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By John Maher
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, June 30, 2009

James Blanton Beard was a starter but never a star for the University of Texas football team.

"Of the 13 boys on the Texas team," he recalled, "I was the only one who didn't make somebody's first team All-Southwestern."

Beard has certainly proved to be the most durable Longhorn, though.

He joined the team in 1926 and lettered in 1929, in the days of one-platoon football. He turned an even 100 during the 2008 football season, and he's the oldest living Longhorn football player.

Like many other UT fans, he is looking forward to the 2009 campaign and will watch it with a trained eye. Asked about Longhorn football coach Mack Brown, Beard paused and said, "He's bound to be a good coach or he wouldn't win like he does. I don't always agree with what he's doing, but they're paying him $3 million and me nothing, so my deal don't count for anything."

Some of his recollections, however, are priceless bits of Longhorn history.

Beard lives in the last place you probably would look for a longtime Longhorn - in Bryan, just a few blocks away from College Station and the Texas A&M campus. "I had a chance to buy a freight agency over here, and I took it," he said by way of explanation. "Then I drifted into the moving business and stayed in it for 50 years."

He worked at Beard Transfer & Storage until he was 87. These days he wears a hearing aid, but the years have been relatively kind to him. Beard still has UT season tickets, although his daughter, Nancy, and her husband now use them.

For decades, Beard attended both Texas and Texas A&M football games, even occasionally doubling up. Now, he watches on TV and notes how the game has changed.

"They wouldn't even issue us uniforms today," Beard said of his former teammates. "Our center weighed 150 pounds, and our tackles weighed about 170."

There were no athletic scholarships when Beard played, but that didn't mean there wasn't pressure to win. After the Longhorn varsity's 5-4 season in 1926, coach E.J. "Doc" Stewart was forced out with a four-year record of 24-9-3. He was replaced by assistant Clyde Littlefield, a three-sport star during his UT playing days.

As a player, Littlefield had popularized the forward pass at UT, but that was not his coaching style.

"I was in the last three or four years where the run was the thing," Beard said. "The pass was just ordinary. You didn't build an offense on passing. You had to run the football if you were going to win.

"Today you've got a boy that can throw the ball 40 yards down the field and a boy that can catch it. We didn't have that. All we had was boys that could throw the ball 30 to 35 yards and sometimes someone would catch it and sometimes they wouldn't."

Coaches weren't allowed to signal in plays from the sideline when Beard played, and substitutes couldn't say anything to anyone until after a snap had been taken. Opposing players would sometimes try to exploit that when subs entered the game.

"A lot of smart boys would run up and shake hands and say, 'How are you?' " Beard recalled. "Of course, if the poor kid opened his mouth, it was 15 yards."

Playing at halfback and linebacker, Beard was a backup in 1927 and again in 1928, when Texas first wore burnt orange jerseys.

Beard lived near the 4000 block of Guadalupe Street with his grandmother. Although a streetcar ride to campus cost a dime, Beard usually got up at 6 a.m. and made the 30-minute walk to campus. He might take a trolley back to save his legs, because the team scrimmaged up to two hours a day three days a week.

Players of years past

In 1928, Beard played behind several halfbacks, including sophomore Dexter Shelley of Austin. Beard rates Shelley and Ernie Koy, who joined the varsity in 1930, as the best players the Longhorns had at that time, but he said Leo Baldwin, a player considered a gridiron washout, "was probably the greatest athlete ever in the Southwest. ... He was a one-man gang."

Baldwin arrived from Wichita Falls, where he was not only a football star but the winner of seven individual titles at the state track and field meet from 1923 to '24. Beard recalled that Ralph Hammond, a two-time national middleweight wrestling champion who became UT's first Olympian in 1928, learned firsthand about Baldwin's athletic prowess.

Hammond, Beard said, "always wanted to wrestle with you. He'd hurt you if he could. He kept fooling with Leo enough that he said all right, and Leo just picked him up and turned him upside down and threw him down and sat on him. He didn't bother Leo any more."

By 1928, though, an ankle injury had left Baldwin "a shadow of his former self," Lou Maysel wrote in his history of UT football, "Here Come the Texas Longhorns." Yet Baldwin recovered enough to finish second in the discus at the NCAA championships in 1928, and in 1929 he was the high-point performer at the SWC track and field championships, winning the shot and discus and finishing second in the high hurdles.

Baldwin's early departure from the team opened the way for Beard to get more playing time in 1929.

The Longhorns were undefeated heading into the Oklahoma game in Dallas. Although that neutral-site game is now a tradition, in 1929 Oklahoma was actually a stand-in for Vanderbilt, which had begun playing UT in Dallas in 1921 after Oklahoma joined the Missouri Valley Conference, which prohibited neutral-site games. When the conference relented, Oklahoma was again a natural fit.

Although it could hold 18,000 fans, Fair Park Stadium wasn't quite so ideal for the players; it didn't have adequate locker rooms.

"We dressed at the Adolphus Hotel, and we went out there in a taxicab," Beard said. "The driver got lost, but one of the boys in there, I guess it was (Gordy) Brown, he lived in Dallas, and he got us to the ballpark. When we got there, they wouldn't let us in because we didn't have tickets."

At the last minute, Beard said, Longhorn baseball coach Billy Disch arrived to help the players gain entrance to the stadium. "We just ran right out on the field. We didn't warm up at all; we were running in to start the kickoff," Beard said.

Brown, the team captain, recovered a fumble at the OU 4 to set up the final touchdown in a 21-0 win.

A 39-0 blanking of Rice vaulted Texas to 5-0 and extended the Longhorns' two-year shutout streak to eight games. Then it was back to Dallas.

"Our big rival when I was there was SMU. Didn't anybody like SMU, " Beard said. "The talk was they paid football players. At Texas there were no dormitories or training tables; everybody stayed on their own and took care of their own. SMU had training tables, and the boys got money for doing something or another."

SMU apparently had plenty of company. A few weeks before the Texas-SMU game, the reform-minded Carnegie Foundation released a shocking report on college athletics that said 84 of the 112 colleges it monitored had funds set aside to subsidize athletes, including Texas.

UT President H.Y. Benedict acknowledged that $1,200 was paid to athletes but said it was for work on campus that was actually done.

Texas and SMU were locked in a scoreless tie in the second half, and the Longhorns were on offense when Shelley approached Beard about a way to neutralize SMU's shifting defensive line.

"He said, 'Jim, cheat a little bit and get outside that tackle and block that line, and I'll take that end out of the flow back, and (Pap) Perkins can go right through there and walk through for a touchdown, and we'll win this ballgame.

"I slipped out about a half-yard farther than I (normally) did and took two steps out and cut back in and threw a left-side body block on the defense and stopped it. Shelley took out either the end or the linebacker, and there's a hole there that you could drive a truck through, and Perkins comes sailing up - and cut back right into the middle of the bunch and got piled up. I tell you, we liked to have died."

The game ended in a 0-0 standoff, as did the Horns' next contest against Baylor.

Texas' clash against Texas Christian brought one of the most memorable plays of that era, a 95-yard kickoff return for a touchdown by TCU speedster Cy Leland. Brown made a futile attempt to chase Leland down.

"Gordy got caught in the suction," Beard joked.

After the 15-12 loss, the Longhorns dropped the season finale against Texas A&M 13-0.

A few years later, when he was working in Fort Worth, Beard received a call from another Texas ex. Former Stanford great Ernie Nevers was coming to town with some all-stars. Could Beard play in that game?

"He said, 'You can get $100,' " Beard recalled. "I played both ways that day because they didn't have enough people."

As for the payout, Beard said, "I got two little bars of soap, which I took out of the restrooms."

Later, he said, he was approached a couple of times about joining the UT coaching staff.

"I didn't want to coach," Beard said. "There were so many players that were all-state that didn't amount to anything. They couldn't block, and they wouldn't tackle."

Like other UT fans, however, he likes to do some occasional armchair coaching - something he's been able to do now for 80 years.

jmaher@statesman.com; 445-3956