Scattershooting

Scattershooting

Author: Blackie Sherrod

Publisher:

Published: 1975

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

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Collection of articles from Dallas Morning News columnist, Blackie Sherrod.


Texas Literary Outlaws

Texas Literary Outlaws

Author: Steven L. Davis

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 9780875656755

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Davis makes extensive use of untapped literary archives to weave a fascinating portrait of six Texas writers, calling themselves the Mad Dogs, who came of age during a period of rapid social change: Bud Shrake, Larry L. King, Billy Lee Brammer, Gary Cartwright, Dan Jenkins, and Peter Gent.


His Ownself

His Ownself

Author: Dan Jenkins

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2014-10-28

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0307474704

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In His Ownself, Dan Jenkins takes us on a tour of his legendary career as a sportswriter and novelist. Here we see Dan's hone his craft, from his high school paper through to his first job at theFort Worth Press and on to the glory days of Sports Illustrated. Whether in Texas, New York, or anywhere for that matter, Dan was always at the center of it all—hanging out at Elaine's while swapping stories with politicians and movie stars, covering every Masters and U.S. Open and British Open for over four decades. The result is a knee-slapping, star-studded, once-in-a-lifetime memoir from one of the most important, hilarious, and semi-cantankerous sportswriters ever.


Coach Royal

Coach Royal

Author: Darrell Royal

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 0292774699

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Many legendary men have been associated with University of Texas football, but for most fans one man will always be "Coach"—Darrell K Royal. One of the most successful coaches in college football, Royal led the Longhorns to three national championships and eleven Southwest Conference titles during his twenty years (1956-1976) as UT's head coach. He coached some of the Horns' best players, including future Heisman Trophy winner Earl Campbell, and was named NCAA Coach of the Year three times. In 1969, an ABC-TV poll of sportswriters called Royal the Coach of the Decade. In 1996 UT recognized his unrivalled contribution to Longhorn football when it designated Memorial Stadium the Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium in his honor. Now, for the first time, Darrell Royal tells his life story in his own words. He remembers growing up poor in Hollis, Oklahoma, during the Great Depression, and describes playing college football for the University of Oklahoma and then coaching a succession of college teams and one pro team before settling in at UT for the rest of his career. He gives a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at Longhorn football during his time-recruiting strategies, coaching techniques, the famous wishbone offense, unforgettable wins and losses, and his impressions of rival teams and coaches, including Bear Bryant of Texas A&M and Alabama and Frank Broyles of Arkansas. Proving that he's still the same straight shooter as always, Darrell Royal even discusses some of the controversies he's dealt with, including early charges of racism in the UT football program, the impact of Title IX on college athletics, his association with Jim Bob Moffett and the Freeport-MacMoRan Corporation, his longtime friendship with Willie Nelson, and his decision to retire from coaching. But whether he's describing the tough times he's faced professionally and personally or the rewards of being UT's most beloved coach and goodwill ambassador, Royal maintains the same plainspoken honesty and sense of honor that—as much as the winning seasons—have made him a legend to so many people.


Hollywood Mad Dogs

Hollywood Mad Dogs

Author: Edwin "Bud" Shrake

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2020-12-11

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 162349883X

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Before his death in 2009, legendary Texas author Edwin “Bud” Shrake completed a final novel based on his real-life adventures as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1970s and ’80s. In this new book, we meet screenwriter Richard Swift, who has been lured away from his cushy job at Sports Illustrated to write a movie for Jack Roach, a matinee idol famous for his electric blue eyes, dimpled chin, and a swagger that makes women swoon. As Swift and his new movie star buddy hurtle through days and nights of Hollywood madness, Shrake’s crystalline prose purrs like a Lamborghini speeding along the Pacific Coast Highway. There are spies and fake houses, mountains of drugs, weird sex, crimes, and bizarre feuds. In Hollywood Mad Dogs, Shrake deftly satirizes a world where a screenwriter is supplied with a bag of cocaine and given a week to write a script, a star demands that a pet cat be his sidekick on the trail, and two competing box office titans square off on a golf course, “each of them armed with a putter.” This rollicking new novel, discovered among Shrake’s literary papers at the Wittliff Collections, provides a hilarious and insightful look at the Hollywood meat grinder. It is a story only Bud Shrake could tell, and it is a worthy addition to the author’s celebrated career, which includes some of the most highly praised novels written by a Texan.


Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming

Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming

Author: Terry Frei

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2007-11-01

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0743238656

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On December 6, 1969, the Texas Longhorns and Arkansas Razorbacks met in what many consider the Game of the Century. In the centennial season of college football, both teams were undefeated; both featured devastating and innovative offenses; both boasted cerebral, stingy defenses; and both were coached by superior tacticians and stirring motivators, Texas's Darrell Royal and Arkansas's Frank Broyles. On that day in Fayetteville, the poll-leading Horns and second-ranked Hogs battled for the Southwest Conference title -- and President Nixon was coming to present his own national championship plaque to the winners. Even if it had been just a game, it would still have been memorable today. The bitter rivals played a game for the ages before a frenzied, hog-callin' crowd that included not only an enthralled President Nixon -- a noted football fan -- but also Texas congressman George Bush. And the game turned, improbably, on an outrageously daring fourth-down pass. But it wasn't just a game, because nothing was so simple in December 1969. In Horns, Hogs, & Nixon Coming, Terry Frei deftly weaves the social, political, and athletic trends together for an unforgettable look at one of the landmark college sporting events of all time. The week leading up to the showdown saw black student groups at Arkansas, still marginalized and targets of virulent abuse, protesting and seeking to end the use of the song "Dixie" to celebrate Razorback touchdowns; students were determined to rush the field during the game if the band struck up the tune. As the United States remained mired in the Vietnam War, sign-wielding demonstrators (including war veterans) took up their positions outside the stadium -- in full view of the president. That same week, Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton penned a letter to the head of the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas, thanking the colonel for shielding him from induction into the military earlier in the year. Finally, this game was the last major sporting event that featured two exclusively white teams. Slowly, inevitably, integration would come to the end zones and hash marks of the South, and though no one knew it at the time, the Texas vs. Arkansas clash truly was Dixie's Last Stand. Drawing from comprehensive research and interviews with coaches, players, protesters, professors, and politicians, Frei stitches together an intimate, electric narrative about two great teams -- including one player who, it would become clear only later, was displaying monumental courage just to make it onto the field -- facing off in the waning days of the era they defined. Gripping, nimble, and clear-eyed, Horns, Hogs, & Nixon Coming is the final word on the last of how it was.


Finding My Little Red Hat

Finding My Little Red Hat

Author: Jo-Carroll Dennison

Publisher:

Published: 2021-09-12

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13:

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Born in a men's prison in Florence Arizona in 1923, Jo-Carroll Dennison learned to walk (and dance and sing) on a medicine show traveling the American West and later taught herself to trick-ride horses in the circus. The huckster snake-oil salesman who ran the medicine show tried to rape her at age 12 -- she fended him off. She was crowned Miss America in 1942. Dennison shows us the underbelly of the Miss America organization of the time, and shares an unvarnished view of a starlet's life in Hollywood through the 1940s. Her marriage to Phil Silvers opened many doors. It was rarefied air. Invited to dance by Howard Hughes and having a deep love affair with Sydney Chaplin (son of Charlie), "normal" life revolved around the Hollywood party scene at the homes of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, and Gene Kelly. The highlight was being part of the core group in weekly gatherings at Kelly's, full of song (including impromptu piano with Andre Previn and Paul Robeson) and "radical liberal intellectualism" along with occasional drop-ins the likes of Garbo (at a Tupperware party, no less), Garland, and Monroe. Un-seduced by the glitter of men in power and their infamous casting couches, Dennison shows us that superstars and power brokers are mere mortals, and often worse. Eighty years before the Me Too movement, Dennison endured inhumane treatment by boys, men, and institutions: among them charlatans, producers, directors, and therapists. She reports on the ravages of McCarthyism on friends and throughout the cultural world. Her second marriage inspired the storyline for Redford and Streisands' dilemma in The Way We Were: She was the free-spirited liberal and he was he conservative pragmatist. She writes that "to stifle one's natural impulses, is to eventually destroy oneself". With that in mind, she ultimately steers away from film roles that would have propelled her to a higher level of stardom -- including Chaplin's Limelight -- but would have required some form of personal compromise. In a bid to recover her little red hat of courage -- worn as a child to unfamiliar schools while on the road with the medicine show -- in 1976 Dennison decamps to Mexico's San Miguel de Allende to write. Whether stroking poisonous Gila Monsters, being unexpectedly hoisted high in the air in an elephant's trunk, or finding soulmates among her many four-legged companions, a common thread through her life is a sublime connection to nature. Serendipity and intuition are everything in this story. Key forks in the road made all the difference. Through choices born of being true to herself, Dennison crafts a life entirely worth living while threading the needles of anger and fear with love and fearlessness. The book is heavily illustrated with vintage photos going back more than a century. Includes mature content.


Slim and None

Slim and None

Author: Dan Jenkins

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0307419266

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Introduced in Dan Jenkins’s previous uproarious novel of the pro golf tour, The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist, Bobby Joe Grooves is now forty-four and still without a win in a major championship. A student of golf lore, Bobby Joe is well aware that only a small group of stars have ever won a major at his age or older, and among them are such immortals as Nicklaus, Boros, Irwin, and Trevino. It’s now or never for Bobby Joe, and excuse him for thinking that his chances are slim and none. So it’s off to the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, and the rest of the PGA Tour for Bobby Joe, who’s leaving behind the prospect of a third ex-wife. On the golf courses he’ll face familiar competitors such as Knut Thorssun and Cheetah Farmer, but the rival who may loom the largest is the game’s newest child star, nineteen-year-old Scott Pritchard. His talents are the talk of the Tour—so is his arrogance—and so, by the way, is his stunning mom, Gwendolyn, a shapely adorable woman who captures Bobby Joe’s full attention and threatens not to let go. Long revered by his peers as one of the world’s best sportswriters, and beloved by readers for such classics as Semi-Tough and Dead Solid Perfect, Dan Jenkins is at the top of his form in Slim and None. It’s packed with authentic insider gems about each of the majors and hilarious sketches of many of the characters—touring pros, officials, media, agents, caddies, and ladies—who inhabit this outrageous and endearing world of sports.