Before the West Orange-Stark Mustangs had a football dynasty, the Emma Wallace High School Dragons won two state championships and played in another state final game. The school was for African-Americans during the days of segregation and the football teams were led by the legendary coach Willie Ray Smith Sr.
The book Thursday Night Lights: The Story of Black High School Football in Texas by Michael Hurd includes the Wallace teams and their famous players, Ernie “Big Cat” Ladd (above) and his uncle, Garland Boyette (below), who was two years younger than Ladd. Both went on to illustrious careers in professional football.
One of the interesting stories in the book is about Coach Smith, who didn’t play football because of a crippled right leg. He was a youth in Denton when his leg was hit by a stray bullet during a shootout between Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow as they fired at the police station where one of their associates was jailed.
Hurd writes that Coach Smith was treated for five years at a Dallas hospital and doctors wanted to amputate the leg because it would not heal. He fought against amputation and a doctor used maggot therapy to heal.
Coach Smith went to Prairie View A&M, where he met his wife, Georgia. Hurd said Coach Smith talked his way into a teaching job at Lufkin Dunbar by also coaching. Georgia Smith taught homemaking.
Coach Smith’s second job was at Wallace High in Orange and that was where he first gained success.
Segregation was the law. As the white schools had the University Interscholastic League (based from the University of Texas) to oversee athletic and academic competitions, the Prairie View Interscholastic League (based from Prairie View A&M) oversaw the “Negro” schools in the state.
Hurd said the PVIL was started in 1920, but the league did not have an organized state championship system until 1940.
Coach Smith took the Wallace Dragons to the 1948 Class A championship. The game was in Dennison and played on Christmas Day afternoon. The Dennison Terrell High Dragons shut out the Dragons from Orange, 13-0.
In the book, Hurd describes a February 13, 1949, Orange Leader story about Coach Smith as “a glowing and extremely rare, mainstream-media feature story on a black coach.”
The story explains his “strap system” of discipline. “The strap system, in case you’re not familiar with it, is based on the old-fashioned idea that cowhide liberally applied to a boy’s bottom is a wonderful aid in helping him to remember lessons in discipline–or in the fine art of sidestepping tacklers on the gridiron.
“Whatever the merits or disadvantages of the strap system, it drew 40 of the 73 boys at Wallace high school out for football last season, although all were well acquainted with the penalty for failure to fulfill an assignment or for breaches of discipline. It also has the full support of parents and fans. A number of players have had the punishment doubled at home for mentioning that they had been on the receiving end of one of coach Smith’s lessons in leather.”
The Dragons won the state championship in 1949 in a game played in Orange on December 23. They beat the Gross High Bumblebees of Victoria 33-13. Hurd’s book has the Corsicana Daily Sun newspaper reporting that the Dragons earlier in the year had beat Port Arthur Lincoln. Lincoln that year tied for the 2A championship 13-13 against Dallas Lincoln in a game played five days before the Dragons championship.
The two most famous players from Coach Smith’s teams were Ernie Ladd and Garland Boyette, who both went on to successful professional football careers. Writer Hurd in the book names two PVIL all-star “dream teams,” one from the north part of the state and the other from the south. Ladd and Boyette made the south’s “dream team” for defense. Ladd as a lineman and Boyette as a linebacker.
After Coach Smith moved to Beaumont to coach at Hebert and later, Charlton-Pollard, he coached his sons, Tody, Bubba, and Willie Ray Jr. Tody and Bubba were born in Orange.
Ladd in the early 1960s was known as the biggest man in pro football and was an all-pro player for the San Diego Chargers of the then-new American Football League. He was 6-foot-9-inches tall and weighed 315 pounds. Hurd reports Ladd had a 52-inch chest, 39-inch waist, 20-inch biceps, 19-inch neck and word size 18D shoes.
Ladd had the nickname “Big Cat” and was a professional wrestler. He was almost as tall as Andre the Giant. During a 1996 appearance at the Gumbo Cook-Off in Orange, he reminisced about his two careers.
Ladd was known for his big appetite. In the 1996 interview, one of his local friends recalled being with Big Cat at an “all you can eat” pancake restaurant in Dallas. While Ladd was still eating, the owner of the business went outside and took down the words “all you can eat.”
Hurd’s book said Ladd competed in the 1961 Golden West Eating Classic while he played for the Chargers with 1,800 people watching. Ladd won. He ate “lobster tails, tossed green salad with oil and vinegar dressing, spaghetti and meatballs, southern fried chicken, baked Virginia ham, roast prime rib of beef au jus, New York-cut sirloin steaks, assorted vegetables, mashed potatoes, rolls and butter, and a layer cake with ice cream.”
Boyette was younger, but his sister was Ladd’s sister, making him Ladd’s uncle. The book has Boyette remembering living across the street from each other. He described Ladd being “as mean as a four-headed rattlesnake.”
Boyette went to Grambling University, like Ladd, and then went on to play professional football for the Houston Oilers and the St. Louis Cardinals.
Thursday Night Lights: The Story of Black High School Football in Texas by Michael Hurd was published in 2017 by the University of Texas Press. It is available through Amazon in Kindle edition, along with hardback and paperback.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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