The University of Texas at Austin Athletics
Bill Little commentary: Kipling, football, and the Longhorns
09.27.2013 | Football, Bill Little Commentary
Without even realizing it, the Texas Longhorns had lived out the words of some of the lines that Rudyard Kipling had written all those years ago.
Truth is, as much as I love poetry, I didn't do well in a UT English course which considered the deepest meaning of the craft. I kind of figured if a poet wrote something, they did it because they wanted to tell us something.
The one guy who did that as well as anybody was our old pal Rudyard Kipling. All of us came to know him in high school -- or maybe even junior high -- from his message of growing up entitled "If." We learned it, we memorized it, we hung it on our walls for inspiration.
Almost 120 years since he wrote it, lines from the poem are cherry-picked to fit almost every purpose. The rapper Nas included four lines of it as an introduction to the video of his song "Made You Look." Two of the lines are written on the wall at the tennis players' entrance to Centre Court at Wimbledon.
And Saturday night in Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium, perhaps without even realizing it, the Texas Longhorns lived out the words of some of the lines that Kipling had written to his son all those years ago.
For openers, let's take "If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you…."
When the 2013 team returned from the summer for the start of fall practice drills, Mack Brown had used an overhead projector to map out plans for camp, and for the season. The year would be approached in parts, with separate seasons capsuled within the whole. The first would be the non-conference games. The second would begin with the Kansas State game which marked the beginning of the second quarter of the season, as well as the start of Big 12 play.
But as the week of the K-State game progressed, the team was reminded of a comment by a Wildcat player who had said that Texas quit near the end of last year's game in Manhattan (which to his credit, he later apologized for in a phone call to Brown). Of the seven writers and editors who pick the games in the local newspaper, three favored Kansas State. Through it all, the team pulled closer together. The leaders led, and the assistant coaches drove them (and themselves) hard all week.
They heard repeatedly about the schedule-skewed "five game losing streak" to Kansas State, dating back to 2003 (even though the Wildcats never faced arguably the Horns' best four teams of the decade -2004, 2005, 2008 and 2009).
When the rains in Austin on Friday gave way to a nice fall evening on Saturday, with a national television audience and a crowd of upwards of 95,000 watching, the team, whose dreams of going undefeated this season had given way to their second pre-season goal of winning the Big 12, embarked on their next excursion.
The week that has followed has been a time to prepare for the next step. The truth is, if you start out planning to win all the games, it is not unrealistic at all to believe that you can win the rest of them.
Mack Brown's message has been based on controlling that which you can control. In other words, focus only on the next game.
"What's the most important game for us?" he has asked. The logical answer is simply the next -- "Iowa State."
Texas made it through the adversity it faced in the Kansas State game by holding to its theme. Despite injuries, tough officiating and a good, solid opponent, they prevailed because they stuck together.
In the poem, Kipling handles that in the next to last verse with, "If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you, except the will which says to them: 'hold on!'"
In the last two meetings against Kansas State, that was the one thing the Horns failed to do. They had chances to win in the fourth quarter in both games, but couldn't make it happen. This time, they did.
And that is where they hooked into Kipling's final message to his son: "If you can fill the unforgiving minute, with sixty seconds' worth of distance run…."
As they approached an open weekend before returning to action next Thursday at Iowa State, the week of practice was a time to work on new things and allow the injured time to heal. As homework, the team will watch games this weekend which will involve all three of their next opponents - Iowa State, Oklahoma and TCU. Each player has been given the assignment to watch the game and bring to their position meetings five things which they saw that might help them win, focusing particularly on Iowa State - which defeated Tulsa on Thursday night.
Rudyard Kipling wrote a long time ago, and he left us both thought and inspiration. And what you find is, that can apply to sports, or it can apply to life.
And for a football team which may be just beginning to claim its identity, it is a message worth remembering.