BLESS HIS soul, it was Big Ed Bookman, Barbara Jane’s daddy, who tracked me down at Herb’s to let drop the news that I was soon to take rich.
Bookman Oil & Gas had been making strikes around my coyotes, wild pigs, deer, and Comanches. Big Ed said I owned a payzone waiting to happen, and he was going to become my fifty-fifty partner and dig the goods out of the rocks, dirt, shale, and geology classes for me.
Big Ed said every discovery needed a name. Like Spindletop, the Permian Basin, East Texas, the Spraberry Trend, the Pecos Pool. Mine wasn’t nearly as catchy as those, but nevertheless it deserved to be branded. So Big Ed branded my land Comanche Stretch.
He said, “Your property is where the Chief of the Comanches, Quanah Parker, led a band of his braves against Captain Big Foot Wallace and a platoon of Texas Rangers in a war-like contest. It wound up a tie, history allows.”
“If you say so,” I said.
He said, “Get ready, Tommy Earl. You’re gonna be sticking your straw in the ground of Comanche Stretch and sucking up that WhaleAid and Dinosaur Wine for years to come. You’re sitting on a deep pool, son.”
I said, “Purely out of curiosity, Big Ed, why do I need a partner?”
Big Ed said, “You’ve never been a roughneck, roustabout, or toolpusher, and you wouldn’t know a drilling super if he handed off a football to you. But in case you’re dumb enough to go partners with a major right away—your 30 percent to Exxon’s 70 percent—I’m here to save your butt.”
“I might have been that dumb a minute ago,” I said. “Why are you still exploring? You already have more oil than the Sheik of Araby.”
He said, “The doctors say I’m healthier than they are. I enjoy a strike. It makes me holler zip-a-dee-do-dah. I’ll deal with the majors when the time comes.”
I trusted Big Ed. He was the son of a famous wildcatter, “Pecos Pete” Bookman, who started the family fortune that Big Ed carved into an empire.
“Pecos Pete” earned his name by making one of the most famous oil strikes in history. It was in West Texas in 1926, and was given two names—the Pecos Pool and the Yates Field. Yates was the name of the rancher who owned the land. That discovery is still producing.
Big Ed said, “Tommy Earl, you can’t have too much whip-out in this world, just for the sake of an emergency.”
I said, “I would agree with that even if I didn’t have any.”
He said, “Whip-out can come in handy when you and me and other folks with common sense are trying to live peaceful lives in the middle of terrorist crazies, suicide nut-cakes, loony-toon anarchists, moron protesters, socialist professors, far-left school teachers, and other misguided sumbitches.”
We became partners with a Texas handshake, which is more binding than a Sicilian mob kiss. The kind you see in the movies where Al Pacino kisses a guy.
When the oil began to lap over my shoes, and the aroma of natural gas started to smell sweeter than a high school date, I was starting to think that Big Ed Bookman was becoming as dear to me as the memories of Jake and Eileen, my dad and mom, who had run out of air to breathe.
I said to my partner, “You’re a great man, Big Ed. Wrap me in a robe, put a gold turban on my head, and call me Prince.”
*****
I HAD KNOWN Big Ed in my youth through Billy Clyde and Barbara Jane, but only to say hello and goodbye.
It was when I was building houses and hustled out to West Texas to get in on the McMansion boom that I got to know him well. This was in the one season that Big Ed owned the West Texas Tornadoes in the National Football League, and had hired T. J. Lambert as the head coach and Billy Clyde as the general manager.
Big Ed talked the NFL commissioner, Blinky Bankston, into letting him have an expansion team. If California could have four pro teams, why shouldn’t Texas have three?
The commissioner yielded to a finder’s fee from Big Ed.
Big Ed placed the team in Gully Creek, Texas, since it was halfway between Lubbock and Amarillo. And semi-historic. Close to where the Spanish explorers stumbled onto the source of the Brazos River, which now meanders a thousand miles through Texas before it dumps itself into the Gulf of Mexico.
Big Ed assumed the Tornadoes would attract fans from the South Plains to the Panhandle. Anywhere that people might hate the Dallas Cowboys or New York City as much as he did. Big Ed didn’t care for California either, aside from the Rose Bowl and Pebble Beach. He liked to say, “Those sillies ain’t worth wasting my hatred on ’em.”
As for people who live up East, his attitude was well known. He was on record saying, “I’ll worry about people in New York City not having enough heat in their homes when I see a drilling platform where the Statue of Liberty used to be.”
Fans considered it a miracle when the Tornadoes won the Super Bowl in their one and only season of 1998. I personally thought parity was responsible. No team in the playoffs had posted a better record than 10-6 in the regular season. That Super Bowl was played in Jacksonville, Florida, in a stadium with a corporate name. The Your Money is Our Money Arena.
Coach Lambert’s squad was made up of rookies and over-the-hill warriors. His top draft choices were Budget Fowler, a locomotive running back from TCU who had played for T. J., and the blond quarterback-slash-surfer, Shea Luckett, from Southern Cal. Budget had a less-talented brother named Avis who tried football at a small college in Mississippi but quit to play casino poker.
Budget and Shea stood out in the 28-21 victory over the Detroit Lions in the Super Bowl. Budget scored on three long touchdown runs. One was for seventy-six yards on a sweep. The zebra didn’t see the clip. Another was his ninety-yard punt return for a touchdown, dancing the last thirty yards. The zebra didn’t see the block in the back. Shea Luckett made his own valuable contribution by laying off weed that afternoon.
T. J. was a happy man at the press conference. Billy Clyde took me along. I chose not to wear short pants, sneakers, a golf shirt, and a ballcap so I wouldn’t be mistaken for a member of the press.
T. J. reminded everyone that he had earned a Super Bowl ring as a player when he was a defensive stalwart on the New York Giants team of Billy Clyde and Shake Tiller in 1988. Now he’d won a ring as a coach.
T. J. said, “You can call me any time—I pick up after two rings.”
He cackled with laughter.
But he momentarily forgot that the era of social-conscience sportswriters was upon us, regrettably.
T. J. said, “I know some of you thought I couldn’t keep the wagon between the ditches . . . that I wasn’t smart enough to teach the Pledge of Allegiance to a team of fence-climbers.”
He was interrupted by moans in the room.
Billy Clyde hung his head and quietly mumbled, “Oh, shit.”
Even I could have predicted the explosive headlines we read the next morning in the newspapers. They all added up to:
“Racist Coach Wins Super Bowl.”
That morning, T. J. said, “I was making a joke.”
Billy Clyde said, “You know that. We know that. But here lies free speech.”
The coach laughed himself into a coughing fit.
*****
DESPITE their success, it was lack of attendance at home games that doomed the Tornadoes. While plans for a ninety-thousand-seat stadium were being drawn up, they played their home games in the county high school stadium that held thirty thousand. Which served the Tornadoes nicely since they never drew more than seven thousand inquisitive souls.
All the while, every high school game, even the one between the Gully Creek Fightin’ Roosters and the Salt Fork Hairy-Legged Bats, filled every one of the thirty thousand seats.
Signs popped up on the doors and windows of grocery stores, diners, pool halls, and washaterias. One said: “God’s Country Don’t Need Pro Football!”
Another one said: “Stop Contaminating Our High School Football.”
Big Ed knew West Texas better than I did. I asked him if these people were serious in their dislike of pro football?
He said, “Does a brown bear shit in the Vatican?”
Big Ed liked flashing his Super Bowl ring with the diamonds in it, but he never took financial losses well. That’s why he turned the West Texas Tornadoes into the Los Angeles Earthquakes overnight, with the commissioner Blinky Bankston receiving another finder’s fee.
He sold the franchise for a tidy profit to a Beijing businessman, a Mr. Wang Yong Kong, who already owned principal stakes in AT&T, United Healthcare, Morgan Stanley, and 256 Szechuan restaurants throughout the United States alone.
We went back to our Fort Worth lives and were enlightened by our experiences.
*****
AFTER MORE strikes were kind to us, and the signs looked promising for others, Big Ed and I were having quail legs and a bowl of chili for lunch one day in his office in the Bookman Oil & Gas Building downtown. We’d begun to have lunch twice a week.
His building was three floors of offices, a map room, board room, dining room, kitchen with chef, gym, library, bar, TV lounge, garage, and a putting green on the roof. He had given me office space on the second floor next to his.
It was in those lunch sessions that I found out there was more to Big Ed’s history that I might have guessed. He was born in 1918, nine years prior to the Pecos Pool. His mama’s name was Katie. Pete and Katie left the world too soon. They died of heart failure and pneumonia in the thirties. Big Ed inherited the mansion Pete built on Winton Terrace in Park Hill. Barbara Jane grew up in that house, having been born in ’65. Her mama was the former Barbara Murphy, now known to everyone as “Big Barb.” The Park Hill mansion gave way to Big Ed upgrading the family to the fortress he commissioned in Westover Hills.
The name of Big Ed’s high school—and ours—changed while he was in school there. It was Central High in ’33 when he entered, and he graduated in ’35 after the school was renamed R. L. Paschal High. His daddy sent him off to work in the oil fields for two years before he went to college. “Pecos Pete” said, “Go learn the business. You’ll still have plenty of time left to play football and study poetry that don’t rhyme.”
I knew Big Ed was generous to TCU—there is a science building and a dorm named for him. But I never knew he had lettered at football. As a sophomore he’d been a second-string end on the Orange Bowl team of ’41.
After the bowl game, the attack on Pearl Harbor prompted him to join the Army Air Corps, where he hoped to kill Japs and Germans. He yearned to be a fighter pilot, but poor eyesight forced him to teach guys how to march at Drew Field in Tampa for most of the war. He returned to TCU, played two more seasons of football as a second-teamer, and got a degree in geology.
That day at lunch, Big Ed said, “Enjoy your good fortune, Tommy Earl. But don’t go buying a fleet of Gulfstreams or collecting a pile of modern art that wouldn’t make sense to a plow horse.”
I said, “Don’t worry. I’ve seen everything I want to see; I’ve been everywhere I want to go. I won’t even buy a house near you and the other swells. I might lease a share of a jet airplane to get me to TCU’s out-of-town games now that Coach ‘Puny’ Crocker has the Frogs winning again.”
Big Ed said, “You’re entitled to some toys.”
I said, “But I have to tell you, Big Ed. If you see me with a fleet of Gulfstreams, it’ll be after I’ve bought a submarine.”