The University of Texas at Austin Athletics
The Dreams of ‘57
09.01.2017 | Football
A look back to 1957 as Texas remembers Darrell Royal's first team 60 years later.
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Editors Note: Darrell Royal's wife, Edith, and longtime University of Texas Sports Information Director, Bill Little, will serve as honorary captains and be recognized on the field pregame and present for the coin toss at Saturday's game.
The old locker room was under the west side of the stadium, tucked somewhere near where storerooms and staircases are today. But Bobby Lackey still remembers the silence.
Lackey, one of the star sophomores on Darrell Royal's first Longhorn football team in 1957, was on his way to hit golf balls Wednesday in one of the few areas around Houston which had dodged Harvey.
"I figured I would have some time to work on my short game, and it wouldn't be crowded," said Lackey as the wind whistled past his cell phone. By Saturday morning, he will have put away the golf clubs and will be at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium to welcome the Tom Herman era of Longhorn football.
But the wheels of memory were turning at midweek. He was, after all, just a few days removed from his 60th wedding anniversary. Long retired from a hugely successful produce business near Weslaco—where the high school stadium is named for him—Lackey lives near Houston, but safely out of harm's way.
The palms are no longer sweaty, and the long shadows from the past are a bit more distant, but Lackey will never forget that time in his life when he was young, and when a 32-year-old coach was about to make an incredible impact on his life.
"I just remember when he walked into the locker room he commanded our complete attention. It was amazing that he was only 32 years old, and yet we had all the respect in the world for him," said Lackey. "We knew we had to change."
The change would come from hard work and attitude.
"Aggressiveness was the trademark Royal looked for first among his players," wrote historian Lou Maysel in his book, "Here Come The Texas Longhorns." And he expected it immediately.
"You spend your time waiting for these promising boys to deliver; pretty soon you're wearing a straw hat to the Christmas party," Maysel quoted Royal as saying.
Lackey remembers it well.
"You had a choice between hitting and getting hit," he said. "It was better to hit them first."
Longhorn Hall of Honor legend "T" Jones was a huge part of the entire decade of the 1950s. He was a star quarterback from 1950-1952, then served as an assistant coach to Ed Price and was one of two coaches retained by Royal when he was hired in December of 1956. Jones, who lives at Horseshoe Bay, is the only surviving member of Royal's first coaching staff at UT.
"When he first came," said Jones, "he spent a lot of time observing the reactions of all of us. He watched us coaches and wanted to understand why we did this and why we did that. He didn't come in with a rigid plan. He wanted to know what worked for this team."
Still, Jones said, Royal was demanding.
"He wanted to win, and wasn't satisfied with anything less. That's why it seemed he stayed upset all the time that first year. He expected you to do your job. We knew not to cross him, and we understood his mood."
That is why, legend has it, that Royal walked out of a post game banquet following the 'Horns disappointing 39-7 Sugar Bowl loss to Ole Miss and gave away his bowl watch to a stranger. Despite that loss, Texas finished the season with a 6-4-1 record which included a 9-7 upset of No. 4 ranked Texas A&M in College Station, a 17-0 upset of No. 10 Arkansas, and a respectable 21-7 loss to No. 1 Oklahoma, which was in the midst of its NCAA record 47-game winning streak.
The season had laid the foundation of the Royal era. A year later, Texas beat Oklahoma behind Lackey's heroics, 15-14. Royal's teams would reel off eight straight wins over the Sooners, part of a string of 13 games against Oklahoma where Texas won 12. The win over Texas A&M in 1957 was the first in a 10 -game victory streak over the state rival.
As the 2017 season begins, Texas football looks back on a curious succession of successes in the years ending in the number "7." In 1937, following a low point of losing seasons in 1935 and 1936, Texas shocked the nation by hiring the highly regarded D. X. Bible as head coach and athletics director. Bible's early teams struggled, but he went on to a marvelous 10-year career that would help earn him entry in to the National Football Foundation's College Hall of Fame.
Bible retired after the 1946 season, and his long-time assistant Blair Cherry took over in 1947, posting a 32-10-1 record. Royal, of course, began his 20-year run in 1957, to be followed by Fred Akers, who took over in 1977 and utilized the Heisman Trophy year of Earl Campbell to finish the regular season as the nation's No 1 team before a post season Cotton Bowl loss.
Now, a new "7" arrives, this time for Tom Herman and his inaugural Longhorn team.
When Royal—to use his own words—"set his bucket down"—at the young age of 52 following the 1976 season, his Texas teams had won 167 games, three national championships, 11 Southwest Conference championships, appeared in 16 bowl games and finished the year ranked in the nation's top-five nine times.
His 167 victories rank him just ahead of Mack Brown, whose teams won 158 games in his 16 seasons.
While the game has changed tremendously over the last 60 years, some of the solid planks of the base of the game remain.
"We all wanted a chance to play," recalls Lackey, who alternated as a quarterback with Walter Fondren in 1957 as well as playing defensive back and punting. "We played two units, and we played both ways. So we knew before every game that we were expected to play seven-and-a-half minutes every quarter. Our second team was just as good as our first team, and we had a lot of veterans and a lot of young players.
"All of us knew things had to change after that 1956 season," Lackey said.
Jones, who helped tutor the quarterbacks, remembers the steel eyes of Lackey, who became one of Texas' all-time great players by his senior season of 1959.
"He was like Darrell in that way," Jones said. "You could look him in the face and see the determination. For the most part, the quarterbacks called their own plays in those days. Bobby understood the game. He was smart, and he was going to do whatever it took to win."
Prior to Saturday's season opener with Maryland, Edith Royal, the 92-year-old widow of the Longhorn coach, will join Longhorn captains for the coin toss for the game which will begin the next era of Texas football.
An old country music song says, "…the class of '57 had its dreams…." And for the Longhorns of 60 years ago, that has turned out to be dead, solid, right.
The football season of 1957 ushered in a new era of Texas football, and if this story sounds hopefully familiar to the Longhorns of 2017, it should.
As we were writing the book, "What It Means to be a Texas Longhorn" in 2007, we asked coach Royal to join Mack Brown in writing forewords to the book. In it, more than 70 former players were asked to answer the question the book title posed. As usual, Coach had a way of taking complicated things and making them simple, so this is what he said:
"…I would define it in three words: 'It's a chance.' It is an honor to be a Longhorn, but to me it has always stood for a chance. If we make the right moves, we've got a chance to be with the people at the top. The University of Texas certainly provides that chance. It is about being the state university, and it's about pride, but it is always about opportunity."
So Saturday, as Texas begins a new era of Longhorn football under Coach Tom Herman, it is with the acceptance of the challenge of that "chance." It is about honoring the past, celebrating the present and looking forward to the future.
