The 1971 Cotton Bowl with Nancy

I am not sure how I came into possession of two tickets to the 1971 Cotton Bowl football game except that I did not buy them. My best guess is that they were a gift from the LaJoie family a few doors down from our house. Two years earlier, they had come over and asked whether we wanted four tickets to the game. Did we ever! My older brother, a friend, a cousin and I went to the game, and saw Texas whack Tennessee by a score of 36-13. I still remember James Street hitting the swift and elusive Cotton Speyrer with a pair of long touchdown passes. The Volunteers’ shade of orange may have been far prettier than ours, but everybody knew which team was superior that day in Dallas.

At any rate, I have to assume the LaJoies were again the kind donors. The tickets were mine to use as I saw fit. I was going to the game, but who would accompany me? There was a green-eyed, blonde-haired cutie named Nancy Sauer in my senior English class at Bryan Adams High School. Since she and I had been giving each other the wink for a while, I asked her to join me. Nancy, a member of the school’s high-kicking drill team (the BA Belles), agreed to do so.

The setting of the game was as follows. UT, the 1969 national champion, had a 30-game winning streak. Darrell Royal’s Longhorns had been just about invincible all year long (including a dramatic victory over UCLA in Austin in which Speyrer caught a pass, crossed up a couple of defensive backs and took it all the way in the final seconds). The 1970 Cotton Bowl had been a pulsating 21-17 defeat of Notre Dame. It was the first bowl game the high-minded Irish had played in almost 50 years, and they were back in Dallas on New Year’s Day, 1971. I had attended the Texas-SMU game at the Cotton Bowl in late October, a 42-15 victory for the Horns. All this football frenzy did something to my brain because—I kid you not—it was the primary reason for me choosing to matriculate at UT a few months later.

An overflow crowd of 73,000 saw a lopsided game in which everything favored the Irish. Their guys just seemed to be bigger, faster and better coached as Notre Dame won, 24-11. UT’s all-America fullback, Steve Worster, fumbled four times. So it was a pretty glum scene for me and Nancy on our way out of the stadium. It would, however, soon get worse.

My 1964 Buick Skylark was not the most reliable car, and that tendency was again manifested. Soon after we got out of the vast parking lot at the State Fairgrounds, it quit running. There was a problem with the engine, night was falling, and we were in a rough part of town. I looked across the street and saw the office of the Dallas chapter of the Black Panther Party. Nancy called her parents, who hurried there and picked her up. I will never forget the look of alarm, if not panic, in their eyes.

So there I was after a depressing loss, with a busted-down car, in search of a mechanic. I found one, a black guy, and what do you know—he was as nice as could be. He was able to diagnose my Buick’s mechanical problem, do the repair and send me on my way in less than two hours.

After the game, Royal had philosophized by quoting Grantland Rice: “I’ve learned something that victory cannot bring, to wipe the blood from my face and smile so none can see the sting.” My face was really not bloodied, and the sting soon wore off. Once I got home, I was able to process all that had happened in the Longhorns’ defeat, my fiasco-date with Nancy and those darn automotive issues.