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Pete Lammons has passed away in a drowning accident. Professor and author Larry Carlson shares his memories of Pete.
REMEMBERING NUMBER 87
by Larry Carlson
A couple of years ago, I started sending a few Christmas cards each year to people I had never met. People who had brought me joy through their deeds on the playing field, on the tinny-sounding radios of my youth, the concert stage, via the books they wrote, whatever. I think it’s important to tell people how much they’ve meant to you, even if it was from afar. So what if they’ve perhaps received thousands of compliments and countless kudos from faceless fans. It means something to me to express it and it might even brighten the day of a famous or forgotten someone.
It’s tough to read that another sports or music hero from my childhood has died. But it seems to happen almost every month now. It comes with my own years adding up, ticking quickly like those electronic signs that track the national debt.
Pete Lammons’s death this week is a particular blow to the spirit for me.
He was always one of my favorite Longhorns and was my favorite Super Jet when “UTNY” (Lammons, George Sauer, Jim Hudson and John Elliott) shocked the football world in January 1969. With a little help from their friends, including a shaggy, charismatic quarterback the Longhorns had beaten in the Orange Bowl four years earlier, UTNY beat the high and mighty Baltimore Colts for all the Super marbles. Now the last surviving member of the UTNY fraternity is gone.
Long before the Jets ruled Manhattan and the NFL, Pete Lammons was synonymous with success. Lots of it. Texas won the national championship in Pete’s first varsity season, 1963, as he made his presence known on both sides of the ball. Lammons, UT’s first great tight end, went on to lead Texas in receiving in ’64 and ’65. He had more receptions than any other tight end in the twenty-year DKR era.: Only future NFL wideouts Cotton Speyrer and Alfred Jackso bested his ’65 reception total of 27 in the Royal years.
Lammons wasn’t catching darts and bullets at Texas. He was corralling fluttering ducks from “Marvelous” Marvin Kristynik, infamous for tossing wobblers. A writer once asked Kristynik, in a post-game interview, whether he had thrown a wobbler or a wounded duck on a certain play.
“I threw a touchdown,” Marv said, settling the issue.
On a November day in 1965, Marv threw only three passes — all for touchdowns — in a 35-14 win over Baylor. Pete Lammons was on the receiving end of two and caught another touchdown pass from Greg Lott, all in the first half. It was an unheard-of feat in the 1960s. (Lammons’s record 3 TD catches would not be equaled by a Longhorn until All-America TE Pat Fitzgerald did it 30 years later. It has been bested once, by Wane McGarity, in a shootout loss to Tech in ’98)
As a 12-year-old burnt orange-clad Texas fan sitting with my Dad In the Memorial Stadium knothole section, I was ecstatic seeing Lammons’s hat trick of touchdowns. Lammons, not the great Tommy Nobis, was my favorite player in ’65. I had decided that Pete’s number 87 was the coolest jersey number in the world. Some years later, while in college, I found an 87 jersey, with the stitched-on numbers, for sale at Rooster Andrews’s Sporting Goods store on Guadalupe. Rooster was selling old game jerseys, and I snapped that baby up. I’ve still got it stowed away somewhere. And I don’t tell anyone, but I use “87” in various computer passwords all the time.
So Lammons went on to the New York Jets, made the AFL All-Star game in just his second season, then was a rock-solid member of the Super Bowl champs the next year and for several more seasons before winding down his pro career for a year in Green Bay.
Later, he worked in real estate back in Texas. And he got into the thoroughbred horse biz for 20 years with his old Longhorns and Jets teammate, Jim Hudson. Lammons told a Jets website several years ago that he got to do it all: breeding the horses, raising them, and racing them. “I don’t know if I made any money but we had fun,” Lammons said.
About 15 years ago, I was headed from Shreveport back to my home in San Antonio. I decided to adjust my route and drive to Pete Lammons’ hometown of Jacksonville, in Cherokee County. It was out of the way, but I was on a mission. I made it to the famous Tomato Bowl in the gloaming, the sun far behind the East Texas pines. Walking around the venerable stone stadium and peering in, I marveled at its old-school cool. Pete Lammons had played here for The Fightin’ Indians. The Tomato Bowl is now, along with the home of the El Paso High Tigers, one of my two favorite high school stadiums in The Great State. But the Tomato Bowl has the edge, I reckon. My old hero, Pete Lammons, played there.
I’m regretting that I never sent Pete a Christmas card. I’m wishing he had lived to catch more fish, to watch another Kentucky Derby. But I’m going to have faith he will get a grin from this remembrance.
A permanent site for a celebration of Pete’s live is a work in process at https://texas-lsn.squarespace.com/pete-lammons
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