A Complex Superiority

Jones Ramsey, the self-proclaimed world's tallest fat man, once mused that Texans cared about only two sports: football and spring football.

The late University of Texas sports information director overlooked one: football recruiting.

If I wasn't fully aware of the mania surrounding college football recruiting while growing up in East Texas, I certainly learned about it as a sportswriter for the Dallas Times Herald in the mid-1970s.

All available sports staffers, as well as some from the news side, were required to report to the office on the first day each year that high school football players were allowed to sign letters of intent, committing them to colleges and universities.

In those pre-Internet days, we would receive hundreds of calls from fans who couldn't wait until the next morning's newspaper arrived to discover whether the blue-chip running back from Kilgore had signed with Southern Methodist or Texas Christian, or whether the stalwart defensive end from Wichita Falls had signed with Texas Tech or Texas A&M.

It was never clearer than on those days that there was a lot more to Texas football than University of Texas football.

The Longhorns undoubtedly had the state's most successful program and the most national acclaim, but I can't remember an instance when the six other Texas universities in the old Southwest Conference ever acknowledged that they were less than equal. There have been enough upsets of the Longhorns by Rice, TCU and Baylor to prove it.

One of those upsets speaks to my next point, which might cause me trouble -- not for the first time -- in Austin.

Before I make it, I should establish my Longhorn bona fides.

Some of my fondest memories as a child are of watching Texas victories, in particular the one over Roger Staubach and Navy in the 1964 Cotton Bowl that earned the Longhorns the national championship and the one over Joe Namath and Alabama in the '65 Orange Bowl.

I graduated from the university in 1973 and, although I have spent most of my life since out of state, I have remained loyal. When my son, now 8, was a baby, I sang three lullabies to him because those were the only songs for which I knew all the words -- "Hey Jude," "The Eyes of Texas," and "Mercedes Benz," which was performed better by my favorite fellow alum, Janis Joplin. She is closely followed on my list by Walter Cronkite, Dr. Denton Cooley and Farrah Fawcett.