The Proudest Squares

"I don't give a damn whether he was representin' anybody or not!" Stallings barked. The point was, the player had in effect challenged his authority. By the same token, when All-America Tackle Mo Moorman disregarded a midseason warning from Stallings to quit cutting classes last fall, Stallings fired him, too. Toughness, you see, and the uncompromising exercise of authority are, to Aggies, virtues they pride themselves on. Because football—more than anything on campus—stirs A&M men wherever they exist, Gene Stallings has become the foremost Aggie archetype. This year his conference champions have lost five games but have fought hard, never losing by more than six points—a circumstance that enables Aggies to continue speaking their proudest boast. "We never lose," they advise strangers at every turn. "We're just outscored." Their words begin to explain why non-Aggies love to put down Aggies.

Stallings' Spartan approach to football suits Aggie students and alumni just fine, because, as it happens, they themselves tune up for a football game with considerable fervor. Aggies do not use kindling and old newspapers to build peprally bonfires—they chop down whole trees. Out on the cadet drill field the week of the Texas game, a pyramid of logs rises to a height of almost 90 feet. The mere sight of an Aggie bonfire—which officially symbolizes, honest to goodness, the Aggies' "flaming love" for A&M—causes Aggies to swallow hard. Cadet sentries stand guard 24 hours a day lest infiltrators from Austin—Teasips, the manly Aggies contemptuously call them—commit sabotage. But on one occasion the Teasips attacked by air, swooping down in a light plane to 200 feet, dropping Molotov cocktails. The Aggies poured out of their dorms as if rising to the defense of Pearl Harbor—"with rifles, rocks, baseballs, anything they could put their hands on," one witness told me. Later, when the Teasip plane landed in Austin, aviation authorities expressed wonder that a craft shot so full of holes could survive.

On football Saturdays at Kyle Field (where, by the way, the scoreboard works and the grass grows nicely), the Aggie Spirit—always capitalize the "S"—charges the air with a tension so overpowering that it moves everyone, save visiting sportswriters. To traveling football journalists, a long-treasured autumn ritual is the Friday night drunk. Beer, which never does the job right, can be purchased in Bryan- College Station, but except in the dining room of the country club and in the Ramada Inn's quiet second-floor pub one cannot buy a drink of hard liquor in Brazos County. Furthermore, there is not so much as a go-go joint, let alone a nightclub. Indeed, in the realm of student hot spots, A&W root beer at last word ranked No. 1. As a consequence, the football writers find themselves disturbingly clearheaded on Saturday, after which they fan out in all directions carrying word that College Station remains nip and tuck with the Spanish Sahara as the likeliest place to spend the World's Worst Weekend. "Even the river runs dry," one sports-writer exaggerates bitterly.

Oblivious to the mood of the press, Aggie exes file proudly into Kyle Field, class rings glittering. Next only to wives and children, perhaps, Aggies prize their class rings most. At the sight of a man wearing one, Aggies bound across restaurants, hand outstretched. So revered is the ring that Aggies are on standing instructions from the Association of Former Students to purchase any seen languishing in a pawnshop. The association reimburses the buyer, and then, as if leading a long-lost relative home from a flophouse, tucks away the ring in a safe lest it ever suffer further ignominy.

The Saturday tension mounts. As the 272-piece Fightin' Texas Aggie Band strikes up The Spirit of Aggieland, students and their dates rise as one—and remain standing throughout the game. "The Twelfth Man," they call themselves. They cannot sit, for they are pledged to fling themselves into the battle should Stallings run out of bodies, which fortunately number 84. "Yeaaaaaaa, gig 'em, Aggies!" the Twelfth Man roars. "It still sets me off," I was told by a middle-aged ex. At half-time the spines of alumni stiffen to the electrifying sound of the Aggie War Hymn, which was written, as you might guess, on the back of an envelope by an old Aggie while he lay in a World War I trench. Finally, should the A&M team reward its faithful by winning—which is to say, by not being outscored—Aggie jaws start flapping all over Texas.

"One Aggie can be splendid company," says a Houston gentleman. "Two Aggies are impossible." If it is true, as even non-Aggies suspect, that A&M's conference rivals have plotted to hold Aggie victories to a minimum by mercilessly gumshoeing the school's every recruiting move, their motive undoubtedly lies in the conclusion that Aggies, though infuriating in refusing to acknowledge defeat, are even more boorish as winners. Ironically, Texans—for so long stereotyped as braggarts by the rest of the nation—turn inward to pin the same rap on their own kind.

Yet, in fairness to the Aggies, one must ask if the Aggie Spirit is more than just a hundred anachronistic rituals kept alive, largely by the Corps of Cadets. Is it more than coincidence, for example, that no fewer than six Aggies won the Congressional Medal of Honor in World War II? When Gene Stallings applies his ramrod Aggie methods to his players, is he merely subjecting them to a juvenile existence? Bill Hobbs, a small but swift All-America linebacker from West Texas, blushes at the sound of his own answer but delivers it intently. "If I ever quit in front of Coach Stallings," he says, "I could never face him again."

I met with Hobbs and a sophomore defensive end named Mike DeNiro, who is the only Northerner on the Aggie squad, in the maroon plush Lettermen's Lounge, and by way of easing our un-familiarity I remarked to DeNiro that I once had spent a week in his home town, Youngstown, Ohio. "The week I was there," I said, "the auto dealers were advertising $40 foolproof locks for auto hoods. There were quite a few people blowing up one another."

"Yes," said Mike. "My Uncle Vince got killed in that."

Vince DeNiro? Certainly—the big boss. I remembered dining on expertly prepared Italian cuisine in Vince's restaurant not long after his body had been gathered up from Market Street. "Vince had a terrific restaurant," Mike said. "He was a nice guy, if you knew him."