Shot Of Lemons To Cure The Blues

Another explanation is that in the Southwest Conference athletic emphasis is on football, and the other sports must take the scraps—or necks and wings, as Darrell would put it.

"That's stupid," Royal says. "At Texas we've had national champions in baseball and golf and track. It would be a feather in my cap as athletic director for Texas to have a big-time basketball team. As football coach, would I have such ego and insecurity that I'd be afraid a great basketball program would put me in the shade?"

Royal said he has admired Abe's style for a long time. Darrell called Abe in Edinburg to offer him the job. Abe returned the call from a truck stop in Waurika, Okla. "Where are you really?" Darrell said.

Darrell was born in Hollis. Abe was born in Walters. They scratched through the Great Depression and World War II. Darrell admits he was poor as dirt. Abe says that while he was not from the wrong side of the tracks in Walters, he was close enough to hear the trains go past.

"I might have been the world's first hippie," Lemons said one day not long ago. "I was barefoot, the seat was torn out of my britches, I had long hair and I rode a girls' bicycle. When you're little and poor in a small town and have to ride a girls' bike, you develop a sense of humor."

His mother bestowed the initials "A" and "E" upon him rather than given names. "Mama didn't realize we were ever going to have Social Security or a war, where I'd have to have a name," Abe says. His fifth-grade teacher called him Abe. Looking back, he sees how easily he could have changed it to Ace. He flunked eighth-grade English. On the second try he had grown tall and the basketball team drew him. After four years in the merchant marine, in 1950 Abe graduated from OCU where he was a forward, became head basketball coach there in 1955 and turned out a 20-7 team the next season.

Ambitious young coaches like Eddie Sutton at Arkansas have moved into the SWC with dreams of lifting teams to the level of the Big Ten or the ACC. Then there are ambitious older coaches like 42-year-old Shelby Metcalf of Texas A&M, who lost two players and two scholarships for a season because of recruiting sins exposed after a written complaint by Leon Black, Abe Lemons' predecessor at Texas.

Black's own ambitions were thwarted in part by the necessity for playing home games in 45-year-old Gregory Gym, which holds about 7,500 people elbow to elbow and is located well onto the campus, from which public parking is barred. Gregory Gym has so many lines for different sports painted on the floor that knowing which ones are out-of-bounds is a home-court advantage. The old gym provides a close-up, vivid, noisy, sweat-splattered, shoe-screeching view of the game, but it is not what a star recruit would call glamorous.

Next season the Texas basketball team will move into the new $35 million Special Events Center, nicknamed the Super Drum, at the south edge of the campus, a few blocks from the state capital buildings' parking lots, which are vacant after dark. The Super Drum was paid for out of the university's oil-lease money and will be rented for circuses, ice shows, pop concerts and similar events as well as to the Texas basketball team. Former Chairman of the Board of Regents Frank Erwin, his close friend Jack Gray (ex-Texas basketball All-America, ex-Texas basketball head coach) and engineers and architects toured arenas around the country. They asked Leon Black for his ideas.

But then Black quit as basketball coach. Although he remains at the university in the athletic department. Black decided to get out of basketball last season after he wrote the Southwest Conference a letter that "requested there be an investigation" of Texas A&M. When the Aggies' punishment was announced, Black admitted he had written a letter; he did not know whether or not it was the only such letter. Cries of "snitch" swept his life like a typhoon. Super Drum or not, Leon Black knew when he had had enough.