Football paved the way for 1950’s MP team mates
When I called and invited myself out to Billy Lyle’s place, Sam Olds’s name opened the door.
“Sam said you won back to back championships at the Tangerine Bowl,” I said to Billy Lyles, 88. The timing was perfect – I got there just after he’d finished the first of his two-a-day workouts on the treadmill.
It’s best to keep moving.
There wasn’t anything left to win after the Tangerine Bowl.
There wasn’t a league sanctioned national champion in the years the Tangerine Bowl committee guaranteed a showdown between their pick of the nation’s best teams from conference champions of what evolved into today’s Division II NCAA ranks.
The pair of Tangerine Bowl Championship trophies on the wall by Billy’s easy chair are priceless since there will never be any more. It’s the Citrus Bowl now, still played in Orlando, Florida, as far from home as Billy’d been back then.
He’s from the country, the old Monticello farm community where he still lives, not far from where he grew up.
Sam Olds grew up in town and met Billy when he came to Mt. Pleasant for high school and was immediately recruited for the freshman Tiger football team.
“He’s the greatest natural athlete I’ve ever seen,” said Sam, who saw plenty of prime jocks after breaking into the Southwest Conference ranks.
This spring, it’ll be 70 years since Sam and Billy graduated high school where both survived fractious player-coach relationships.
“Sam grew up on the wrong side of the tracks,” explained Billy, which a number of fans attributed to his playing behind a more prominent starter, making him possibly the only Mt. Pleasant High second string quarterback ever to get a full-ride NCAA scholarship.
“I got put in once on a third and long,” said Sam. The crowd at the old WPA rock stadium on West 1st roared to life, coming to its feet as he broke into the secondary on a quarterback keeper, leaving the Tigers with first and goal on the three where the coach pulled him and put in the starter who scored on the next play.
Billy likewise found his coach difficult to work with.
“One day at practice he got mad because of how hard Billy hit a guy,” Sam said. “The coach threatened to send Billy to the locker room to turn in his uniform. Billy told him if he wanted his uniform he’d have to take it,” which ended the discussion.
Early in Sam’s memories of growing up on the East Side, there was a barbecue joint where his daddy regularly associated with the community bootlegger, so Sam grew up with the bootlegger’s son.
Sports provided his ticket out of town. While his varsity coach brushed him aside, freshman coach O.L. Colley loved him.
“I was our quarterback,” Sam said. “Billy was our running back. We went 10-0 our freshman year.”
At East Texas State, Billy was moved to the line, made a guard.
“In those days, you played both ways, offense and defense,” said Billy, who was twice named to the Dallas Morning News All Texas team.
Paul “Bear” Bryant was coaching at Texas A&M when he came to Mt. Pleasant recruiting the spring Sam and Billy graduated.
“Coach Colley told him I had the best arm he’d ever seen,” said Sam. He came close to signing with the Aggies, a plan that changed after he and Billy went out to Fort Worth together and visited TCU, whose Coach Abe Martin had come to Mt. Pleasant to call on Sam.
“He came to our house,” said Sam, who still slips in and out of town to visit his father’s grave and go out to call on Billy Lyles. “He sat on the front porch with my dad – he treated us as equals. That’s why I decided to go to TCU.”
Sam’s dad worked in the forest, cutting logs. His mom had left them both.
Sam tells a story about his dad putting cardboard in his shoes when the soles wore out.
“He kept wearing those shoes so he could buy me a baseball glove,” Sam said. “I was in the fifth grade and I’d made the sixth grade softball team.”
As a red-shirt freshman, Sam played against Ole Miss in the New Year’s Day 1956 Cotton Bowl after TCU beat Texas for the Southwest Conference Championship.
“It was a freak deal,” Sam said. On the opening kickoff, TCU quarterback and punter Ray Taylor took a lick that broke two ribs. Sam was sent in twice to punt.
After TCU, he met an Allstate Insurance agent in a Sears store, a chance encounter that launched his insurance career. Starting with Allstate, he later became an independent agent with an office in Phoenix.
His retirement includes a cabin on Mogollon Rim, a landmark with a peak 7,000 feet above Phoenix.
Billy Lyles coached in Mt. Pleasant, Talco and Pittsburg, where a player he groomed remembers his style.
“You’d be down in your stance and he’d come up behind you and pull the hair on the back of your legs just to make you mad,” he said.
It was four degrees at Sam’s cabin on Mogollon Rim, where he’d gone up to spend the night before the morning he called to say it’d be a good time to go out and get a picture of Billy with his Tangerine Bowl championship plaques. Billy’s birthday was coming up.
The morning that the mercury stalled in the single digit range up on the rim, the forecast called for the temp to hit the high 60’s down in Phoenix, where Sam and his golfing buddies had reserved an afternoon tee time.
“My drive’s not what it used to be,” admitted Sam, “but I make up for it chipping and putting well enough to wear out the youngsters.”
He gave me Billy’s number and told me to call back and tell him what Billy had to say when I went out.
So I did.
First thing every morning, Billy writes his daily schedule on a dry erase board just to make sure he doesn’t forget to eat lunch or skip his workouts.
He didn’t need it to remember Sam Olds.
“Sammy Bob!” he laughed, and cut back through time more than 70 years.
In the huddle at critical points in any game that freshman year they went 10-0, any time Billy wanted to fire up his quarterback and make him mad, “What’s it gonna be, Sammy Bob?” he’d ask before Sam called the play.
“I never did like that name,” Sam said, so nobody dared call him that, “except Billy Lyles.”
Billy married Sarah Scott, who “grew up right over here,” he said, gesturing vaguely over his shoulder, more interested in the oil painting of a setter that caught my attention and caused me to wonder aloud if there were still quail in the country when he kept bird dogs.
He passed on my question in favor of remembering Sarah.
“She painted that for me,” he said, and smiled and was quiet for a moment, which I reported when I called Sam back.
Sam was quiet for a moment.
“It’s about time for me to come visit,” Sam said, “maybe this spring.”
“You still out on the golf course?”
“As a matter of fact, the youngsters are waiting for me to hit.”
“Have one of them shoot a picture of you and text it back,” I said.
At 88, it’s best to keep moving.
