Earl Campbell: Yards after Contact

by Asher Price

Overview

Earl Campbell was a force in American football, winning a state championship in high school, rushing his way to a Heisman trophy for the University of Texas, and earning MVP as he took the Houston Oilers to the brink of the Super Bowl. An exhilarating blend of biography and history, Earl Campbell chronicles the challenges and sacrifices one supremely gifted athlete faced in his journey to the Hall of Fame. The story begins in Tyler, Texas, and features his indomitable mother, a crusading judge, and a newly integrated high school, then moves to Austin, home of the University of Texas (infamously, the last all-white national champion in college football), where legendary coach Darrell Royal stakes his legacy on recruiting Campbell. Later, in booming, Luv-Ya-Blue Houston, Campbell reaches his peak with beloved coach Bum Phillips, who celebrates his star runner’s bruising style even as it takes its toll on Campbell’s body.

Drawing on new interviews and research, Asher Price reveals how a naturally reticent kid from the country who never sought the spotlight struggled with complex issues of race and health. In an age when concussion revelations and player protest against racial injustice rock the NFL, Campbell’s life is a timely story of hard-earned success—and heart-wrenching sacrifice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781477316498
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	09/05/2019
Pages:	344
Sales rank:	494,408
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Asher Price is a state desk reporter for the Austin American-Statesman. He is also author of Year of the Dunk and coauthor of The Great Texas Wind Rush. He lives in Austin with his wife and daughter.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Part I: Tyler
• Part II: Austin
• Part III: Houston
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index

What People are Saying About This

Justin Driver

Whenever I watched Earl Campbell play on television, his impossibly powerful runs seemed almost folkloric—John Henry wielding a stiff-arm. This splendid biography conveys not only Campbell’s superhuman feats, but—even more impressively—his underlying humanity. In Asher Price’s formidable hands, Campbell becomes a prism for examining our nation’s struggle for racial equality and the punishments inflicted by our nation’s most popular sport. Price writes with verve and style and has succeeded in doing nothing less than establishing a new standard for sports biography.

Raymond Arsenault

Earl Campbell’s saga as an African American sports celebrity in the largely unreconstructed State of Texas contains elements of triumph and tragedy, and Asher Price’s extraordinary new biography captures it all with riveting prose, gifted storytelling, and a carefully crafted analysis of race, region, and football mania. Not since the appearance of H. G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights have we seen such an important and insightful book on the world of Texas football.

Chris Tomlinson

Asher Price profiles not only the greatest running back ever but the football-infused Texas culture that produced, rewarded, and exploited him. From Earl Campbell's birth in segregated Tyler to his retirement in a wealthy Austin suburb, Price captures every telling detail in his painstakingly reported and beautifully crafted book. Anyone interested in football, and its future, needs to read Earl Campbell: Yards after Contact to understand the sport's problems and promise.

Dave Zirin

Earl Campbell is a towering figure in the history of sports. Finally, there is a book worthy of the man.

Editorial Reviews

A gripping and very powerful account of what Earl Campbell had to fight through to push along the integration of Texas football.

Literary Hub

Asher Price's book about the legendary UT running back is full of surprises.

Texas Monthly

For anyone who wants to understand what made one of the game's greatest running backs tick, [Earl Campbell is] well worth your time.

Bleacher Report - Mike Freeman

A revealing story of race and class in Texas.

austin360

[Campbell's story] is captured in riveting detail and with crisp analysis…The point of Earl Campbell: Yards After Contact…is to recenter the running back and his career in our understanding of the history of both football and race in Texas…It’s an important story, and Price tells it well."

Texas Observer

Carefully crafted, but brutally honest, [Earl Campbell is] as much a commentary on race and football culture as it is a tribute to the Heisman Trophy winner and two-time NFL MVP.

Austin Monthly

"For anyone who wants to understand what made one of the game's greatest running backs tick, [Earl Campbell is] well worth your time."

Bleacher Report Mike Freeman

"Deeply researched and reported...Earl Campbell is an argument against the insistent call for athletes and sportswriters to 'stick to sports' and ignore the larger world—an argument we still hear in the age of Colin Kaepernick and the NBA vs. China."

Texas Monthly

07/12/2019

Earl Campbell (b. 1955) is considered one of the best running backs in football history, making a name for himself at the University of Texas, then spending most of his professional career with the Houston Oilers before retiring with the New Orleans Saints. Despite these accomplishments, not much has been written about him. Austin American-Statesman reporter Price aims to fill in some of the gaps with this comprehensive biography, offering insight from the people closest to Campbell. What sets this account apart are the abundance of historical details about the areas where Campbell grew up and played football, which make it dense at times, but these details put Campbell's life and upbringing into context. VERDICT Will appeal to readers wishing to learn more about Campbell and this era of both college and professional sports as well as Texas history.—Pamela Calfo, Baldwin Borough P.L., PA

Library Journal

2019-07-01
Thoughtful portrait of the 1977 Heisman Trophy Winner and 1991 inductee into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Earl Campbell (b. 1955), writes Austin American-Statesman reporter Price (Year of the Dunk: A Modest Defiance of Gravity, 2015, etc.), was a force of nature on the field, "a modern John Henry, the heroic and tragic figure of a hard-working, plow-straight-ahead man who worked himself into a broken-down condition by giving it his all—his body an atlas of the brutality of the game." Born in small-town Texas, Campbell always had "country manners" that led some to think of him as a bumpkin, which he answered with a stiff arm and phenomenal moves on the field that led many students of the game to consider him one of the greatest players ever. Campbell was a fearsome player who graced the campus of the University of Texas, once a bastion of segregation, at a time when Austin was emerging as a perhaps unlikely capital of hippiedom. Price's portrait of a town where "on game days in the parking lot of Mother Earth, a club not far from campus, you could barter football tickets for weed" is nicely detailed, and it's telling that as part of his rookie hazing on the roster of the Houston Oilers, Campbell sang "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow up To Be Cowboys." Price knows his sports, and he writes well about such things as the Landry Shift—"a beat after taking their stance…the offensive linemen, in unison, would stand and reset"—and Campbell's considerable skills as a running back. More than that, he discusses Campbell's college and pro careers against the backdrop of racism that accompanied the "shift from crew cuts to Afros" of which he was a part, considering himself to be a champion of racial reconciliation who had the outward demeanor of a "smiling athlete" but was altogether serious.

A well-crafted life of a man who, though now largely out of the spotlight, enjoyed a storied career.

Kirkus Reviews