The Texas Monthly Terquasquicentennial Blog

1120 N. Northwest Loop 323, Tyler | August 1973

When summer two-a-days started on the practice fields at John Tyler High School—known as the Pit—the only thing that Coach Corky Nelson had in mind was getting to the playoffs. So he pulled aside his best player, two-way starter Earl Campbell, and informed him that Campbell would be playing only offense during his upcoming senior season. The move was counterintuitive; Campbell had been an all-American schoolboy linebacker the previous year. One of the University of Texas at Austin coaches recruiting him, defensive coordinator Mike Campbell (no relation), had called him the best he’d ever seen at the position. And Earl, who’d grown up idolizing Dick Butkus, was disappointed. But the coach knew better. “He couldn’t score points on defense,” Nelson says. Campbell averaged 225 yards per game his senior year, leading John Tyler to the state championship. He would go on to win a Heisman at UT in 1977, taking the Horns to the national championship game, and three NFL rushing titles in 1978, 1979, and 1980, turning the doormat Houston Oilers into Super Bowl contenders. He was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame in 1991. And today the boys at the Pit still dream of running like the Tyler Rose. —JS

101 South Coit Road, Richardson | 1987

Lance Armstrong was a talented swimmer as a boy and a top-notch triathlete as a teenager, but it was his decision to focus on cycling full-time that turned him into an international superstar. Like a lot of area kids who were interested in riding, Armstrong hung around Jim Hoyt’s Richardson Bike Mart, in Dal-Rich Village. It was here that, arguably, Armstrong first became a cyclist, when Hoyt started paying him $500 a month to ride for his RBM Team at his celebrated Tuesday night criteriums—multi-lap races on a closed track, often on the streets of undeveloped business parks in town. The store closed in 1997 and headed two miles north, to Campbell Road. But Armstrong’s legacy remains. A large sticker on the front door greets visitors: “Lance Is Back on the Bike. Are You?” —BDS

3120 North Haskell Avenue, Dallas | Early 1940’s

As a teenager, Lawrence Herkimer was too short to play on the football team, so he joined the North Dallas High School cheerleading squad instead. One day, while trying to execute a split jump at practice, he inadvertently created one of the most popular leaps in the history of cheerleading. If you’ve attended a football game in the past six or seven decades, you’ve seen a “Herkie”: Gathering every ounce of oomph, the jumper springs into the air, kicking one leg out straight and bending the other back while one fist punches the heavens and the other fuses to the hip. Executed correctly, it’s charmingly off-kilter; if underperformed, it looks like a half-baked toe-touch. But it wasn’t until Herkimer became the head cheerleader at SMU that his signature move gained national prominence. “Reporters would come out and want to take pictures, so I’d sit four or five girls in a row and then jump over them,” he says. “It was seen so many times, I guess it just caught on.” Though he’s now retired and living in Florida, the 85-year-old still has the vim of a yell leader. So how would he instruct a novice trying to pull off her first Herkie? “You just have to practice,” he says. “But remember: Really use that right arm to get yourself off the ground.” And the best place for you to try out your new move would be a small triangle of grass in front of Herkimer’s old high school, where it all began. —JB

8008 Cedar Springs Road, Dallas | April 4, 1966

Perhaps you think that history’s most important parking garage conversation took place in 1972, when Mark Felt (a.k.a. Deep Throat) divulged the secrets of the Nixon administration to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward. Hardly. Six years earlier, in a parking garage at Love Field, Tex Schramm and Lamar Hunt had hatched the idea for the world’s greatest sporting event. Schramm, the blustery general manager of the National Football League’s Dallas Cowboys, met Hunt, the son of Texas oil giant H. L. Hunt and the head of the rival American Football League, in front of the twelve-foot-tall Texas Ranger statue inside the terminal. Having been rebuffed by the NFL in his bid for an expansion franchise, Hunt had formed the AFL in 1959, with his own Dallas Texans as a charter member. Schramm’s success with the Cowboys had driven Hunt to Kansas City, where he renamed his team the Chiefs, but now, at the direction of NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, Schramm had been ordered to cut a deal with Hunt. Fearing they would be recognized, the two men headed to Schramm’s car in the dark, two-story parking garage, and the conversation began. The NFL-AFL merger was completed four years later, featuring a championship game between the top team from each league. After watching his kids play with a Wham-O SuperBall, Hunt even came up with the name for the game: the Super Bowl. —SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH

Jerry LeVias going to SMU is nice and all, but Texas college football’s color barrier had already been broken by the great Abner Haynes and Leon King at North Texas in 1956.  In fact, Haynes had already been playing in the AFL for a few years by the time LeVias showed up in University Park.