By Bud Kennedy
bud@star-telegram.com
The last time the TCU Horned Frogs won a college football game in Austin, it wasn't what we now consider college football.
Back in 1967, TCU and the Texas Longhorns were white-only teams.
"Guys today say, 'Really? That late?' They have no idea," Jerry LeVias said by phone from Houston.
As a Southern Methodist University receiver, he had broken the color line in the Southwest Conference and endured race-bashing, threats and abuse, some of the worst in Fort Worth.
When TCU beat Texas 20-13 on Thursday, one 1960s Horned Frog was home in Houston cheering.
"I liked the way they went into Austin and won," said former TCU receiver Linzy Cole, 64, TCU's first African-American player.
He signed to join TCU only six weeks after the Frogs' 1967 win at UT.
"I remember hearing all about how they won in Austin," he said by phone.
"Football is a lot different game now."
The segregated TCU-Texas game was among the league's last.
SMU already had LeVias. He was the league's second African-American athlete behind TCU basketball player James Cash, a former Fort Worth high school star and now a professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School.
But the other football coaches had been slow to follow SMU coach Hayden Fry in signing African-American players.
"Coach Fry became an outcast because the other coaches didn't want black athletes," LeVias said.
In 1966, when LeVias made his first visit to TCU and Amon G. Carter Stadium, police and federal agents escorted him on the sideline because of a death threat.
The incident is featured in the HBO documentary
Breaking the Huddle.
Even in 1968, with Cole playing for the Horned Frogs, one of his linebacker teammates roughed LeVias up, spat in his face and called him a racial slur.
LeVias, already sore, wanted to quit. But Fry made him go out for a punt return that turned into an 89-yard touchdown.
"I won't say what happened, but it would get you kicked out of the conference today," LeVias said.
"I don't like remembering that. It was the only time I ever ran out of hate."
LeVias praised Cole as a "forgotten man" in the story of desegregation. The two roomed together one summer in Fort Worth.
"I got all the attention, but Linzy got the same kind of abuse," LeVias said.
"He just let everything roll off his back."
LeVias didn't watch the Thanksgiving game. Too much turkey overload.
"But I love what TCU's done the last few years," he said.
"They opened up their athletic program. They welcome equality. They play great football."
Everybody gets to play.
Bud Kennedy's column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. 817-390-7538
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