Only 14 men have been able to claim the honor of being the head football coach of the Temple Wildcats.
Bob McQueen, of course, is the dominant figure of this exclusive group with 243 victories in 28 seasons, highlighted by state championships in 1979 and 1992.
Men such as Leslie Cranfill, Ted Dawson and Jay Fikes made Wildcat football one of Texas’ winningest and most respected programs before McQueen took it into a whole new stratosphere.
Harvey Nual “Rusty” Russell was the third head football coach at Temple, from 1923-26. Russell ranks 10th on the Wildcats’ wins and games coached lists.
Yet it’s Russell who joins McQueen and Fikes as former Wildcat coaches inducted into the high school wing of the Texas Sports Hall of Fame. And only Russell resides in the general sports hall, as well.
Russell’s term in Temple was by all means successful. He guided the Wildcats to a 25-8-4 mark in those early yet already popular days of Texas high school football. His first head coaching job came in 1922 when he led Granger, which made periodic trips to the playoffs in the ’20s, to a 7-3 mark.
However, his biography on the TSHOF Web site does not mention his stints at Granger and Temple. But he did indeed cut his coaching teeth in Central Texas and got a glimpse of what was to come, coaching in games of statewide significance and interest.
Although he may be little more than a footnote in Granger and Temple football history, his footprint on the high school and college game is still being followed.
His hall induction and lasting mark center around the 16 seasons following his curious departure from Temple. Russell left the Wildcats after a successful 1926 campaign to start a football program at Fort Worth Masonic Home, an orphanage school for children who had lost at least one parent who was a Mason in good standing.
There likely has been a spike of interest in Russell’s life and career since last year’s release of Jim Dent’s book “Twelve Mighty Orphans,” which tells the story of how a tiny school with ragged uniforms took on the far bigger, richer giants of the day and developed a huge following while playing for state championships.
The book also serves as a rediscovery of one of the most innovative football minds of the first half of the 20th century, pioneering what would be known as the spread offense decades before it came into vogue.
- Puzzling career move -
The move from Temple to Fort Worth Masonic Home looked for all the world like career suicide. Russell’s Wildcat teams drew statewide attention and fit nicely in the same conversation with Paul Tyson’s dominant Waco teams of the era that routinely won or played for state titles.
Maybe it was a calling. Maybe it was an entrepreneurial spirit desiring to start something from scratch. Even Russell couldn’t put his finger on why he would take his pregnant wife and walk away from a steady position with a bright future to accept a $30-a-week job at a school that didn’t own a football and whose field was a literal cow pasture.
Dent, a longtime sportswriter who authored “The Junction Boys” about Paul “Bear” Bryant’s rugged boot-camp training regimen with the 1954 Texas A&M Aggies, explains that a friend of Russell’s originally took the job with the Home and changed his mind, then asked Russell to bail him out. For some reason, he did.
“People were saying disparaging things about him,” Dent writes. “He had to be crazy, they said. One of Texas’s hottest young coaching properties had, by his own choice, just crash-landed on the other side of the moon.”
- Accomplished athlete, hero -
Russell was an all-conference end at Howard Payne in 1921 and was also an all-conference basketball player - this despite losing much of his eyesight and almost his life in France during World War I when a canister of mustard gas blew up beside him in September of 1918, Dent reports.
Russell spent six months in a Paris hospital. He always would require thick-lensed glasses to see properly.
When Russell arrived in Temple in 1923, the Wildcats had been playing organized football for 16 seasons and doing very well. The 1922 team coached by Floyd Betts went 10-1-1, reaching the state quarterfinals. The Wildcats had tied eventual state champion Waco earlier in the season but lost 30-0 in the quarterfinals, serving as a precursor for a scenario that would repeat itself in the next four years.
The 1923 Wildcats went 5-3-1. They followed that in 1924 by winning their district - which included Austin and Corpus Christi - and then defeating Sabinal in bi-district before again falling to Waco, 27-0, in the quarterfinals. Waco handed the Wildcats their only loss the next season.
It was the 1926 Wildcats for whom locals held promise of a first state championship that wouldn’t come for 53 years.
All-state players such as Henry “Lanternjaw” Easterling, Oren “Dutch” Furl, Hayward Shull, Barton “Botchey” Koch and Woodie Zachry had Temple buzzing with excitement that fall. Those Wildcats won their first eight games - including a forfeit over Corpus Christi - by a combined score of 207-6.
- An early state championship game -
That led to the biggest showdown Woodson Field had ever hosted. Also-undefeated Waco would arrive in Temple on a Friday afternoon in November. It was being hailed as the true state championship game, though both teams still had another regular-season contest left on the schedule.
The Temple Daily Telegram reported on preparations being made to accommodate the throng that would descend on humble Woodson. Bleachers were borrowed from the local YMCA, Belton and a local baseball field to handle some 3,000 people. A telephone line was installed to relay results to Waco. Crowd estimates for that game ranged to as many as 10,000, with many patrons arriving two hours early to stake out a spot.
It was peculiar that Russell was not at the Wildcats’ practice the day before that game. He had been called away to officiate a game between Lorena and Moody.
Just as the Wildcats and Lions had blanked opponents week after week, they wound up doing it to themselves that day, playing to a scoreless tie. At that time, there was no provision for breaking a tie. Tiebreakers such as penetrations - awarding victory to the team that crossed its opponent’s 20-yard line the most - first downs or total yardage were not instituted until a couple of years later. Before 1928, teams simply had a rematch to determine a victor.
That rematch - still considered by many to be the hyperbolic state title game, if not the literal one - occurred at the Cotton Palace in Waco two weeks later.
The Wildcats jumped out to a 10-0 first-quarter lead. But Waco stormed back to score 27 unanswered points and claim a 27-10 victory, capturing the district title and advancing to the playoffs. Waco went on to win the third of its four state crowns in the ’20s.
Temple’s 1927 yearbook, Cotton Blossom, described the ’26 team as “the greatest ever turned out by Temple High School.” Koch later was inducted into the Texas High School Sports Hall of Fame, where he joined his coach.
It was amid the afterglow of the emotional 1926 season and expectations for those to come that Russell inexplicably left Temple, turning over the reins to assistant Bill Henderson. It wasn’t exactly a rebuilding year in ’27, as the Wildcats went 8-2.
- Building from the ground up . . . through the air -
As it turned out, bigger things awaited Russell at that orphanage and beyond. He quickly turned the Mighty Mites into a respected football power. He spread the field with receivers and a variety of offensive sets that had the single-wing-minded coaches of the day befuddled. He employed a brand of aerial football not seen before.
In 1932, Russell used his networking skills to gain admittance into the much larger Texas Interscholastic League’s (now the UIL) Fort Worth district, allowing the Mighty Mites the opportunity to play for true state titles in Class A rather than being limited to a regional status in the Class B division.
These days that would be akin to Russell’s first school, Granger, playing in a district with his final high school, Dallas Highland Park.
The 1932 Masonic Home team reached the state final and played Corsicana to a 0-0 tie, just as Russell’s Wildcats did in a critical district game of state title proportions against Waco six years prior.
Russell continued to enjoy stunning success at Masonic Home until he was finally wooed away by Highland Park. He actually coached at both schools in 1942.
In 1940, Russell’s Mighty Mites narrowly missed an opportunity to go to battle against his former school for the state championship game.
Masonic Home lost a heartbreaker to Amarillo in the semifinals for the right to play Temple, then coached by Cranfill. Amarillo went on to beat Temple 20-7 in the state final. Five of Russell’s Mighty Mites are enshrined in the Texas High School Sports Hall of Fame.
- Doak Walker and the college game -
At Highland Park, Russell began a lifelong association with football legend Doak Walker.
Russell’s taking an assistant’s position at Southern Methodist University under Matty Bell probably secured Walker’s decision to attend SMU.
Dent reported that Russell served as a mentor to Walker, and in Walker’s acceptance speech of the 1948 Heisman Trophy he said he never would have won it without Russell. Walker later named his first son after Russell.
Russell took over at SMU in 1950 and the Mustangs, powered by Kyle Rote, won their first six games and reached No. 1 in the polls. But the Mustangs sputtered down the stretch and had mediocre seasons the next two years, prompting Russell’s ouster.
He coached at the small-college level at Schreiner and Victoria before retiring after two seasons at his alma mater, Howard Payne, in 1963, 40 years after he first arrived in Temple.
Russell was inducted into the TSHOF in 1971 and again to the high school sports wing in 1990, seven years after his death.
Before he left Temple, Russell was lauded in the 1927 Cotton Blossom. The yearbook stated: “As a hard worker “Rusty” plays second fiddle to none. He held the respect of all his men.”
Not too bad for a footnote.
twaits@temple-telegram.com
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