Some TCU memories from a proud Horned Frog

My first journalism boss, Chuck Offenburger, asked me on Facebook for some stories about TCU.

Chuck, an enthusiastic football fan who was sports editor at the Evening Sentinel in Shenandoah, Iowa, when he hired me in 1971, wanted to prep for tonight’s national championship game between Texas Christian University (my alma mater, where I enrolled a year after Chuck hired me) and Boise State. Yes, I said national championship. Don’t give me Alabama-Texas; they’re hiding behind the BCS skirts. TCU and Boise State take on all comers and would be playing in the national championship game if the alleged power conferences would agree to a playoff. You think Texas and Alabama play tougher schedules? Well, TCU foes have won six bowl games, to five for ‘Bama foes and four for Texas’.

Anyway, I spun a few stories for Offenburger on Facebook, then decided to pull them together with minimal editing for a blog post. As for the accuracy of any of the stories, I did check a few facts and have one correction below. For the others, which I couldn’t check online, I will claim the standard of accuracy that Jimmy Buffett declared in “Semi-True Story“:

It’s a semi-true story,
believe it or not;
I made up a few things,
and there’s some I forgot.
But the life and the telling
are both real to me.
and they all run together,
and turn out to be
a semi-true story.

The best TCU football story I have illustrates how far TCU has come from when I went there many years ago.

My senior year (I graduated in 1976, so this was the ’75 season) the MVP was a guy named Lee Cook. Cook was the quarterback, but he wasn’t MVP for that because he was a lousy quarterback (I just checked, completed less than 50 percent of his passes) and we were 1-10 with a wretched offense. And those 10 losses coupled with 10 straight from the year before (also 1-10) to give us a 20-game losing streak. The final game of my senior year we got a lead on Rice, but Tommy Kramer (who went on to be a pretty good quarterback for the Vikings) led a couple fourth-quarter touchdown drives. We were a couple points ahead, as I recall. Cook and the offense sputtered with a chance to run out the clock and he was punting from our end zone with about a minute left. Everyone presumed he would get off a mediocre punt as usual and Kramer would complete a pass or two to get Rice within field-goal range and we would end the year winless. But he got off a monster punt that went over the return man’s head and bounced for something like 70-80 yards. The roll took some good time off the clock and left Rice deep in their own territory and they were unable to get within field goal range, so we broke the 20-game losing streak.

By the way, the next year, we went 0-11, and Coach Jim Shofner got fired with a 2-31 record.

Accuracy note: I was able to fact-check a piece of this: Cook’s longest punt in 1975 was 60 yards. Presuming that it was the Rice punt (a safe bet, since he averaged less than 40), I think exaggerating by only 10-20 yards after 34 years isn’t too bad.

Jim Wacker brought TCU back to national prominence in the 1980s, following another bad coach named F.A. Dry (yep, his tenure was known as the Dry Spell). As happens sometimes with a sudden turnaround, there were rumors that TCU was guilty of recruiting violations. After a story ran in a newspaper mentioning an investigation, Wacker made an emotional speech to the troops, saying TCU was above-board and the players should focus on playing ball and not pay any attention to the rumors and investigations. Kenneth Davis, a running back who was a Heisman candidate (and went on to be Thurman Thomas’ fullback/backup for the Bills’ Super Bowl losers), went to an assistant coach (perhaps a holdover from the Dry years) and asked what he should do: He had taken cash ($30K, as I recall) from a booster while being recruited under Dry. The assistant took Davis to Wacker, who investigated further and turned TCU in, declaring Davis and six other players who had taken cash ineligible.

Offenburger asked me: “Now, I’m afraid I have to ask: Does TCU do any cheers based on the way Horned Frogs croak?”

Horned Frogs don’t croak. They are actually a lizard, (a horned toad, actually; we weren’t so good at biology way back when). I don’t remember cheers, but I remember they were lame. Lisa Deeley Smith, a TCU friend, recalled on Facebook one cheer: “Two, four, six, eight, score before we graduate!”

My freshman year we were actually decent: 5-3 at one point and rumored to be headed to a bowl game (back when that actually meant something). After a couple losses, they still were favored to beat arch-rival SMU, which was having a bad year, to salvage a winning season. Well, SMU fired their coach the day before our game, but let him coach the last game. So SMU came out and played a great game, giving us a losing record (but the best record of my four years). The SMU players carried their coach off the field on their shoulders. The coach? Hayden Fry.

My junior or senior year (senior, I think), they had a tamale-eating contest for Parents’ Weekend (what were they thinking). I was part of the three-person team representing the Daily Skiff, the campus newspaper. We wolfed down 91 tamales in 15 minutes, good enough for the first-place trophy. We kept all of ours down, which the first- and second-place teams did not do. But TCU Hall of Famer Bob Lilly, who presented the trophies, had his doubts. He was standing next to (and towering over) Mimi during the competition and at one point gestured toward me and said, “That boy’s gonna be sick.”

I think Lilly and Sammy Baugh are our only Pro Football Hall of Famers, until LaDainian Tomlinson goes in five years after he retires.

I returned to TCU this fall (below), leading seminars on journalism ethics and the Complete Community Connection for the Schieffer School of Journalism. And yes, I’ll be watching and cheering tonight.