Ken Dabbs was one of first football recruiting coordinators in the nation in 1974. “It wasn’t Coach Royal or Coach Akers who brought all those great football players to Texas. It was Coach Dabbs,” Earl Campbell said Thursday. “Everybody loves Coach Dabbs. He’s so down-to-earth.”

 One fall day in 1973, a nervous Ken Dabbs drove his school-issued Ford to East Texas and knocked on the screen door of the rustic home at the end of Lavender Road outside Tyler.

Life for him — and a whole lot of other folks — would never be the same.

One of Ann Campbell’s 11 children answered the door and politely ushered in Dabbs, the 38-year-old assistant football coach at the University of Texas. If he was scared to death, Ann was overwhelmed.

How in the world, she told Dabbs, was she going to sort through all the names of these anonymous but very persistent coaches who stood on her porch day after day in search of a promise from her seventh child to play football for them? She didn’t know Barry Switzer from Grant Teaff.

Dabbs had the perfect remedy.

He told her about that old ad for a hair-styling cream with the catch phrase that went “A little dab’ll do ya.” Well, Dabbs said, just add another b and an s, and you’ve got Dabbs. Nobody had more b and s than Dabbs.

A week later, Dabbs was making his rounds to outposts like Marshall and Longview and Shreveport and stopped in at the Campbell home. One of the girls came to the door, saw Dabbs and yelled out, “Momma, Coach Brylcreem is here.”

The name stuck. As Dabbs says now, “I got my point across.”

UT’S HALL OF HONOR

He almost always did, and he got his man more often than not. In fact, twin brothers Steve and Tim Campbell would later follow their older brother to Austin to play for Texas. They always called him “Little Dab’ll Do Ya.”

Earl Campell called him a friend. Still does. So does his entire family, who used to eat greens and black-eyed peas and cornbread together in that Tyler house where Dabbs still says “you could see the Big Dipper at night through the roof.” Why, Dabbs might as well have been child No. 12.

When Dabbs, 80, underwent radiation to combat prostate cancer a few years ago, it was Ann Campbell who called and told him, “Coach Dabbs, this is your 85-year-old girlfriend, Momma Ann. I’m calling to tell you I’m your friend morning, noon and night, and the Good Lord is going to take care of you.’”

The Good Lord called her not long after, and when the matriarch of the Campbell family died in 2009, there was Dabbs in one of the pews of the Greater Hopewell Baptist Church for the funeral service. Her son’s never forgotten him either.

“It wasn’t Coach Royal or Coach Akers who brought all those great football players to Texas. It was Coach Dabbs,” Campbell said Thursday. “Everybody loves Coach Dabbs. He’s so down-to-earth.”

Says long-time friend and colleague Spike Dykes, “I don’t know anyone in the state of Texas who has anything to do with coaching who doesn’t know Ken Dabbs. He’s one of those guys who always remembers names, and people trusted Ken because he always told the truth. Ken’s the real deal. He’s one in a million.”

Dabbs, who will be inducted Friday into the Texas Men’s Hall of Honor, became one of the first football recruiting coordinators in the nation in 1974, for $18,100 a year, when Darrell Royal tabbed his freshman backfield coach to counter Oklahoma’s Jerry Pettibone and scour the state for high school talent. Dabbs, whom Royal hired out of Westlake, where he was the first head coach in 1969, spent nine years convincing young players that Texas was their destiny. He may be the only recruiting coordinator in history to recruit a Heisman Trophy winner (Campbell) and an Outland Trophy winner (Brad Shearer) in the same class.

It was nothing for Dabbs to put 10,000 miles on those Fords in two months’ time as he traced the state’s backroads and freeways. He wasn’t a coffee drinker like Fred Akers, whom Dabbs once saw consume 34 cups in a single day, and it wasn’t until after he retired that he was diagnosed with sleep apnea. But that’s what 10-minute naps at roadside parks and a love of his job and of people were for.

Dabbs never met a stranger, and you can bet he’d remember that stranger’s name a decade later. He can still recite all the names of Ann Campbell’s 11 children. He can remember the 17 nights he spent in Room 164 at Tyler’s Ramada Inn for 12 bucks a night as he courted Earl.

And he can recall the day he picked up Earl at the Pounds Airport after his visit to Oklahoma. Earl came off the plane wearing an OU T-shirt and a smile, showing off pictures of him with Joe Washington and the Selmon brothers. A worried Dabbs couldn’t get a word out of him all the way home.

Finally, when he got up the gumption to go see Earl a day later, he found Ann lying down in her back bedroom. The phone rang, Earl answered and asked his momma if Switzer could come by for a talk the next afternoon. Momma Ann straightened up in bed and gave her son the whatfor.

“Earl Christian Campbell, I’m sick in this bed because my blood pressure’s high,” she told him. “Earl, you are going with Coach Dabbs. He’s like family. We haven’t lost one thing in the state of Oklahoma.”

That’s an old saying that folks used to mean they ain’t never spent any time somewhere. Earl told Switzer he was going to be a Longhorn. “And that’s a true story,” Dabbs says.

No one will ever question the immense impact of Campbell’s four years at the school that had the last all-white college football national championship. Roosevelt Leaks came before Campbell, and Donnie Little and Vince Young and many more after. Leaks became the school’s first black superstar, Little its first black starting quarterback and Young an icon for bringing the program its first national championship in 35 years.

Texas may not have landed any of them, but for Dabbs. There’s no more worthy honoree into UT’s hall of honor, no more respected and beloved individual who’s universally embraced as one of the driving reasons for the success of the Texas football team for decades. Like Earl would say, Ken Dabbs is family.

A few comments from Bill Little about the recruiting of Earl Campbell

When Earl’s mommy apologized for her homes appearance DKR says “I’ll tell you the truth, Mrs. Campbell, your house is nicer than the one my grandmother raised me in.”

Dabbs remembers that Ann Campbell was flat on her back in bed when Earl asked the question about the possible visit from Barry Switzer. She raised up and looked Earl straight in the eye, “Earl,” “This (recruiting) has gone on long enough. You know you are going down to Texas with Coach Dabbs and Coach Royal, so you tell them that. Those Oklahoma coaches are the reason I’m laying here in this bed right now.”