After 40 Years, Still the Game of Century

What makes the Game of the Century?

A good place to start is with a president in attendance and The King watching from his throne. In this case, there were actually two presidents in attendance. Three, if you think Bill Clinton lies about everything.

The truth is what happened 40 years ago December 6 was the greatest college football event of any century.

Texas 15, Arkansas 14.

Other games have claimed the Game of the Century billing. Some say it was Nebraska-Oklahoma '71 or FSU-Notre Dame '93 or Army-Notre Dame '46. In our ADD world some would probably argue for this weekend's Florida-Alabama showdown.

I'd agree if the hero of those games played on an aching leg that had to be amputated six days later. What else makes a game for the ages?

You need a buildup, which in a lot of cases merely leads to a letdown. This one didn't.

"I do not remember the details of the game," George H.W. Bush said, "but I do recall it was exciting."

America's 41st president was at the game, though he was just a congressman at the time. America's 37th president was also there, and Richard Nixon was more than the nation's chief executive.

He was the sloop-nosed symbol of The Establishment, which wasn't popular on college campuses. Big things were happening, from the Vietnam War to Apollo 11 landing to Woodstock to the Civil Rights struggle.

If Nixon wanted a break from all that, his little football excursion seemed like a good idea. He loved football, and everybody was caught up in the Texas-Arkansas hype.

The Longhorns were No. 1, having won 18 straight. The Razorbacks were No. 2, with 15 straight wins.

It not only was the final regular-season game of the year, it was the final game of the first 100 years of college football. ABC wanted something special, so sports chief Roone Arledge and publicist Beano Cook persuaded Arkansas coach Frank Broyles to move the game from mid-October to Dec. 6.

There was one game on a week back then, not the 342 or so that cloud our attention every Saturday. The winner would claim the Southwest Conference crown and a berth in the Cotton Bowl.

The polls that mattered were the AP and UPI, and the UPI didn't vote after the bowl games. That made the game a de facto national championship and allowed Nixon to present a title plaque to the winner.

That never set well with Penn State, which went 11-0 that year. The White House received 90,000 angry letters and telegrams from Nittany Lions fans. It was almost enough to make a staunch Republican like Joe Paterno vote for George McGovern.

"How could the president know so little about Watergate in 1973 and so much about football in 1969?" Paterno asked at the 1973 Penn State commencement.

JoePa should have been in Fayetteville that week. The football dorm was besieged by well-wishers, phone calls and people driving by honking their horns. It got so bad that on Wednesday, Broyles moved his team 45 minutes up the road to a hotel in Rogers, Ark.

Down in Austin, 25,000 people showed up at a pep rally to see the Longhorns off. Arkansas had beaten No. 1 Texas teams in 1964 and '65. Along with Alabama they were two of three winningest programs of the decade.

No Game of the Century can match those numbers, and the fact Billy Graham showed up to give the invocation. And we haven't even gotten to the good stuff.

"The landing on the moon, the Manson murders, Woodstock, Vietnam," James Street said. "All that stuff adds to it."

He's a tax attorney now in Austin, but back then he was the Longhorns' quarterback. Like 42,000 other people, an enduring memory that day was watching Nixon's helicopter, Marine One, land on the practice field beyond the open end of the stadium.

"It was a cold, windy day," said Joe Ferguson, a quarterback on the Hogs' freshman team.

The rotor blades whipped up the fog and ice to give Nixon's entrance a Transylvania quality. It also helped that he was fashionably nine minutes late with his entourage of congressmen and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The campus could have used Kissinger's diplomatic touch. After decades of playing "Dixie," the student senate recommended that week that the band no longer play the tune.

Not only did the game mark the death of Dixie, it was the final contest the schools had with all-white rosters. Segregation was coming, and not everyone approved.

A black law student was shot in the leg a couple of nights earlier. All he heard was a truck go by and somebody yell, "Beat Texas!" followed by "Yea for Dixie!"

The South was proud of its football, and its heritage. Or is that redundant?

"Attention Darrell Royal. Do not cast your steers before swine."

That's what the marquee at First Baptist Church in Fayetteville read. Sam Walton's monolithic chain was just 25 stores big back then. The only area Arkansas could compete with Texas in was football.

You want intense? When Bill McClard tried to kick off for Arkansas, the "Razorback!" cheer was so loud he swears the vibration knocked the ball off the tee.

"I had to see that to believe it," the official told McClard as he handed him the ball.

Texas fumbled on its first possession and Arkansas took a 7-0 lead. Nixon missed the first touchdown, though he had to see the crosses war protesters had put up on a nearby hill.

They formed a peace sign. In a tree that overlooked the stadium, a young man held an anti-war sign. If you're a fan of urban legends or Rush Limbaugh, you believe it was Bill Clinton.

"Of all the great football games I ever watched, only the Game of the Century had any impact on my political career," Clinton wrote in his autobiography.

He was actually in Oxford, England on his Rhodes scholarship that day, listening intently to the game on a short-wave radio he'd rented. But when Clinton ran for congress in 1974, his opponent called almost every newspaper in the state looking for a photo of the Flower Child Clinton protesting against Nixon.

It became Arkansas legend until a paper found the real protester in early 1980s. Not that Clinton didn't bear a grudge against Nixon.

"For years afterward I think I held that against him almost as much as Watergate," he wrote.

What did he hold? Nixon's halftime prediction on ABC that Texas would come back to win.

It was 14-0 entering the fourth quarter, but on the first snap Street turned a busted play into a 44-yard touchdown run. Royal didn't want any part of a potential tie, so Texas went for two points and got it.

Arkansas then drove to the Texas 7-yard line. All it needed was a field goal from McClard, an All-American, to go up two scores and probably ice the game. But on third down, Freddie Steinmark intercepted in the end zone.

Steinmark had been hobbling since Monday with a strange pain in his leg, but he wasn't about to sit out. His play set up the winning drive, which essentially came down a fourth-and-3 on the Longhorns' 43.

Royal, Mr. Wishbone himself, called for a deep pass to tight end Randy Peschel

"Are you sure?" Street asked him.

"Damn right I'm sure," Royal said.

It gained 44 yards and Texas scored two plays later.

Arkansas had one more chance. As the Hogs drove downfield, McClard got loose for what would be the winning kick.

He never got a chance. Tom Campbell intercepted a pass on the Texas 21 with less than a minute left.

"It's like the dangling end of a sentence," said McClard, now a realtor based in Rogers. "We never get to the period or question mark or exclamation point."

It's just hangs there. Broyles supposedly never watched the tape of the game. Street painfully remembers the sight of Broyles' two young daughters weeping after the game and their father trying to console them. He also remembers Nixon.

"It was the first time the President of the United States had been in our locker room," he said.

The 'Horns got their plaque and everyone cheered. The draft lottery had been held earlier that week, and Street recalled another Longhorn teammate had something special to tell Nixon.

"Thank you so much," that player told the president. "Not for the game. I'm thanking you that I was No. 365 in the draft."

Steinmark's birth date of January 27 was pulled out at No. 355. He wouldn't be going to Vietnam. He would, however, go to the hospital.

That pain turned out to be a tumor in his hip. It was malignant, and Steinmark died of cancer less than two years later.

Nobody foresaw that when the Longhorns landed back in Austin. Street was in the cockpit waving to fans as they rushed onto the tarmac. He was the game's celebrity, and his fame reached the pop culture zenith: Elvis.



Street was in Las Vegas a few weeks later and he got an audience with the King. It was after a show at the Hilton. Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers showed up in the dressing room, and they chewed over the game for a couple of hours.

Medley said Arkansas was the better team.

As for Elvis, "He thought Texas should have won," Street said.

Everybody had an opinion. The game drew a 52 rating, meaning more than half the TV sets in America were tuned in.

As the years passed, the clash of '69 has become a Woodstock-like touchstone. The Flower Children are now The Establishment. Vietnam is a tourism spot. "Dixie" is rarely whistled. Steinmark rests in peace.

It's when you look back on all that, then throw in a game that dangles like a sentence with no end.

"It's still there," Ferguson said. "I don't know if it will ever go away."

That's what makes a Game of the Century.