It’s a rainy, windy evening in Austin, TX. Harvey continues to meander northward towards Travis County. But we still have power. Sounds like a good opportunity for a mini-Roo Tale (a Joey Tale!) before the lights go out.
“We come to practice. We play the game. We win. We lose. We go home.” – Gregg Popovich, San Antonio Spurs
I love wins and championships like everyone else. But writing 100-year-old sports stories has a way of changing one’s priorities over time. The simple idea of being a “man in the arena”, as Teddy Roosevelt famously said, becomes elevated.
Austin College has a long history of competition against schools with which you might not be familiar. Eastman College? Ever heard of them? What about Burleson College? Have you visited Hughey Turner College? Know a graduate of Epworth University? I doubt it. Those schools no longer exist.
More common is the abrupt termination of competition as competitor schools drop individual sports, or athletics all together. More than a few SCAC rivals simply disappear from the record books after deciding to no longer suit up.
The history of Austin College is surviving adversity. The school somehow stayed afloat during and after the Civil War years, in part due to the move to Sherman. The downturn of 1913 hit the school hard, and the Great Depression even harder. Those familiar with Dr. Light Cummins’s work know just how close the school was to folding in 1933.
Athletics is no exception. The decision to go non-scholarship in the 1950s was controversial, and it may have hurt football competitiveness. But it was at the end of the day a financial decision to preserve athletics itself. Baseball was in jeopardy three decades later, but the commitment of a core group of Roos rescued that program as well.
Here’s another school from the history books. Ever heard of Fort Worth Poly?
In 1903, the Polytechnics of Fort Worth traveled to Sherman to take on the Roo football team at Luckett Field. That same day, the Oklahoma Territory (!!!) University of Norman headed to College Station to face Texas A&M. At the time, the number of Texas schools participating in collegiate athletics could easily be counted on two hands.
The Roos dominated the second half, and won convincingly by a score of 29-0. Starters in the game included Thomas White Currie, a distant relative of Kate Currie Carey and Chad Parker Carey. Austin College finished the season 3-0. Soon after the last victory, Orville and Wilbur Wright took off at Kitty Hawk, NC.
Austin College and Fort Worth Poly faced off again in 1940. Only that year, they weren’t the Polytechnics. They were the Rams of Texas Wesleyan, and were Texas Conference rivals. As the Battle of Britain raged, the Rams got a measure of revenge against the Roos with a 16-6 victory at their brand new stadium………..the 1-year-old Farrington Field near downtown Fort Worth. Farrington Field was a product of FDR’s depression fighting public stimulus. The Roos finished 1940 with a 5-5 record.
The Rams returned to the gridiron for the 1941 season, which ended with a 39-0 victory over Trinity at home on November 15th at Farrington Field. Texas Wesleyan never played again.
Pearl Harbor occurred three weeks later, and America’s entry into war suspended athletics on campuses across the country. After 1945, play resumed in Sherman and elsewhere across the nation. But not football at Texas Wesleyan. TWU administration decided to abandon the sport.
Until now.
Football is back at Texas Wesleyan after 76 years. On September 2, the Rams will open up their NAIA schedule in Kansas. A week later, they’ll return for their first home game against Millsaps at…………historic Farrington Field. Yup, it’s still around.
It seems likely that Texas Wesleyan football will find its way back to the Roo schedule sooner rather than later, and the competition will resume. Welcome back Rams! The Roos will be ready. Because we come to practice. We play the game. We win. We lose. We go home.
