Charlie Strong has a lot of work to do. But so does UT itself.
New Texas head football coach Charlie Strong with his wife Vicki and daughters Hope and Hailee.
I grew up in Texas, but there was nary a trace of burnt orange to be found in my neighborhood. In a mostly black suburb outside of Houston, my childhood friends and I didn't root for the Longhorns.
We mostly favored the late '80s and early '90s teams from Miami, Florida State, and — strangely enough — arch-conservative, quasi-militaristic Texas A&M because of their swaggering greatness. They ran fast, hit hard, and weren't afraid to tell everyone about it. Most of our local sports stars found their fame elsewhere, most notably eventual NFL Hall of Fame running back Thurman Thomas. We couldn't imagine Deion Sanders, Michael Irvin, or anyone from The Wrecking Crew playing for the Horns. There didn't seem to be room for those kinds of brash personalities or that kind of ball up on the Forty Acres, as the UT campus is known colloquially.
Former Longhorns offensive tackle Stan Thomas suggested as much prior to the 1991 Cotton Bowl, when he called the Hurricanes "typical gangsters," noting that when he'd seen their players at a bowl-week event, "I thought I was in prison." His comments seemed an institutional repudiation of the players and the kind of game that we loved. If the Hurricanes had those kinds of players, we thought, then surely the Horns did not.
The Horns' comeuppance was a 46-3 humiliation by the Canes that set then-bowl records for points scored and margin of victory. In victory, Miami also set records for penalties (16) and penalty yardage in a game (202).
To this day, I can't remember rooting so hard against the "home" team or taking more pleasure in another's obliteration. Preteen schadenfreude is a special kind of cruelty.
Some things have changed. On Monday, former Louisville coach Charlie Strong officially became the first black head coach of the University of Texas, one of the most coveted positions in all of football. It's a decision that would seem to be a watershed moment in racial progress in college sports. Because Texas — which fielded the last all-white national championship team in football — has long had a reputation as an unfriendly place for black athletes that extended far beyond my band of childhood friends.
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As recently as 1997, the success of a black Texas quarterback — James Brown — was seen as potentially crucial for football players across the country.
"James's success has made Texas viable for a lot of black kids that never would have considered Texas before," Donnie Little told Sports Illustrated in August 1997. Little had been the university's first black quarterback, in 1978. "It's brought the community together."
Little spoke too soon. That fall, Brown underperformed for a 4-7 team, leading to the ouster of head coach John Mackovic and the arrival of Mack Brown, who actually did bring the community together — by winning more than any coach in UT history other than the legendary Darrell K. Royal.
This other Brown remade the football program as broader perceptions changed about Austin, which now fancies itself the progressive antidote to the conservative state around it in spite of its status as "the most segregated city in Texas." (And if we're discussing race in Austin generally and UT specifically, we shouldn't forget the dueling affirmative action cases — Hopwood and Fisher vs. UT — in front of the Supreme Court that could further reduce the population of blacks on a campus where they are already underrepresented.)
The pinnacle of Mack Brown's tenure came in 2006, when he and Vince Young, a 6-foot-5-inch superhero from the declining neighborhoods of southwest Houston, teamed up to win a national title — the school's first since that all-white edition in 1969. Incidentally, the turning point in their pairing was when Brown stopped tinkering with Young's elongated throwing motion and just let him play. Young was once the sort of player who, before, wouldn't have looked right in burnt orange, but Brown convinced him Austin would be a better choice for him than (of all places) Miami. Meanwhile, on issues of race and really everything else that didn't involve football, Brown assiduously sidestepped most, if not all, of the uncomfortable conversations that could have made headlines. That's a credit to his substantial gifts as a politician and CEO.
Of course, as all coaches eventually do, Brown stopped winning as much and the Horns' fans started to fracture again. So the job of bringing everyone together again has fallen to Strong.
