(gentle upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to "The Bookmark."

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today my guest is John Adams, author of "Standing Ready: "The Golden Era of Texas Aggie Football and the Beginning of the 12th Man Tradition."

John, thank you so much for being here.

- Great to be here.

- I am so excited to talk about this book.

I think this is a great book because we do a lot of Aggie history and a lot of sports history, and this is the perfect combination of one of our maybe greatest moments in sport.

- No question, and you do do a great combination of those subjects.

So hopefully this will fit in pretty well.

- I think it's already, it's the star player for now.

- Good.

- So why did you wanna write this book?

I don't know that there's been a book-length treatment.

Of course, it's been an Aggie histories, and it's all over our literature and our lore.

But why did you wanna do this book?

- Well, it is.

It's been a part and parcel of A&M forever, and there's stories that come out.

One of the things, I think, two different things.

Number one, there was a lot of misinformation about what happened.

It is such an iconic tradition.

It's known nationwide, worldwide, the 12th man.

Other people have tried to copy it and steal it and all this other stuff.

So I had that piece.

But the other piece I've always had is in the late '70s, I was in Dallas with Buck Wire, so the former students.

And he said, "Let's go by and see this old boy from Texas A&M named Joe Utay."

And Joe Utay was the class of not '08, but they call it nought eight.

And Joe was about your height and about 120 pounds and was the captain of the 1907 football team.

He must have been pretty dadgum mean.

But we walk in there, and his home is like a hall of fame.

I mean, there's pictures.

There's footballs.

And I'm going, "Oh my God, this is Joe Utay."

So we sit down to, and I start talking to him.

And at that time, you're thinking, "What questions could I ask?"

I just went by to meet.

And so I always remember that happening.

So from that day forward, I said, "At some time, if I ever do a sports book," 'cause you know there are a lot of experts that do great sports books, and y'all are publishing 'em.

But this along with the tradition was what started me out to put those two things together to take a look at the tradition and what happened.

And of course, then I have a chance to interview the guy who created it, really.

He's the one behind creating the Dixie Classic.

- And you talked to a lot of the players that, well, the players in the book.

- I did.

I was very fortunate.

I was able to interview three or four of 'em, definitely Dr. King Gill, who's the major subject here, Sam Houston Sanders, who was, The average side of the team was like five-foot-eight, 140 pounds.

I mean, it's amazing in today's football terms, but they must have been mean and must have been fast.

Tiny King was the biggest guy.

He's called Tiny 'cause he was six-one, and I used to visit with him on campus.

But I knew him through the years, and I never, ever discussed the game.

And he was there.

And another individual that was really critical to this is a man named Ernest E.E.

McQuillen.

And he was known as Mac McQuillen.

He's class in 1920, the number-one graduate, captain of the basketball team.

He stays here to coach basketball, and he's a very big part of the story because he will be the one who will let King Gill off of practice to go up to Dallas to visit his parents on New Year's Eve.

Coincidence of things that will happen or could never have happened is also kind of interesting.

- I think that's what makes the story.

I mean, the story itself is, as you say, it's a tradition.

It's part of our lore, but there are, you see these little dominoes that if they hadn't fallen this way or if this hadn't worked out, it all could have not happened at all.

So it's fascinating to get the full true story like that.

Before we get into the game and what happened, I want you to set the scene for us a little bit because when you think Texas Aggie football, I think you think a different thing than what was happening at this era at this time because football itself was still kind of young as a sport.

They're still figuring out the rules and the ball shape and the helmets, and all that stuff is still being, So what was football like in this era at this time?

- Football started at A&M in the mid '90s.

It comes out of there, and it's almost a club sport, and they might be playing colleges.

And then they formed some loose conferences and stuff.

By the time of World War I, '17, '18, it kind of goes in freeze frame.

Football is played, but for some reason, and I think it's just the natural history of the country, baseball was the number-one sport.

And so there really wasn't a fall sport.

But football all of a sudden coming out of 1917, '18 really will take off.

A&M will get obviously a Southeast Conference, Southwest Conference.

All these conferences will start to be formed, and it will become a big thing.

One interesting thing that people have been surprised at, there was no pro football.

Pro football doesn't start until about 1921 or '22.

So you've got baseball, and you've got some basketball, but all of a sudden now, you've got a real crowd attractor with football, and A&M got involved.

One of the interesting things that set Utay off and a lot of the people was that the South in general and Southwest where football's played had no recognition.

The football that was being, it was reported in the Dallas paper, the Houston paper, San Antonio, would be great stories, I found, throughout the teens and everything.

But they talked about Harvard and Rutgers and Chicago and California as if the South wasn't there, to the point is, up until 1921, there was only one All-American named in all of the South.

And it was some guy from Georgia Tech.

And so Joe Utay says, "You know what?

We need to put, Obviously, I'm an Aggie.

I wanna put A&M on the map, but we wanna put football, Texas, and Southwest football on the map.

We've got SMU and TCU in Texas.

We've got good programs down here, but we get no respect, no recognition."

And so all of this begins to weave together to where Joe says one of the ways to get attention is to have a bowl game.

- That's another thing I think that's easy for us to maybe take for granted, is we've got bowl games on bowl games on, - Oh.

- My dad calls 'em the Cheez Whiz bowl.

- That's right.

- There's 50 to a dozen of 'em, but back then, there weren't 'cause like you say, football hadn't caught on to the degree that it would, but.

- Well, the Dixie Classic is only the third or fourth bowl game in the country.

The granddaddy of 'em all is the Rose Bowl, but it will start and falter and have to be restarted.

Then they did one called the Christmas Bowl in San Diego, California, and then there was a one-off bowl in Fort Worth, but really the bowl had not caught on, and the only one was the one in the good weather for everybody to go, the Rose Bowl.

And so Utay, knowing this, said, "We'll create a game."

And what he had is he used to run baseball tournaments, and it was called the Dixie Classic Baseball Tournament.

Well, you couldn't call the football game a football tournament.

So he says, "We'll call it the Dixie Classic, the Bowl."

And so he got the idea from baseball tournaments in Fort Worth and Dallas to say, we need something in the fall or January to attract attention.

- Sure.

Makes sense.

So how does he pick his teams?

How does he set this game up?

- well, that is one of the, and I can go through it quite quickly.

It's kind of interesting.

He's got A&M.

He said, "Well take the conference champion."

Well, A&M, it was touch and go at the end 'cause they end up, they basically had won the conference, but they end up tying the last two games.

But they are declared conference champions.

So he says, "We're gonna make this a national game.

I'm gonna get the number-one team."

Well, at that time, there is no football rankings per se, but the top team that was 10 and 0 in the country was a school called Washington and Jefferson.

I have not talked to anybody that knows where it is except one person who lives in Philadelphia.

It is a little school still with about 700 students somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania.

In that day and time, small schools like Swanee, Washington and Jefferson, Centre College, could have seven or 800 students.

If they recruited well, they could play and field great teams.

So this Washington, he invites 'em.

They accept.

About a week after he's accepted, he gets just an urgent call from the head of the Rose Bowl saying, "Mr. Utay, we were gonna call and sign those people."

And Joe says, "You're the number one, you're the number one bowl.

I will release 'em."

So he releases 'em, and they go out, and they play Stanford in a terrible game, tied zero to zero, by the way.

So he goes, "Now what do I do?"

He goes, "Well, we've got A&M with a military tradition.

I'll call West Point.

This is too logical.

We can really attract people."

So he gets hold of West Point.

Now, the game is supposed to be the 2nd of January.

Now it's the first week of December.

They still do not have a team.

He calls West Point, and he receives a letter back saying, "We would love to be there.

It would really be an honor.

But the Army and the US government does not give us any money to travel."

The letter is signed by General Douglas MacArthur.

And that's really been a surprise to a lot of people.

So now he's without a team.

So he goes, "You know what?

There is one other friend of mine, a guy named Charlie Moran, and they're 10 and 0.

They're basically tied for top of the thing."

And he thinks they're already committed to a game, and they are.

They're committed to a bowl game on the 26th at the Christmas Bowl in California.

So he calls Charlie Moran and says, now, Charlie had been fired from A&M in a really contentious situation.

He called Charlie and said, "How would you like to come over and play Texas A&M?"

He said, "I'd like nothing better to come over there and beat the Aggies."

Now, he says, "But you're playing a game on the 25th."

"Don't matter, we're chartering a Pullman train."

So they chartered a train from Kentucky.

They went out to the football game.

They beat Arizona 45 to nothing.

They're out there.

They get on the train.

They visit out there, and they drive the train up and ride, arrive back in Dallas on New Year's Eve.

- Two days, three days before?

- Day, day and a half before the game, and are ready to go.

And so that's how, again, all nothing but a series of coincidence.

And they are a powerhouse, we say.

They had two All-Americans, a quarterback, Bo McMillin and Red Miller, two consensus for two years All-Americans.

And then two others would be All-Americans also.

This was the team.

If there would've been a ranking, they would've beat Washington and Jefferson.

But there were no rankings at that time, except you were ranked by who you beat.

So they had beat Harvard and Rutgers, and they had beat all the powerhouses.

And a little old school in Kentucky, Danville, Kentucky is where they're from.

- I was gonna ask about the coaches.

You mentioned Charlie Moran, who used to coach at A&M and then left, and then his replacement was DX Bible, who was still the coach.

Can you talk about both of them?

- Well, let's take DX first.

DX Bible comes out Tennessee, coaches in a couple of places.

They're looking for an assistant coach at A&M, be the kind of the freshman coach.

He comes here for the first year or two.

This is 1915, '16, and he does real well.

LSU's coach retires and quits.

So LSU calls A&M and says, "Can we borrow your coach for the last four games of the season?"

So it would be the 1916 season.

So here's a part-time coach, goes over to Baton Rouge and Beats Purdue, beats all these fabulous teams, wins all four games.

So LSU calls A&M, says, "Can we keep this guy?"

They said, "No."

Well, in the process, A&M, this is the guy they really want.

The coach they have leaves, and so they make him head coach.

And he will begin a string of seasons that are unbelievable.

The second season, they go undefeated, untied, and un-scored upon.

They score 270 points, and the opponents score none.

The war will start obviously by 1917, '18.

The country's not in it.

The country does enter.

Well, that shuts everything down.

And so his entire team enlists.

He enlists, goes to flight school, becomes a pursuit pilot, and is assigned and is flying in France.

That's the second thing people have no idea about.

And apparently he's a pretty good pilot.

So he's there.

He comes back after the war's over.

It ends in November of '18, and sends a letter out to everybody saying, "Okay, we're gonna get ready for next year."

Next year's here.

They gave him another year of eligibility, just like they did during COVID here.

They gave him another year, so he was able to get his players back.

He recruited well.

And so starting in the season of the next season in '20, he starts putting together the powerhouses again.

And he's a great recruiter.

One of the interesting things about DX Bible is he was absolutely a defensive coach.

I found in an antique shop about two years ago a book he wrote called "The Coaching of Football."

I've been looking for it everywhere.

And I'm in this antique show.

There it is.

There's a copy, $4 or $5.

I couldn't believe it.

Now, I've seen it online, but the entire book is about defensive football.

And he figures if you can play a strong defense and make the other team make mistakes, you take advantage.

And this is what will happen at the Dixie Classic.

We'll score and win.

Now, he has to have a good offense also.

So he's back here.

Well, in the interim, Joe Utay, who had graduated in 1907, had come back to coach and to be here.

Well, they hired a coach called Charlie Moran.

And Charlie Moran had been playing professional baseball, but he had been playing like minor league football, and he was good and could coach.

They got him down here.

Well, he begins to have fabulous seasons, and Texas is a little irritated.

He beats the University of Texas three times in one year if you could imagine that.

And they pick their football up and go home.

They didn't wanna play him.

They said he's too rough, too tough, whatever.

And let me tell you an interesting thing about him.

He had played professional baseball.

Well, baseball, before the season starts, has spring training.

And you take all the players down to Florida or somewhere, and you get 'em all ready before the season.

He says, "Why don't we do that with football?"

So when he gets to A&M, he contacts all the players and saying, "I want you to meet me.

We'll rent a place in Galveston, a hotel, and we'll go down to a hotel in July and August, even though it's hot, it's on the coast, and we will practice and get in shape and ready for the team."

So he will do the first spring training in football of anybody in the country.

Well, when they get on the campus, they are ready to go.

He said all they could do is practice, swim, and eat seafood.

That's all they could do.

They could have visitors every other weekend, their families.

And he got everybody ready.

But they were a unified team.

And he begins to win, and he wins big.

An interesting dynamic at that time, since they really don't have the stadiums and everything, they wanna play in neutral sites in Dallas or San Antonio or Houston to where there are big cities, and you can have a bigger draw.

The problem is Texas wanted to control the tickets.

So it really becomes a real mess.

And it's a mess because there's no organized conference.

So what will come out of this is the Southwest Conference will be organized.

- Which I was a little surprised.

Conferences nowadays seem like they change so frequently and so often.

And when it's, okay, Southwest Conference, and then I thought, is that the same?

I looked it up.

It's the same conference that I knew from when I was younger.

That started right here at this time.

- And it is solid.

It is really solid because the eight teams they have, the leadership in there, the coaches, the administrators, everybody has bought into it.

And then out of this, that group of schools really becomes a real powerhouse in the programs they put together and things like that.

So the conference really survives, where others do come and go.

And obviously we've got a lot of changes that happened in the last few years.

- Sure.

Sure.

- In football.

- But we had that going for a good stretch.

- Right.

- Let's jump to the game a little bit ahead.

So they pick their teams.

We've got our good coaches.

We show up in Dallas.

What's the mood like?

- Well, a couple of really interesting things, and it's gets real confused.

People think they took 36 or 40 people up there.

Their team picture in November before they left the last big, it's about 36 or 38 players.

But that's everybody that they could find.

The season's over with.

They're working on basketball.

And so when he puts the team together, he only has got 15 or 16 players he's gonna travel with.

But when they print the program, they print the picture with 36 people, and people say, "Well, you left out all these people."

I said it was a promotional thing that they set to print in advance, which is the same thing they do now.

The program, a football program now, there'll be people printed in the program that won't play or suit out.

So, anyway, so this will be set up.

Centre College will come in from the West Coast, go to the Adolphus Hotel, the biggest structure west of the Mississippi, most fabulous hotel in the country.

It's still opulent.

It's still the most unbelievable hotel there in downtown Dallas, and stay there.

I really think they had no budget.

They were told that they will get paid for their expenses and stuff.

So when Bible goes up there, he rents dormitories at an old school outside of town that has a lot of dorms, a big kitchen, a meeting hall, and a big field to practice on.

People say, "Well, they stayed at the hotel in Adolphus."

They did not.

They went up five or six days later and just went into this camp-out type of scenario to where he could practice 'em three times a day, have their meals, do training.

He kept 'em out of Dallas-Fort Worth.

There was no partying or anything.

Well, on the second day of practice, the star, Buckner, the star running back, broke his leg.

And you've already gone up there with 16 players.

Now you've lost the number-one running back.

Well, because they were at kind of a secluded place, the media or no one knew about that.

That was kept under wraps, and they kept practicing and getting ready.

And again, it was so defensive.

One of the most interesting things to me is the day of the game, he let him sleep in till 7:30.

He got 'em up, had an early breakfast, and then they practiced for an hour and a half before the game in full pads.

There wasn't a dressing room.

So they had dressed out in their uniforms, carried their pads on, and got on a bus to go over to play the game.

And so the last hour and a half was on punt recoveries and defense.

That's all they did.

And that will end up playing into the game tremendously.

But he would practice, practice, practice, and then they would show up and go to the game.

- Now, I wanna contrast this with my favorite anecdote from the book, which is that, on the other team, you had a player get married that morning in Fort Worth, have a full reception where people are eating, and I hope not drinking, but probably sneaking some.

- [John] They were.

- They're not practicing.

They're literally at a wedding.

- Bo McMillin, the quarterback, had, with his fiance and their parents and his parents, had picked that date two months beforehand to get married.

They had picked that date.

And so he had talked to his fiance and everybody, and he talked to the coach, Coach Moran.

He goes, "Well, what are we gonna do?

You've already set this thing.

We're gonna have it.

Let's just do it.

Can you do it early in the morning?"

So the church service was at nine o'clock in the morning.

They took a train over to Fort Worth for the church service.

But instead of coming back and resting to get ready for the game, they went into a massive, like you say, reception and banquet back at the hotel.

And literally at the last minute, had to pull 'em out there, had to borrow cars and take a caravan in cars to get 'em out to Fair Park, to the stadium.

And somehow in between there, they changed in their uniforms.

I don't know.

Sam Houston Sanders, I can tell you a great story.

Sam Houston Sanders was another, is a great, one A&M's greatest football players.

And he left after he graduated and went to Tennessee.

He became a medical doctor and retired.

The Sam Houston Sanders Corps Center is named for Sammy Sanders.

And he said when I talked to him, I said what surprised him.

I was thinking he's gonna tell me about a football thing or a play.

He goes, "Let me tell you, we got in there.

We were warming up, and they opened up the gates on the other end, and here comes this team.

And the middle is Bo McMillin with his new bride, walking, leading the team out.

He said, "They're passing with both arms.

They're kicking.

The winds blowing in this way.

They're kicking balls on top of us.

We're going, 'What in the world have we got ourselves into?'"

And he says, "And they brought her down to the middle of the field, and he gave her a kiss, and they went over, and she sat on the sideline with the team."

I says, "You can't make this stuff up."

- These are the stories that make this book so rich and so important.

Now, we unfortunately are running a little low on time.

So I wanna jump just ahead a little bit.

We've got about five minutes, so what are some bullet ports you want us to know?

- [John] Well, the key thing is King Gill.

- Yes.

- The 12th man.

He is practicing basketball at A&M.

He did not travel.

He was a sophomore.

At the last minute, he wants to go home.

His birthday is New Year's Eve, so his family's in Dallas.

So he hitchhikes to Dallas, and he stayed with his family, and somebody says, "Well, they're playing the game at Fair Park."

"Well, no, that's okay."

At the last minute, he hitchhikes to the stadium.

He has no money.

It's $2 and 50 cents to get in the game.

So what does he do?

He goes around to the entrance.

He waits till the team gets there.

So he walks in with the team and goes on a sideline.

And while he's on the sideline, Jinx Tucker, the lead sports writer at the Waco paper says, tells the coach, "I need a spotter."

He says, "Oh, here, take this kid, King Gill.

He knows all the players."

So he doesn't have a seat.

He says, "Now you have a seat."

So he walks him up.

It's about the size of a good high school football stadium.

I mean, you could see.

Walks him up into the press box, and so he's in the press box.

Two or three interesting things.

You could not finish the game if you didn't have 11 players.

A rule had just been changed.

The gridiron had just been changed.

You had mentioned rules.

A dozen rules had been changed the year before.

So they begin to have injuries, and they're down to 11 or 12 players.

And I remember talking to him, and it's in interviews and stuff.

Bible turned around, and he said, There's stories the yell leaders ran up there, and they could have gone to help.

But he said, "As soon as the coach looked up at me, I knew exactly what was happening."

And so he comes out of the stands.

Heine Weir, who is the all-star captain and quarterback of the team, has his leg broken on the third play.

He is on a stretcher underneath the stands.

So they come down at halftime, and he goes under the stands, and he changes.

He takes a uniform from Heine Weir, and King Gill puts it on.

And he goes down on the field and stands there ready to play.

And still to this day, I see articles that he went down there, went in, and scored a touchdown.

He did not play.

But I gotta tell you a very important point that he brought up two or three times, says, "John, they talk about this," and he was such a wonderful, humble guy.

It never came up.

And if you brought it up, if I could, and you start talking to him, I said, if I ask him specific questions.

But anyway, I said, "What is the thing that surprises?"

He said, "They didn't know what I," So that's in January.

That next November, he's the one that scores the touchdowns in Memorial Stadium to beat Texas.

He said, "I get there.

I run 55 yards.

I score."

He didn't score the second time.

He ran back to five yard line.

So he set up the second touchdown.

"Everybody talks about the Dixie Classic, and I didn't even play.

And here I am, I'm playing the University of Texas, and we beat 'em in Memorial Stadium."

And he says, "That's been totally forgotten."

And I told him, "well, if ever I have a chance, I'll try to help rectify that."

- Well, here we are right here talking about it.

That's certainly very important.

We wanna acknowledge his win.

But I also think it's the symbolism of being ready- - Absolutely.

- To give it all, to give whatever you can to help your team, to help yourself.

- And it caught on quite quickly, but it was slow.

And really, it sets in.

It's used.

He's recognized when he gets back as the 12th man.

He is recognized.

We have 100% proof of that, but it doesn't gel until 1939 till the national championship when this E.E.

McQuillen, who is now, 20 years later, the head of the former students, the Humble Radio Network calls him and says, "Can you tell us any neat stories about A&M?"

So McQuillen tells a story about this kid coming out of the press box and standing up like the 12th man.

So the Humble Radio did a program about five or six minutes.

They played it for the week before the New Orleans Sugar Bowl, all over the country about King Gill coming out, the 12th man standing up.

He doesn't play.

And that really caught people's attention.

- And that's- - And here we are now.

- That's the legend.

- He was- - Here we are.

- Standing ready.

- Well, actually, we're out of time.

So that's the perfect place to end.

The title of the book was "Standing Ready."

I was talking to John Adams.

Thank you so much for being here, John.

Thank you all for joining me, and I will see you again soon.

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