivotal in establishing his program. But before we get to that part, one must appreciate the immediate impact of a new-fangled addition to the college game introduced just in time for the 1958 season: the two-point conversion.

Royal opposed the innovation because “it put a lot of strain on coaches. I thought it was too much of a gamble.” Yet, college football officials approved the two-point conversion in no small part because the highly influential Wilkinson served on the committee that lobbied for its passage. As such, a board room decision made in early 1958 would prove critical when Wilkinson and Royal clashed on the second Saturday in October.

For the second straight year, Texas scored first against Oklahoma, this time on a 10-yard completion. And, to nearly everyone’s surprise, Texas went for two.

“We had to be aggressive,” Royal said. “We had to come out swinging. That (two-point play) proved to be the winning margin.”

The Sooners cut into the 8-0 Longhorn lead by scoring on a run around left end with 3:56 left in the third quarter, but their two-point attempt failed. After forcing a Longhorn punt, OU drove to the Texas 24 but defensive end Bobby Bryant came up with the key stop on fourth-and-two. In what was one of the flukiest turn-of-events in series history, the Sooners scored on the next play. OU’s Jim Davis advanced a Longhorn fumble — the ball never touched the ground because it landed on FB Mike Dowdle’s rump — and returned it 24 yards for the defensive touchdown. OU completed the two-point conversion and led for the first time, 14-8.

Texas took over on its own 26 with 6:50 remaining. Substitute-quarterback Vince Matthews drove Texas to the Oklahoma seven after converting a critical fourth-and-seven at the Sooner 42. Twelve plays into the drive, facing third and goal with little more than three minutes remaining, Royal switched quarterbacks. Starter Bobby Lackey was taller and more experienced at running the play that would turn the tide in the series. Lackey hit Bryant over the middle on a seven-yard jump pass. For the first time in the contest, a team attempted a traditional PAT. Lackey added the extra point and, in fact, clinched the sweet 15-14 victory for Texas when he intercepted a pass deep in Longhorn territory on OU’s last-gasp drive.

Back in Austin, the team’s aircraft had to circle the landing strip for 20 minutes until airport officials could clear more than 2,000 ecstatic fans from the runways. But Royal knew, then, that his fledgling program had taken flight.

“There had been a six-year streak of Oklahoma wins. I was a young coach trying to earn the confidence of sports writers, alumni, fans and players. That win helped probably more of getting me established at Texas than anything else.”

Including the 1958 upset, Texas would go on to win 12-of-13 from its archrivals. It also stopped much of the bleeding that saw Texas lose busloads of in-state talent to north of the border. One of the most prized recruits signed in 1959 was Culpepper. Wilkinson made what was (for him) a rare, in-home recruiting visit to woo Culpepper from his native Cleburne, but already Royal was capturing the eye of Lone Star prep stars such as Culpepper.

“That Oklahoma game was a crusade for coach Royal,” Culpepper noted. “He knew that was why they hired him.”

To be sure, the other 10 regular season games mattered. In 1959, Texas won nine of them and skyrocketed to a No. 2 ranking before TCU upset the Horns, 14-9 in Austin. History repeated itself two seasons later when TCU shocked No. 1 Texas at home, 6-0. It cost Royal what would have been his first national championship and prompted one of those Royalisms that didn’t necessarily endear the fifth-year coach to some of Horned Frog fans in Ft. Worth: the TCU Cockroaches.

For the record, “I didn’t call them cockroaches,” Royal explained. “The exact thing I said was that it’s like a cockroach: it ain’t what he eats and totes off, it’s what he falls into and messes up. (TCU) had been wollering around during the season and playing lackadaisical ball, but Texas gets their best shot always. I guess I did bring ‘cockroaches’ and TCU in at the same time, but I said it was like a cockroach.”

The grand finale was a 12-7 Cotton Bowl win over No. 5 Mississippi in the Cotton Bowl, resulting in Royal’s first post-season victory and final No. 3 national ranking.

“That win really established, in my mind, coach Royal and The University of Texas as a dominant team,” said Dixon, who was a freshman that season.

Freshmen were not yet eligible to play varsity football while most of the upperclassmen standouts played on both sides of the ball, or as Dixon puts it, “the way God intended football to be played. All three years I was there, we trained both ways, offense and defense. You’re a more complete football player that way, and not just a specialist.”

But how special was Royal in the eyes of his players? Did they have any inkling — as the wins began to mount and as victories over OU and A&M came to be expected — that Royal would one day become a college football icon?

“People asked if I knew, when I played, that Darrell Royal was an outstanding coach and I’d say, ‘Well, no’,” Dixon admits. “I’d never had a college coach. I didn’t know what a college coach was supposed to do. How are you supposed to know that when you’re 19- or 20-years old? I didn’t know Coach Royal was special until after I was out and looked back. I just thought that all big-time college coaches were like him, but it isn’t so.”

It begs the question: what made Darrell Royal, well, Darrell Royal? Dixon believes it has much to do with an innate sense of timing resulting in correct decision-making. He quickly points to a perfect example: the Right 53 Veer Pass from James Street to Randy Peschel on the climatic fourth-and-three conversion late in the 1969 ‘Game of The Century’ at Arkansas.

“Great coaches are like great leaders: when the timing is there, they make the right decisions,” said Dixon. “They have ‘it’. Coach Royal has got ‘it’. And if you’ve got to define ‘it’ to somebody, then they ain’t got ‘it’.”

With respect to Royal, Stockton describes “it” as “an unbelievable ability to focus at a time when there is unbelievable pressure on you. Every ounce of your being is focused on that particular moment in that particular environment. It’s the ability to do it, time and time again.”

For Nobis, it has to do with Royal’s uncanny ability to communicate and motivate.

“The thing that he could do is cut through everything and get right to the point,” Nobis said. “When he spoke, you knew the point he was trying to make. He could relate well to the young men of that era. He had his sayings and he could make you laugh just as quick as you could grit your teeth, but there really wasn’t any small talk. As we say in Texas, there was just not a whole lot of bulls— with Coach Royal. He was going to call it and say it like it was.”

Effective motivation is rooted not only in command of the language but also in recognizing the temperament of each individual player, Nobis continued. In short, it’s knowing which button to push.

“When you’ve got two or three minutes at half time, the head coach is either going to say something that will really get to you or not,” Nobis said. “Young men feed off of that. A lot of them won’t admit to it but, when you look at the head man, you want him to motivate you. Coach Royal was so good about being able to say what needed to be said. You had to yell at some guys. Some guys, you may need to physically kick them in the butt. Now, I don’t know if you could get away with that today. Different people are motivated in different ways. The great coaches know these differences.”

Even so, there have been varied responses throughout the years in how former players perceived Royal. It has been a mixture of reverence, fear, admiration, anger and deep affection.

“Not all players liked everything Coach Royal said,” Nobis admits. “Most of it was right to the point, truthful and factual. That hurt some people. There were times when he said some things to me where I would mumble to myself and not totally agree with him. But then when you looked at it, more often than not, you had to admit that he was right.”

There is a distinction to be made between a coach who could “relate well” with players and a coach who attempts to befriend his athletes while they are still on scholarship, Nobis said: “When coach Royal walked in the room, you would almost stand at attention. He didn’t ask for that, but you knew the man was all-business. Coach Royal is certainly very special in my life in many ways but, when you played for him, it was more of a business relationship. Playing football for The University of Texas, or for any major institution that has a winning tradition, it’s pretty serious, I can tell you that. There wasn’t a whole lot of grab-assing, particularly between you and the head coach.”

Dixon also described his collegiate relationship with Royal as business-like, but one which — in time — resulted in one of his life’s most endearing friendships.

“Coach Royal used to be my boss and now he’s my friend,” Dixon said. “When we were playing, there was no question that he was the boss. He didn’t want anybody popping him on his rear end as he walked by the shower. But once you used up your eligibility, then you became his friend.”

One thing was for certain: Royal was well acquainted with winning. From 1961-64, the program would lose but two regular season games by a combined seven points. There had been three SWC titles and two runner-up finishes in his first six seasons. The team briefly reached the pinnacle of college football, occupying the top spot in both 1961 and 1962 before stubbing its toe in mid-November and late October, respectively.

As revered as Royal was in most quarters, the murmurs occasionally surfaced: could he win the big one?—————————————————————————————–At the end of the day, the undefeated Texas Longhorns were poised to play for the program’s first national championship but the body of an assassinated U.S. President was lying in state in the nation’s capital.

As leaden skies wept rain on central Texas in the days following November 22, 1963, it was as if the earth grieved alongside a shell-shocked nation. Days earlier, on a Dallas street, six floors below the Texas School Book Depository, the unthinkable happened. Now, could anyone really be thinking about football?

Until then, it was a season in the sun for Darrel Royal’s Longhorns. Royal was actually scheduled to meet John F. Kennedy in Austin on November 23, an open date for his team just before the annual showdown against Texas A&M. It shaped up as one of the most significant weeks of Royal’s career. Before 1970, both major wire service polls (AP, UPI) awarded the national championship prior to the bowl season. As such, the November 28 grudge match in College Station wasn’t just for braggin’ rights. It was for the national championship.

Across the nation, college games were appropriately cancelled on the day after Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas. But should a football game be played just six days later? In Texas?

“There was talk of canceling that game,” Royal said. “Serious talk.”

For three months, however, Texas was the talk of college football. A team that lost eight starters from its undefeated regular season the previous year opened the 1963 campaign at No. 5. The Horns flattened their first three opponents (Tulane, Texas Tech, Oklahoma State) by a combined score of 104-14. By the time the second Saturday in October rolled around, Texas stood at No. 2 in all the land. It’s just that Oklahoma was ranked No. 1, setting up the first showdown between the nation’s top two teams in the overheated history of the series.

It wasn’t close. On its opening possession, Texas drove 63 yards on 11 running plays to stake a 7-0 lead. And the Horns never looked back, booming the Sooners 28-7. As expected, Texas jumped to the No. 1 spot for the third straight season. But could they stay there?

Narrow wins against Arkansas, Rice and SMU followed on successive Saturdays, setting up a showdown with Baylor in Austin. There are those who insist the biggest play of the 1963 National Championship season took place on November 9 against the once-mighty Bears. Baylor boasted one of college football’s most prolific passing attacks while the Texas ground game was the proverbial irresistible object. Who could have expected a defensive struggle, resulting in one of the most critical defensive plays in Longhorn history?

“Both teams actually moved the ball up and down the field,” Stockton recalled, “but when we got down close to their goal line, they would tighten up and the same with us.”

Stockton’s touchdown run gave Texas a precarious 7-0 lead and its only points of the game. But the Bears were primed for a last-second upset. With 29 seconds left in the contest and Baylor at the UT 19-yard line, quarterback Don Trull dropped back and looked for All-SWC receiver Lawrence Elkins. It was a post route. Elkins appeared wide open near the goal line. That’s when Duke Carlisle, displaying the kind of closing speed that still amazes those on hand that day, made a leaping, back-bending interception to stave off what would have been a back-breaking touchdown against the Horns.

For years, the Longhorn football media guide has mentioned that Elkins “eluded UT’s Joe Dixon and looked to be wide open” before Carlisle’s game-saving pick. But four decades later, Royal said Dixon made the right play on the ball.

“Joe’s job was to turn the play inside and not get beat on the outside,” Royal said. “That’s the way a three-deep zone is played. Duke Carlisle had good range. He overlapped it a long way, and Joe had to rely on the safety overlapping. Carlisle was stretched out when he intercepted the ball, but Joe made a good play on it. If Joe had led Elkins to the outside, Duke couldn’t have reached him. He just barely got it, as it was.”

Even so, Dixon approached Carlisle after the game and proclaimed, “You saved my life.”

“Ironically, it’s probably the best game I had in my whole career,” Dixon recalled. “I just get remembered for it because Carlisle comes in there at the last and makes that great interception. Coach Royal wasn’t going to bench me and (defensive) coach (Mike) Campbell wasn’t going to yell at me, but it was an important moment. I really meant it when I told him, ‘You saved my life.’ It was important. It was a big deal. Without that, we’re probably not going to win the national championship.”

One week later, for the first time since 1957, Texas survived a home game against the TCU Cockroaches. All that was left was for Royal to prepare his team to win a national championship at Texas A&M on November 28 and to greet John F. Kennedy following the President’s flight from Dallas on November 23.

At the end of the day, regents at The University of Texas and Texas A&M decided that the game would be played after all. The field at College Station had been dyed green to appeal to a relatively new concept known as color television but, after steady rainfall, the turf was a grayish quagmire. And, with minutes remaining in the contest, the Aggies held a slim lead.

The Horns were driving but then disaster struck — sort of. Stockton explains it this way: “We had a play where the fullback went through the tackle hole and then just flared out into the flat. So I go through the hole and I’m thinking, ‘All right! We’re going to have a good-sized gainer.’ I’m running along and Duke throws the ball about five yards behind me. The linebacker intercepted the ball and he started running it back. All he had to do was go down on a knee and A&M wins the game.”

Less than three weeks after notching the only score in the 7-0 win over Baylor, Stockton was about to make an even bigger play against the Aggies.

“The weirdest thing about it is that, at the time, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was going to get the ball back,” Stockton said. “So, I started trailing him. As one of our players went to tackle him, (the linebacker) turned around. He turned his back to the tackler and right toward me, and just kind of held out the ball. Well, I reached out and slapped the ball out of his hand and recovered it. I later read in the paper that the linebacker was asked why he did what he did. He said, ‘Well, I could tell that my teammate was behind me and I was going to lateral it to him.’ But if you look at the film, there was no one in the picture but me.”

Following the most surreal fumble recovery in the history of Longhorn football, Stockton “just put the ball back down on the ground, went back into the huddle and said, ‘Let’s go.'”

And Texas went, but not before Royal substituted Tommy Wade at quarterback.

“Tommy Wade went in and passed us down the field,” Royal said. “It was very muddy and we drove the ball, it seems like 80 yards, by throwing it. We were throwing, throwing, throwing, throwing. We had to. We didn’t have enough time left to run the ball.”

With seconds remaining, the Horns were on the A&M goal line and a season was on the brink. But just as he did to clinch his first win over Oklahoma, Royal switched quarterbacks.

“I substituted Duke in to run the sneak,” Royal said, “but that was to send in the play more than anything else.”

Driving through the mud and, to some extent, severing the unspeakable grief of the previous week, Carlisle reached the promised land. Touchdown!

Final score: Texas 15, Texas A&M 13.

Even with a perfect slate and a top ranking, few gave Texas much of a chance to upend No. 2 Navy and its Heisman winning quarterback Roger Staubach. (One East Coast sports writer reported that “Texas is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the football public”.) Just before kickoff, Navy coach Wayne Hardin announced on television that his team should be awarded the national championship if it beats Texas. Royal’s terse response: “We’re ready.”

At the end of the day, Texas held the Midshipmen to minus 14 yards rushing while passing (passing!) for 234 yards on the way to a 28-6 win.

“I didn’t mind the reputation that we didn’t throw,” Royal said, “but if you look at all of the big ball games that we won, we had big throws in them. The Arkansas game in 1969, the (1964) Cotton Bowl game when we played Navy, we did a lot of it throwing.”

All that stood between Royal and consecutive national titles was a failed two-point conversion in a 1964 home loss against Arkansas. The Horns would conclude the 10-1 season with a riveting 21-17 win over No. 1 Alabama and quarterback Joe Namath in the 1965 Orange Bowl. The bitter irony is that the 1964 Longhorns, as outstanding as any team in program history, is one that relatively few Orangebloods remember.

“It was just as good of a team as the 1969 (national championship) team,” Royal observed. “In 1969, we beat Arkansas, 15-14. It was just as good as any team that we’ve ever had. 1961 was a fine football team. The only difference between the 1961 and 1964 teams is they lost a real tight game while the 1963 and 1969 teams won a real tight game, a game they could have lost.”

There would be another (UPI) national title in 1970, but it would also be the last year Royal beat OU. Baylor snapped Texas’ six-year stronghold on the SWC title with its 34-24 ‘Miracle On The Brazos’ upset in 1974. In 1975 and 1976, the Aggies would post consecutive wins against Texas for the first time in 25 years. Upstart Houston would join the league in 1976 and shellac Texas at home, 30-0. Scholarship limits, and college football parity, was just around the corner.

Still, Texas posted Top Ten finishes in 1972, 1973 and 1975. There was the promise of a healthy Earl Campbell returning for his senior season in 1977. Winning conference titles would no longer be a forgone conclusion but the team was still loaded and Royal was only 52-years old (approximately the same age that Bobby Bowden started winning games at Florida State). That’s why the most surprising development of the 1976 season was when Royal and Arkansas coach Frank Broyles announced their retirement late in the season. It meant that on December 4, the lifelong friends hung up their coaching caps on the same night in the same game in front of a nationally televised audience.

There will always be those who are convinced that Royal was gradually shown the door after posting an 0-5-1 mark against the Sooners to end his career. For the most part, Royal is content to let those folks think that.

“I was still having fun, and I wanted to quit while I was still having fun,” he said. “I didn’t want to do it (coach) until I didn’t like it. I wanted to get out before people wanted me to.”

And he got out the way he got in: as a winner. Including that season-opening win over Georgia in 1957 and the career-ending 29-12 win over Arkansas in 1976, Royal’s 20-year record at Texas stood at 167-47-5. The only thing that stands taller is his enduring legacy that can hardly be quantified. In fact, a couple of years ago, head coach Mack Brown chuckled when a reporter asked what type of legacy he wanted to leave at the Forty Acres.

“There will only be one legacy at The University of Texas,” Brown said, “and that’s coach Royal.”

The college football landscape has changed so dramatically since December 18, 1956 that the 32-year old Okie who interviewed for the Texas job would hardly recognize the place. But the landscape of Texas football would not be the same without him. Not even close. Love him or loath him, Royal laid not only the foundation of Texas football, but also the goal toward which it will forever aspire.

And whatever “it” is, Royal certainly possessed the undefinable “it” during a 20-year span that remains unsurpassed at the Forty Acres. It leads one to painstakingly search for the one, superlative word that somehow encapsulates this innate quality that set him apart from his contemporaries and ensured his presence within the pantheon of those who have attained college football immortality.

“All I can say…,” Dixon concluded, “…is that there’s just some royalty about him.”

At the end of the day, perhaps that’s all that needs to be said.