The Swan Song for Two Legends

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When I was a boy in Arkansas, as I have written here before, I was a fan of the Arkansas Razorbacks — like nearly everyone else.

Many of my earliest memories are of Saturday afternoons at my friends' houses — where, more often than not, the Razorback play–by–play could be heard on the radio in the kitchen or the living room.

I'm still a Razorback fan, but many things are different for me now. Yet, sometimes, when the breeze blows just so or I catch the scent of honeysuckle in the evening air or I feel a slight chill after an autumn rain shower, my memory bank conjures up, however briefly, a snippet from my childhood.

Most of the time, I don't remember the game or the circumstances — or the names of people whose faces I can see in my mind's eye for a second or two.

I only know that it is a link to a time that was early in my life, when things seemed more reliable, more stable.

Maybe that was one of the things that I always liked about the Razorbacks. They were reassuringly constant. They almost always had competitive teams, and I always got excited when Arkansas and Texas were about to play.

I guess you could say there were three things that I felt I could count on in those days:

• Frank Broyles was the coach of the Razorbacks. There had never been any other head coach at Arkansas in my lifetime.


• Darrell Royal was the coach of the Longhorns. There had never been any other head coach at Texas in my lifetime.


• The Arkansas–Texas football game was always televised. (That wasn't as routine as it might seem to 21st century football fans, who are used to the idea that most of their favorite team's games will be televised. There was no cable in those days, and there were restrictions on the number of regular–season TV appearances a team could have.)

Probably the most memorable of the Arkansas–Texas games in my childhood was the one played in December 1969. It is remembered as the "Great Shootout," and it was so big it brought the president of the United States to tiny Fayetteville, Ark.

I may be wrong, but I believe that, until native Arkansan Bill Clinton came to dedicate a statue on the UA campus, it was the only time a sitting president ever came to Fayetteville.

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That game, I must say, was not an example of stability — and not only because it drew higher–profile attendees than usual.

Ordinarily, Arkansas and Texas met in mid–October — but, because everyone figured they were the two best teams in the country, they were persuaded to move their 1969 game to the first week in December, when no other games would be played (this was a couple of decades before conferences started holding championship games), and the attention of the nation would be on that game alone.

And, in fact, the gamble paid off. It turned out that Texas was ranked #1 in the nation and Arkansas was ranked #2 when they met in Fayetteville on that December day. The winner would go to the Cotton Bowl to play Notre Dame for the national title, but the president was on hand to prematurely proclaim the winner the national champion.

When the game was over, I remember watching President Nixon gush about the Longhorns as he presented them with a national championship plaque that he said would be engraved with the winning school's name — and I noted bitterly that he hadn't said anything about the Razorbacks, who had shut out the Longhorns for the first three quarters.

If Texas was the best team in the nation, I reasoned, Arkansas was nearly as good. The Longhorns beat the Razorbacks by a single point that day.

I didn't dream that, nearly seven years later to the day, in another Arkansas–Texas game that had been moved to December, Broyles and Royal would leave the sidelines together for the last time.

I'm not sure if I ever knew the reasons why Arkansas and Texas agreed to move their 1976 game to early December. They had shared the Southwest Conference championship with Texas A&M the year before, and perhaps the ABC executives were gambling that, as in 1969, the two would be the best teams in the conference — if not the nation.

If that was the gamble, though, it came up way short of expectations. Arkansas and Texas tumbled out of contention early that season. Newcomer Houston won the conference title and went to the Cotton Bowl. Neither Arkansas nor Texas played in a bowl game that season so 35 years ago last weekend, the coaching careers of Broyles and Royal came to an end.

I don't know when or why those two men decided to retire from coaching. It just always seemed right that they did so at the same time. I couldn't imagine watching another Arkansas–Texas game and seeing one but not both on the sidelines.

Both continued to influence athletics as the athletic directors at the schools where they had built their coaching reputations.

And Broyles, at least, continued to wield the kind of power that successful football coaches in small states tend to wield. During his coaching days — and afterward, as athletic director — Broyles was, arguably, the most influential individual in Arkansas — more powerful than governors or senators, more revered than ministers (and, in devoutly religious Arkansas, that truly is saying something).

Broyles retired a few years ago. He's still living — he'll be 87 the day after Christmas — and, while he may still be an influential figure within Arkansas, outside the state one hears little about him anymore.

Royal marked his 87th birthday last summer. One hears even less of him. After he stopped coaching, he continued, as Broyles did, to serve as the school's athletic director, but only for a few years. Texas re–named its football stadium in his honor, and you hear his name mentioned whenever the Longhorns play in big games, but he has mostly remained out of the spotlight for the last three decades.

He now serves as a special assistant to the UT president — which sounds a lot like professor emeritus. If that is, indeed, what it is, he earned the honor, winning nearly three–quarters of the college games in which he coached.

Likewise, Broyles enjoyed a successful coaching career. He won more than two–thirds of his games, and he remains the only Arkansas football coach to win 100 or more games.

Current coach Bobby Petrino would have to win every regular season game, every conference championship game and every postseason bowl game from now until the end of this decade to match Broyles — and, since Broyles' 1964 team was the last Arkansas team to go through an entire season without losing, it seems likely that Petrino would have to remain at Arkansas well beyond 2019.

Even at his present pace (10 wins in each of the last two seasons), it would take Petrino until the year 2023.

Of course, if he manages to do that, he is sure to replace Broyles as the most powerful man in Arkansas — by which time, Broyles is likely to be deceased or far too old to care. In the immediate future, though, Broyles' status is secure.

Royal is also the winningest coach in Texas history, but the current coach, 60–year–old Mack Brown, needs only 35 wins to pass him.

In 2005, Brown became the second Texas coach to win a national championship. Royal was the first, and he went on to win three of them. Brown needs two more to match him.

No matter how you slice it, Broyles and Royal are living legends, and, for many long–time fans of both schools, their legacies are intertwined, like the epic boxing duels between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier or the tennis matches between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova or the Triple Crown races between Affirmed and Alydar.

It was fitting that they ended their coaching careers together.

A Perfect 10

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On this day in 1976, something happened that had never before happened in Olympic gymnastic competition.

A perfect score — 10.00 — was recorded.

Thirty–five years ago, these were uncharted waters. The scoreboards in Montreal (where the Summer Games were being played) weren't set up to display a four–digit score so they showed 1.00 instead.

Who achieved this milestone? Nadia Comaneci of Romania, a 14–year–old dynamo of a pixie who instantly replaced Olga Korbut, the star of the 1972 Games, as the world's favorite gymnast.

Korbut was back in 1976, but she was almost an afterthought. She wasn't even the best Russian gymnast, let alone the best in the world. For that matter, she wasn't even the second–best Russian gymnast.

In Montreal, Korbut was treated more like a celebrity who was recognized for past achievements than a serious competitor. There was a vacuum in women's gymnastics, at least as far as ordinary viewers of the Olympics (such as myself) were concerned. There was no clear star.

And then Comaneci shot across the gymnastics firmament.

Maybe the folks who followed gymnastics closely in those days had heard about Comaneci before the Olympics, but my memory is that almost no one knew who she was. Certainly, I had never heard of her before.

In all, Comaneci recorded seven perfect scores in the Montreal Games. Mind you, that did not mean seven gold medals.

Some of those perfect scores were recorded in competition for the team all–around medals — as a team, the Romanians finished second — and the others propelled Comaneci to three individual gold medals.

No doubt about it. She was a sensation that summer, the new center of the international gymnastics universe. Whenever the female gymnasts were competing, TV ratings went through the roof. People were tuning in to see if Comaneci would record another perfect score — and, most of the time, they got what they wanted.

In a decade that saw three Triple Crown winners in horse racing, Jack Nicklaus flirt with golf's Grand Slam a couple of times, Hank Aaron replace Babe Ruth as baseball's home run king and swimmer Mark Spitz win seven gold medals at the '72 Olympics, individual accomplishments were practically expected — even in team sports.

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Perfect scores are somewhat commonplace in gymnastics today — at least when compared to 1976 and all that had come before. In fact, only eight years later, in 1984, 16–year–old Mary Lou Retton became the first American to do it.

That was pretty remarkable in many ways — but especially for Americans, who had been longing for a gymnastics champion of their own for many years. The sport had been the domain of Russian and Eastern European women for decades.

The fact that the Russians and Eastern Europeans did not participate in the '84 Games didn't seem to matter much to Americans — but it might have cheapened the achievement in the eyes of the rest of the world.

(Anyway, to show how far things had come technologically since Comaneci's day in Montreal, the scoreboards in Los Angeles were equipped to handle four–digit scores when Retton recorded her 10.)

Perfect scores were sort of regarded as impossible dreams when Nadia Comaneci burst onto the scene in 1976 — and her name was hardly a household word. Before the Olympics, most Americans probably had never heard of her.

The anchors of the Olympic TV coverage didn't know how to pronounce her last name when the Games began. They mispronounced it throughout the competition and only began pronouncing it correctly when the closing ceremonies were about to begin on August 1.

Initially, it was pronounced in an almost Italian sort of way, with the "i" spoken. But, in fact, it rhymes with "peach" — with a "ch" sound, not a "y" sound, at the end.

Someone from the Romanian Olympic team brought it to the announcers' attention. My memory is that they corrected themselves with little, if any, fanfare.

I'm told they were pronouncing it correctly four years later, when Comaneci participated in the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow. But I didn't see those Games. Because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter ordered a boycott by American athletes and athletes representing countries that sympathized with the United States.

In that atmosphere, Comaneci won two more gold medals — but she had retired from competition when Retton scored her perfect 10 in Los Angeles. (And, because the Romanians didn't come to Los Angeles in 1984, it hardly mattered.)

The torch had been passed.

A Rivalry Like No Other

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This year's Super Bowl is a little more than a week away.

The Super Bowl has been played every year for nearly 50 years, usually in southerly, sun–splashed climes. It's been played often in California, New Orleans, Miami, and it is not a complete stranger to Texas. It was played in Houston twice.

This year, however, it will be played in Dallas — for the first time.

Lately, the folks in Irving and Dallas have been unrolling all their new facilities and vehicles and gadgets that are intended to accommodate the needs and desires of visitors in town for the big game — and earn local entrepreneurs a neat profit in the process.

Back in the summer and into the early fall, North Texans harbored hopes that the Dallas Cowboys might host their own Super Bowl, but those hopes were dashed rather rapidly.

I figure that, in the long run, that will be good news for local merchants, who are counting on the revenue from visitors from two cities. If the local team had made it to the Super Bowl, logic tells me that approximately half of the out–of–town visitors would have been eliminated.

So it's a good thing for all those folks who want to make money from this — especially the ones who run the hotels and the motels, who would have lost the income from all those out–of–towners who will need rooms for several days.

People are always going to have to eat, even if they're from a nearby community and only in town on the day of the game, so restaurateurs wouldn't have been affected quite as severely, but they, too, would have had to lower their expectations.

But the Cowboys went into a tailspin early. Between the Cowboys' and the Longhorns' declines, football dropped from sports fans' radars around here, and, remarkably, the sports talk in this area in October did not focus on football but on baseball, as the Rangers advanced to their first–ever World Series.

I grew up in Arkansas. I have lived in this area for most of the last 25 years. Until a few months ago, I never thought I would see a time during football season when baseball was the leading topic of conversation, but that is exactly what happened here.

It was gratifying for baseball fans, but it often felt, to me, as if the natural order of things had been disrupted.

There have been times when it's felt like one of those alternate reality episodes from the Twilight Zone. It was astonishing to witness the vacuum that was created when the Cowboys and the Longhorns crashed to earth. Talk about tumbling into a black hole.

Only recently, it seems, have people around here remembered that they were going to have a Super Bowl here in early February. It is almost as if the plan to host a Super Bowl locally depended upon whether the Cowboys would be in it — and, when it became clear that the Cowboys would not be in the playoffs, the right to host the Super Bowl defaulted to some other city.

It's probably going to be a good thing for the economy that Cowboys Stadium (known locally as Jerry World for Cowboys owner Jerry Jones) will host two cities, but I can't help thinking of what might have been.

Assuming that everything else would have been unchanged — if the Cowboys had been the NFC's representative in the Super Bowl, who would have been waiting for them from the AFC? None other than the Pittsburgh Steelers — and, if you've been following football as long as I have (or longer), you know what magic that matchup conjures up in one's mind.

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There are all sorts of rivalries in football, but the Dallas–Pittsburgh rivalry in the Super Bowl is unique. I guess you could say it's been a rivalry of milestones.

It began 35 years ago, on Jan. 18, 1976, when the teams met in Super Bowl X. The Cowboys, as I mentioned earlier this week, became the first wild–card team to play in a Super Bowl on that day, but the Steelers won the game, 21–17.

Even if you aren't old enough to remember that day, if you've watched any Super Bowl highlights shows in the last 35 years, you're all but sure to have seen Lynn Swann's amazing acrobatic catch from that game.

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Some folks will tell you it was the greatest catch ever made in pro football.

Then, three years later, on Jan. 21, 1979, the teams met in the first–ever Super Bowl rematch.

Superstitious people tend to be wary of the number 13, but Super Bowl XIII was far from unlucky for football fans. Not only was it the first rematch of a Super Bowl, but it would also mark the first time that a team won its third Super Bowl title, no matter who won the game.

Once again, the Steelers were victorious. The final score was 35–31, and, as one weekly newsmagazine declared in its headline on its game story, "This one really was Super."

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Part of what made it super was a fantastic fourth–quarter comeback by Dallas that was brilliantly captured in NFL Films' wrapup, which can be seen above.

In hindsight, that game featured many of the greatest football players of my youth — Terry Bradshaw, Roger Staubach, Tony Dorsett, Franco Harris, etc., etc. But the play that will always stand out in my memory is of Jackie Smith, a tight end who played much of his career for woeful St. Louis Cardinals teams, dropping a pass in the end zone that could have altered the outcome.

I think everyone watching the game, whether they were pulling for the Steelers or the Cowboys, felt bad for Smith, writhing in agony in the Orange Bowl end zone after dropping that pass.

"Bless his heart," I remember an announcer saying, "he's got to be the sickest man in America."

It took nearly 20 years, but the Cowboys finally got their revenge in Super Bowl XXX, which was played 15 years ago today. It really wasn't a surprise. Dallas went into that game favored by nearly two touchdowns.

With that victory, the Cowboys pulled even with the San Francisco 49ers in total Super Bowl victories with five. At that time, the Steelers had won only the Super Bowls in which they played in the 1970s — their two wins over Dallas along with wins over Minnesota and Los Angeles. Pittsburgh has won two Super Bowls since that time and now leads all other teams in that category with six Super Bowl titles.

It was also the first time that a football team won its third Super Bowl in four years. That's an accomplishment that has been matched only by the New England Patriots.

Steeler fans probably don't like to think about that game too much. Pittsburgh has been to seven Super Bowls, more than any other team, and the one they played in 15 years ago today was their only loss — so far.

As a Packer fan, I hope that will not still be the case a week from Sunday.