Sports and the Racial Divide: African American and Latino Experience in an Era of Change

9. The Pigskin Pulpito: A Brief Overview of the Experiences of Mexican American High School Football Coaches in Texas

  The Pigskin Pulpito A Brief Overview of the Experiences of Mexican American High School Football Coaches in Texas —Jorge Iber On the evening of October , , the Duval County town of Benavides provided one of its former head football coaches with the highest honor that can be granted to a Texas field general, naming the community’s gridiron stadium in his honor. The tribute was well deserved for between the years  and , Coach Everardo Carlos (E. C.) Lerma guided the hometown Eagles to an impressive—even by Texas standards—run of success. The , , , and  squads won district championships. The , , and  clubs earned bidistrict titles and the  and  contingents finished with undefeated seasons and claimed regional crowns. In addition to his remarkable success on the gridiron, Lerma, like many of his colleagues during that era, directed all the school’s other team sports and produced district titles in track, baseball, and another regional championship in basketball. The accomplishments of Lerma’s charges generated a sense of pride among Benavides’ residents and, as another student of Texas high school football history has noted, impacted the community because success on the gridiron affected “how outsiders viewed [such] places.” In addition to onfield success, Lerma, reflecting the experiences and convictions of most of his coaching contemporaries, believed it was his responsibility to instill in his athletes the values of “self-reliance, sacrifice, discipline, accountability and survival—in a word that coaches so often used, manliness, in its most positive sense.” Mexican American High School Football Coaches in Texas  Over the past seven decades, numerous individuals have chronicled the role of high school football coaches in Texas. Writers such as Harold Ratcliff, Bill McMurray, and Carlton Stowers have generated works with heroic titles such as Autumn’s Mightiest Legions, Texas Schoolboy Football, and Friday Night Heroes: A Look at Texas High School Football. These tomes had two principal purposes: first, to “record and preserve the sport’s highwater marks,” and second, to regale “readers with riveting vignettes of greatness on the high school gridiron.” While such works are important in capturing the lore and statistics of on-the-field action, they are limited in their analysis of the historical impact of football and coaches on community life in the Lone Star State. A more scholarly perspective of this subject matter is provided in Ty Cashion’s  work, Pigskin Pulpit: A Social History of Texas High School Football Coaches. Here, using oral history interviews with coaches active primarily between the late s and late s, the author examines the “ways and outlooks” and societal impact of these men. Unanimously, Cashion’s interviewees, whether white, African American, or Hispanic, embraced a belief in the value of football as a way to improve one’s economic and social standing as well as a similar philosophy regarding the game. These coaches believed that football presented their players with some of the same obstacles that these young men would confront in later life. It was a coach’s task, then, to use sport to instill the “keystones of character” to the next generation of Texan males. One individual Cashion quotes, Panhandle High School’s Stocky Lamberson, succinctly noted the significance of this phenomenon : “I teach history in the morning. In history you try to show how our forefathers reacted under pressure. In athletics you can experience it for yourself. The most satisfying moment is seeing a young person achieve something he didn’t think he could. He had a doubt in his mind, and all along the way you tried to convince him he could do it.” It is doubtful that E. C. Lerma would have disagreed with Lamberson’s assessment of the goals of coaching. Still, an analysis of Lerma’s career, and other Mexican American coaches, reveal some important differences in their experiences from their white and African American colleagues. As many scholars of the Mexican American experience in Texas have noted, while Spanish-speaking people did not face segregation that was as strict as the segregation that African Americans experienced, they were also not treated as the “equal” of the state’s white majority population. How did this trend manifest itself in the hopes, philosophy, goals, and experiences of Mexican American coaches? Jorge Iber  Clearly, Pigskin Pulpit provides a more sophisticated analysis of the Texas high school football coaching profession than do previous works, but the study does have certain limitations. Cashion does a thorough job...