TAMU Press editor Thom Lemmons on Dave Campbell's Texas Football collection

Key notes from Thom Lemmons interview

• Writing this book with Dave was a blast . There’s a ton of stuff that we had to cut because of how much history Dave Campbell knows, he’s a walking Texas football encyclopedia. Dave reached out to us about writing the book, and I nearly jumped out of chair in excitement. He’s a blast and so much fun to listen to. He has so many fun stories. 
   
• I did have to dial back the Baylor content a little bit, because it needed to be more about the old southwest conference. Dave grew up a Baylor guy, so you can’t fault him for focusing on them more than anyone, but we managed to find a good balance in this book. There are so many great stories that need to be shared about the Southwest conference. 
   
• Dave Campbell started covering football in 1953, and this book predates that. His first assignment was covering Baylor in California for the Waco Tribune Harold. 
   
• The Billy P. Huddleston story was super important to add to the book. It took a little bit of work to find a picture of Billy, but we managed to find one through the library archives. 
   
• Styles change, and its true for anything. What I grew up reading is different from today, so this book lets you go back and recapture those moments that set you back in time. 
   
• Vast majority of these stories came from Dave’s columns in the newspaper. There is a few side stories on people like RC Slocum, Gene Stallings, and my personal favorite story about Bear Bryant and the Hurricane game in 1956. Jim Swink vs. Jon David Crow was an unbelievable matchup at the time.  
   
• Dave was in Junction in 1954 during the Bear Bryant era. He had a chance to cover it for a day and talk to the players. A lot of cool stories came from that. 
   
• The hurricane game is my favorite story. 1956 between A&M and TCU. The wind really picked up near the end of the first  half. There is a great story of Bear sending an assistant to perch on a pole near the end zone to make notes of TCU defensive scheme. He would then drop  the paper to an assistant who would then run it to Bear.  They ended up forgetting him at halftime, so he spent the halftime stuck on the pole with all the wind and rain. Of course, A&M comes back to score a touchdown and converts the extra point to win the game. Some TCU fans, maybe even till this day, still complained that a Swink touchdown was wrongly taken away.
   
• We’ve got a very exciting book about the 1968 Cotton Bowl between A&M and Alabama, but the focus of the book is on the relationship between Gene Stallings and Bear Bryant.