Willie Ray Smith Sr. coached high school football in southeast Texas for 33 years, living throughout a a period of American history spanning the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights movement and the end of segregation.
He emerged from those troubled times with a legacy as much more than a football coach and a teacher.
Smith’s career with the Beaumont Independent School District, near Houston, included working as a liaison officer between schools as the district implemented court-ordered desegregation. Upon retirement from a career of overcoming, the district named “Willie Ray Smith Middle School” for him.
That has been one way they honor his legacy in southeast Texas. Another has been the Willie Ray Smith Offensive and Defensive Player of the Year Awards presented to the area’s top two players among 32 high schools.
At Michigan State, Willie Ray Smith is known more simply as the “father of Bubba Smith.”
That’s not necessarily insignificant since Charles “Bubba” Smith, 6-foot-8, 295-pound defensive end with an outsized personality, was the face of Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty’s Underground Railroad teams in the 1960s that led the integration of college football. The Spartans increased national awareness of a fully integrated roster with their back-to-back national titles in 1965 (United Press International) and 1966 (National Football Foundation co-champions with Notre Dame).
Connections over time and regions can be fascinating. This story, intended to connect fan bases in southeast Texas and at Michigan State on how they view Willie Ray Smith Sr., includes fascinating connections.
Thus, Pre-Bubba and Post-Bubba backdrops needed to be painted to tell the full story of a giant – a coach bigger in some ways than his son, who was big enough to block out the sun. Willie Ray Sr’s death at age 81 in 1992 followed that of his wife Georgia, who also was a career teacher. Bubba passed away in 2011 and Tody in 1999.
PRE-BUBBA
Willie Ray Smith Sr. was a head coach at three segregated high schools, Dunbar in Lufkin, 1942-46; Wallace in Orange, 1947-56; and Charlton-Pollard in Beaumont, 1957-75.
His teams won two Texas black state titles and played in two other finals among 235 career victories. In addition to winning district titles, that’s 7.1 wins a year in an era when 10-game seasons were rare.
His record includes sending 20 of his athletes to play pro football and dozens on to college, including his three sons, Willie Ray Jr. (Iowa), Bubba (Michigan State) and Tody (Michigan State/USC). Bubba and Tody also played in the NFL.
But despite Willie Ray Smith Sr.’s success, he was an accidental football coach.
Accidental because he grew up poor in Denton, Tex., uninterested in sports despite his 6-foot-4 height. He also had suffered a severe leg injury from a shotgun blast to his thigh while a teenager caught in a confrontation. He walked with a limp the rest of his life.
Accidental because despite graduating from Prairie View A&M he was without a teaching job in the depression years. He was working at a chemical company when the outbreak of World War II left Lufkin High, a black school in Dunbar, Tex., without a football coach; he had been drafted into the Army. So for the 1942 season, Dunbar’s principal hired Smith as then 31-year-old teacher and coach despite no experience playing or coaching football.
With no assistant coaches, he prepared for his first season reading football textbooks. In a tribute video about him he told a story, laughing at himself, about how his first players helped him learn the game.
“The first year coaching I wanted to be tough,” Smith said. “A boy was in the the tackle position and after he made the block, he was standing up. I hollered, ‘What are you supposed to be doing?’ … I didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing.
“He said, I”m a tackle, coach.”
“Well, act like a tackle!”
“I am acting like a tackle.”
“One of the boys called me after practice and said, ‘Coach, we’re going to help you learn how to coach.’ ”
Although that was the beginning of his X’s and O’s background, with time his peers later said his greater strengths were his reputation as a disciplinarian, a motivator, an innovator and his keen eye for talent. He fit his athletes with their best positions.
Four seasons later, with the end of World War II, Dunbar’s coach returned home and was reassigned to his job. However, it didn’t spell the end of Smith’s coaching career.
Moton High in Orange, Tx., had been renamed Wallace High for its principal, Emma Wallace, an esteemed Texas educator and civic leader. Emma Wallace wanted a new football coach for a school that had been without a winning season in four years, with one of the losses said to be 100-0. Smith was hired, and he and his wife relocated to southeast Texas.
Smith turned the program around quickly, guiding the Wallace Dragons to a state runner-up finish in 1947 while competing in the Prairie View Interscholastic League, the governing body for Texas black sports. That was the first of three straight state final trips topped by claiming the state championship in 1949. The Dragons won another state title in 1954. The success of the black school with a small enrollment drew crowds of 5,000 that were said to have more white fans than black turning out to watch.
Bum Phillips, an NFL head coach in Houston and New Orleans from 1975 to 1985, grew up in Orange and attended Wallace games prior to his own coaching career in the 1950s at all-white high schools in southeast Texas.
” All he had was worn out equipment,” Phillips said in the tribute video. “He didn’t have a budget. He was coaching on a shoestring.”
One of Smith’s Orange players was Ernie Ladd, who went on to star at Grambling State and play eight pro football seasons in the American Football League (prior to the merger with the NFL). According to Garlette Boyette, 81, one of Ladd’s high school and Grambling teammates that went on to his own nine-year NFL career with the St. Louis Cardinals and Houston Oilers, Smith’s use of Ladd as a long-snapping center was a prime example of Smith matching his players with their skills.
Ladd, a 6-foot-9, 290-pounder as a pro, had a knack for sending his snap on a twisting arc that could hit a running back on the move for a special sweep play. Smith sprung Ladd’s magic to surprise opponents only at opportune times.
“The ball would be in the middle of the field and Ernie snapped the ball to the hashmark,” Boyette said. “The running back would take the snap on the run to get a head start on a sweep. We didn’t do it often, but it wasn’t a trick play. It fit everything we did on offense.”
However, when Emma Wallace retired in 1952, Smith coached five more years as friction grew between him and the new principal. Smith resigned and took the job at Charlton-Pollard, his final coaching stop the next year 18 years.
Boyette was a senior at Orange when Smith’s successor took over.
“He called us together to introduce himself,” Boyette said. “He talked for about 30 minutes and then he told us seniors, ‘You’re dismissed.’ He was tired of hearing about Coach Smith’s success so he got rid of his seniors. He didn’t want to hear it. A lot of guys didn’t play their senior year, and it cost them a scholarship.”
Boyette was fortunate. Ladd informed legendary Grambling coach Eddie Robinson about his high school teammate that was a year behind him. Robinson offered Boyette a scholarship despite not playing his senior season.
Years later Boyette gained some revenge “best served cold” when the coach that dismissed his senior class was coaching at high school in Los Angeles.
“I was playing for the Cardinals against the Rams in Los Angeles, and he brought a couple of his assistant coaches with him to the game,” Boyette said. “When he saw me after the game, he told his friends I was one of his players in Texas. I said, ‘I never played for you.’ ”
Smith began winning games and district titles at Charlton-Pollard to continue his stature in the state. All three of Smith’s sons played for him, but Bubba said there was no favoritism.
“There was pressure playing for him,” Bubba said in the tribute video. “He told us we had to be twice as good to make the team. I was under the impression it would be the opposite — we’ve got the edge with Dad as the coach. … Oh, no. O-h-h, n-o-o.”
Willie Ray Sr explained in the video, “Anytime they said tried to use they were the coach’s son, I got them straight right away. I said they had no more advantage than anybody else. Of course, I was lying. He was my son.’ ”
Although Bubba rose to the greatest fame, Willie Ray Jr. was the most celebrated of the three sons as high school athlete and most highly recruited among as a running back. Bubba was a teammate as a sophomore while still growing into his body.
However, Willie Ray Jr. suffered a knee injury late in his senior year. He had a scholarship to Iowa and played on the freshman team in 1961 (when NCAA rules prohibited freshman eligibility), but the injury plagued him. His lone varsity season was 1962, carrying the ball only 37 times for 136 yards in nine games. He only touchdown was on one of his three receptions.
Before Willie Ray Jr. left Iowa, without finishing his career, Bubba took a recruiting trip to the Big Ten campus in Iowa City. Bubba said years later Willie Ray Jr. told him on the trip not to pick Iowa as his college choice. That began Willie Sr.’s efforts to steer Bubba toward Michigan State, another Big Ten school.
Willie Sr. continued coaching until taking a position as a liaison officer and upon retirement the district naming a middle school for him. To have a school named for a football coach is exalted status, but one of Smith’s former high school players later felt a football award was needed. In 1992, Jess Phillips, who had played for Smith at Charlton-Pollard prior to three years as a starter at Michigan State and another 10 seasons in the NFL, launched the first Willie Ray Smith Offensive and Defensive Player of the Year Awards.
Along with a banquet the past 28 years, the award soon gained prestige.
“The kids call it the Heisman Trophy of southeast Texas,” said Jorge Ramos, a sportswriter at the Beaumont Enterprise.
The 2019 recipients were West Brook senior quarterback Troy Yowman and West Orange-Stark junior linebacker Tyrone Brown.
Brown, who is verbally committed to Baylor in the Class of 2021, said in a phone conversation the award first captured his imagination as a sixth-grader. That was the 2014 season when future Alabama and Arizona Cardinals defensive back Deionte Thompson won it while playing for Brown’s alma mater, West Orange-Stark.
“I wanted to win it since then,” said Brown. “I hope I can win it twice.”
Putting on the banquet, sponsored by the Beaumont Founders Lions Club, is a labor of love, says Vera Sanders, a Beaumont businesswomen and Lions officer. She’s 84 and says every year is her “last” until she decides to run it “one more” year. The speakers have included Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker and Pro Football Hall of Famers Bob Lilly and Bob Hayes.
“We’ve been fortunate with the speakers that have agreed to attend,” Sanders said. “We’ve had the agent of some coaches turn us down because they want an honorarium. We’re a service club, and our budget is to pay for the players, parents and their coaches to attend. It’s an exciting event. There is a tribute video to Coach Smith, and we love hearing the speeches from the players.”
POST-BUBBA
Willie Ray Sr., like his accidental coaching career, became an accidental conductor on the Underground Railroad. It was through his respect for Daugherty, the Spartans’ colorblind College Football Hall of Fame coach, and his reaction to his oldest son’s unhappy experience at Iowa.
Smith asked Daugherty to take his middle son, Bubba. In Daugherty’s 1974 book, Duffy, he says Smith called him and asked him to “take a chance on my boy Bubba and try to make a man out of him.”
Apparently, despite Willie Ray Sr.’s reputation as a strict disciplinarian, Bubba was as rambunctious with parents and teachers. He was known for lacking motivation his first two years at Michigan State (one on the freshmen team before the NCAA eligibility). Bubba ran plenty of disciplinary laps, Daugherty and Smith’s Michigan State teammates have said, until the light finally flicked on for Bubba his junior year in 1965, the first of back-to-back consensus All-American honors.
Bubba was the first pick of the 1967 NFL draft — a year changed the face of the and with four of the first eight picks black players from Michigan State — and was on a path to the Pro Football Hall of Fame with a Super Bowl title and two Pro Bowl trips. But a knee injury in the 1972 preseason sidetracked his career.
Bubba’s longer lasting legacy has been as the face, with his play and personality, of Daugherty’s Underground Railroad teams. Willie Ray Sr. was among southern black high school coaches, starting in the late 1950s, that trusted Daugherty.0 The reputation was born from Daugherty speaking at a national coaching clinic in Atlanta.
When Daugherty learned that the black coaches were denied entry, he put on his own free clinic for them. He continued the practice over the years. A vast network was born across the south that separated Michigan State from other schools that recruited only a handful of black athletes. In those days, a high school coach was the most influential figure for a teenager to pick his college future.
Bubba was among four College Football Hall-of- Famers in the 1963 recruiting class, joining George Webster, Anderson, S.C., the fifth pick of the ’67 NFL draft; Gene Washington, La Porte, Tx., eighth pick of the ’67 NFL draft; and Clinton Jones, Cleveland, Ohio, the second pick of the ’67 NFL draft. When Jones followed his three teammates into the Hall in 2015, it marked the first time four black players from the same class were enshrined into the Hall. It also was the first time since 1940 for any school with four players from the same class.
Another All-Big Ten player in the 1963 class was linebacker Charlie Thornhill of Roanoke, Va. Jimmy Summers was a starting cornerback from Orangeburg, S.C.
Jimmy Raye, a quarterback in the 1964 class from Fayetteville, N.C., was the South’s first black quarterback to win a national title as a backup in 1965 and starter in 1966. He also broke barriers as a coach, getting his start under Daugherty at Michigan State and continuing the next four decades in the NFL
The 1965 class included Phillips, the Smith awards founder, who was one of nine players from the Houston area that Smith sent to play for Daugherty’s 1960s Underground Railroad. Most prominent among those from rival Houston-area high schools was Washington. Both Willie Ray Sr. and Bubba, who had played against Washington’s Baytown High teams in football, basketball and track, told Daugherty to take Washington, too. Washington has often stated his indebtedness to the Smiths and Michigan State.
Bubba’s 1963 recruiting began a symbiosis that pushed the needle to recognizing a fully integrated roster. Such puzzle might not have pieced together at any other school as startlingly well as it did with the Michigan State’s cast of talent and characters. They played together through the 1966 season. TV contributed to the awareness with vast audiences that watched the 1966 Rose Bowl (1965 season) and the 1966 Game of the Century with Notre Dame. A record TV audience of 33 million viewed the quasi-national championship played on Nov. 19, 1966 at Spartan Stadium. Notre Dame quarterback Terry Hanratty has said it was bigger than the Super Bowls he played in with the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The increased awareness included schools with a long history of integrated rosters as they began to follow the example of the Underground Railroad.
— In 1960, Minnesota won the national title with five black players.
— In 1966, Michigan State lined up 20 black players with 11 black starters against Notre Dame with one black athlete, Alan Page, in the Game of the Century that ended in a controversial 10-10 tie.
— In 1967, USC won the national title with seven black players. But by 1972, USC’s next national title, the Trojans featured 23 black athletes.
Segregation at many Southeastern Conference schools, including Alabama with coach Paul “Bear” Bryant dragging his feet, lasted into the 1970s – long after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling and the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights acts.
The myth that black and white athletes couldn’t get along in a locker room, one that Bryant protégé Gene Stallings espoused as late as 1965 as Texas A&M’s head coach, began to be ignored as a fallacy.
Smith’s fingerprints were instrumental in laying the tracks to the Underground Railroad along with his fellow southern black coaches, and they are still evident with the high percentage of African-American athletes in college and pro football.
“Willie Ray Smith was legendary,” said Brown of winning the award last month. “It’s a big honor. It’s as big as it gets.”
You could say bigger than Bubba Smith, and that includes Smith adding to his image in popular culture as Moses Hightower in the “Police Academy” movies and in the popular \Miller Lite commercials with his sidekick, Dick Butkus.
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I invite you to follow me on Twitter @shanny4055
Tom Shanahan, Author: Raye of Light http://tinyurl.com/knsqtqu
— Book on Michigan State’s leading role in the integration of college football. It explains Duffy Daugherty’s untold pioneering role and debunks myths that steered recognition away from him to Bear Bryant.
http://shanahan.report/a/the-case-for-duffy-and-medal-of-freedom
Don’t believe the myths at Duffy Daugherty’s expense about Bear Bryant’s motivation to play the 1970 USC-Alabama game or myths about the Charlie Thornhill-for-Joe Namath trade. Bear Bryant knew nothing about black talent in the South while he dragged his feet on segregation.
http://www.shanahan.report/a/forty-four-underground-railroad-legacy-facts
http://shanahan.report/a/myths-that-grew-out-of-1970-alabama-game-with-usc
http://shanahan.report/a/mystery-solved-in-thornhill-and-namath-myth
David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize winner and biographer; “History writes people out of the story. It’s our job to write them back in.”
https://www.augustpublications.com/
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