A Very OK Podcast
Episode 38: “47 in a Row”
August 20, 2024
Episode Transcript
(upbeat music playing)
Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to A Very OK Podcast. My name is Trait Thompson. I’m the executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society, and with me, as always, is Dr. Bob Blackburn. Bob, we took the month of July off, and now we’re back in the studio again, talking to our listeners, and hope you’re doing well,
Dr. Bob Blackburn: Doing well. Just spent a week in Colorado with my two-year-old and seven-year-old grandsons, and the young one developed a new game for me that’s sports related, so it fits with the topic today. He would throw a pickleball off the balcony and see how far down the mountain it would roll, and Papa would go get it. So there’s a new Papa game. So yes, I’m doing great.
Thompson: Well that’s fantastic. I had an opportunity to do a little traveling. We took our family out to Yosemite National Park and Sequoia National Park out in California. And it was great to be out in nature. Of course, those parks are both incredibly busy, but you can still find those moments of quiet and solitude. And I have to tell you one thing. It is just otherworldly beautiful out there. Those parks are just incredible. And if you’ve never seen the sequoia trees, you have to go. It is, the pictures just don’t even do it justice. You can’t even conceive of how big these trees are until you’re standing right next to one.
Blackburn: Yeah, well, it almost may, well makes you believe in the divine presence. You know, they’re so monumental. And it’s almost spiritual when you’re in that forest, you can see the impact it had on John Muir and others like that.
Thompson: Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting. One of the placards that I read out there when we were in one of the groves of the trees is in 1875, they cut down one of those sequoia trees and they shipped it to Philadelphia in preparation, they were going to display it. They’re going to, they cut it down. They were going to reassemble it, display it in Philadelphia for the 100th anniversary of the United States in 1876. And so they did that, and all of the people back East, they called it a California hoax because they couldn’t believe that there was a tree that big. And they said that they thought they were just being, the wool was being pulled over their eyes.
Blackburn: A Paul Bunyan story.
Thompson: Exactly, exactly. But I’ll tell you, it was nice to be gone, but it’s nice to be back here talking to you today. And I am so excited about our topic. It’s August, which means football is coming back, which means the world is aligning itself back to its rightful place. Maybe we can think a little less about politics, and we can think a little bit more about the gridiron and what’s going on on the football field. And the topic that we have today is really exciting because we’re going to be talking about Bud Wilkinson, the University of Oklahoma Sooners, and that 47-game winning streak from 1953 to 1957. That’s a record that still stands today as the longest winning streak in college football. And I’m excited about our guest today. We have Berry Tramel. Berry Tramel is a 46-year veteran of Oklahoma journalism who joined the Tulsa World this year after having spent 13 years at the Norman Transcript and 32 years at The Oklahoman. He has six times been named the Oklahoma Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sports Media Association. He was born and raised in Norman, and he grew up reading four newspapers a day and began his career at age 17, which good luck even finding four newspapers today. But his first assignment was the Lexington- Elmore City High School football game, and he’s enjoyed the journey ever since, covering everything from NBA finals to Rose Bowls and everything in between. And so, Berry, we’re excited to have you as a guest today to talk about this, really cool era in college football that happened here in Oklahoma.
Berry Tramel: Well, thanks for having me. This one of my favorite places to come, the History Center. I was telling Trait, Bob, I could eat lunch every day right out here in the rotunda with, you know, everything from the view of the Capitol to the stagecoach to the, you know, to the airplanes and stuff. So I love coming to the History Center, and I was a history major in college. I was a non-traditional student, so I didn’t really start college until I was 26, graduated at 36, but I was a history and English major. So I still remember going to middle school and thinking, I’m finally going to get a history class. Turns out I didn’t. I had to wait till ninth grade. But I always loved history, and just thrilled to be here.
Blackburn: You know, part of your education too, Berry. We’re about same generation. I’m a little older, but reading Frank Boggs and Volney Meese and those great sportswriters of the 1950s and ’60s. I would, you know, my dad would take the front section. I’d get the sports section at the breakfast table. And Frank Boggs was one of my heroes at the time, and I know you probably feel the same way. That was my introduction to sports and why it was significant and what was going on. And so you grew up reading those same papers and carried on the tradition, and I think you’ve excelled and done better than a lot of those pioneers. And we all agree that you’re probably one of the best writers that The Oklahoman has ever had. And that’s a large gallery gathering of Hall of Fame writers, and you’re one of them.
Tramel: Well, I appreciate that. And, I you know, I just love, always loved newspapers, always had an aptitude for writing, and always loved sports. And from the time I saw one of my, when I was 12, a kid I was playing basketball with dunked, and I remember thinking, I’m probably not going to be long for this game. And when I saw my first curveball at age 14, I thought, I don’t know about this. So I had the discernment to transition, sort of transfer to writing about sports instead of trying to compete in them. And it’s just been a great it’s been a blessed life. And I just couldn’t be more thrilled to have done it here in my home state.
Thompson: One of the things I love about your writing, and of course, I’ve read you for many years, and in doing the research for this podcast, I was telling you just a few minutes ago, but almost every topic that I googled as a part of doing some of the research, the first or second thing that came up would be a Berry Tramel article. And one of the things I love about your writing is it doesn’t seem like it’s just an assignment. It seems like you’re really passionately involved with the topic, that you care about the topic, you care about conveying the the emotions and the feeling of sports. And that’s really hard to translate into writing a lot of times. And so, I’m just thrilled to have you here with us today.
Tramel: Well, thanks. And I think, you know, I think the, the confluence of history and sports is a major relationship. It’s the same as with music a lot of times, or maybe film and other things, but it’s not just the thrill of watching a game or being at the game, it’s the memories that it provides, you know, not for the next five or ten days, but sometimes for five, ten years, sometimes 50 years. I mean, I’m to the point where I can remember, I chatted with Barry Switzer last week, and we talked about specific plays from the 1973 Oklahoma–Miami game. That was 51 years ago.
Thompson: Yeah. And I remember the play that he didn’t remember, and he remembered the play that I didn’t remember. But just things that stick out in your mind from that half a century ago. And if you got somebody that can either report on it or write about it, it’s sort of, it sort of gives it a longer runway, and maybe other generations can sort of pick up, you know. Here’s what, Bob, you talked about, you know, Volney Meese and Frank Boggs. You know, when I figured out that OU–Texas was a big deal? It wasn’t the first time or two when I was seven or eight watching the game. It was reading about it in The Oklahoman or the Oklahoma City Times. Hey, these guys are writing every day this week about OU–Texas. It must be a big deal. They’re writing about the the ’57 game or the ’58 game, and here it’s 1971. That’s 13—why are we doing this? And of course, now I know because it’s important to people, and it sort of invigorates their memories and gets that passion flowing that you talked about, Trait. So yeah, I think sports and history go together, and college football, probably baseball and college football cherish their histories and their traditions more than any other sport. And here in Oklahoma, of course, we’ve got a deep and proud history when it comes to, to college football.
Blackburn: And Trait, if you don’t mind me, while we’re on memory is that I’m an OSU graduate. So I’ve been, since Walt Garrison, I’ve been an OSU Cowboys fan. I remember listening to him on the radio almost beating Nebraska.
Tramel: Right.
Blackburn: That you probably remember that game too, just at the last minute, they tackled him after he had taken the team. But anyway, those are my memories of football. But my stepdad was Jim Weatherall, from the time period we’re talking about today. Of course, he was a little earlier, ’49 through ’52.
Tramel: White Deer, Texas.
Blackburn: White Deer, Texas. Exactly. And just a big 240-pound was huge at the time. Played both offense, defense on the line, kicker, heavyweight wrestler for the OU football. Well, once he became my stepdad, we would go to an OU game, and he was coaching the alumni varsity game at the time. They still had that. And we’d be walking down underneath the stadium, and it would part like it was Billy Simms would today. People would just, you know, all be looking. Well they were looking at Jim Weatherall. This would have been ’63 and ’64. So he was still very much a part of everyone’s memory at OU. But that gave me an entrée to get to know those people. Dewey Selmon, the Selmon brothers were just starting their little run through OU at that time. I remember thinking Granville Liggins was my favorite player on the defense because he was undersized. I was undersized playing, trying to play football. And I remember thinking, oh, no, we need to keep Granville in there and everyone else said, put in Selmon! Put in Selmon! But those memories come back to me when Trait called me and said this will be the topic. I thought, well, I don’t know much about it, but it brought back my own memories, and that’s what sports can do for us. And it makes people think about that time in their life and going back into family history and where they were with their dad or their mom or their brothers and sisters. I think it’s a popular topic.
Tramel: And that’s what I like, not to belabor the point, but when you hear a song, it can immediately take you back not just to a time, but to a certain place, you know, you know, Lindsey Street in Norman, when you were 16, dragging, or 12th Street in Moore or wherever. Just a simple song can put you in a place in a time and just really make your day is what it can do.
Thompson: Well, I love, one of the things I love about sports is it’s a unifying factor too. There are so many things that divide us in our culture today, and on a Saturday in the fall, when you’re either wearing the red or the orange here in Oklahoma, or whatever other, you know, whatever other color you like to wear. When you’re sitting in that stadium, you don’t really care if the person next to you is a Republican or a Democrat. You don’t care if they’re Black or they’re white or what, you know, another culture. You don’t care about anything. You care about rooting your team on to win, or you care about hating that other team.
(laughter) And I think that it’s one of those things now that that, you know, when all the world just feels like we’re just always at each other’s throats, that in sports, we can come together and we can say, hey, we’re all for this same thing for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. I think that’s pretty cool.
Tramel: It’s not a college football topic, but that’s one of the beautiful things about the Thunder is it does the same thing you’re talking about, only it literally brings everybody together. It brings, you know, you know, you said Black and white, and you said Democrat, Republican, also Sooner and Cowboy. You know, it literally brings everybody together. So, but that’s a different sport. So today’s football.
Blackburn: Trait, since Berry brought up the name Thunder. That brings up, if you don’t mind me, talk a little bit about the background in Oklahoma history, why this topic today fits into the bigger picture of Oklahoma history, which I think is significant. Some people might say, oh, it’s sports. It’s a silly game. Why is it all that important? Well, it fits into the Oklahoma story, and to understand our story as a community. You have to understand things like this streak just as you have to understand the importance of Jim Thorpe or Will Rogers. And it all comes back to image, and the Thunder, and Berry and I have talked about this many times, the Thunder has been revolutionary in our image, external image especially, but also internally image. The fact that Tulsans will support anything in Oklahoma City is revolutionary, and I never would have expected it. But it happened with the Thunder. So internal image was changed.
But now if you go to Europe and you say you’re from Oklahoma, they don’t start singing “Oklahoma!” the song right away like they did in the ’80s. They say, oh, do you know Russell Westbrook? Have you met Kevin Durant? They know the Thunder. It’s external. But in terms of this streak that we’re going to be talking about today, you have to put that in the context of Oklahoma history really from the 19th century. The fact that we were the last frontier known across the country as this place to go, where you can make it, you can claim a piece of the Promised Land, you can go there and find your fortune like E. K. Gaylord did in 1903. That created a newspaper that employed Berry for many years. And here come the Braniffs of the world. And here come the people from all over who were part of it. And so, from 1889, really, until 1930, you could be proud of Oklahoma because we were the fastest- growing state in the nation. We went from five congressmen in 1907 to nine congressmen by 1930, which means we were growing almost twice as fast as the rest of the country. We have the oil boom starting in 1905 with Glen Pool near Tulsa, and then every couple of years. So one of the leading oil production states.
We had heroes like Will Rogers, a big part of our internal and external image. Jim Thorpe on the sports field. We were hitting on all cylinders, and people were proud to be Oklahomans. It starts shifting in the 1930s, Great Depression and in people’s minds, the Dust Bowl, even though that affected only the Panhandle to speak of, but we still had Depression. Farmers were suffering. We start losing population in the ’30s, and we would continue to lose population. We lost more people in the ’40s than we did in the ’30s. So population is going down. People are leaving and going to California, as one of my uncles did in 1935. And so we’re losing, as in rural Oklahoma was being depopulated. That’s when the farming depression really started, that’s accelerated even since. But it’s all starting. And then you get the impact of art. Berry mentioned art. You get John Steinbeck with Grapes of Wrath. That sets that in Oklahoma. That could have been in Arkansas, could have been Kansas, should have been in west Texas. But he set it in eastern Oklahoma. But it’s art, not history. But that was the image. And then John Ford comes along a couple of years later makes another piece of art that’s brilliant. But it shows this dusty, dry Oklahoma. Our external image and our internal image goes in the trash can. We’re not thinking that we are the next place for hope, that we’ve lost hope. And then in the ’50s, the drought comes back just as bad as the drought in the 1930s. So, and here comes President Eisenhower out here to tour farms in western Oklahoma, why they’re blowing away. And so this image of ourselves, the external image of Oklahoma is down there, and we really then rely on hero worship. That’s when we go back to really worshiping a Will Rogers, who had died in 1935, worshiping a Jim Thorpe, and worshiping anything we can. And here comes along this young man from Minnesota named Bud Wilkinson, who seems to be this vision of hope that, yeah, we can do better. All we have to do is work together, work harder, be more skilled, and pay attention, and we can do better. And so a lot of that hero worship, because we can’t worship the state anymore. We had 20 years of really declining image. Here’s something we can hold onto, and it would have an impact on external image. OU football became known around the world almost as big as Notre Dame. Probably similar to what Georgia and Alabama are today. Berry knows more about that than I do.
But we became the image of football in those years and of excellence, of hope, of working together when the rest of the state really wasn’t succeeding that well, and that would have an impact on the state, similar to what stage play Oklahoma! and the movie Oklahoma! would have. It’s, oh, something to hold on to that we can be proud of. And it really made an impact for many years. And the Thunder would come along and just, you know, put that on nuclear power around the world and internally, but OU football and that streak in particular would really set Oklahoma up for this changing image internally and externally.
Thompson: So Berry, coming out of World War II, you know, OU hires Jim Tatum, but the administration says as a condition, you have to bring Bud Wilkinson on as your assistant coach. What did the administration see in Bud Wilkinson that they liked about bringing him on along with Jim Tatum?
Tramel: Well, the, they were in the meeting with Jim Tatum, the interview, if you will. Jim brought Bud with him. The regents were sitting around talking about the very thing Bob was talking about, which was the state image. And everybody’s sort of, you know, what I call an inferiority complex. And Lloyd Noble is credited with the idea. I don’t have any reason to doubt it wasn’t him. But he said, you know what? The war is over. Got all these, we got a four-year class of football players ready to get back in the game. If we hired a coach with wartime ties, if you remember, base football, military base football was a popular thing. It was part of a national program that the Pentagon and the federal government had instituted. They did a lot of athletics in bases for boosting morale and also building camaraderie and a lot of things, and so military football was a big thing. Iowa Pre-Flight, Jacksonville Air Naval Air Station were two of the more prominent teams, and they would play Big Ten teams, and they’d play SEC. I mean, they played a college football schedule.
Blackburn: My dad’s Army Air Corps team, and one time I asked dad, what did you do in World War II? Played football in softball. They beat Texas A&M twice.
Tramel: Well, there you go.
Blackburn: I have photographs.
Thompson: Now come on, Bob. Why did you have to bring that up?
Tramel: And Jimbo Fisher wasn’t even the coach, right! But so anyway, he had this idea that if we hire a coach with military experience coming out of the military, which a bunch of the coaches had been drafted or had entered the military, he could bring, he’d have connections, bring a ready-made roster. And that’s where they settled on Jim Tatum. They found Jim Tatum. He had coach with Don Faurot and, in the military, Don Faurot, Missouri coach famous for his split-T offense.
So Jim Tatum comes in. He’d been the head coach at North Carolina before the war, was a very good coach, but he brought Bud Wilkinson with him. Jim Tatum was an abrasive personality. A lot of people compared him 50 years later, 40 years later, to Howard Schnellenberger, who came to Oklahoma and was sort of blustery, and personally, I loved Howard, but he could be off-putting, and he did off put a lot of people. Jim Tatum did that in 1946, but they brought Bud Wilkinson with him, and George Cross, in his fabulous book, Presidents Can’t Punt, George Cross, the OU president, detailed how some of the regents said, let’s just hire Bud Wilkinson. And George Cross said that would not be the least bit ethical. We can’t do that. But George Cross came up with the, or brokered with his regents the compromise. We’ll offer the job to Tatum on the condition that he brings Bud Wilkinson. George Cross has written that he didn’t think Jim Tatum would accept, that he was a proud man. He’s a you know, he was a forceful man. He didn’t like to be told what to do, and George Cross thought he might not take the job. And if he didn’t, maybe then you could go to Bud Wilkinson. Well, Jim Tatum took the job, and, I don’t know, I don’t know if he liked having to bring Bud with him. I think he wanted to be, I think he wanted to bring Bud. I just don’t know that he wanted to be told he had to. But anyway, he brings Bud Wilkinson, and 1946 was a transformative year. OU I think goes 7–2–1, had not really done much during the war years, and it was a major improvement. Everybody realized, hey, this is great.
Blackburn: And A&M had excelled. So OU people were pissed off that A&M was doing so well.
Tramel: I think they switch in scores. I think it was 47 to nothing, Oklahoma A&M in ’45. And then OU won 73–12 in ’46. I think that was the flip in scores. So everybody’s all excited. But Jim Tatum had grown, he’d grown contentious with the administration, and not just, he wanted a lot of stuff. They weren’t willing to give it to him. There were some financial irregularities, all kinds of. It wasn’t gelling. And he takes the Maryland job after the Gator Bowl of 1946, and he just takes the Maryland job, and it could not have made the Sooners happier. I mean, they thought, this is fabulous! We can hire Brad Wilkinson! And so they did. Bud Wilkinson was a very non-conventional football coach. He would be today. Maybe the closest thing, if anybody knows about Jim Tressel, the Ohio State coach of, you know, he was 2011 or 2010 was his last year in Columbus. A very educated man, smart man, very demure, not a fiery guy, soft spoken. And he ended up being the president of Youngstown State University, Jim Tressel did. That was his final job before retirement a couple of years ago. But that’s the way Bud Wilkinson was. He just he commanded a room with his, not with a big voice, but just with his spirit. And, you know, his eyes, and his intellect. And people just felt better being around him. And you just thought, this guy really knows what he’s doing.
Thompson: One of my favorite stories I read in doing research for this is Bud’s father had built a successful lumber business in Minnesota, and he didn’t really think much of this football thing. And so he tried to, he talked Charlie Johnson, who was sports editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, into a plan to try and talk Bud out of going into coaching and come on back home, do the family business, this coaching thing isn’t, you know. And of course, we have to, you know, coaches didn’t make the kind of money that they make now. I mean Vince Lombardi had a job when he was coach of the Packers as a life insurance salesman. So you didn’t make a lot of money doing this thing. But Bud was having none of it. This was his passion, and this is exactly what he wanted to do. And, I just thought that was a really interesting story that his dad tried to talk him out of it.
Tramel: Yeah. And, you know, his mother died at a young age. Bud and his brother, I think he had one brother, were raised by their dad, and he was on the great Minnesota teams. What Ohio State is today in the Big Ten, Minnesota was in the ’30s. Just a fabulous football program. The National I think, the first AP National Championship was Minnesota in ’36, and Bud was a part of that team. Anyway, he just, very tactician. He knew how to talk to people, but he also knew the strategy of football. He had that split-T of Don Faurot that he implemented at Oklahoma. Just it’s very much a perfect place and perfect time. You know, Bob’s talking about looking for heroes to worship. Among the football heroes, Bud Wilkinson was that guy who’s, you know, the players came to be, you know, legendary and building statues, all that stuff. But Bud Wilkinson was elevated. I mean, people, the “Great White Father” is what they refer to him, as he the white or, you know, he’s early white-headed and just revered is what he was, and just perfect timing for a state that really would latch on to anything. You mentioned, you know, the inferiority complex. “Oklahoma!” the musical in 1942, I think it, ’43, it debuted. I mean, Oklahomans thought that was the greatest thing of all time, that they were singing about it in New York.
Thompson: Yeah.
Tramel: You know, this is great. Something good is finally happening. And then Bud Wilkinson comes along ready to remake OU football.
Blackburn: I think another reason Bud stood out among all the players is that if you think about football, they’re really hidden behind those masks.
Tramel: Right.
Blackburn: And helmets, it’s hard to identify with a mask and a helmet and shoulder pads. But here’s Bud on the sidelines dressed in a suit with the tie, buttoned up, the hat on.
Tramel: Fedora.
Blackburn: And he’s in control. And it’s easy to say, man, that’s the guy right there. He became the identity. And one other asset I want to mention because it’s personal, Jim Weatherall was his first Texas recruit. So Jim comes out of White Deer, and Bud discovers the Texas pipeline.
Tramel: Yeah. And he starts getting these big kids out of Texas coming here instead of going to UT or Texas A&M. And that was one of his assets. He could do that. People would just say, hey, we want, we want our son to learn from this man. He was the kind of coach that everyone was drawn to. The players respected him, that the parents, as you said, this is what we want our sons to be. Yeah, It was, he was very much a perfect fit. And it doesn’t seem like it would be, you know, sort of a, an educated guy from Minnesota, and sort of an academic.
Thompson: Yeah, had a master’s degree in English.
Tramel: Right, right. One small correction, Bob. Face masks weren’t a thing just yet. So just the helmets.
(laughing) Yeah. I’ve got some quotes here that I’ve found from some of the players that really kind of speak to. He was a person who required discipline. He was someone who was very into repetition and making sure that you knew everything you were going to do cold. This quote from Norman McNabb, who was a guard. “He insisted upon perfection. Mediocrity was a dirty word to him. His players were disciplined and unselfish, a brotherhood I’ve never seen equaled.” This is a quote from Wilkinson, talking to his players. He said, “Remember, it’s been medically proven that when your body is telling you to quit, you’ve only gone half as far as you can go.”
So that’s some of the mentality. And then I love this one from Joe Rector, who was an end. He said, “He was so organized that we’d play the game back and forth ten times before the actual kickoff. And once it started, we could have played it blindfolded. This gave us lots of confidence, and I always knew exactly what I was supposed to do on every situation. It was automatic.” I mean, you don’t get there by sort of a lackadaisically going through the week. That this is a demanding person. By all accounts, a nice person, a person that you respected. He didn’t seem like he was a cusser or ranter or raver, but someone who, you were going to do it right, and you were going to do it his way.
Tramel: Yeah. The players, feared might not be the right word, but it might be, you know. The players, no one, no one. The stories were legendary in the early ’60s of of people like Joe Don Looney and a couple of the guys in his crowd that sort of really sort of stood up. Stood up is not the right word, but sort of pushed the limits with Bud Wilkinson because it never happened before. Didn’t happen in the ’50s. Nobody bucked Bud Wilkinson. And, you know, he didn’t really need bucking. But I mean, he that people just followed in step with him. And of course that’s what happens when you win. I mean, and he did a whole lot of winning.
Thompson: Berry, you brought up the split-T, and we talked a little bit about it, Bob, last year on our podcast when we talked about the 1956 Frederick Bombers, and that was the offensive formation that Dean Wild ran there for that team, which was the first integrated team to win a state championship game. You can go back and listen to that episode if you want to, but, Berry, can we talk about the split-T and why it was successful? What made it a good offense for Bud? And of course it was, that’s what he carried through in the streak.
Tramel: Well, you know, he had learned that from like I said, from Don Faurot in the, war days, and the cool thing about the split-T is, you know, the wishbone came along at OU in 1970 and exploded, invigorated the program and created two more decades of fabulous success under mostly Barry Switzer. And if you were 10 years old in 1971 when they were hanging all these unbelievable numbers, which is what I was, I was 10. I thought, this is great, this new offense. Nobody has ever done this before. The wishbone is very much like a split-T. They just line up the backfield a little bit different. It was a triple-option offense. And if you go back to what football was like in the ’20s and ’30s into the ’40s, the old single wing, which is a little bit of deception, but it’s power deception, football. It wasn’t spread the field everywhere and hit the corners and find the creases and those kinds of things, and then the split-T comes along and does exactly that. And it, Mike Leach, if you’re a younger person in the air raid with Mike Leach, the wishbone before that, and then split-T before that is similar football. It’s just not throwing it forward, sometimes throwing it backwards, but spreading the field and using the entire width of the field to really distort the defense. And, Bud had a series of great quarterbacks who were really good at deception, the fake handoff to the fullback and keeping and going around the corner.
And, you know, my dad would tell me, my dad got to OU in ’49 and graduated in ’53, so he saw those early, the Jim Weatherall teams. But he would tell me about Eddie Crowder, the quarterback of ’51 and ’52, how several times Eddie Crowder would fake to the fullback and keep the ball, and the play would be whistled dead. You know, the whistle would blow, because the officials got faked out. They didn’t know Eddie Crowder still had the ball. So this was a new kind of football. And OU wasn’t the only team, you know, running the split-T. Missouri was doing it and others, but it was still pretty unique. And it really was exciting football to watch compared to the old days that were still pretty jumbled in the middle, and it was incredibly effective. So the split-T was revolutionary, and it was one of the it was one of the beneficiaries of bringing in the wartime team of Jim Tatum and Bud Wilkinson.
Thompson: Before we get into actually talking about some of the games and the players that participated in the streak, I don’t want to go too much farther without talking about Gomer Jones for just a minute. You wrote a couple of really great articles about Gomer Jones in 2017 that I found in doing the research for this, but he was Bud’s right-hand man for the entirety of the run of that streak, and of course, the entirety of Bud’s tenure as coach. What did he mean to the team, and what did he bring that was able to help during this time?
Tramel: Well, Gomer Jones was an old, line lineman at Ohio State. And he was not really the, he was a super guy, not a mean guy. But he was not distinguished, shall we say, as Bud Wilkinson. He was, you know, sort of the traditional football coach, get in there and, you know, let’s play some rugby. And he was highly respected, 17-year, the line coach and back when they played, you know, single platoons, so people played offense and defense. So he coached the defensive line, the offensive line. And just generation after generation of Sooners respected him. I believe it might have been, I think it was Port Robertson who was another bastion of those great teams in terms of coaching and and discipline and all those things. But when Gomer Jones died, he said, you know, there was never a finer man as part of the Oklahoma football operation. Then Gomer Jones, he had the misfortune of being named the head coach in 1964.
Thompson: Yeah. That’s not a good, that’s about the best way to tarnish your reputation is try to follow Bud Wilkinson. He went, what was it, 9–11–1 in two seasons and was fired the head coach, and they demoted him to athletic director, which is, you know, the things were sort of upside down in those days.
Thompson: I’m a little familiar with trying to follow a legend, and, you know, I had to succeed Bob Blackburn.
Tramel: Trait, it’s not, it’s a pretty good similarity because it’s a difficult thing to do when somebody’s that successful and that long-standing. No matter what you do, it’s not going to be good enough. So we see it today. We see it in coaches today. But Gomer Jones was instrumental, and, you know, the OU line. The truth of the matter is if you compared the OU backs and the OU line from the Wilkinson era, there were probably more great linemen than backs, and that’s how they really distinguished people. But if you go back through the the awards, Jim Weatherall won the Outland Trophy. Yeah I mean they had, the only Heisman winner in the Wilkinson era was Billy Vessels in ’52. OU had more of the Outland-type winners than they did the back winners. So, yeah, Gomer Jones was a massive, massive part of all those years as Bud’s lieutenant.
Thompson: Yeah. Well, Wilkinson said, “If Gomer left, I think I’d have to quit.” You know, that’s how important he was to Bud Wilkinson. Let’s get into the 1953 season. This is when it all starts. And the first two games of the 1953 season, I don’t think anybody would have said, we’re on, we’re on the verge of greatness here because the first game of the season, they lose to Notre Dame 28 to 21, and then they tie with Pittsburgh 7 to 7 in the very next game. But it was the game after that when everything started. And so talk about that 1953 season a little bit. And what turned on that helped them to start this streak?
Tramel: Well, a couple of things to remember, and this is not anything people can relate to today is the conference schedule for Oklahoma football in the ’50s was not strong. The Big Seven was not a strong conference. Nebraska was hit-and-miss, that Bob Devaney had not gotten there. Missouri was hit-and-miss. The Kansas schools were not very good. Colorado would come into the league and was probably the second-best program. It was not a strong conference, played in six conference games. So Oklahoma had four non-conference, and a coach wouldn’t even have thought about scheduling an automatic victory, which is what we do today about 75% of the time. They weren’t playing. That wasn’t happening. Pitt was a national brand in 1953. Notre Dame was Notre Dame. All kinds of, and Texas is an annual part of that too. So the non-conference was going to be tough every year. And in 1953, the Sooners were bringing in a new quarterback. And Gene Calame was quarterback to start that 1953 season, and OU was talented. But if you look back in terms of the legendary names, and Jim Weatherall was gone off the ’52 team. Billy Vessels was gone off the ’52 team. It was, for that time, it was a sort of a rebuilding year. So it was, you know, ’52 was the year that might have been, you know, that spike. You’re coming back down a little bit, refinding your footing, and you’re opening the season with Notre Dame and Pitt. So it wasn’t going to ever be an automatic, you know, let’s just keep winning big.
Thompson: Yeah. And so they end up going, for the rest of the season. I’ve got a few of the stats here for the 1953 season. Here’s what’s interesting too. So they win the rest of their games that season. They go 9–1–1, and then they go to the Orange Bowl, and they’re they faced Jim Tatum, the former coach of OU, and they beat Maryland seven to nothing on January the 1, 1954. They led the nation in rushing, 306 yards a game, Actually, 307 if you round up. Larry Grigg led the Big Seven in rushing once with 790 yards on 130 carries. So they finished the season pretty well there. And one of the things that they did is Gene Calame. Did I say that?
Tramel: Calame is how I say.
Thompson: Okay.
Tramel: How I’ve been, it’s how I’ve been told to pronounce it.
Thompson: Yeah, I appreciate the correction there. So when they started 0-1-1, Wilkinson moved Buddy Leake from quarterback to halfback and put in Gene Calame at quarterback.
Tramel: Buddy Leake was a really, for the time, he was like a revolutionary recruit. He’s from Memphis, Tennessee, really fast. Ended up staying in Oklahoma, became a prominent oilman. I got to know Buddy well. Lots of people in Oklahoma know Buddy, or knew Buddy, but Buddy Leake was, if Bud had a, if Bud had a blind spot, he always wanted to push the boundary at quarterback. You know, he was forever, in 1940, in the 1947, ’48, he had this grand plan that he had Jack Mitchell, was who was one of the all-time great option quarterbacks. But Jack was fast and could run. And he kept thinking, you know, I got this other guy who’s a really good quarterback, Darrell Royal. Let’s put Darrell at quarterback, and let’s put Jack at halfback, and we’ll be twice as good. And it just, he did it, and it just never worked out, and he quickly got Jack back in there. And he did the same thing with Buddy Leake. Buddy Leake clearly was a halfback. He wasn’t a quarterback. He tries Buddy at option quarterback. Other people have done that, you know, throughout the years. But it was not a perfect fit. And so he goes back, and Gene Calame, I don’t think Gene ever lost a game. You know, OU is the only quarterback, only school, that’s what happens when you win 47 straight. But they had two straight starting quarterbacks who started double-digit games and never lost
Thompson: Jimmy Harris.
Tramel: Jimmy Harris and Gene Calame. I think Gene Calame was 15–0, and Jimmy Harris was 25–0. Yeah, so Calame quarterbacked the last nine games of 1953, the first two of 1954 before he was hurt. And then, that’s when Jimmy Harris came in.
Tramel: Yeah. Jimmy Harris from Terrell, Texas. I spent the night in Terrell this very summer on our way to the Gulf. We got a late evening start, and so we made it as far as Terrell. But, yeah, Jimmy Harris was a consummate leader and just a, you know, one of the premier names in Oklahoma football history for that 25–0 record. But he wasn’t a superstar. That’s the thing about Bud. Bud’s best quarterbacks tended to not win the national championship. I think that’s happenstance. I think it’s coincidence. But Eddie Crowder didn’t win. Darrell Royal in ’49 didn’t win. Jack Mitchell didn’t win. But Claude Arnold and ’50 and Jimmy Harris ’55 and ’56. So yeah, it’s a, it was a tag-team affair there in ’53 through ’56 and ended ’57 with those two quarterbacks.
Thompson: Yeah. Jimmy Harris started 25 games at quarterback. He won them all. He was quarterback for more than half of the 47-game winning streak and one of only six quarterbacks to lead their teams to back-to-back national titles. So yeah, he had some game. Gerald McPhail, Harris’ teammate, said he had a flair about him that was just national champion confidence. A “Here I am. Come on, guys. Let’s go get it now. He made everybody feel confident he had that air about him that was really special.”
Tramel: He really did. And you know, I got to know Jimmy later in life and, I don’t know, almost 50 years later, the exact same personality. You know, he ended up being a Shreveport oilman and when OU under Bob Stoops, you know, had gone pretty far down before Stoops got here that first year. He goes 7–4 and gets OU to the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, and Jimmy Harris sort of hosted the Sooners that whole week. And I remember talking to him on the practice field sidelines, and he just couldn’t have been more proud. He was like a proud papa sitting there looking out over this team that had finally gotten back going.
And, a few years after that, was probably 2010, there was an event put together when all the national championship quarterbacks got together. And because of a scheduling snafu with practice or something, Josh Heupel got there right after one of them, might have been Jimmy, I can’t remember. Had to leave. So they all five weren’t there at the same time, but there for a few minutes. I mean, but for the day, all were there. And Jimmy Harris had the same persona. He was pretty much the life of the party and just sort of the same commanding, winning personality, leadership personality. A lot of those, a lot of those, football players from the mid ’50s, sort of the stoic Jerry Tubbs, Clendon Thomas guys, super guys, but not real boisterous. But Jimmy Harris was sort of the voice of those teams, I think.
Thompson: Do you think, you know, as the Jimmy Harrises of the world and when they would meet the younger players, did you feel like the younger players had a full appreciation for what they had accomplished back in their day?
Tramel: Oh, I think it diminished every year or every few years. I mean, it’s hard for, you know, a player from the ’80s to have too much of a grasp of the ’50s. And, you know, one of the things that especially, you know, the, the integration of Oklahoma football came in 1957 with Prentice Gautt, and, you know, if you’re, you know, in 1985, you’re Dante Jones or Darrell Reed or, you know, one of the great players from the ’80s, it’s hard to, it’s hard to connect with players on all-white team from the ’50s.
Thompson: Yeah.
Tramel: So I don’t know if it, I don’t know that they even attempted it too much. I do think though that those players connected with fans, and there are still people today, a lot of people today that are alive and saw Jimmy Harris and Clendon Thomas and Jerry Tubbs and those guys play football. But a lot of people who weren’t alive still talk about it. Hey, I’m one of them. So I do think the tales of those guys resonated, and somebody like Jimmy Harris was a fabulous athlete. You know, he played several years in the NFL as a defensive back. So he wasn’t just a, he wasn’t just a rah-rah guy handing it off to big-time players. I mean, he was a really good athlete who also played defense for the Sooners, you know, in that single-platoon era.
Blackburn: You know, Trait, one other thing in terms of memory of those great teams for us Baby Boomers, we have a little bit of the memory, but our dads would have had a great memory because of the Bud Wilkinson coaches show. WKY-TV had gone on the air in ’49. Kerr-McGee, which started in 1939, it’s doing really well across the country. They’re the sponsors, and they’re sending Howard Newman out to every game. And I had one of our board members here was one of the sales manager at one of the big distributing electronics companies. He would fly with them to every game, and they would shoot. They would film the entire game, rush it to, I think it was Dallas at the time to get the film processed, get it back to the station the next day, edit it out. Bud would be on the next day, and so people could see those games. You know, today we think, well, football’s on 18 channels at any given time. It wasn’t that way in the 1950s, but here in Oklahoma, we had the Bud Wilkinson show, the first coaches show in the country. And that kind of created a memory that we have as Baby Boomers, especially in our parents. So, but that would have faded away as football grows on television and television changes, of course.
Tramel: And Bud’s little men became a cultural phenomenon. He would have these little, were they made out of wood, Bob?
Blackburn: We have a set here.
Tramel: Oh you have a set? Oh my goodness! But he’s got, he literally had 11 little, I’m sitting here using my finger. But on a podcast, you can’t see it. But maybe these little wooden football players, maybe three or four inches high, and Bud would put them out on a field for his show and maneuver and show you how plays develop and things. A modern coach would fall over dead trying to explain, truly explain a football play to you, but Bud didn’t mind doing it in the 1950s.
Blackburn: Berry, when we first opened here in 2005, I wanted an exhibit. I was the curator on the sports exhibit, and I had Jack Zink’s Indy race car for the first thing you saw. But I want to do something on OU and OSU, but instead of doing the Bedlam, I did Bud Wilkinson and Hank Iba, and I had video cameras for both, and I found footage from the, we have all of the archive footage here, so I chose a section of one of his shows where he’s explaining the draw play, which I always loved. I thought that was so deceptive—the draw play. And so here he’s explaining it with the little guys, and I had a case next to it with the little guys, and then on Hank Iba, I had, he produced a series of films in 1946, because he still had the great players on his team, and it was how, it was for coaches, how to run basketball. So I had him explaining his tactics on the basketball court and Bud explaining tactics on the football field. And it was really a cool experience when I had, you know, that’s the one. That’s the story I want, the draw play because it was my favorites.
Tramel: And, you know, related to that, Trait, is in the ’50s is when we actually saw the advent of some televised games. Now nothing like we’ve got today. No more than one a year, I don’t think. Maybe two if it was just a phenomenal something. But the idea that you could actually watch these guys instead of listening, instead of going to the games or listening on the radio, you could actually see it on television. You know, a good friend of mine, he died last year at age, I think he was 84, but he remembers as a boy in 1952, from Hobart, his dad drove his the family up to Oklahoma City to rent a room at the Skirvin Hotel because they had televisions to watch the Oklahoma–Notre Dame game on television, and just, you know, 70 years later, this is imprinted in his mind. So, you know, that had another major impact on the state’s fascination, because this is not a game, a team they could just read about anymore or hear about or see with their eyes, you know, or have to travel to Norman to do it. You can actually just sit at home and watch them on television. If you were lucky, once a year.
Thompson: In the 1954 season, the team goes 10–0, and they won the Big Seven championship. But there’s something really interesting happens, and this is another way that that Bud Wilkinson was kind of a pioneer here. He and the sports department at OU do one of the first Heisman campaigns in US history. Before it was just kind of like, okay, everybody would, all the sportswriters would get together and vote, but they actually put together a letter-writing campaign to get Kurt Burris, who was center and linebacker, the award for the Heisman Trophy that year. And it’s the closest a lineman has ever come to winning the Heisman. He placed second in the Heisman voting that year. I find that to be fascinating.
Tramel: Well, one of the cool things about OU football tradition and history is that they did have revolutionary things, not just like the split-T, but you mentioned the coaches show. In 1930, OU hired Harold Keith in, for what we would call sports information director or media relations director. Chief publicist is what he really did. He just was hired to promote athletics at Oklahoma, and I’m sure do a whole lot of other things. Another great historian.
Blackburn: He wrote several books.
Tramel: Oklahoma Kickoff is one of the best books, he wrote a book about the first 20 or 25 years of OU football, from 1895 to, I think, 1920. It’s not just one of the best football books about Oklahoma. It’s one of the best history books about life in Oklahoma in the first 20 years of the 20th century. But anyway, Harold Keith was doing this job that had never been done before. He was literally the first in America and sort of a blank slate and did all these things. And the thing you’re talking about doing a Heisman campaign, and it’s so cool that Kurt Burris was the recipient of that. You know, he’s one of the five Burris brothers that played football at OU. Three were really big time. Two transferred back to Northeastern State in Tahlequah. I think one became a federal judge, Lyle Burris, I think. But three stayed in Norman. Buddy Burris was OU’s first three-time All-American. They’ve only had three three-time All-Americans in OU history. I mean, you’d think it’d be a bunch, but it’s only three. Rod Shoate in the ’70s. Baker Mayfield in the 2010s, and Buddy Burris in the ’40s coming out of the war. Bob Burris was a halfback, All–Big 7 in 1955. But the best of the three was Kurt, who was a rock, a rough and tumble center and linebacker. They were all from Muskogee. Just a bunch of tough old guys. And yeah, it was really cool that he dang near won the Heisman in ’54.
Thompson: Yeah. Lynn Burris called his brother a “headhunter. He wouldn’t be able to play today. He usually knocked two or three guys out of a game.” That’s a no-no now. “He would be awful upset to see football as it is now.”
Blackburn: So speaking of that, when I started playing football in junior high, Jim Weatherall was my stepdad when he bought me shiver pads is what they called them at the time. You put on your, I said, Jim, why do I need these shiver pads? He says, when you hit those guys on the helmet with your elbow, it won’t hurt as bad. And that’s the way they played. You’re trying to knock the guy out on the other side.
Tramel: That’s true.
Thompson: Well, I’ve got a story I always tell at the Capitol about Jim Thorpe in the Carlisle versus Army game in 1912. And when Jim Thorpe was running all over the army team, Dwight Eisenhower, he got with a friend of his on the team and said, let’s try and injure Thorpe and get him out of the game, which is perfectly legal in 1912 football. It’s why Theodore Roosevelt wanted to ban it. So it’s always had a bit of a history. And, I think today, of course, with all the penalties, they try to control that a little bit more, but it’s still a rough game.
Tramel: Yeah. That was a, you know, it was, OU’s Heisman history now is fantastic. But for the longest time, you know, till 1969, OU only had one the one Heisman winner, Billy Vessels. They’re coming in a lot more frequent these days.
Thompson: In 1955, they go 11–0–0. Once again, they beat Maryland in the Orange Bowl to cap off their season in January 2, 1956. Bo Bolinger and Tommy McDonald made the All-American team, and Tommy McDonald was a special player. He was someone who, he played halfback, and he was the first player in OU history to score a touchdown in every game of the season, won the Maxwell Award in 1956. He would go on to a very prolific NFL career as well.
Tramel: In the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I was actually, I think it was 1995. He went in, and I was there in Canton when they inducted him into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1995. If my memory serves, I think Tommy McDonald led OU in rushing yards, receiving yards, and passing yards. He actually threw for more yards than Jimmy Harris did, because they ran some halfback passes that were really effective. A little kid from Roy, New Mexico. Dangdest thing. We have some friends I had lunch with on a regular basis a couple years ago, and we had the same waitress, and she was sort of a character, and she’d always talked to us. And one day we asked her where she’s from, and she said a little place in New Mexico. You’d never heard of it. I said, well, where was it? She said, Roy, New Mexico. I said, that’s Tommy MacDonald’s hometown! And she didn’t even know who Tommy McDonald was, but I thought that was so cool.
(laughter) So, anyway, he comes out, he’s 5’8”.
Thompson: Small even for 1950s standards, 175 pounds.
Tramel: And here’s the thing. He was an atypical Bud Wilkinson Sooner. He was a personality. He was not stoic. He was a talker. He was sort of goofy. He was goofy in 1995 when, I don’t know if anybody remembers, they gave him the bust in Canton for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He’s talking about how he had good hands. He said, you don’t believe it? And he steps to the side of the podium, and he’s got this bust. They’d handed him his bust. He grabs the bust, starts throwing it up and catching it, throwing it up and catching it. (laughter)
Thompson: Oh my gosh.
Tramel: He’s like 70 years old. But anyway, yeah, he was a character, and but he was lovable because he never really got out of, you know, he never really got in the doghouse, but what a player he was. He was not a great defender. You know, somebody like Billy Vessels won the Heisman as a halfback, but he might have been Bud’s best defensive back ever.
Tramel: Tommy McDonald was not. They had to hide him on defense, but, man, what an offensive threat. Yeah, just a wonderful player. Tommy McDonald would have won the Heisman himself, but he, in ’56, but he and Jerry Tubbs, I think my memory’s right. I think they finished 2–3 or 2–4 and split the votes, or Tommy would have won the Heisman in ’56 instead of Paul Hornung.
Thompson: 1956, that was that was the season that was 10–0–0, national championship second year in a row because they won in 1955 as well. They led the nation in rushing with 391 yards a game. They set a national record for first downs with 222 in the season. Clendon Thomas won the major college scoring championship with 108 points. Jimmy Harris said this about Clendon. “Clendon ran with the long stride. He’d be going full speed after the first two steps. He kept his head up and cut and hit the open hole as well as anybody I ever saw. He was easy to hand off to. I always knew exactly where he would be. He was a fine defensive back too.”
Tramel: Well I’d say fine. In 1964, Clendon Thomas was the highest paid defensive back in the National Football League, so he was a big-time player. Clendon Thomas was ahead of his time. He was not like Tommy McDonald. He was 6’2” and 210 pounds. And as late as 2019, or actually, I saw him the other day. He wasn’t standing up, but he was sitting down at the function. We had a nice chat, but Clendon Thomas was an imposing figure, even at the age of 75. I mean, he could play today with his stature. Bigger than everyone, as fast as anyone. Came from Southeast High School in Oklahoma, in Oklahoma City. He was a big-time, big-time player. And he was a little bit, he was a little bit, a victim of being a year behind the stars. He was a year behind Jerry Tubbs and Tommy McDonald and Jimmy Harris. If he’d had been a senior with those guys, he might have been, he might have won the Heisman. He might have been the marquee guy, even with Tommy McDonald on his team. I mean, think about the 1956 Sooners. Their halfbacks were Clendon Thomas and Tommy McDonald. So OU had a great system. They had a great coach. They had a great culture. They had all the great stuff. They also had Clendon Thomas and Tommy McDonald as their two halfbacks. So let’s not forget that.
Thompson: Not too shabby.
Blackburn: Little quick anecdote on Clendon. I got to know him when I did the Bud Wilkinson exhibit. So, you know, a lot of those guys from Bud’s day came back, but Clendon was telling me a story one day. I was just so fascinated by his story. I think it was Philadelphia. Wasn’t that where he played defensive back? He was, he moved around.
Thompson: Tommy McDonald played for Philadelphia.
Blackburn: Clendon, I can’t remember, but Clendon was the defensive back playing against Jim Brown, Cleveland Browns. When I was a kid, Jim Brown, well he was king. No one could play with him. Well, Clendon told me. He said that he studied enough film that you could not tackle Jim Brown by going for his legs. He was so strong in the legs, he could just kick it off. He said he had to go high and grab around the shoulder pads, get him off balance, and get him down. He dominated Jim Brown in a game, and that really impressed me. I’ll never forget that day. I must almost see the day that he was telling me that story. He was a smart player.
Tramel: Right.
Blackburn: And not just a talented player.
Tramel: Right. I actually, I happen to think Jim Brown’s the greatest football player of all time. So if you can stand up to Jim Brown.
Thompson: Yeah, I mean certainly, one of the all time greats. one of the things that struck me about that 1956 season, they played ten games that season. Six, against six of those opponents, those opponents scored zero points. Zero. Six of the ten games, the opponents didn’t score a point. I mean, that is dominating.
Tramel: Yeah.
Thompson: That that is absolutely dominating.
Tramel: Now the ’56 team was a little bit fortunate because their non-conference schedule included Notre Dame and Texas, and it was one of the worst Texas teams of all time. I can’t remember if the Longhorns went 1–9 or 2–8, whatever they went. It was the worst Notre Dame team of all time. For some reason, that just happened.
Thompson: Yeah, they beat them 40 to nothing.
Tramel: The Irish was 2–8. They still won the Heisman with Paul Hornung but got a little bit of a break. Now even one of the Texas’ best teams, even one of Notre Dame’s best teams, I think they would have, they would have caught them. I mean, I think the Sooners would have handled them. But the ’56 team embodies a truth about most of the 47-game winning streak. There wasn’t a lot of drama. There weren’t a lot of close games.
Thompson: Yeah.
Tramel: There weren’t a lot of tight fits. You know, if you win in college football today, if you go 13–0, you got at least two or three tough, you know, tough squeezes. If you win over the course of three or four seasons, you’re gonna have a bunch of close games. That group of guys didn’t. They very rarely played a close game.
Thompson: Well, to that point, Colorado got up on them 19 to 6. And one of the games in the 1956 season, and at halftime, Bud Wilkinson told them all you might as well just take off those jerseys with Oklahoma on the front because you’re not representing us. And I think that got their attention.
Tramel: Well, yeah, they came back. I think it’s 27–19 final, I think. But, yeah, he was a master, he was a master psychologist, Bud was. I tend to think that today’s athletes don’t really listen to their coaches speeches much. I think they listen on the practice field when they’re watching film, when they’re actually. But when they’re messing with their minds, I tend to think they don’t. They tune it out. You know, modern people, not just kids or teenagers or young people, all of us. We tune people out pretty easy nowadays. We got things that tune us out. But, they listened to Bud Wilkinson when he talked, I think in the ’50s. So he had that presence. And I think that did motivate them, that speech against Colorado, when the one time they had a pretty tough game.
Blackburn: Speaking of Bud’s motivation, when I was working on the exhibit on Bud I called Jay. He was still, I think, Colorado or someplace. He wasn’t in Oklahoma City.
Tramel: Yeah, that’s his son.
Blackburn: Yeah. Excuse me. For those young people don’t know. Jay was Bud’s and a great athlete but decided to go to Duke instead of play at OU for various reasons. But I was talking to Jay. I said, Jay, I need some artifacts from Bud’s real life. Not on the football field, but as a man and a leader and someone who understood what’s important in life. And he said, well, when I was at Duke, my dad wrote me a series of letters, the way I should live my life as a man. And it wasn’t about how to be a better football player. It was how to treat your family, how to treat others around you. And I said, man, I wish, you still had those. He said, I’ve got them all. I said, can I borrow a few of them? He loaned me some of those letters. That was a centerpiece on the artifacts I wanted to use on Bud Wilkinson. Here’s a man talking to his son, and all of us with kids can relate to that. He was pouring out his heart saying, son, here’s what I expect of you. This is, this is a good life. This is the way to do it. And of course, he was a star at Duke and later a star businessman. But he really felt that motivation from his own dad. And I thought that was a special thing that we could include in the exhibit.
Thompson: And those letters are in a book now. So we have it here at the Historical Society. I’m sure many people can find it at a library, but Jay put those into a book so that other people can go read them as well. Moving into the 1957 season, which was the season where the streak ended, they went 10–1–0. So what’s just kind of wild about this whole thing is the last loss they had was to Notre Dame, November 16, 1957, the loss to end the streak, which, by the way, Bob, Statehood Day, the 50th anniversary of Oklahoma statehood. Remember, this was the big “Arrows to Atoms,” you know, 50-year celebration here in Oklahoma.
Blackburn: Frontier City was created that year.
Thompson: They lose to Notre Dame. To break the streak on Statehood Day, November 16th, 1947. The Sooners’ longest drive in that game was the opening drive. They went all the way to the Notre Dame 13 before they could, they were unable to convert on a fourth and three. With 12:51 left in the game, this is a defensive battle. Back and forth, back and forth. Notre Dame started on its own 20. They ran 20 plays to get to paydirt, and there was only one pass on the entire series, which was a ten-yarder on fourth down from the three-yard line. They scored on a running play around the right to beat Oklahoma to end the 47-game winning streak. After the loss, he said to the team, Bud Wilkinson said, “You’ve done something that no other major college football team has ever done before or will ever do again.” And as we sit here in 2024, that is right. “You won 47 straight football games, and I’m proud of you. You have been just as much a part of this as any other Oklahoma team, and the only ones who never lose are the ones who never play.”
Tramel: Yeah. Pretty good speech.
Blackburn: Yeah.
Tramel: Strangest day in OU football history from the people who were there. Because by multiple accounts, people were stunned. I mean, you’re talking about four years and what, two months since OU had lost a football game, and the crowd didn’t leave for a few minutes. They just sat there in sort of stunned silence at what, what’s going on? This can’t you know, it’s not the way it’s supposed to end.
Thompson: Well, and they were favored. OU was heavily favorite.
Tramel: Not a great Notre Dame team. They were much better than the year before. I think they finished 7–3. But this was not a vintage OU team, and the crowd was just stunned. And you know, a friend of mine, I remember talking to him a few years ago. He lived over west, a little south of the stadium, and not too far from where the Wilkinsons lived. And he just, he said, I remember walking home and nobody was saying a word, you know. Go hang out among people leaving a football game today, everybody’s talking about what happened and whatever. And it’s they’re either angry or they’re jubilant or whatever. And this is just people even sitting in the stands and then going over, they’re just stunned because something had happened that they just didn’t know how to process. And, you know, I can remember when OU’s 28-game winning streak in 1975 ended, and it was a weird feeling. Kansas beat Oklahoma 23–3, and I was 14. And I was at the stadium that day. And I remember, it was even in Norman that night, I remember we went to get some barbecue, and I remember where we went, to old Lindy’s Barbecue. And I just remember the mood around town was different. It was just strange, and I can’t even imagine what it would have been like compared to ’57, where the streak was much longer and the timeframe, twice as long. And, but what Bud said after the game, you know, no one’s ever done and no one ever will again. You know, not only has that been true, I think it’s going to be true going forward because it’s harder than it’s harder than ever to stay unbeaten, and the way rosters turn over.
Thompson: Well, with the NIL these days, I can’t imagine that this record will ever be broken.
Tramel: No, no, no. And you know, you’d have to go, if you went unbeaten three straight seasons, three straight national championship seasons, you’d go 48–0, and that could do it. But you can’t. How do you do that? You can’t do it. Yeah I mean Georgia’s been unbelievable has gone 40–2 the last three years. And you know and now they’re going to, they’re even given a more difficult slate. So I think that’s a streak that will last, will stand the test of time.
Thompson: One of the things I want to, as we start to wrap up here, I want to talk about, and you mentioned it earlier, Berry, but Prentice Gautt, the first Black player to play at OU, and he was brought in by Bud Wilkinson. This was a big, big thing. I think he was the first Black college football player in all of Oklahoma. And he was someone who went through a lot of really bad experiences and racism, not only from some of the fans, but also from some of his own teammates as well. And I read this that one day during Gautt’s senior season, this was after the streak, but then head coach Bud Wilkinson unexpectedly canceled practice. Instead of calling everyone into the locker room, But Wilkinson wasn’t happy with the way some players were treating Gautt, using racial slurs behind his back and wanted to address the team about the manner. He called for change, pointing directly at Gautt and telling his players if they were men, to speak to Gautt face to face. Bud often defending Gautt after becoming one of the first coaches in college football history to give a scholarship to a Black player, something he knew wouldn’t be appreciated until years later. And Gautt said later that, because 1957 was one of his first seasons to play, that a lot of people blamed him for the reason that they lost during the streak because they said, well, you know, some white players didn’t want to play with the Black players, so they left and, you know, so he was blamed in some ways for losing the streak. And of course, you know, we all know that no streak is going to go on forever. And of course, looking back through the lens of history, Bud Wilkinson was a pioneer in this. And he said he got hate mail, lots and lots of hate mail when he decided to do it. And he kept, he didn’t waver because it was the right thing to do.
Tramel: What I find interesting about the Oklahoma football integration story is, you know, Oklahoma culture, when it comes to race, is mostly southern. I mean, Jim Crow laws and segregated schools, all those kinds of things. And when you look at the peer institutions in the southern culture, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, all those places did not integrate until 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, more than a decade after Bud Wilkinson. So up in the north, integration had occurred. You know Ohio State, Michigan, the Iowa schools, places like that were playing Black players. Out in California, Jackie Robinson played for UCLA well before he played Major League Baseball. So in the, you know, before the war. So we’re talking early ’40s. But in the south, it didn’t happen. I think the Southwest Conference broke the color line in 1966 with Jerry LeVias at SMU, Southern Methodist. And so when you look at that, Oklahoma doing it in 1957, nine years before the Southwest Conference, 12 to 13 years before the SEC. This was, it was a landmark decision. It was a landmark move. It was not easy. It didn’t go without its, without its hiccups. It went, you know, there were problems in inside and outside the program, no doubt about it. But it was a major move. Oklahoma A&M or Oklahoma State did the, you know, followed up very quickly. I think the next year was when OSU integrated. So OSU followed suit too. So Oklahoma was on the cutting edge of that in this southern culture, and it was a powerful thing for the state. And it didn’t come quickly. You know, in the mid ’60s, OU still didn’t have 20 Black players on the team, but by the early ’70s, you know, half the team was Black.
Thompson: Well and Barry Switzer was very good about recruiting Black players.
Blackburn: And the Selmons changed a lot of minds too. They were so dominant.
Tramel: Yeah. That’s right. OU had a first, had its first Black, had the first Black captain in the southern culture, Glenn King in 1971. First Black quarterback in the southern culture schools, 1972, Kerry Jackson. So OU football was on the cusp of integrating southern football, but it was definitely a southern thing. And that’s, you know, sometimes with the south and sometimes with the southwest and sometimes with the midwest, it just depends on what the circumstances are. But in football culture and racial culture, we’re definitely, I think historically, a southern state. And Bud Wilkinson and Prentice Gautt were on the forefront of integration.
Thompson: Well and Gautt would go on to be a very successful player for OU. He was the MVP of the 1959 Orange Bowl. And then, of course, he went on and he became, he got his doctorate, and he was very involved with OU and other schools until he passed away a few years ago.
Tramel: Associate commissioner of the Big Eight Conference for many years.
Thompson: Yeah, yeah. Well, Berry, this has just been an absolute pleasure to walk down memory lane with you and to hear your stories and to, your encyclopedic knowledge of these great teams from the 1950s at OU. And I just thank you so much for taking your time to be with us this morning.
Tramel: Well, I’ve enjoyed the heck out of it. Like I said, I don’t know a whole lot about much, but football and history are two of the things I actually know a lot about. So you’ve caught me in my wheelhouse.
Thompson: Well, fantastic. And like I said, as I was doing my research, it became very, very clear that you were the person to come on and talk about this, and I’ve absolutely enjoyed it. And I’ve learned a lot, Bob.
Blackburn: I have too. I’ve enjoyed this. Thanks, Berry, and keep doing what you’re doing. And just one mention, my wife, not a sports person, but she will listen to Sports Animal if Berry’s on. So if I have it on, I pick her up somewhere. And if it’s Berry, she’s like no, turn it back on. I want to hear. So my wife is one of your fans.
Tramel: Well, great. Well, great. You know, I got this, you know, I don’t have a James Earl Jones voice, but, I do have a good old Okie accent that I can’t lose. So people can pick it out pretty quick.
Blackburn: Well, you come through with passion and, you know, that’s one thing that we all need. Whatever we’re doing, whether it’s Historical Society or writing. If you do it with passion, you’re going to overcome a lot of shortcomings, and people will recognize the passion. And you certainly bring that to to your writing, to radio, and hopefully keep doing that for many years.
Tramel: Well, I appreciate it. And thanks to both of you guys for what you have done and are doing for history in the state. Like I said, I love history, I love the History Center. So, anything I can ever do to help, I’ll be glad to do.
Thompson: All right. Well, folks, we appreciate you taking time to listen with us today, and we’ll catch you on our next podcast. (upbeat music playing) You’ve been listening to A Very OK Podcast, hosted by Trait Thompson and Dr. Bob Blackburn. The podcast is produced by the Oklahoma Historical Society. Visit us at okhistory.org and find us on social media by searching for @okhistory. I encourage you to purchase a membership to OHS to help us continue our mission to collect, preserve, and share Oklahoma’s unique and fascinating history.
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