Texas A&M Football
“It has been a long time since I’ve played football. I’ve kind of moved on. Maybe twenty years ago I would have felt nostalgic. Like I said, time has passed. The conversations I have with my old teammates and friends are mostly
“I think the initial reaction to landing the cover of Sports Illustrated was from my dad. Someone had told him about it or he had gotten word of it, but I had no idea. I just saw it when it first came out. From that point on, it was sort of one of the things that I remember a lot about my time here at A&M. But it was a collaborative effect of equals that allowed me to be on the cover. It wasn’t just me. It doesn’t play any factor in my life now. My life now is about my grandkids and what they’re doing in school and sports and things of that nature.
Like I say, I live in a little different world now, even though I live in College Station. I don’t follow sports very much at all. If I’m thumbing through the channels and someone’s playing, I may stop and look a while, but that was a real brief part of my life, which I’m thankful for – grateful. But I had a lot more life to live after I quit playing football when I was 28 years old. We talk more now about whose health is good and whose health is bad among former players.”
“I had known R.C. Slocum for a couple years prior to me being a senior in high school. That was during a time when there was pretty much unlimited contact. He had basically befriended my family. He knew everybody in my family – my aunts and uncles – and of course, my mom and dad loved him to death. I was going to Beaumont for a shopping trip one weekend, and he called me and said that if I was going to be in the area why don’t I stop by Orange where his brother lived, which is just off the beaten path there a little bit.
We’re sitting out, and his brother’s barbecuing, when he gets this phone call, and he goes inside the house. All this time he’s preaching about the state of Kansas, Kansas State and that area. He comes back out and says, ‘You know all that stuff I was telling you about up there?’ He says, ‘Man, it gets really, really cold up in that area, so how about A&M?’ We talked about it a little bit, and I came up for a visit. Of course that visiting weekend, Ed Simonini was here and I think Skip Walker and Garth TenNapel – there were a ton of guys that actually, eventually signed here. That was a time when you could walk out on the gym floor, and they would introduce you at halftime of a basketball game.
Well, if you gave the ‘thumbs up’ that meant you were coming to school here. Well, we didn’t know that. We were just giving the ‘thumbs up’ like, ‘Hey look, that’s what everybody else does.’ The next day you go in to see Coach Bellard, and he says, ‘Well son, I appreciate you deciding to come to school here.’ And I said, ‘Well Coach, I didn’t really decide yet. I’m still kind of wanting to…’ Coach Bellard said, ‘Nope. That’s what that meant last night.’ But R.C. had already convinced my mom and dad this was the best place for me. Obviously, he was going to be here, so they felt comfortable enough to allow me to sign here. It was probably the best thing I ever could have done.”
“I never really looked at my playing days from a racial standpoint. I looked at it from the standpoint of: here’s an opportunity for you to play and play right away. In regards to what color I was, I only heard that later on after Coach Bellard had become pretty old, and we talked about it in great detail. I never looked at it that way. It was a place to go play. I knew there were very few black players on the team before we got here, but to me, that didn’t matter. If you can play, you can play. Then the next year we recruited guys like Tank Marshall and Lester Hayes and that group, so it kind of snowballed from there.”
“You call it fun (to play in the wishbone offense), but I’m going to call it something else. I’ve had both of my hips replaced. It’s a grueling type of offense, because you’re not only asked to run the ball periodically – if we averaged ten, eleven times a game, that was a big game – but you also had to block every play. There was never a time when you didn’t – carry out a fake? I didn’t know what that was. No, you’ve got to go lead block. And my first year or so – year and a half – the guy who invented it was our position coach. I spent a lot of time with Coach Bellard my first two years, and I can still hear him barking behind me running, ‘Sink into the hips. Sink into the hips, son.’ You know, here thirty or forty years later, my hips have been sunk.”
“I started fiddling with things when I was probably 12 or 13 years old. I initially tore my first house down with an old carpenter over in my hometown. I was fascinated with the way that it went together. So I always wanted to put things back together. My parents would always tell me that they would not leave me at home, because I would always take things apart, whether it was a radio or whatever. It was just something that I always enjoyed doing. So I kept doing it. Even my rookie year and the first two or three years when I was in Atlanta, I’d come back in the summer and I’d work as a carpenter for an old guy over in east Texas. It’s just something I enjoy. I really like it.”
“In ’85 I came back and started working as the recruiting coordinator at A&M for a little while. I thought about getting into coaching, but I could see the difference between the way I approached sports and what other people did. I just thought, ‘This is probably not going to be the best thing for me.’ Athletes are so much different now. It’s about brands and things of that nature as opposed to what I thought was a team sport. I’m just kind of a little put off with a lot of things that I see in sports now.”
“I think the turning point (of Emory Bellard’s teams) happened when we started to become sophomores and juniors and get a little more experience, because most of us played in smaller schools. I played in 3A, and I think Skip was in 2A. We were used to playing in front of crowds of about two- or three-thousand people. You go down there and it’s sixty-, seventy-thousand people. So it’s a big adjustment to make. I think just us growing up – we stayed together as a group. I think of all the guys that came in that year, pretty much all of us graduated. A lot of us got a chance to go play at the next level, but going down there and playing in that environment was difficult. I think, if I’m not mistaken, that was the first time that three backs for A&M in the wishbone had rushed for 100 yards. I think it was me, Skip and Bucky Sams.”
“Coach Bellard, I was with him quite a few days before he passed away. I was over there almost every other weekend. He meant a lot to me. I mean, he gave me an opportunity. My mom and dad trusted R.C. that he was going to make sure that I did what I needed to do to get through this process, and he did. And he still is. I see him and talk to him all the time now.”
Aggie Flashback with former A&M RB Bubba Bean
Key quotes from Bubba Bean interview
“I still live locally. I moved back in ’86, and I’ve been here ever since. I enjoy playing a little golf and doing a lot of construction. That’s my passion. The company that I’m working for – we’re doing a lot of the material testing over at Kyle Field. I just happened to be out here this week with a guy going on vacation, so I’m sitting here in what used to be the parking lot at Kyle Field.”“It has been a long time since I’ve played football. I’ve kind of moved on. Maybe twenty years ago I would have felt nostalgic. Like I said, time has passed. The conversations I have with my old teammates and friends are mostly
“I think the initial reaction to landing the cover of Sports Illustrated was from my dad. Someone had told him about it or he had gotten word of it, but I had no idea. I just saw it when it first came out. From that point on, it was sort of one of the things that I remember a lot about my time here at A&M. But it was a collaborative effect of equals that allowed me to be on the cover. It wasn’t just me. It doesn’t play any factor in my life now. My life now is about my grandkids and what they’re doing in school and sports and things of that nature.
Like I say, I live in a little different world now, even though I live in College Station. I don’t follow sports very much at all. If I’m thumbing through the channels and someone’s playing, I may stop and look a while, but that was a real brief part of my life, which I’m thankful for – grateful. But I had a lot more life to live after I quit playing football when I was 28 years old. We talk more now about whose health is good and whose health is bad among former players.”
“I had known R.C. Slocum for a couple years prior to me being a senior in high school. That was during a time when there was pretty much unlimited contact. He had basically befriended my family. He knew everybody in my family – my aunts and uncles – and of course, my mom and dad loved him to death. I was going to Beaumont for a shopping trip one weekend, and he called me and said that if I was going to be in the area why don’t I stop by Orange where his brother lived, which is just off the beaten path there a little bit.
We’re sitting out, and his brother’s barbecuing, when he gets this phone call, and he goes inside the house. All this time he’s preaching about the state of Kansas, Kansas State and that area. He comes back out and says, ‘You know all that stuff I was telling you about up there?’ He says, ‘Man, it gets really, really cold up in that area, so how about A&M?’ We talked about it a little bit, and I came up for a visit. Of course that visiting weekend, Ed Simonini was here and I think Skip Walker and Garth TenNapel – there were a ton of guys that actually, eventually signed here. That was a time when you could walk out on the gym floor, and they would introduce you at halftime of a basketball game.
Well, if you gave the ‘thumbs up’ that meant you were coming to school here. Well, we didn’t know that. We were just giving the ‘thumbs up’ like, ‘Hey look, that’s what everybody else does.’ The next day you go in to see Coach Bellard, and he says, ‘Well son, I appreciate you deciding to come to school here.’ And I said, ‘Well Coach, I didn’t really decide yet. I’m still kind of wanting to…’ Coach Bellard said, ‘Nope. That’s what that meant last night.’ But R.C. had already convinced my mom and dad this was the best place for me. Obviously, he was going to be here, so they felt comfortable enough to allow me to sign here. It was probably the best thing I ever could have done.”
“I never really looked at my playing days from a racial standpoint. I looked at it from the standpoint of: here’s an opportunity for you to play and play right away. In regards to what color I was, I only heard that later on after Coach Bellard had become pretty old, and we talked about it in great detail. I never looked at it that way. It was a place to go play. I knew there were very few black players on the team before we got here, but to me, that didn’t matter. If you can play, you can play. Then the next year we recruited guys like Tank Marshall and Lester Hayes and that group, so it kind of snowballed from there.”
“You call it fun (to play in the wishbone offense), but I’m going to call it something else. I’ve had both of my hips replaced. It’s a grueling type of offense, because you’re not only asked to run the ball periodically – if we averaged ten, eleven times a game, that was a big game – but you also had to block every play. There was never a time when you didn’t – carry out a fake? I didn’t know what that was. No, you’ve got to go lead block. And my first year or so – year and a half – the guy who invented it was our position coach. I spent a lot of time with Coach Bellard my first two years, and I can still hear him barking behind me running, ‘Sink into the hips. Sink into the hips, son.’ You know, here thirty or forty years later, my hips have been sunk.”
“I started fiddling with things when I was probably 12 or 13 years old. I initially tore my first house down with an old carpenter over in my hometown. I was fascinated with the way that it went together. So I always wanted to put things back together. My parents would always tell me that they would not leave me at home, because I would always take things apart, whether it was a radio or whatever. It was just something that I always enjoyed doing. So I kept doing it. Even my rookie year and the first two or three years when I was in Atlanta, I’d come back in the summer and I’d work as a carpenter for an old guy over in east Texas. It’s just something I enjoy. I really like it.”
“In ’85 I came back and started working as the recruiting coordinator at A&M for a little while. I thought about getting into coaching, but I could see the difference between the way I approached sports and what other people did. I just thought, ‘This is probably not going to be the best thing for me.’ Athletes are so much different now. It’s about brands and things of that nature as opposed to what I thought was a team sport. I’m just kind of a little put off with a lot of things that I see in sports now.”
“I think the turning point (of Emory Bellard’s teams) happened when we started to become sophomores and juniors and get a little more experience, because most of us played in smaller schools. I played in 3A, and I think Skip was in 2A. We were used to playing in front of crowds of about two- or three-thousand people. You go down there and it’s sixty-, seventy-thousand people. So it’s a big adjustment to make. I think just us growing up – we stayed together as a group. I think of all the guys that came in that year, pretty much all of us graduated. A lot of us got a chance to go play at the next level, but going down there and playing in that environment was difficult. I think, if I’m not mistaken, that was the first time that three backs for A&M in the wishbone had rushed for 100 yards. I think it was me, Skip and Bucky Sams.”
“Coach Bellard, I was with him quite a few days before he passed away. I was over there almost every other weekend. He meant a lot to me. I mean, he gave me an opportunity. My mom and dad trusted R.C. that he was going to make sure that I did what I needed to do to get through this process, and he did. And he still is. I see him and talk to him all the time now.”
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