FORT WORTH — There hasn’t been a husband and wife since Eden, not even Ward and June or Mike and Carol Brady, who haven’t at one time or another wondered if “we might be spending too much time together.”
The vows were until death do us part, not lunch every day.
That was almost certainly the case with Kansas and TCU, two non-conference teams who played one another in football every year from 1944 to 1964 and not again until time could do its thing with wounds.
Looking back, the 1960 game was the harbinger of the divorce. Kansas had just taken apart the Horned Frogs in Lawrence, beating TCU for the first time in eight years, 21-7 in the season opener.
In triumph, Kansas coach Jack Mitchell, raised on Kansas’ flatlands before doing his part to defend the world from evil in Europe and Asia and then throwing in with Oklahoma football, long tossed the diplomacy, decorum and grace of college athletics, even if forced at times, into the bin with all the discarded, half-eaten concessions.
Instead, a cold-blooded hitman, who sounded more like a prosecutor talking about a bad guy, addressed the assembled media, as retold by the archives.
I’ve never been as happy before over a victory.
My players weren’t a third as surprised as I was over the ease of our victory. The Southwest Conference may be the weakest in a long time.
For a team that has always appeared sound in football fundamentals [as TCU has], this was the worst one I’ve seen. It may be a long season for TCU.
In the Batman parlance of the 1960s, that’s a Thwack! Powie! Zzzzzwap!
What the what?
There was a simple explanation for this demonstration of the raw human emotion most often reserved for the least polished among us, those who supplement income as guests of Jerry Springer.
Someone had gotten between these two.
His name was Burt Coan, a freak of nature athlete at 6-foot-4 or 6-5, who was said to run the 100 in something akin to the speed of sound. He was a track star who college coaches believed could be molded into a weapon in the art of football war.
Out of Pasadena High School in 1958, he chose to sign with TCU over Texas. It was quite the catch for Abe Martin’s Horned Frogs. The letter of intent, though, was for track. An important distinction … for some reason we never really found out.
As a freshman on the freshman team (freshmen weren’t eligible for the big team in those days), Coan indeed stood out for TCU. In the spring, he ran track. When the spring 1959 semester had completed, he went back to Pasadena.
He never came back to TCU.
“The boy is supposed to have written someone that he was unhappy with the track deal here,” said Dutch Meyer, by that time TCU’s athletic director. “But that is only hearsay.’’
Dutch, in fact, was incensed about what had happened with Coan, never knowing Kansas was in play until Coan suddenly showed up at the registrar’s office.
“The coaches at LSU, Houston and Colorado all notified us when Coan was visiting them,” Meyer said.
But not Kansas.
“And I am going to inform the Kansas AD no later than this Saturday” of the 1959 game “of my feelings on this.”
In truth, Dutch believed something even more sinister was at play – an inducement – and he was right.
A “representative” from Kansas had gotten in Coan’s ear.
Bud Adams – potentate of Houston’s Oilers of the AFL and later villain for moving them to Nashville – was in those days to Kansas what Boone Pickens was to Oklahoma State. An alum and zealous supporter of the university, who put his money where his heart was.
He was at times overzealous, as in the case with Coan. Adams proved his admiration for the player that summer by paying Coan’s way to Chicago for some sort of all-star game. Coan, he said later, simply believed Adams was just a nice guy, sliding a little philanthropy to the poor college student.
The constant talk about Kansas, Coan said, didn’t dawn on him until later.
Adams was alleged to have done the same thing with Texas A&M upstart quarterback Rodger McFarland, raised in Fort Worth and a graduate of Paschal High School. McFarland left A&M after his freshman year, but he had a ready reason.
“Purely inner emotional feelings that make me feel I would not be happy at A&M next year,” said McFarland, explaining his decision to leave. “I did this after long deliberation and felt sure I was making the best decision for myself.”
In reality, he deemed his ambitions for social life incompatible at Texas A&M. If McFarland was to live out a full college experience, he believed, he needed … girls. Girls on campus and girls on Friday and Saturday nights. The all-boys campus in College Station was a bit too restrictive to what he envisioned was getting away from mom and dad.
There was another problem. Picking up girls required, in his opinion, a full head of hair. And this crew cut tradition/hazing of Aggies freshman football players, something started in the days of Bear Bryant, wasn’t going to cut it.
When McFarland’s time came, he begged off, telling his barber upperclassman teammates that he wished to wait a day, the day after being an “important social engagement,” he told them. His teammates refused his request.
The next day, McFarland was back in Fort Worth, his hair unblemished and blowing in the south wind.
The Aggies coach, Jim Myers, later a chief aide to Tom Landry with the Dallas Cowboys, drove north to the McFarland home and coaxed the prized pupil back to class at A&M.
As part of the discussion, Myers told him he could keep his hair.
The most consequential deal, however, was done. McFarland had lost the respect of his teammates.
Adams was suspected of lurking, telling McFarland, using more than a little license here, where the best-looking coeds in Kansas could be found, as well as the best places in Lawrence, Kan., to keep his hair well maintained. Who knows, he might have even offered to throw in some Dapper Dan pomade.
As far as the Aggies were concerned, those suspicions were confirmed when a letter from Adams addressed to McFarland, who had already left A&M, appeared on campus.
The Aggies, being the Aggies, sent it back to him with a postscript: “Why are you sending this here? You know better than we do where he is.”
McFarland indeed wound up in Kansas. “My first love will always be Fort Worth and Texas, but my loyalty in football is to Kansas.”
In the 1962 game in Lawrence and TCU desperately clinging to a 6-3 lead, McFarland drove the Jayhawks to the Frogs’ 4 in the finals seconds. Mitchell, the coach, threw a tee out on the field, signaling his desire to try a game-tying field goal in the game’s last play.
McFarland threw it back. Kansas went for it and were rebuffed by Abe Martin’s men.
McFarland had a mind all his own.
Suffice it say, with Coan eligible to play after sitting out his mandated transfer year, the 1960 game in Kansas was tense.
“Bert was scared to death,” Mitchell said afterward. “He came into the dressing room, his eyes as big as saucers. He had heard that the TCU team was out to get him. You can figure how scared a kid could get thinking about 11 people concentrating on you.”
As it turned out, TCU couldn’t have been more gracious.
The night before the game, Abe Martin tried to stop Coan in the lobby of the Jayhawker Hotel in Topeka, where both teams were staying, to say hello. Coan just shook his head and kept walking, as sure a sign that it’s not just Millennials who are ill-mannered and lack the social graces.
Afterward, TCU players praised the ability of Coan, who scored a touchdown as part of Kansas’ dismantling of the Frogs.
“Why would he stop?” Mitchell said of Martin’s attempted good gesture. “Coan made a clean break from TCU. Bert is a likable youngster … real sincere. He wouldn’t hurt anyone. He was simply miserable at TCU.”
He continued: TCU wouldn’t have ever lost Coan if the school had lived up to its agreement with him on track. Whatever that was. Mitchell didn’t explain himself, a reporter on site noted.
Oh, and lest anybody forget, of the game: “It looked like we had more speed in the backfield – that probably made the difference.”
Dutch had said previously that he didn’t expect the dispute between the schools over Coan to affect the schools’ football series. “It’s immaterial,” Meyer said. That might have changed after the 1960 game. Nonetheless, it was clear that these two would be better off not seeing each other anymore.
Moreover, at the urging of Meyer, the NCAA took up the case of Coan’s transfer to Kansas. The NCAA’s detectives detected Adams’ role, though it named neither Coan nor Adams in a dubious decision. The NCAA ruled that every game Coan played in in 1960 was a forfeit, including a beatdown of Missouri, the archrival and then No. 1 team in the nation. Coan, though, continued to play.
After 1964, TCU and Kansas didn’t play again until 1982, the same year, coincidentally, that Dutch died.
Dutch’s final resting place is in the Mansfield Cemetery, where he was lying very much in peace on Saturday. Actually, considering what the Frogs did to Kansas, the ground might have moved just a bit in jubilation.
(Photo: Burt Coan, Kansas Athletics)