Evin Demirel: Aggies Can Thank Arkansas for The Most Storied Part of Their Past

 

In the old days, there was but one way to be manly.

And, usually, it was an Arkansan who showed the rest of the world how to do it best.

This was certainly the case in 1954, when Fordyce native Paul Bryant arrived in College Station to take the helm of the Texas A&M Aggies program. That first training camp, “Bear” decided it was high time to separate the chaff from wheat. He’d signed more than 100 prospects that first spring but knew not all of them had the chest hair to make it. So he loaded up all his boys into two old Greyhound buses and rambled off to a place called Junction, where he provided a ten-day boot camp that would resound throughout the ages as the manliest in college football history.

Bryant huddled his masses into “old Quonset huts, which were no more than cement floors, wooden walls four feet high, then screening and tenting on top. The facilities were so sorry that just looking at the place would discourage you,” Mike Bynam wrote in AGGIE PRIDE: A STORY OF CLASS AND COURAGE. Fellow Arkansan Elmer Smith, Bryant’s assistant, recalls in his memoir that practices were held on land that consisted of “sand, sand burs and stubble. The sand burs provided an incentive for players to stay off their belly in drills.”

Bryant, Smith and the other coaches conducted a training camp so strenuous that by the end all but around 27 players had quit. Before dawn, the cadets were roused from their beds like army trainees and put through backbreaking drills until night. “They were forced to skirmish in eye-stinging dust and boiling sun,” Bynam wrote. “The coaching staff was always over them, slapping them on the buttocks, exhorting them to greater effort.” Moreover, “not once during the hell camp did a Junction Boy take a drink of water on the practice field,” wrote Arkansas native Jim Dent, author of “Junction Boys.” “A doctor once told Bryant, ‘You don’t pour cold water into a hot engine. So why would you pour cold water into a hot boy?'”

This was the crucible from which the steely-jawed Bryant disciple Gene Stallings rose. This “Junction Boy,” who caught the pass which set up Bryant’s lone win his first season, himself took over as the Aggies’ head coach in 1965.

Here, Stallings became the Don Draper of SWC coaches:

That’s Puzzled Stallings, as you can clearly tell from the label in lower right corner.

Why?

Perhaps Gene has just returned from a fortune teller’s hut on the banks of the Brazos River, where unto him a prediction was made: Manliness would not always be so singularly defined. Perhaps, Puzzled Stallings had through the mist glimpsed as far ahead as the year 2015, to see a world where his SWC successors are allowed to market their manliness in all manner of bewildering ways.

Maybe it’s learning that in today’s world Kliff Kingsbury is allowed to wear a corsage to press conferences that has him confused. Or the fact that Bret Bielema rocks sparkly shoes, or that Kevin Sumlin sometimes descends into the backyards of top recruits in something called a “Swagcopter.”

Whatever the reason, Stallings circa ‘60s need not fret. He, is after all, a Real Winner*

*Stallings’ overall record as Texas A&M’s head coach was 26-45-1.

More important than real winning, though, is being a real human. ‘60s Stallings was that, no doubt.

He felt all kinds of emotions, from the highs of livin’, lovin’ and winnin’, to the lows which defeat can bring. He even went so far as to think his team didn’t look particularly awesome in preseason, stating one spring he only had nine players “who know what they’re doing and who’ll hit you.”

Although the ability to temper preseason expectations may be an extinct one in big-time college coaching, some of today’s well-heeled commanders are still capable of experiencing the same range of emotions as their more steak-’n-potatoed predecessors.

Exhibit A: the head coaches of Arkansas and Texas A&M:

 

 

Frustrated Bielema Sumlin Stallings Aggies Final

 

FINAL Disappointed Sumlin Bielema Stallings Aggies

 

By Saturday night, at Cowboy Stadium in Arlington, either Bielema or Sumlin will be nudged closer to authentic humility against their will. A loss may push Bielema’s 1-2 Razorbacks, already beaten by underdogs Toledo and Texas Tech, through a kind of mental anguish as trying as the challenges faced by Bryant’s “Junction Boys.” For Sumlin, a loss to these now seemingly weakened Hogs would rank among the most disappointing of his career.

But there is, of course, also a flip side. One of these coaches will emerge from Saturday’s game feeling on top of the world, like the kind of guy who doesn’t just talk about winning – but actually does it.

 Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

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I write more about Texas A&M-Arkansas and the #bertenfreude it has begat, at BestOfArkansasSports.com. Follow me farther down the photo-visual rabbit hole @evindemirel

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