Coach Paul Tyson

Dallas Morning News

Waco coach heard cheers, then whispers

Paul Tyson was a Texas coaching legend, but his demise cast a cloud over his career

09/01/99
By Kevin Sherrington / The Dallas Morning News

WACO - On the 50th anniversary of their old coach's finest football team, some former Waco High teammates got together to fix up his headstone and start a club. They replaced his porcelain picture on the stone and added an inscription, just below his record. Dedicated to the memory And regime of coach Tyson 1913-1941 With love and respect Paul Tyson Tiger Club
Organized 1977

Seventy-eight men came to the first reunion in Waco that spring. Several went all the way back to the 1920s, a high school football era that the Waco Tigers dominated as no school has in any decade since. The Tigers won four state championships in the '20s. And that doesn't include the '21 team, which played before Waco High was a member of the University
Interscholastic League and eligible for playoffs.

All the Tigers did in '21 was go 9-0 and outscore their opponents, 526-0. Only one team moved the ball past midfield against them all year.

And that wasn't even Paul Tyson's best team. No, that would have been the '27 Tigers, who went 14-0 and didn't give up a
touchdown until their 10th game, which must have upset them. The next week in a playoff game, they took it out on Houston's Jeff Davis, 124-0.

The '27 Tigers beat Abilene for the state title and, finished with Texas teams, invited one from Cleveland, Ohio, to come to Waco, where they beat the Ohioans, 44-12.

Even before the mythical national championship, Tyson was a national figure. He attended and spoke at football clinics all over the country. Knute Rockne and Pop Warner routinely sought his opinions on offensive philosophy, and he was a favorite of reporters, who found him charismatic and humble and openly campaigned for major universities to hire him.

Tyson remained at Waco, though. He would have been happy to finish his career there, too. But, in the spring of 1942, the school board suddenly and unanimously voted to fire him after an 8-2 season, two removed from a year he took the Tigers to the state finals.

No reason was given. Newspaper reports indicated that the board fired Tyson because it'd been more than a decade since the Tigers were regular state title contenders. He'd spoiled them, defenders said. Some said it was because, at 55, he was too old, or that he'd made enemies with a board member.

But, for any of those reasons, it seemed unthinkable: How could Waco High fire Paul Tyson, the man who revolutionized Texas high school football and may have been its greatest coach?

What could he have done?

"I know where you're going," Windsor Deaton said gruffly, "and I don't believe any of that bunk."

Deaton, 73, was a tailback on Tyson's last Waco team. He had heard the rumors. Tyson, a lifelong bachelor who never dated, was "too intimate" with his players. He lived in the YMCA or the Roosevelt Hotel his 28 years as coach, and he always was in the company of at least two or three players. He'd drive them up to Dallas in his big Packard, where he'd treat them to steak dinners at the Golden Pheasant downtown. Or he'd take them to Austin to watch football practice at the University of Texas.

Some said it was just evidence of his affection for his players. Others said they were signs of something darker.

The rumors got so bad that Tyson even instigated an investigation to clear himself. But it did nothing to stop the whispers, which grew too loud for the board.

"I'm sure that's true," said Bob McCollum, 78, a star of Tyson's '39 state finalist team. "The rumors just followed him, and the school board got all they could stomach. People were talking about it all the time, and they just fired him to pacify all the people raising trouble."

Tyson never got over his dismissal. Neither did his players. A quarter-century after his death, as his name began to fade in the memory of Texas sports fans, Tyson's players started a lettermen's club. It was no accident that they put his name on it.

More than 70 years have passed since some of those men fought on a football field for Paul Tyson.

Some are fighting yet.

The first football game he ever saw cured Paul Tyson's homesickness for his hometown of Santa Anna. The next game, he started in it.

He went to Addison-Randolph College in Waco, planning to be a doctor. Then he went to a football game, tried out for
the team the next week and made the starting lineup.

He had many interests, though. He taught himself to play the clarinet, flute and trombone and worked at the violin.
He played the piano for Sunday services and Wednesday prayer meetings at the First Christian Church in Santa Anna, and, later, at Central Christian Church in Waco.

He was tall, slender and striking as a young man, though he didn't make much use of it. He dated a young girl in his hometown named Bessie Herndon, or at least he did until he went to pick her up one evening and she'd already gone out with someone else.

"That was the last of his lady friends right there," Tyson's sister, Amboline, said in 1977.

In 1908, Tyson graduated from Add-Ran, one of the last classes before it burned and was reborn a few years later in Fort Worth as TCU. He got his Masters, then went to the University of Chicago to study medicine. While playing baseball there, he reportedly was offered a contract to pitch for a major league team.

"Professional baseball players are not regarded very highly," he explained in declining. "I was afraid that I might wind up a loafer."

He went back to Texas, where he taught biology in Tyler to supplement his income while
studying medicine. It was there that he also helped coach the football team and gave up
medicine for athletics.

After Tyler, he went to Denison, then to Waco High in the fall of 1913. He was more famous
on campus at first as a biology teacher. His first team at Waco went 1-3-2.

He wouldn't have another losing season for 27 years.

The run really started in 1919, after a year of military service. Between 1919 and 1931, the
Tigers did not lose a home game. Waco had winning streaks of 16, 14, 10, 21 and 19 games
and went to the state finals six times.

They didn't just beat teams, either; they destroyed them. From 1921 to 1927, they scored at
least 100 points eight times. They scored at least 50 in 32 games, in which the average score
was 85.5 to .2.

Why were they so good? Former players and coaches said most teams in the '20s employed a
basic offense run out of a short punt formation and a defense not much more complex.

Tyson changed all that. "He made it into an art," said Dr. Howard Dudgeon, 88, who played
on Tyson's '27 team. "Before that, it was slapstick."

Teams in the '20s were lucky if they had uniforms and 20 players to fill them out. Waco
generally had at least 100 players, which Tyson divided into three groups, with the second
group, or "cannon fodder," as it was known, scrimmaging the first-teamers twice a week.

They looked like an army. "We thought the field would tip over when they walked out on the
field," said Thomas E. Turner, who played for Hillsboro in the late '30s. "We turned pale."

As the Tigers went through pre-game drills, Tyson strolled the field, studying the uneven
terrain, looking for bare spots or wet grass, anything that might give his team an edge. A
perfectionist, he never left anything to chance. After Oak Cliff gave the Tigers their only good
game in 1921, losing just 21-0, Tyson had one of his coaches scout every one of Oak Cliff's
games the next year, at a time when no one scouted games.

Tyson didn't cuss or swear or even raise his voice. Sometimes he'd challenge one of the boys
to a race and give him a 10-yard head start. If the boy was particularly fast, he'd give him five
yards.

He never lost. "He knew how to handle boys," Dudgeon said. "He believed in discipline. If
you started cussing, you didn't play the next game. If you made an error, he'd call you over.
He'd call you 'Boy' or 'Kid.' 'Boy,' he'd say, 'this is what you did wrong. I know you can
do better.'

"And you could."

He had some stars. Ben Lee Boynton, an All-America in college, played for him, and one of
Boynton's teammates was Leo R. "Dutch" Meyer, who would go on to fame as coach at
TCU. John Drew "Boody" Johnson, considered by some old-timers the greatest all-around
high school player ever, played for Waco from 1921-23.

Tyson also had Joel Hunt, who would become an All-America at Texas A&M. Hunt's last
year at Waco was 1923, when the Tigers lost the state title to Abilene, 3-0. Waco's best
chance to score came late in the game, when the Tigers got the ball down to the Abilene 2, and a play was called for Hunt.

A rare mix-up in the backfield netted nothing. Four years later, recalling that scene for his
national championship team, Tyson smiled.

"You know," he said, softly, "Joel has not come by for that ball yet."

The Tigers played at the old
Cotton Palace in the '20s,
Baylor's home field, too, and they
regularly outdrew the Bears with
crowds of 12,000 to 15,000.
Fans once rewarded one of
Tyson's state championships by
sending him to the Rose Bowl.
After the '27 national
championship game against Latin
High of Cleveland, they presented
him with 75 percent of the net
receipts, or $6,000.

He had no need for such a great
sum. He lived in the YMCA for
years and paid $15 a month in
rent. He was so careless about his
dress that his players took pity on
him, surreptitiously seeing that his
shoes were shined and clothes
laundered. Local merchants
occasionally would tell him to
come by their stores, where they
would fit him with a new shirt and
suit.

He made $250 a month as a
biology teacher and coach. What
would he do with $6,000?
Someone told him he should buy
a Packard straight-8, which went
for an astronomical $3,500. He'd
never owned a car. He didn't even
know how to drive one. He
bought the Packard, though, and
his players gave him lessons.

He took them everywhere in it, and he always drove Packards after that. He was sleeping in
the back seat of one on the way back from Dallas when Deaton and another teammate decided
to see how fast it would go. They got up behind a Greyhound bus and were pushing 100 mph
when the bus suddenly braked, and the Packard did, too.

Tyson flipped out of the back seat and landed face-first on the floorboard. He slowly collected
himself and looked over his two startled players.

"You boys found out how fast that bus would run, didn't you?" he said, and went back to
sleep.

His easy, gentlemanly nature belied his interest in the game. Since 1919, he attended coaching
schools at Wisconsin, Notre Dame, Ouchita College, Colorado, Stanford, Northwestern,
Baylor, SMU, TCU, Nebraska and other colleges. From Pop Warner at Stanford, he refined a
play out of the single wing in which the quarterback would take a snap, spin to one of three
backs crossing behind him and hand off or keep the ball for a run or pass.

The "spinner" play proved devastating in 1927. Defenses had no idea where the ball was
going, particularly poor Jeff Davis, whose coach said after the 124-point defeat, "They would
have beaten a good college team today."

Friends began to wonder if Tyson could coach one. An executive at The Dallas Morning
News wrote Knute Rockne in the spring of '27, asking him to recommend Tyson for an
opening in the Southwest Conference.

Rockne complied a few days later. He called Tyson, whom he had met at his coaching schools
in Dallas, "one of the finest coaches I ever met, college or high school" and said he was "as
capable from every angle as most any of the college coaches I know."

But the letter either did little good, or Tyson didn't want to leave Waco. Friends insisted he
turned down jobs in the SWC. He was without question a confidante of both Rockne and
Warner. A file containing more than a dozen letters of correspondence between Rockne and
Tyson is in Notre Dame's archives. In one letter, Rockne invites Tyson and Warner to be his
houseguests for a football confab. In another, he tells Tyson he wants to discuss "some fresh
dope on the lateral pass in the Canadian game which is very interesting, though I believe it will
play but a small part in our game."

Because of the close relationship between Tyson and Rockne, a rumor circulated that he had
accepted a position on Rockne's staff in 1931, just a few weeks before Rockne's plane
crashed in a Kansas field.

Tyson later told Thomas Turner, who grew up from Hillsboro to head The News' Central
Texas bureau, that Rockne never actually offered him a job.

"But he made it plain," Tyson told Turner, "that anytime I wanted to leave Waco and join his
staff, he'd be glad to have me."

As it turned out, Tyson took a sabbatical in 1931 anyway, going to Stanford for a year to
study under Warner. He came back in '32 to Waco teams that weren't as dominant anymore.

Other coaches, studying his methods, started to catch up. He had one more great team,
reaching the state finals in 1939 against Lubbock. The Tigers lost, 20-14. The next season,
Waco went 3-6-1, Tyson's first losing season since 1913. He brought the team back to 8-2 in
'41, just missing the district title.

Four months later, the school board met and asked Tyson for his resignation. He refused. So
the seven-member board met again the next night in executive session, voting unanimously to
fire him. Assistant coach Clyde Martin also was fired, and principal G.M. Smith was
reassigned as a classroom instructor.

Dudgeon, who later served on the school board, said he went back through meeting notes and
found no records to indicate why the board acted as it did. Turner, who researched the story
for The News, said the board apparently fired the principal for defending Tyson.

Turner said he never found any evidence of sexual abuse by Tyson. He talked to scores of
players, and a couple said they thought Tyson was gay but offered no proof.

Most of the players acted as if they wanted to fight him for asking.

"There was absolutely no proof," Turner said. "I knew everybody in town, and no one could
prove anything. But it was like what George W. Bush is going through now with the drug
rumors. It just got out of control, and he couldn't stop it. And Paul was getting older and a
little seedy, a little out of it. He was a proud, stubborn person, and he wouldn't change his
ways.

"It was a sad ending."

Tyson took a job as an instructor at Dallas' Woodrow Wilson High in 1942, then spent three
mediocre seasons as football coach at Beaumont South Park. He went back to Dallas in 1946
as football coach and athletic director at Jesuit College Prep. But he left after a year, claiming
poor health.

He seemed like an old man to Eddie Joseph, a sophomore tailback on Jesuit's team in '46.
Joseph spent some time in the hospital in the spring of '46 with a broken leg, and Tyson came
by to visit him every night.

"He would draw a crowd, especially all the older people," said Joseph, now director of the
Texas High School Coaches Association. "He talked about the old days and the great
ballgames. He was a fine, neat old man."

Joseph remembered that and Tyson's "big old playbook. He tried to run all those great plays
that he'd done in his career. And it was just too much. His repertoire was too great for us."

As for the rumors, Joseph said he didn't hear any until after Tyson left Jesuit. Like the rest, he
said there was no proof.

From Jesuit, Tyson went to Westminster College in Tehuacana as an instructor. He stayed
two years before accepting a job as football coach at Daniel Baker College in Brownwood, a
school with a history as one of the worst programs in Texas college football.

He went 2-6-2 in 1949. He couldn't have enjoyed it much. Since he was fired in 1941, he'd
never strayed too far from Waco. In 1948, as the Tigers were on their way to another state
championship, Tyson would appear at the offices of the Waco Tribune-Herald on Sunday
afternoons.

"He'd stay an hour or so," said Dave Campbell, former sports editor of the Tribune-Herald.
"I think he was just revisiting the good old days."

At a banquet honoring the '48 state champions, Dudgeon looked up from the dais at the
Roosevelt Hotel and saw Tyson out in the hall, looking in. "By the time I got to the door,"
Dudgeon said, "he was gone."

His players always looked out for him. When the board fired Tyson, the athletic council,
made up mostly of his former players, issued a statement indicating they didn't support it. His
current team protested, too.

But nothing helped, not even a petition signed by the mothers of 300 of his former players.

Their only recourse was to honor him. In 1955, when Tyson was voted into the Texas Sports
Hall of Fame, Dutch Meyer presented his plaque. He broke down while reading it. When the
Hall of Fame moved to Waco, Dudgeon and others insisted that a special Paul Tyson room be
included.

And then there is the Paul Tyson Tiger Club. For years, members put flowers on Tyson's
grave on the date of his death. He died during a faculty meeting, a week before Daniel Baker's
1950 season opener. A dean, thinking Tyson was asleep, nudged him, and he toppled to the
floor.

Doctors said he died of a brain hemorrhage. He was 64. The body was returned to Waco,
where the family of Waco High's former team physician took care of the details, as usual.
Most of the years he was at Waco High, the Crosthwaits had Tyson over for Sunday dinners.

They buried him in their family plot. The petition was in his pocket.








the great italian playwright
luigi pirandello,
“in right you are if you think you are”,
showed a community pays
when it is driven by gossips
to find out “the truth” about people’s private lives.