Coach Royal: Conversations with a Texas Football Legend (review)

The popularity of football in Texas, firmly established long before the explosive growth of the National Football League during the 1960s, elevated several of the state's most successful coaches to legendary status. None has risen to greater stature than Darrell Royal, who arrived at the University of Texas (UT) on the cusp of profound social and political changes. John Wheat's transcript of his conversations with Royal from 1993 to 2004 provides glimpses of the man and these times, from Royal's childhood in Oklahoma through his retirement years.

Royal guided the Longhorn football team, served as Athletic Director and as Special Assistant to the President of UT during years filled with assassinations, student protests, and racial integration, all of which affected life in Austin. As the coach of one of the most popular teams in a region fanatical about football, Royal would not only become a legend but friends with other state icons and notables: Willie Nelson, Lyndon Johnson, John Connally, Bear Bryant, Abe Lemmons, et al. Royal's conversations with Wheat address all of them, as well as football, including the wishbone offense, the 1969 National Champions, Freddie Steinmark, and recruiting.

Royal touches on several other subjects as well. But readers expecting the candor exhibited by high school coaches in Ty Cashion's Pigskin Pulpit (Texas State Historical Association, 1998) will be disappointed. Royal, a seasoned interviewee, quickly dismisses inquiries into some of the more controversial subjects broached by Wheat, an archivist at the Center for American History at UT. For example, an entire chapter entitled "Racial Integration" devotes less than two pages to the topic. While Royal admits, "we should've done it a lot sooner" (p. 33), he excuses the delay thusly, "it wasn't done in this section of the country" (p. 33). The remaining pages of the chapter deal with Gary Shaw's Meat on the Hoof, throwing the football, and his television program with Austin celebrity Cactus Pryor.

Comments on other topics such as recruiting violations and Title IX are also cursory, as is, surprisingly, his comments on key games and innovative strategies. Royal does expound at length on his relationships with Nelson, Johnson, Jim Bob Moffett, and Freddie Steinmark. His comments on the latter's fatal bout with cancer are, not surprisingly, the most emotion-filled. The mentor's retelling of the young player's courage reminds older readers and informs younger ones of the reason for the scoreboard dedication at Royal-Memorial Stadium.

Coach Royal addresses a copious number of topics of interest to football fans, UT alumni, Texans, and historians. But for a career spanning a period of half a century, the book is far too short and the interviewer too close to the subject to delve deeply into the controversies of the times. Despite the brevity, the book does offer a positive if not "compelling self-portrait of one of the most honored figures in the history of the University of Texas" (p. xiii).