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Texas sports history celebrated at Waco book festival

Books celebrated at the festival tackled a variety of topics from a high school football coach who shaped the game to integration at Texas high schools and colleges.
Credit: Kurtis Quillin, KCEN
The Texas Sports Hall of Fame in Waco held its third annual book festival on Aug. 17, 2019, celebrating recently-published books on sports across the state.

WACO, Texas — A book can tell a lot.

That's why so often, we learn our history by opening one and browsing the pages. It's where we learned about the American Revolution and World War II.

It's no different in sports, especially not in a sports scene as diverse as Texas.

That's why for three years, the Texas Sports Hall of Fame has held a book festival celebrating books sharing the history of sports in the Lone Star State.

"There's a lot of diverse stories," Robert Jacobus said. "Like my book and Dave Campbell, who was here, stuff like that."

Jacobus wrote one of the eight books invited to the event, "Black Man in the Huddle: Stories from the integration of Texas football."

Credit: Kurtis Quillin, KCEN
"Black Man in the Huddle: Stories from the integration of Texas football," was honored at the 3rd annual Texas Sports Hall of Fame Book Festival on Aug. 17, 2019.

In his book, Jacobus said he interviewed almost 250 former high school and college football players across the state to learn what integration in the sport looked like following the Brown v. Board of Education decision from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. The book shares several of those stories from all over the state. Jacobus said among them are stories from black athletes who were skeptical of integration.

Among the stories he learned while researching and writing the book was the integration of San Saba High School, involving William Storms.

"When they went to play Rockdale, Rockdale canceled the game because William Storms, who was black, was on San Saba's team," Jacobus said. "Well, the black high school in Rockdale (Aycock) was a powerhouse and the white high school (Rockdale) was terrible. The black high school won state that year in both football and basketball in the Prairie View League.

"Well, when I interviewed those guys with the black high school 60 years after this happened, they had no idea that the white high school had canceled that game 60 years before. That shows you how separate the races were."

Another of the books celebrated Saturday was "Rocket Man: The story of D.W. Rutledge and the Judson High School Football Dynasty."

Credit: Kurtis Quillin, KCEN
"Rocket Man: The story of D.W. Rutledge and the Judson High School Football Dynasty," documents the life of legendary Texas High School Football coach D.W. Rutledge in the San Antonio area.

Chris Doelle wrote the book, alongside UIL executive director Charles Breithaupt. D.W. Rutledge was the longtime coach at Judson High School in Converse, near San Antonio where he built the Rockets into a state power between 1984 and 2000.

Rutledge is widely credited in Texas for not only shaping the way the game is played and practiced in Texas, but the way athletes were trained. His "boot camp" program is still used at high schools across the state.

"This is a story Charles has been wanting to tell for a while," Doelle said. "We started talking and said, 'Yeah, that's what needed to start with, that's the book.'"

The book tells Rutledge's life story from growing up near Houston, to winning an NAIA national championship playing for the famous Jim Wacker at Texas Lutheran, to cementing Judson's place in the Texas high school football landscape.

Among the other books was "Historic Texas Gyms: A tribute to vanishing traditions."

In the book, author Jackie McBroom said he examines the role gymnasiums played outside of basketball and volleyball in small towns across the state. McBroom said the architecture and designs of the buildings made them local staples, similar to the local football stadiums.

"At one time, there were about 3,000 public schools in Texas and now there's just around 1,000," McBroom said. "So the stories of the kids at 2,000 schools are just gone."

McBroom said the gyms are the sites of community gatherings both positive and negative and he wanted to tell the stories of what's happened in those venues.

One of those examples was in Navarro County in 1968 when the gym at Dawson High School became a makeshift morgue for federal investigators when Braniff Flight 352 from Houston to Dallas crashed in a nearby field, killing all 85 people on board.

"That building is still there," McBroom said. "The school is gone but the red brick gym is still right there on Main Street."

McBroom said his book includes about 20 such stories and about 200 pictures of historic gyms across Texas.

The other books honored Saturday were:

  • "Cloyce Box: 6'4" and "Bulletproof" by Michael Barr
  • "Dave Campbell's favorite college football stories" by Dave Campbell
  • "Cattle to Courts: A history of tennis in Texas" by Ken McAllister
  • "Beyond the Big Shootout" by Mark S. McDonald & Bill DeOre
  • "When the Men Were Gone" by Marjorie Herrera Lewis

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