Wails of a Winner

The hardest thing a football coach has to learn is to keep a straight face. No coach--or con man--ever gave it a better try than Oklahoma's Bud Wilkinson. Those might have been real tears welling in his blue eyes as he watched his Sooners take the field against Southern California's mighty Trojans, winners of twelve straight games, the nation's No. 1-ranked college team. "Us?" sniffed Wilkinson. "Oh, we're far too slow and inexperienced to have much of a chance against their superior speed, aerial play and experience."

As handsome as a movie star, Bud Wilkinson, 47, could probably charm the mittens off a polar bear. But convince anybody that he could field a bad football team? In Wilkinson's 16 seasons at Oklahoma, the Sooners have won 14 Missouri Valley (Big Eight) Conference titles and three national championships, and rattled off victory streaks of 31 and 47 games. Only once has Wilkinson suffered the indignity of a losing season, and even out-of-state sportswriters know that when Wilkinson wails, he wins. So last week, after the Sooners outgained (360 yds. to 237 yds.) and outscored the Trojans (17-12), the experts were ready with their superlatives. "Magnificent," they wrote. "Hotter than Los Angeles' 105DEG weather." That was enough to push Oklahoma back into its familiar No. 1 spot in the rankings and start Coach Wilkinson wailing all over again. "We could well lose five games this year."

"Hit First!" A leathery blocking back at Minnesota in the late '30s, Wilkinson arrived at Oklahoma in 1946 as an assistant to Head Coach Jim Tatum, inherited the top job a year later when Tatum left for Maryland. It was hardly a plum: over the years, the Sooners had regularly clobbered patsies like Kingfisher College (179-0), just as regularly taken their lumps from the likes of Texas (7-40). "You know what we were before we started winning football games?" asks a Wilkinson admirer. "The Grapes of Wrath. That was all anybody thought of us. Bud changed all that."

Scouring the prairie, Wilkinson recruited squads of lean, tall, whippet-fast plainsmen. "Hit hard!" other coaches taught. Wilkinson taught, "Hit first!" Other teams might run 60 offensive plays on a winning afternoon; the go-go Sooners ran 100.

Week after week, year after year, Oklahoma ran under, over and around a succession of bedazzled opponents. Things got so monotonous that the N.C.A.A. finally broke up the act, slapped Oklahoma with a two-year probation. Southwest Conference colleges complained that Wilkinson was pirating away Texas's best football prospects. The probation worked: Oklahoma slumped to a 3-6-1 record in 1960 and 5-5 in 1961.

Local Lumber. Quietly, carefully, Wilkinson rebuilt the team--with local lumber. Six of this year's starting eleven are Oklahomans, and there are only twelve Texans on the 63-man varsity squad. The team is big: Tackle Ralph Neely weighs in at 246 Ibs. It is fast: Halfback Joe Don Looney, a bull-necked 225-pounder, runs the 100 in 9.7 sec. It is brutal, boisterous--and tricky as a sidewinder. The Sooners sometimes run plays without a huddle, trying to catch their opponents out of position.

In the locker room, Wilkinson never lifts his voice above a caress. Yet the effect is cosmic. Says Assistant Coach Leon Cross: "When he lays it out there, it's all I can do to keep from throwing on the pads myself." Wilkinson's No. 1 assistant, Gomer Jones, has a different problem. "Sometimes," he says, "I think of myself as St. Peter."

This week Wilkinson's Sooners come up against No. 3-ranked Texas in what promises to be one of the most exciting battles of the young season. Oklahoma has had two weeks to prepare and will be the favorite. But Texas is just as lean and just as mean, and Coach Darrell Royal is one man who knows most of Wilkinson's tricks. After all, he was an All-America quarterback for Bud in 1949.

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