5

First Meetings

When ABC Sports president Roone Arledge made a last-minute decision in August 1974 to hire me as part of his revolutionary new college football sideline scheme, neither he nor his lieutenants knew the one identity element I had been holding back from them for months.

But at some point, closer to the start of the season, I was summoned to New York to sit with a financial officer (as the producers invariably called him, a “green eyeshade”) and learn how to use an air travel card, how to treat the daily cash per diem, how to fill out and properly compute an expense report, which card to use to check into hotels, etc. He went through about 20 minutes of this before sitting back in his chair, smiling, and saying, “Anything else you are curious about?”

His name was Bob Apter, and executive producer Chuck Howard had explained to me that Apter was the number two financial officer at ABC Sports, but there was no reason for me to meet his superior, so for anything administrative he was my guy.

Now or never. “Yeah, thanks. I am about to go on national television with a yellow blazer and an ABC Sports identity, and I haven’t yet been introduced to Roone Arledge. Should I be surprised by that?”

Apter burst out laughing. “Oh, hell no. There’s nothing surprising about that. We’ve got people who have worked here for years and haven’t met Roone Arledge. He’s a virtual recluse, almost never comes to work in the daytime, and if you ever meet him casually, it will probably be in the restroom. That’s where I first met him, and I had already been here two years.”

Bob’s office was on the 16th floor at 1330 Avenue of the Americas. That was the ancillary floor for the sports division. All the royalty were on the 28th floor, and because of the overwhelming success the division had achieved under Arledge, several of them already had hall-of-fame resumes even while still in their 20s and 30s.

So there was an aura about the 28th floor, and I felt it. Now that my business with Bob Apter was done and I had no further official agenda in the building, it was thrilling to me that I needed to go back to 28, where all the LeRoy Neiman paintings lined the walls, the glamorously Italian receptionist Phyllis Colonna smiled from behind the front desk, and after retrieving my suitcase I could hit a restroom before grabbing a cab in afternoon traffic for LaGuardia.

I left the suitcase with Phyllis and walked into the men’s room. And there at the bank of washbasins, having just exited a stall, was the unmistakable physical presence of the guy they called “the Redhead.”

Roone Arledge, no doubt. He could never have imagined that my first quiet thought was: Wow, he looks a lot like his dad.

What I had never said to anyone (because how exactly would it have come up?) was that somewhere in my Hendersonville, North Carolina, childhood I had heard his credit on a telecast and asked my mom, “Do you think he is related to our neighbor Roone Arledge?” And she told me, “Yes, he is their son.” All through my teenage summers I had made money caddying at Hendersonville Country Club, and “Mr. Arledge” was an occasional client. I was aware that the Arledges had retired to our Blue Ridge mountains from New York. Mrs. Arledge was in my mother’s bridge club.

So after the initial greetings and his warm welcome to the network, I jumped right into “By the way, how’s your father?”

A look of shocked curiosity. A confused grin. “Well, why in the world would you be asking me that?”

I explained about the caddying. I don’t think I even got to the bridge club.

He held out a hand to terminate the conversation. “Listen, I’ve got to run. It is really great to meet you, and you’re going to do great things for us. But by all means don’t EVER tell anyone that. NEVER. Are we clear on that?”

Of course we were. A sworn secret. How would they have explained that out of 432 candidates, they had wound up putting on the air the only one who had caddied for Roone Arledge’s father fewer than 10 years before? They wouldn’t have to. I’d be the last person alive to reveal something that compromising.

Ever.

As that first ABC Sports college football season on the sidelines developed, Arledge’s highest-ranking production lieutenant, Chuck Howard, became my mentor. The established staples of the division’s programming prior to the 1971 inauguration of Monday Night Football had been college football and Wide World of Sports, and as the senior VP of production, Howard assigned himself the featured games in the fall and the mainstream Olympics sports events like track and field and swimming through the rest of the year. He also produced golf.

But in September 1974, I was concerned mainly about the sideline and how to create story material in a highly restricted space. I didn’t realize at first Chuck was thinking about that when he advised me to begin finding reasons to travel to Tuscaloosa and Austin, and to try to promote face-to-face contact with two coaches I already idolized and cheered for, Bear Bryant and Darrell Royal.

Back in Chapel Hill, I flew to Birmingham and rented a car to drive down to Tuscaloosa. Chuck had reached out to make me an introductory appointment with Bryant, and step one was to try to beat the great man to his office on Monday morning, which required getting up before dawn. I was carefully instructed that to be later than Bear would be disrespectful, so I was seated in his outer office, facing his secretary, when he arrived, sometime before seven. We began chatting, he asked me personal questions about my small-town background in the Blue Ridge, and sometime before eight I watched in quiet astonishment as the secretary brought in a Crimson mug with the Alabama A, and Bear casually opened a bottom desk drawer, pulled out a pint of Smirnoff vodka, and liberally enhanced his black coffee.

Later I was told that was the highest compliment he could have paid me. An even higher compliment, I was assured, than when we went onto the practice field for Monday morning drills and he allowed me up on the top deck of his famous observation tower, where I watched as he showed off his capacity for minutely detailed observations, all shouted out through a megaphone.

“Hey, tell the strong-side tackle to turn his outside foot toward the boundary at a forty-five degree angle in his stance. That way he’ll beat the running back to the corner!” An order tossed out from 40 yards away.

Bryant was an instant friend, maybe because I was a Southern boy whose mother had struggled to raise me. During my first season when some veteran Southern sports editors tried to deep-six the entire sideline experiment, Bear backed me and ABC for the innovation.

Royal was a little pricklier when, by mid-October, we were in Austin for an Arkansas-Texas game that felt like it was scheduled way too early.

On the third weekend of the season, Texas had lost to Texas Tech in Lubbock when a hot quarterback named Tommy Duniven scorched the Longhorns’ secondary in a 26–3 Red Raiders upset victory.

The loss to Texas Tech took place at a moment of undercurrent in Royal’s program. The star of the preceding season was a power runner named Roosevelt Leaks, who had rolled up more than a thousand rushing yards and been chosen as the Southwest Conference Player of the Year. Leaks was back, but now there was competition for his starting role, because Texas had won a once-in-a-lifetime recruiting war with Oklahoma to sign a freshman star named Earl Campbell. Leaks was a bit dinged up with a damaged knee. Campbell was healthier than the proverbial horse. Neither was a blocking back, they both needed to carry the ball, and the entire Texas fan base was watching and debating when the moment would arrive that Campbell replaced Leaks. It was a massive distraction.

Now in the wake of losing in Lubbock, Royal was plotting toward the moment he knew his team needed, though it was a moment that would fly in the face of requisite loyalty to a noble warrior who had shown no slippage. Leaks was still Leaks; he hadn’t exactly slipped. But Darrell knew Campbell was cosmic. He needed a way to showcase that for the media and fan base against Arkansas.

I was still reciting memories from the 1969 “Game of the Century” and James Street’s game-breaking 44-yard fourth-down pass to Randy Peschel in a game that pitted unbeaten, No. 1 Texas against unbeaten, No. 2 Arkansas. The pass, which came in the waning minutes of the regular-season finale, led to a touchdown. Final score: Texas 15, Arkansas 14.

I was stunned that this time the Horns were playing the Razorbacks before November had even arrived. But now here I was in Austin, meeting Street and drinking Lone Stars with him Wednesday night, and then eating Mexican breakfast Thursday with Royal at Cisco’s Bakery & Bar, listening to the coach’s speculation about how to showcase Earl Campbell in the right way.

The project would begin with a sit-down interview I was to conduct with Campbell the following morning, an appointment Royal had delegated to legendary publicist Jones Ramsey, and the first time Earl would be speaking in front of a camera. Royal and Ramsey were sure I would be supportive rather than challenging. Producer Terry Jastrow, a Midland, Texas, native and Houston golf graduate, took it to another level. He stopped the camera several times to tell Earl what he wanted him to say and how to say it. I was blown away, and at one point complained to Terry that it was inappropriate to do that. Terry just looked at me and said, “Jim, it’s sports, not news, and we don’t want to be here all day.” For that moment in the evolution of the medium, I’m going to say he was right.

Earl was monosyllabic but unscathed. The following day Leaks was again in the starting lineup, and Campbell waited on the sideline while fans trained binoculars on his number 20 jersey. Fewer than two minutes remained in the first half when a Longhorns student manager showed up at my elbow and said, with considerable urgency, “Coach Royal wants to see you.”

The rule I had been quoted by Chuck Howard said not to go within the 35-yard lines, which meant I was barred from in-game contact with players and coaches. I knew of no variation for a head coach who wanted to violate that. But this was Darrell Royal, and I had ardently rooted for him to win national championships, and supposedly he wanted to see me. Right now.

Arkansas was in possession of the ball, somewhere near its own 40, and facing a lengthy third-down play when I reached Royal’s side. Chewing a blade of grass, he half turned toward me and said, “Let’s see if we can set this up.” I wasn’t sure what he meant.

The third-down Razorbacks pass was incomplete, and as his punt return unit ran onto the field, Royal turned fully toward me and grabbed my shoulders to focus my vision.

“You see number 20, right there? Now watch Earl block this punt.”

Campbell was positioning in the center of the line, a couple of feet off the Arkansas center’s nose. When the snap sailed back to the punter, Earl exploded past the center and crashed into the punter a split second behind the ball. The punt was engulfed, setting up a Texas touchdown before the half. The crowd buzzed for the rest of the day, as a new era in Longhorns football had begun. Three years later, Campbell won the Heisman Trophy.

That night after a Texas barbecue feast, I witnessed the most majestic of all illustrations of Darrell Royal’s godlike power in Austin. Along with Jastrow and a couple of other ABC types, I was allowed into the coach’s private postgame gathering in an upstairs suite at the Stephen F Austin Hotel.

Several of Royal’s musician friends performed an acoustic concert there, trading the stage back and forth among themselves throughout the evening. They included Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Tracy Nelson, and others from the Old Pecan Street scene. I was fortunate that someone explained to me Royal’s house rule for this: Whenever someone was singing, out of respect and attentiveness, not a single person was allowed to utter a word. Not a syllable. Not a whisper. And anyone who did so would immediately be escorted out of the room. No questions asked.