The Cock Roaches
Larry Carlson’s article is sponsored by HornFans.com
Twenty months ago, Texas State’s Professor of journalism contacted me and said he was retiring. However, he still wanted to write original Longhorn football stories primarily from the 1960s-1980s era and place them on the TLSN website. So we struck a deal. Best decision I ever made.
Larry Carlson got his great break just one year out of college and became sports director at Austin’s KVET Radio, doing multiple sportscasts daily and hosting the Fred Akers pre-game show and post-game Longhorn Locker Room Show. Larry also was a sportscaster and wrote articles for James Street’s Orange Power.
He later worked as the first sports information director at The University of Texas at San Antonio and then became Texas Hill Country View magazine editor. All told, his professional experience includes broadcasting, writing, producing, and consulting.
Larry
Flashback:
Sixty Years Since UT’s Toughest Loss
by Larry Carlson ( lc13@txstate.edu )
I was madder and more upset than I had ever been. And I couldn’t find a rock anywhere in the stands of Memorial Stadium’s north end zone horseshoe. Blinded by rage and hot tears, it just didn’t add up to an eight-year-old that there were no rocks to be found there. Just empty Coke cups. I desperately sought a missile to let fly at the TCU band, now marching around the track. They were celebrating a 6-0 victory over my Texas Longhorns, and I sought some form of retribution.
My family and I were too stunned to file out of the stadium the first moments after the big scoreboard clock at the south end ran out of time. Texas had come in as the top-ranked team in the nation. Pre-game chants of “We’re number one,” had rocked the place.
The Horns, 8-0, were big favorites over the Horned Frogs, 2-4-1 entering this mild November day in 1961.
But things went wrong quickly for the boys in bright orange (burnt orange would return to the Texas scheme the next season, after a two-decade rest). Jimmy Saxton, UT’s All-America halfback, took a swing pass for 45 yards on the fifth play of the game. When finally tackled, he popped up quickly, only to take a stray hip to the head from a 230-pound Frog lineman trailing the play. The villain in white was Bobby Plummer. He claimed in post-game remarks that he just couldn’t slow up in time.
Saxton went down and stayed down. The crowd of 51,000 went silent. After Texas trainer Frank Medina administered to him, Saxton slowly rose to a knee and then took a few wobbly steps before collapsing. Now the crowd gasped. It was scary stuff. Saxton, out cold, was again revived and now escorted to the sidelines.
“It was a shot that didn’t have to be taken,” Saxton told Kirk Bohls some thirty years later, for “Long LIve The Longhorns,” co-authored by Bohls and John Maher. The player who had UT’s highest yards-per-carry average until it was broken by Bijan Robinson in 2020 said the blow to the head led to a fifty percent loss of hearing in his right ear.
Saxton, referred to on the cover of Sports Illustrated as “Football’s Fanciest Runner” the following week (the cover and feature had been planned to mark a 9-0 start and continued status as America’s top team), would return and produce 85 yards. But he was knocked out again, this time for good, in the second half.
TCU surprised Texas and scored on a well-executed flea flicker good for a 50-yard TD midway through the second period. The scoring was over. The Longhorns, owners of a prolific offense that averaged 33 points per game in an era of low scores, had been blanked. They had reached the TCU 2, 3, 8, 21 and 27 without denting the scoreboard. Two field goal attempts were flubbed and the Horns — minus the spark of Saxton — could not convert fourth downs deep in the Frog bog. It was the upset of the year and would perhaps be the biggest one of the 1960s.
Texas coach Darrell Royal was consoled by someone after the game who reminded him “just beat the Aggies next week and you’ll be in the Cotton Bowl.” Royal shook his head and said he didn’t think he would ever get over this loss.
It was in later remarks that a frustrated Royal referred to the lowly-regarded team that had upset his proud Longhorns, as “cockroaches.” “It’s not what he eats or totes off,” DKR reasoned, “but what he falls into and messes up.” Indeed, a team with a losing record had cost the Horns their number one ranking and a potential national championship.
Texas bounced back to shut out A&M, 25-0, with Saxton even throwing a 46-yard TD pass from his halfback slot. Syracuse’s Ernie Davis would take the Heisman over Ohio State’s Bob Ferguson and Saxton, in third place. The Longhorns would defeat Ole Miss, 12-7 and secure Royal’s first of five Cotton Bowl championships.
Those close to the Texas program of long ago always referred to the TCU loss as Royal’s most bitter defeat at UT. When I look back six entire decades to mull the game, I recall that I cried not just in the stands but in the family car as we headed back to San Antonio.
My two older sisters also cried, as did my Mom. Daddy, a 1947 Texas grad and Marine-turned-petroleum geologist, bit his lip and tightly clenched the wheel. We did not stop for a traditional post-game piece of pie at Night Hawk or for pancakes at Cunningham’s back on the road. It was dark but nobody was hungry. Somewhere in there was a painful lesson that sometimes life ain’t fair, even when it’s “just a game.”
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