Editor's note: This excerpt -- Chapter 13 -- is from HORNS, HOGS & NIXON COMING by Terry Frei. Copyright © 2002 by Terry Frei. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., N.Y.

On November 19, 1966, Bob McKay was about to suit up for the Longhorn freshman team against Texas A&M, hoping to beat the Aggies and win the right to enter the dining hall through the front door. The Notre Dame-Michigan State game -- the "Game of the Century" -- was on a radio in the dressing room. When the Fighting Irish meekly accepted the 10-10 tie, with coach Ara Parseghian directing the Irish to run out the clock after taking over on their own 30 with eighty-four seconds remaining, McKay led the jeers. "We all cussed Parseghian for not going for the win," McKay says. "Why would you not play for the win if you're out there?"

Three years later, the Longhorns remembered their disdain for Parseghian's take-the-tie-on-the-road mentality in a No. 1 versus No. 2 showdown, and recalled McKay's outspoken derision. But by then, they all were accustomed to McKay's inability to camouflage his feelings. He might have been scared of Darrell Royal -- and Royal's power -- but he was liable to say exactly what he thought to just about anyone else. He wasn't a chatterbox like James Street, but when McKay talked in that West Texas growl and got that sardonic smile on his face, he would make everybody laugh -- in the huddle, on the sideline, in the dressing room, even while running wind sprints. He was "Big 'Un," the giant offensive tackle who manhandled defensive ends and relished aggressively chasing down other defensive players in the wishbone attack.

Mike Campbell flew his private plane into Crane and, within an hour, was at the high school, watching film of the big tackle in the Crane coaches' tiny offices. McKay was summoned from class. The Longhorns are here! Want to talk with Coach Campbell? "I was more scared of him than I was of a man with a loaded shotgun," McKay says. "He asked me if I'd be interested in coming to visit him, down there in Austin. That was like asking a dying man if he wanted a meal and a glass of water. When I got there, Coach Royal said they had a scholarship for me and if I wanted it, I could have it; but if I didn't, they needed to know."

That approach turned off Texan Ronnie Hammers, which was one reason Hammers played guard for Arkansas on December 6, 1969. But it was exactly what Bob McKay wanted to hear. Sure, Coach, count me in! "People like Texas Tech wanted me to come visit there, but hell, I have kinfolks there and I knew what Lubbock looked like," McKay says. "J. T. King didn't understand why I didn't want to go. I had been there, done that, even had the T-shirt. I wasn't smart enough to know I wasn't supposed to be able to play at Texas. Most people I knew were saying, 'Ain't no way in the world he can play there,' but I was too stupid to know better."

After battling a shoulder injury that required surgery in the spring of 1968, McKay was starting by the time he was a junior. He is one of the handful of Longhorns who say the 1968 squad -- which had senior All-Americans Ken Gidney at guard, Chris Gilbert at halfback, and Corby Robertson at linebacker -- might have been better than the '69 team. But the winning streak continued through '69, and it was so easy, McKay was darn near disgusted. "Hell, halfway through the season, the second team had lettered and we hadn't yet," he says of the system that required players to participate in a certain number of plays to become varsity lettermen that season. "We had to come out so early, and Coach Royal wasn't going to let us embarrass anybody."

That also meant that when the coaches believed the starters hadn't played enough to be physically tested, they had to run conditioning windsprints on Sundays. "Guys," McKay asked his teammates, "could you imagine if we had lost this game?"

When Royal told McKay he had been named to the Look magazine All-American team, selected by the Football Writers Association, it meant he would get a free trip to New York the weekend after Thanksgiving for pomp and circumstance and a filming of an appearance on the "Bob Hope Special." McKay and fullback Steve Worster were on the Look team; the other tackle, Bobby Wuensch, was on the American Football Coaches Association's All-American team, sponsored by Kodak.

At six-six and 245 (really), McKay was imposing even before the ball was snapped. Wuensch, the other tackle, was a six-three, 221-pound junior, and was scary in a different fashion. A soft-spoken teddy bear away from the field, Wuensch would say "sir" to professors -- and sometimes even to the guy across the aisle in the class. He fooled his coaches, too, because it was hard to imagine that this meek kid on campus could be so devastatingly mean on the field. The transformation on game day astounded his teammates, until they got used to it.

"Wuensch was a football player," Bob McKay says. "I happened to be masquerading as a football player. Bobby was good and I happened to be following him around."

Wuensch loved making one block on or near the line of scrimmage and then, once the back was in the open field (which happened a lot in 1969), sprinting downfield and nailing some poor sap safety trying to close in on the ballcarrier. He often just took off, not worrying about the defensive end across from him, and until the whistle blew, anyone was fair game. It was unusual to see a tackle -- Wuensch -- flying into the picture on the film and blowing a linebacker or defensive back right off the screen. The Longhorns howled as they saw Wuensch work in the Sunday movies.

But they were wary of him, too, especially when he was getting himself pumped up. "If you could get out of the dressing room without getting killed by Wuensch, you had a chance to play all right," McKay says. Wuensch would prowl the locker room, banging guys on the shoulder pads, hollering, going crazy. "Nothing they could do to me on the field could hurt me as bad as Wuensch in the dressing room," McKay says.

Wuensch says, "Yeah, I'd get a little pumped. But it was honest-to-goodness adrenaline, I assure you. I just loved being in that state and I loved playing football and I loved hitting people. We had a steak table and if you had a great play or a great hit, you could make the steak table for Monday night. So maybe it was my eating."

Actually, part of his explosiveness came from his conditioning. When the Longhorns took treadmill tests at the beginning of the season, they were supposed to run fifteen minutes. Most guys ran fifteen minutes and maybe four-tenths of a second. But Wuensch -- an offensive tackle -- and Danny Lester stayed on the treadmills and kept running. For forty-five minutes, showing off, enjoying themselves, competing. Finally, someone had to step in and say: All right, already!

Wuensch was a linebacker when he came to Texas from Houston, where his father owned a small sales company. Growing up, his hero was Tommy Nobis. Although an uncle, Les Richardson, played for Texas A&M's 1943 national champions, the lure of getting a shot to be the next Nobis was too strong when Texas offered him a scholarship. Unfortunately, Wuensch jammed his neck as a freshman in 1967 spring practice. He was in traction for a short time and doctors even raised the question of whether he would ever play again. He sat out '67 as a redshirt, but practiced as a center, and his neck healed. The Longhorns switched him to tackle for the '68 season, and they found that the linebacker's mentality worked well for a tackle in the wishbone. "In the wishbone," Wuensch says, "we started using our heads and started popping people right in the nose. That was how I knew how to play football."

The Longhorns between the two All-American tackles were undersized, even for their era. With left guard Bobby Mitchell, the former Wheat Ridge Farmer star fullback, fighting injuries, Randy Stout got a lot of playing time in his place. Stout was six-two and 241, but the other three men between the tackles -- Mitchell (five-eleven, 206), center Forrest Wiegand (six-one, 200), and right guard Mike Dean (six-foot, 195) -- all were lighter than Steve Worster, the fullback they were blocking for.

Also, if there were a College Bowl quiz show for offensive lines, the Longhorns might have advanced to the semifinals with Princeton. Dean was the president of the Math Club at his high school in Sherman, and was set to go to Texas A&M until Darrell Royal won over his mother, Nadene. To Nadene, UT football was the bully, the bogeyman. "She was adamant that I wouldn't be going to UT," Dean says. "She hated Coach Royal and hated everything about UT. She didn't even want to meet Coach Royal."

Royal knew how to read the various challenges presented by prospects and occasionally hostile mothers. Royal took Dean and his parents out to dinner, and the coach made a point of sitting next to Nadene. "I was sitting down at the end of the table and he was sitting up there next to my mother and before she even got the salad, she was cooing and trying on his T ring," Dean says. "After that dinner, he had her in the palm of his hand. I wasn't going anywhere else."

Dean suspects Royal took the unusual step of visiting him personally in his hometown because he also was after one of Dean's high school teammates, defensive lineman Greg Ploetz. Ploetz, another strong student, and Dean were close friends, and they ended up going to UT together. Dean also acknowledges that the attrition from the 1968 spring practices moved him up the depth chart and gave him a chance, but he was suited for the wishbone blocking approach.

"Quickness was the whole thing," Dean says. "We only had about four pass plays, and all of them were off the option. I didn't even know if we had a dropback passing blocking scheme. If I had to take a step back and block on a guy 255 or 270, I was history. But we never had to do that."

He backed up Ken Gidney as a sophomore, then stepped in as the '68 starter at right guard. During the '69 season, he went home to Sherman on Sunday, November 2, the day after the Longhorns beat SMU to go 6-0, to get married, and was back at practice on Monday.

Like Mike Dean, Randy Stout once planned to go to Texas A&M. He was the star lineman of Coach Emory Bellard's Texas state championship team at San Angelo Central High School, and when Bellard accepted Darrell Royal's offer to join the Longhorn staff, Stout headed for Texas. "With Coach Bellard," he says, "you never thought you were going to lose."

Stout's UT career started slowly, though, because he suffered a knee injury in the Big 33 high school all-star game between Texas and Pennsylvania in Hershey. While in the toe-to-hip cast necessary following major knee surgery at the time, he lost seventy pounds -- going from 270 to 200. He redshirted in 1968, with the understanding that if either Wuensch or McKay suffered a significant injury, he would play. He didn't have to give up that redshirt year, but when 1969 started, he still was a backup tackle. He also attended a couple of the antiwar protests, as an observer and not a participant, until his brother, a Secret Service agent, told him that if he was positively identified in three pictures, he would get an FBI file.

"As the season begins, I'm second team behind two All-American tackles, and the only way I'm going to play is if one of them dies," Stout says. "When Mitchell got hurt, they didn't have anybody to move to guard." Stout was nominated, although he didn't fit the prototype of the small, quick wishbone guard. But he played well, and when Mitchell came back, he continued to spell Mitchell and also serve as the messenger bringing in plays. For example, "53 veer pass."

In Edna, a small town about one hundred miles south of Houston, Forrest Wiegand, like so many other future Longhorns, including Bobby Wuensch, idolized Tommy Nobis and dreamed of succeeding him as a UT linebacker. That dream could get you in fights in rural Edna, where the majority of the kids were Texas A&M fans.

At his small high school, Wiegand was the star, but he hadn't had to learn very much about defense: He just ran around and made all the tackles. At Texas, it was different: He laughs and says that Coach Mike Campbell's lectures about scraping here and scraping there, taking the block on a shoulder, and filling gaps, all went right over his head. "I had no earthly idea what they were talking about," Wiegand says. But he was a strong athlete, and he was switched to center. The Longhorns finally gave up on the thought of redshirting him in 1967 and made him the starter for the final five games of that season. The primary reason was injuries, but he also had shown he could handle the position -- and he was even better when UT went to the wishbone. The blocking schemes were about scrambling, and letting certain men go while double-teaming others to create avenues and gaps and mismatches for Street to read, creating dilemmas for the defenders left unblocked. To do it all right, it took smart linemen. And the Longhorns up front did it right.

From HORNS, HOGS & NIXON COMING by Terry Frei. Copyright © 2002 by Terry Frei. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., N.Y.