The Shootout, 50 years later

Alot can happen in a half- century, speaking of the rise and fall of Arkansas Razorback football.

Fifty years ago this December, the undefeated Razorbacks played the undefeated Texas Longhorns essen- tially for the national championship in a game called the Big Shootout.

The epic event was attended in Fayetteville by a trophy-presenting president, Richard Nixon.

Those Hogs stopped the vaunted Texas wishbone attack that day as no one else had, to the extent that Texas’ 15-14 victory resulted from two flukes—a quarterback scramble on a broken play, during which a Razorback defender was clipped, and an unlikely completion of a perfectly covered pass play by a team that seldom passed or needed to.

The game’s outcome, and the way it came about, contributed to a sense of insecurity and fatalism in the Arkansas psyche only now being generationally overcome, perhaps with the hard-learned perspective that atrociously inept college football performance isn’t the end of the world.

If you deem that overstated, then you’re either young or not from around here.

A 60-something Arkansas man told me the other day that he divides his life into two parts—before that game and after.

My dad said to me as the clock ticked to zero in ’69, when I was 16, that surely I’d known all along that the Razorbacks were bound to lose. And people wonder why I can sometimes reveal a negative or contrarian nature.

Then, just last Saturday, not quite a full five decades afterward, the Razorbacks lost a football game to San Jose State, a logically presumed patsy to which the Razorback defense surrendered more than 500 yards.

On Tuesday, quite by coincidence, the Clinton School of Public Service presented Mark McDonald, author of yet another book about the 1969 game, titled Beyond the Big Shootout—50 Years of Football’s Life Lessons.

McDonald was joined by two of those Razorback defensemen— All-American defensive end Bruce James and linebacker Mike Boschetti, who, by the way, was the player who got clipped during Texas quarterback James Street’s meandering and unlikely touchdown run on a broken play that pulled Texas to 14-6.

Street had taken off running only because the Hog defensive line had beaten the Texas offensive line and harassed him on a pass play. Things are so much different now. The Shootout was the last major collegiate football contest played by all-white teams. Integration of black athletes deepened and spread the talent pool.

Scholarship limits further served to equalize talent.

Business decisions based on TV revenue led Texas and Arkansas into bigger, tougher and separate conferences.

Modern concern for players’ wellbeing changed practice habits, ending genuinely abusive off-season ordeals to which the ’69 players, at both Arkansas and Texas, were subjected, and which made them uncommonly tough.

There was no concern in those days for the tragic long-term effects of head injuries. Players butted skulls and were denied water. Practice wasn’t over until they’d thrown up. The idea was that, if you could survive practice, you could easily hold up through the fourth quarter with Texas.

But there remain a few applicable direct comparisons and contrasts between then and now.

When a questioner asked James and Boschetti how the Hog defense could possibly manage to stop, or at least significantly slow, the vaunted Texas wishbone, they credited their defensive line coach, Charley Coffey, for a strategy that could work only if all 11 defenders sold out their bodies every play to do their jobs and hold up their end for the other 10, as they all did every play that day.

Contrast that, James said, with several big plays given up by the Hogs on Saturday night. All that meant in each case, he said, is that somebody—maybe just one man— didn’t do his job.

When another questioner noted that there was no on-field player celebration after big plays in that ’69 battle, James and Boschetti said that sound defensive plays were expected as routine, not celebrated as rare.

They said there was no time to strut after a good defensive play because Texas was coming right back at you.

James said his immediate focus after every play was to consider the down and distance and collect his thoughts on what he’d been instructed about Texas’ tendencies in those situations, and to prepare for that. “It was all concentration,” he said. “There ought to be a happy medium,” Boschetti said, meaning between the grim intensity of ’69 and the celebratory demonstrations common today. But that middle ground should not extend, he said, to dancing or taunting when you’ve managed to deflect one pass while you trail by 17 points. That happened Saturday night.

The lesson seems to be that times change, mostly for the better but occasionally for the worse, and that, yes, football is but a game.

Winning is better, though losing can be noble, as it was in 1969. It also can be inexcusable, not to call any names.