The University of Texas at Austin Athletics
Bobby Lackey (1937-2021) – The Essence of Pride, the Eternal Spirit of the Soul
09.07.2021 | Football
Bill Little remembers Bobby Lackey, who helped the Longhorns win their first SWC title under Darrell Royal and led the team in scoring in both 1958 and 1959. Lackey was 83.
A memorial service for Bobby Lackey will be held on Thursday, Sept. 16, at 7 p.m. at Bobby Lackey Stadium in Weslaco.
Bobby Lackey (1937-2021) – The Essence of Pride, the Eternal Spirit of the Soul
By Bill Little
Texassports.com Contributor
The old song says, "The Class of '57 had its dreams…"
If you were a coming-of-age kid in the small town of Winters, Texas, those dreams included dashing football stars who were capable of miraculous feats and darned near unbeatable deeds. Fact was, we needed heroes.
And Bobby Lackey was my hero.
Fact is, Lackey's story would have made a perfect Hallmark movie.
The odyssey begins in the Rio Grande Valley, near the city of Weslaco. When Lackey passed away last Thursday at the age of 83, folks there were still calling him, "the greatest athlete in the past 100 years of the Valley."
He was a three-sport star, excelling in football, basketball and baseball. He was 6-foot-3 and filled his overalls even in high school, and when it came time to go to college, he picked Texas. He was recruited by many schools. But, a visit to historic Gregory Gym for the UIL State Boys Basketball Tournament and the events that followed a few weeks later at the Texas Relays and other campus activities surrounding it, sold him on Austin.
"I enjoyed those things so much," he said in the book, "What it means to be a Longhorn." "I said 'Hey, if they want me, I'm coming.'"
And that was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
Bobby Lackey had grown up dirt poor. He lived with his parents and his siblings in an "Agricultural Labor Camp," and then moved from rent house to rent house. He was the only one of his family to go to college. After amazing success as a high school athlete, his ticket out of the Valley would be that football scholarship waiting for him in Austin.
Lackey came to Texas in 1956 as part of the last recruiting class of head coach Ed Price. A year later, everything would change for the Longhorns as Price stepped aside and athletics director D. X. Bible hired a 32-year-old Oklahoman named Darrell Royal as the head football coach. Even before he met Lackey, Royal knew him. In many ways, he had traveled miles down the same path.
What Royal knew, and the world would soon find out, is that the worth of a person doesn't lie in what he has, but rather in who he is. The people of the land, like Darrell's Dust Bowl days in southwestern Oklahoma and Bobby's time as a kid in the labor camps, claim their dignity from their pride, and their soul. And those things, nobody can ever take away from you.
But even before he left Weslaco, Bobby's heart would become a huge difference maker.
And there is where all of us fans of Hallmark movies take over. Bobby had noticed (as had everybody else in Weslaco), that the prettiest girl in school was a cheerleader named Judy McManus. He would notice as she drove by in a nice car and waved as he walked to school. The two eventually became friends, and even went out on a date, as their son remembers. Then, near tragedy struck. Judy's younger brother fell from a tree, suffering life-threatening injuries and was hospitalized.
And that, my friends, is when we call for heroes.
Folks say that the young boy rallied when the town's star quarterback walked into his room to cheer him up, and just like in the movies, the pretty girl and the quarterback fell in love.
Judy McManus, whose father owned a tremendously successful produce operation in the Rio Grande Valley, came to Texas, and so did Bobby Lackey. The two married after Bobby's freshman year at UT.
Royal arrived in December of 1956, and in 1957 split his quarterback duties between Lackey and the veteran Walter Fondren. But Lackey was going to find a way to get onto the field. By the time the regular season ended, Lackey and Fondren teamed up to lead Texas to a stunning 9-7 victory over Texas A&M. Lackey's 38-yard field goal at the end of the third quarter wound up providing the deciding points.
A year later, Lackey would again step into the spotlight, this time in the most important game of the era. Oklahoma had beaten Texas six straight times and had won nine of the last 10. The '57 team had actually challenged the Sooners before losing in a hard-fought 21-7 game.
Prior to the 1958 game, Royal had told a gathering of supporters, "I think we can win. I am not saying we will win, though. I believe our players actually think they can." And then he added: "Texas has to develop a football tradition. It had one once but lost it. When we get one, maybe we can stop that blood-letting up in Dallas and turn it into a good show."
Texas had nudged all the way up to No. 16 in the national rankings (after having been unranked for two and a half straight years just a season before) and OU came in at a lofty No. 2.
The football rules committee, despite Royal's disapproval, had made a major change in the game. That year, teams could choose to go for two points, rather than just the customary one for a kick, after a score. So when Texas scored first, Royal shocked the packed stadium and a national TV audience by going for two points — and scoring. The Longhorns led, 8-0.
Oklahoma, however, would not be deterred. The Sooners came back, and took a 14-8 lead early in the fourth quarter. Vince Matthews, who was a passing quarterback, had shared duties with Lackey, and took the 'Horns down to the Sooner 5-yard line with under five minutes left. Texas salvaged its drive when it recovered a fumble at the 7, but when Matthews threw incomplete, Lackey came into the game.
The play would become known as "The Shot That Sank The Sooners." Lackey took the snap, jumped in the air and fired a strike into the waiting hands of tight end Bobby Bryant. And then he kicked the extra point for a 15-14 lead. After the game, both Lackey and Royal were quick to give credit to Matthews, who opened the game with his first competition of the year combined with Lackey and halfback Rene Ramirez for 12-of-17 passing for 153 yards and two touchdowns.
It could have ended like a Hallmark movie, because following the game, Bobby and Judy Lackey were photographed walking together up the famed Cotton Bowl tunnel. When the Longhorns defeated OU a year later, that photograph was run on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine — the first SI cover ever for Texas Longhorns football.
Lackey's final chapter with Texas came in the 1959 season, when he and his teammates had Royal on the lip of the cup of an unbeaten regular season before an upset on an icy day in late November in Austin gave TCU a stunning 14-9 victory over UT.
That set the stage for one more miracle from Lackey, this time in the annual grudge match with Texas A&M in College Station. Despite the loss to TCU, Texas was still ranked No. 4 nationally, and a heavy favorite over the Aggies. A victory would send UT to the Cotton Bowl for the first time since 1952 and give the Longhorns a share of the SWC Championship.
But at halftime, Texas was looking at the wrong end of a 10-0 score, and members of the Aggie Corps of Cadets were mockingly tossing cotton bolls at the Longhorns.
In the locker room, Royal called Lackey to the side just before the team left for the second half.
"This half is yours," he said. "Go out there and take charge and see if we can't score some points."
Lackey directed Texas to a 14-10 lead, but with only 7:55 remaining the Aggies had retaken the score at 17-14. Texas had the ball, at its own 25.
Kids, as I said at the beginning, dream. Heroes play. I remember the cold, almost misty air, sitting on those wood stands on the east side of Kyle Field. I remember Texas driving north, their uniforms a strange mix of mud and grass strains on what had begun the day as a pristine white. Lackey would end it, with a 15-yard bootleg pass to Larry Cooper and a final statement on a short quarterback sneak to win 20-17.
"That kid was tremendous," said Royal after the game. "He's been great before, but he was at his best today."
Texas went on to close the season with a 23-14 loss in a hotly-contested game with No. 1 Syracuse in the Cotton Bowl Classic. In his time at Texas, Bobby Lackey had guided Texas to Darrell Royal's first Southwest Conference championship, and started the amazing surge of success that would carry through the next decade. He led the team in passing, in punting, and twice in scoring. But his contributions to this program, or to the lives he touched, cannot be measured in statistics.
When Mack Brown's Longhorns won the National Championship following the 2005 season, he famously told the team to "not let this be the best day of your life." He told them to take what they had learned and apply it to be better dads, husbands, friends and people.
In a very special way, he had written the epitaph for Bobby Lackey.
After graduating from Texas, Bobby took a look at professional football, and decided it wouldn't work for him. He came home to Texas, where Judy was expecting their first child. He returned to the Valley, and he joined Judy's Dad, John McManus, with the development of one of the largest produce companies in America.
Living in Weslaco, and later in the Houston area, Bobby and Judy remained active in civic and philanthropic endeavors, and as one would expect — active in their support of The University of Texas and the Longhorns. He was inducted into the Texas Athletics Hall of Honor in 1977. The high school football stadium and one of the two school gymnasiums in Weslaco are named in his honor.
For more than 63 years, they remained the kids who fell in love in the Rio Grande Valley, nurtured that love in college as sweethearts, and then saw the sunset for the final time together when Judy died last summer.
When Bobby's memory began failing with age, it was Judy who had been there for him. Thursday, the clock ran out on the quarterback.
But those who knew them swear they are together, walking up that tunnel, side by side.
Oh, yeah … and as a tip of the hat to Hallmark movies … they kiss at the end.
