The VIIIth
9/14/2006, 12:46 PM
My apologies in advance if this has been posted, I do not remember seeing it. I am also unsure of who to credit, but it is a great, great read.
viii
Bud Wilkinson - the 'Lost Interview' Part I
In late 1982, longtime Georgia Bulldog radio commentator and college sports connoisseur Loran Smith began working on his book, "Fifty Years on the Fifty, the Orange Bowl Story." As part of his research, he sat down with former Oklahoma coach Bud Wilkinson at the Coaches Hall of Fame Football Clinic in Atlanta, on February 26, 1983.
"I had known Bud for many years before that," Smith recalled recently from his Athens, Georgia home. "I had the pleasure of meeting him for the first time in 1965 when he and Jim Simpson came to Athens to broadcast the Alabama - Georgia game for ABC. At the time, I was an intern in the Georgia SID office and my job was to assist Bud and Jim in any way that I could."
"I must have made a favorable impression, because Coach Wilkinson apparently never forgot me after that and always returned my calls and gave me the same kind of respect that he would a journalist with the New York Times or any other famous writer or celebrity. The thing I most remember about him was that he was so courteous and accommodating, added to of the fact that he spoke in such an articulate manner, and in complete sentences as well."
Smith used a few excerpts from the interview in the Orange Bowl book, but afterward the tape feel into a drawer full of interviews with other sports greats and was somewhat forgotten for 23 years until Smith came across it earlier this year. Smith forwarded it to Jakie Sandefer, who played for Wilkinson at OU in 1956 - 1958, and Sandefer in turn, shared it with OU Insider.com and Sooners Illustrated.
Although the purpose of the interview was Wilkinson's history with the Orange Bowl, as he had coached Oklahoma in five appearances, (remarkable in an era where the Big 8 conference champion was prohibited from participating in back to back Orange Bowls); however, because it occurred on February 26, just one month after the death of legendary coach Bear Bryant, who, like Wilkinson, dominated college football in the 50's and 60's.
The Interview - February 26, 1983 Part I:
Smith: Paul 'Bear' Bryant passed away a few weeks ago, what was your opinion of Coach Bryant and what kind of relationship did you have with him?
"He was obviously the longest successful coaches of the day and I got to know Bear very, very well. We had met casually in the Navy, and we played in the Sugar Bowl game, January 1, 1951. That was after the 1951 season and Bear was at Kentucky and I was at Oklahoma.
"From playing each other in that game, and we were relatively of the same age, we were playing better offense than they were and they were playing better defense than we were. So for about the next six or seven years - Bear and I, either the last week in July or the first week of Augusta, (Masters - early April), would go to a mutually convenient town, might be Memphis, or Dallas, or somewhere. We'd get a three room hotel suite, two bedrooms and a living room with a blackboard, and we'd talk football for four or five days. We did that for six years, so obviously, we both thought we were getting some value from it - and it was fun too. We had a lot of good social times."
Smith: You took over at Oklahoma when Jim Tatum left after the Gator Bowl win in 1946. Why did he leave?
"Curley Bird (University of Maryland President) was a very persuasive guy, and Jim wasn't sure that we would be able to keep all the people that he recruited from Jacksonville Naval Air Station - as a matter of fact, we didn't. We lost two or three guys that were awfully good who went to the new pro league.
"I don't know how confidant he was with what could happen at Oklahoma, but more important, he wanted to get back to North Carolina. He really had roots, more than most people ever dream of having and he thought, in view of the fact that he would be in total control at Maryland, in addition to building a new stadium and everything else, and Curly Bird had been a football coach, so he would be dealing with a college president who understood what the problems were. Curley just gave him a better deal than Oklahoma and brought him closer to North Carolina.
Smith: What attracted you to the Oklahoma job?
"My alternative was to go to Maryland with him, or become head coach at Oklahoma. I was 30 years old and didn't have much of a choice. There's one problem about college coaching and it's almost as true as pro, then there were probably more good jobs than there are now.
"By that, I mean how much do you give away before the coaching begins? Right now, I can name maybe 12 schools where you ought to be able to do it. Penn State and Pitt; Georgia maybe. Tennessee is kind of like Georgia. Alabama can, at least when Bear was there. Texas can, Oklahoma can. Nebraska can. Southern California can. UCLA can. What can a coach normally expect in the way of material support and the tradition that is there?
"Back in my beginning years, there were maybe 30 schools that had an equal chance to win. SMU and TCU could play well in those days. The only concern I had was I knew we were going to lose those kids and when I was appointed with the Oklahoma supporters really felt quite vocally that I was to young to coach. Fine, I was going to be a nice assistant coach, but I really didn't have quite the background to be a head coach.
"We won our first game against Detroit University and we lose to Texas. Anyway, we play Missouri and we have lost two, won four and tied one. That was the critical game, if we lose this one we're losing the conference championship, and if we ever get our team back together, and the whole thing. If there's any one game in my coaching background that sort of changed the numbers - momentarily at least, it was this game.
"We were favored to win (in Columbia). It's a gray damp day. Royal kicks the ball out of bounds. He kicks it out of bounds three straight times inside the five yard line and the fumble the ball the third time and we score (a touchdown), breaking a very tight game, and win 21 - 12. Then we go on and win the rest of our games. Next year, we get it rolling and we're a pretty good football team from that time on. But that one game we could have lost as well as won."
Smith: Harold Keith says you were a 'shoo-in' when Tatum left; a lot of people found you very attractive when Tatum first brought you in on his interview for the job, and that some were interested in hiring you at that point."
"I think that a lot of that is rumor and those kinds of things that are inevitable around athletics. I don't . . . "
Smith: He said there was no contest as far as who was getting the job.
"That's probably correct, but that didn't change the fundamental that I was talking about. We wind up 2-2-1 after we'd gone to the Gator Bowl the previous season ('46), which was the first bowl game in 8 years (and the second in school history), and there's the inevitable grumbling that takes place out there. They weren't going to give me three years to develop as a coach.
Smith: What was your recruiting situation like back then? Could you win with Oklahoma boys?
"That's something that probably is more misunderstood than anything about my coaching. If you go over our rosters at Oklahoma, you will have to hunt hard to find anybody that played for us who grew up over 300 miles from Norman, Oklahoma.
"We had a hypothetical 300 mile arc that we used to swing. We really couldn't touch people in Kansas very well. But the Texas panhandle, (Texas Tech was not in the southwest Conference), we were the closest major school. We had a line from Dallas to Midland, if a kid lived north of that line we had a good shot at him.
"But they were all Texas and Oklahoma boys, and all from that small portion of Texas. Buddy Leake happened to come from Memphis. His father wanted him to come to Oklahoma. That's the only name I can think of right now that didn't come from that area. There had to be some others, but this was really a home grown group. I was all for that because these kids had grown up reading about (Oklahoma football) and this was the culmination of a boy's ambition. That's the reason they tried do hard. That's paramount to their playing very well.
"In the last two years that I coached, I think my inability to recognize how the world had changed hurt us because we had a good reputation, I think, to recruit on a semi-national basis. It was the jet airplane that changed things."
"Lou Alcindor, (who is now Kareem Abdul Jabar), would have never gotten west of Pittsburgh before the days of jet air travel. No way. Now with the jet, anybody is within four and a half hours of your campus, no matter where they are. And everybody knows where the good players are.
"There's no question where the good players are, like Herschel (Walker). I remember (UCLA coach) Terry Donahue, this was two years ago, Herschel's freshman year, we had UCLA and Arizona State for our first ESPN game.
"The day before the game I'm talking with Terry in his suite. They'd been practicing, and we're trying to get filled in on what they're going to do and so forth. All the coaches are very cooperative. Somehow, Herschel came up in the conversation and Terry said. 'We tried harder to get Herschel than anybody we've ever worked on. We new there was no possible way he would ever attend UCLA, but we also knew if he went to Southern California, which he might, it was over for everybody for four years. With the supporting talent that USC has, you put Herschel in there and that's it. It's four years where they're going to dominate so badly. We spent a lot of money and we accomplished our objective. He didn't go to UCLA, and he didn't go to USC.'
Smith: Oklahoma, at that time, was a sparsely populated state - where did this great interest in football come from?
"One of the amazing things about Oklahoma, it's more apparent in baseball than it is in football because you don't have that many people going into pro football, didn't during those years anyway, but if you take a look at the big league baseball rosters and the great players that came from Oklahoma and relate it to the population of Oklahoma, it's frightening. It really is. It's so disproportionate that you can't believe it.
"Mickey Mantle, the Warner brothers, Johnny Bench, my good friend 'the Indian' Allie Reynolds, it goes on and on. It really was a product at that point in time, where there's not much else going on in Oklahoma. The circumstance in addition to the kids just growing up, that's just something you do - compete in athletics.
"There were a lot of towns in Oklahoma that had exceptional high school coaches. You hadn't gotten into where they are now in some of the cities. It's just the way administration is handled - where the coach is basically a teacher and the coach gets a small stipend for coaching the football team. It's so small that unless he's highly energized, he's not going to really give it his best shot. AT that time you had people that were coaches that were hired to coach. Whatever else they did at the school was secondary. As a result, you had great motivation.
"This was one of the more amazing things that I know of getting back to athletic ability. Hollis Oklahoma is a town of 3500 people. They had a coach named Joe Bailey Metcalf. Our '49 team that won a national championship, we had 3 of the starting 11 from Hollis. Darrell Royal, Leon Heath and the best tackle I ever saw named Willie Manley, and we had a back-up tackle. Four kids in our top 22 from Hollis. Muskogee was another town - that's where (Eddie) Crowder's from. But that was the pattern all over the state. You just had more good athletes that you expect to have. They weren't big - there wasn't anybody big in those days by today's standards - at all.
Smith: The war years, when you, Jim Tatum and Don Faurot were coaching together, you developed the Split-'T' - How did that happen?
"We were assigned to Iowa Pre-Flight, as a part of the 'B-5' program. Bernie Bierman, (Bud's former coach at Minnesota), had been the coach there the year before and then moved on. Tom Hamilton had sold Admiral Radford on the B-5 program. It was a totally different concept. The theory behind 'B-5' was that you're going to spend an awful lot of money training a naval aviator and if the guy wasn't competitive and wouldn't fight when he was out there in his plane you had wasted your money. So we should have a program where we find out who's a competitor before we start spending money to teach them to fly.
"Those kids all wanted to be naval aviators, so we had our pick of the best kids - college, pro athletes, high school athletes. These were the cadets coming through the pre-flight program. It was total military, but the classwork consisted of competitive athletics. They took boxing, wrestling and swimming - everybody had to do that. Soccer, football, baseball, the whole thing.
viii
Bud Wilkinson - the 'Lost Interview' Part I
In late 1982, longtime Georgia Bulldog radio commentator and college sports connoisseur Loran Smith began working on his book, "Fifty Years on the Fifty, the Orange Bowl Story." As part of his research, he sat down with former Oklahoma coach Bud Wilkinson at the Coaches Hall of Fame Football Clinic in Atlanta, on February 26, 1983.
"I had known Bud for many years before that," Smith recalled recently from his Athens, Georgia home. "I had the pleasure of meeting him for the first time in 1965 when he and Jim Simpson came to Athens to broadcast the Alabama - Georgia game for ABC. At the time, I was an intern in the Georgia SID office and my job was to assist Bud and Jim in any way that I could."
"I must have made a favorable impression, because Coach Wilkinson apparently never forgot me after that and always returned my calls and gave me the same kind of respect that he would a journalist with the New York Times or any other famous writer or celebrity. The thing I most remember about him was that he was so courteous and accommodating, added to of the fact that he spoke in such an articulate manner, and in complete sentences as well."
Smith used a few excerpts from the interview in the Orange Bowl book, but afterward the tape feel into a drawer full of interviews with other sports greats and was somewhat forgotten for 23 years until Smith came across it earlier this year. Smith forwarded it to Jakie Sandefer, who played for Wilkinson at OU in 1956 - 1958, and Sandefer in turn, shared it with OU Insider.com and Sooners Illustrated.
Although the purpose of the interview was Wilkinson's history with the Orange Bowl, as he had coached Oklahoma in five appearances, (remarkable in an era where the Big 8 conference champion was prohibited from participating in back to back Orange Bowls); however, because it occurred on February 26, just one month after the death of legendary coach Bear Bryant, who, like Wilkinson, dominated college football in the 50's and 60's.
The Interview - February 26, 1983 Part I:
Smith: Paul 'Bear' Bryant passed away a few weeks ago, what was your opinion of Coach Bryant and what kind of relationship did you have with him?
"He was obviously the longest successful coaches of the day and I got to know Bear very, very well. We had met casually in the Navy, and we played in the Sugar Bowl game, January 1, 1951. That was after the 1951 season and Bear was at Kentucky and I was at Oklahoma.
"From playing each other in that game, and we were relatively of the same age, we were playing better offense than they were and they were playing better defense than we were. So for about the next six or seven years - Bear and I, either the last week in July or the first week of Augusta, (Masters - early April), would go to a mutually convenient town, might be Memphis, or Dallas, or somewhere. We'd get a three room hotel suite, two bedrooms and a living room with a blackboard, and we'd talk football for four or five days. We did that for six years, so obviously, we both thought we were getting some value from it - and it was fun too. We had a lot of good social times."
Smith: You took over at Oklahoma when Jim Tatum left after the Gator Bowl win in 1946. Why did he leave?
"Curley Bird (University of Maryland President) was a very persuasive guy, and Jim wasn't sure that we would be able to keep all the people that he recruited from Jacksonville Naval Air Station - as a matter of fact, we didn't. We lost two or three guys that were awfully good who went to the new pro league.
"I don't know how confidant he was with what could happen at Oklahoma, but more important, he wanted to get back to North Carolina. He really had roots, more than most people ever dream of having and he thought, in view of the fact that he would be in total control at Maryland, in addition to building a new stadium and everything else, and Curly Bird had been a football coach, so he would be dealing with a college president who understood what the problems were. Curley just gave him a better deal than Oklahoma and brought him closer to North Carolina.
Smith: What attracted you to the Oklahoma job?
"My alternative was to go to Maryland with him, or become head coach at Oklahoma. I was 30 years old and didn't have much of a choice. There's one problem about college coaching and it's almost as true as pro, then there were probably more good jobs than there are now.
"By that, I mean how much do you give away before the coaching begins? Right now, I can name maybe 12 schools where you ought to be able to do it. Penn State and Pitt; Georgia maybe. Tennessee is kind of like Georgia. Alabama can, at least when Bear was there. Texas can, Oklahoma can. Nebraska can. Southern California can. UCLA can. What can a coach normally expect in the way of material support and the tradition that is there?
"Back in my beginning years, there were maybe 30 schools that had an equal chance to win. SMU and TCU could play well in those days. The only concern I had was I knew we were going to lose those kids and when I was appointed with the Oklahoma supporters really felt quite vocally that I was to young to coach. Fine, I was going to be a nice assistant coach, but I really didn't have quite the background to be a head coach.
"We won our first game against Detroit University and we lose to Texas. Anyway, we play Missouri and we have lost two, won four and tied one. That was the critical game, if we lose this one we're losing the conference championship, and if we ever get our team back together, and the whole thing. If there's any one game in my coaching background that sort of changed the numbers - momentarily at least, it was this game.
"We were favored to win (in Columbia). It's a gray damp day. Royal kicks the ball out of bounds. He kicks it out of bounds three straight times inside the five yard line and the fumble the ball the third time and we score (a touchdown), breaking a very tight game, and win 21 - 12. Then we go on and win the rest of our games. Next year, we get it rolling and we're a pretty good football team from that time on. But that one game we could have lost as well as won."
Smith: Harold Keith says you were a 'shoo-in' when Tatum left; a lot of people found you very attractive when Tatum first brought you in on his interview for the job, and that some were interested in hiring you at that point."
"I think that a lot of that is rumor and those kinds of things that are inevitable around athletics. I don't . . . "
Smith: He said there was no contest as far as who was getting the job.
"That's probably correct, but that didn't change the fundamental that I was talking about. We wind up 2-2-1 after we'd gone to the Gator Bowl the previous season ('46), which was the first bowl game in 8 years (and the second in school history), and there's the inevitable grumbling that takes place out there. They weren't going to give me three years to develop as a coach.
Smith: What was your recruiting situation like back then? Could you win with Oklahoma boys?
"That's something that probably is more misunderstood than anything about my coaching. If you go over our rosters at Oklahoma, you will have to hunt hard to find anybody that played for us who grew up over 300 miles from Norman, Oklahoma.
"We had a hypothetical 300 mile arc that we used to swing. We really couldn't touch people in Kansas very well. But the Texas panhandle, (Texas Tech was not in the southwest Conference), we were the closest major school. We had a line from Dallas to Midland, if a kid lived north of that line we had a good shot at him.
"But they were all Texas and Oklahoma boys, and all from that small portion of Texas. Buddy Leake happened to come from Memphis. His father wanted him to come to Oklahoma. That's the only name I can think of right now that didn't come from that area. There had to be some others, but this was really a home grown group. I was all for that because these kids had grown up reading about (Oklahoma football) and this was the culmination of a boy's ambition. That's the reason they tried do hard. That's paramount to their playing very well.
"In the last two years that I coached, I think my inability to recognize how the world had changed hurt us because we had a good reputation, I think, to recruit on a semi-national basis. It was the jet airplane that changed things."
"Lou Alcindor, (who is now Kareem Abdul Jabar), would have never gotten west of Pittsburgh before the days of jet air travel. No way. Now with the jet, anybody is within four and a half hours of your campus, no matter where they are. And everybody knows where the good players are.
"There's no question where the good players are, like Herschel (Walker). I remember (UCLA coach) Terry Donahue, this was two years ago, Herschel's freshman year, we had UCLA and Arizona State for our first ESPN game.
"The day before the game I'm talking with Terry in his suite. They'd been practicing, and we're trying to get filled in on what they're going to do and so forth. All the coaches are very cooperative. Somehow, Herschel came up in the conversation and Terry said. 'We tried harder to get Herschel than anybody we've ever worked on. We new there was no possible way he would ever attend UCLA, but we also knew if he went to Southern California, which he might, it was over for everybody for four years. With the supporting talent that USC has, you put Herschel in there and that's it. It's four years where they're going to dominate so badly. We spent a lot of money and we accomplished our objective. He didn't go to UCLA, and he didn't go to USC.'
Smith: Oklahoma, at that time, was a sparsely populated state - where did this great interest in football come from?
"One of the amazing things about Oklahoma, it's more apparent in baseball than it is in football because you don't have that many people going into pro football, didn't during those years anyway, but if you take a look at the big league baseball rosters and the great players that came from Oklahoma and relate it to the population of Oklahoma, it's frightening. It really is. It's so disproportionate that you can't believe it.
"Mickey Mantle, the Warner brothers, Johnny Bench, my good friend 'the Indian' Allie Reynolds, it goes on and on. It really was a product at that point in time, where there's not much else going on in Oklahoma. The circumstance in addition to the kids just growing up, that's just something you do - compete in athletics.
"There were a lot of towns in Oklahoma that had exceptional high school coaches. You hadn't gotten into where they are now in some of the cities. It's just the way administration is handled - where the coach is basically a teacher and the coach gets a small stipend for coaching the football team. It's so small that unless he's highly energized, he's not going to really give it his best shot. AT that time you had people that were coaches that were hired to coach. Whatever else they did at the school was secondary. As a result, you had great motivation.
"This was one of the more amazing things that I know of getting back to athletic ability. Hollis Oklahoma is a town of 3500 people. They had a coach named Joe Bailey Metcalf. Our '49 team that won a national championship, we had 3 of the starting 11 from Hollis. Darrell Royal, Leon Heath and the best tackle I ever saw named Willie Manley, and we had a back-up tackle. Four kids in our top 22 from Hollis. Muskogee was another town - that's where (Eddie) Crowder's from. But that was the pattern all over the state. You just had more good athletes that you expect to have. They weren't big - there wasn't anybody big in those days by today's standards - at all.
Smith: The war years, when you, Jim Tatum and Don Faurot were coaching together, you developed the Split-'T' - How did that happen?
"We were assigned to Iowa Pre-Flight, as a part of the 'B-5' program. Bernie Bierman, (Bud's former coach at Minnesota), had been the coach there the year before and then moved on. Tom Hamilton had sold Admiral Radford on the B-5 program. It was a totally different concept. The theory behind 'B-5' was that you're going to spend an awful lot of money training a naval aviator and if the guy wasn't competitive and wouldn't fight when he was out there in his plane you had wasted your money. So we should have a program where we find out who's a competitor before we start spending money to teach them to fly.
"Those kids all wanted to be naval aviators, so we had our pick of the best kids - college, pro athletes, high school athletes. These were the cadets coming through the pre-flight program. It was total military, but the classwork consisted of competitive athletics. They took boxing, wrestling and swimming - everybody had to do that. Soccer, football, baseball, the whole thing.