By Merv Moore
In the fall of 1989, I was 22 years old, three months out of college, and about as ready for Crockett, Texas as a tennis player is ready for a linebacker blitz. Which is to say, not at all.
I was a city kid from Seagoville. I had covered football for two seasons at Bethel University, chasing the Royals around Minnesota fields in the kind of cold that makes Texans stay indoors. I knew the process. Attend the game. Grab the coaches after. Head back to the office. Write it, develop the photos, cut the copy, paste it onto the sheets by hand like a monk assembling scripture out of box scores. I had done it dozens of times. I thought I was ready for anything.
I was not ready for Crockett.
The New Sports Editor of the Houston County Courier
Bassett Keller was the publisher, and for whatever reason, he handed a 22 year-old city boy the keys to his sports section. Jim Brannan, the editor in chief, ran point on the Crockett Bulldogs. Larry Lamb had the Lovelady Lions. I got the Grapeland Sandies, which was a fine assignment, mostly because it meant covering a quarterback named Sterling Davidson who looked like he had been built in a lab specifically to play college football at the highest level.
I was loud. I was opinionated. And, I was also rarely wrong, though I will let the readers of 1989 be the judge of that.
Crockett itself was another matter. It reminded me, uncomfortably, of the parts of the Deep South I had spent my whole life steering clear of. The newspaper rented me a house on the white side of the tracks, which instantly did something I never asked for. It quietly told the Black community across those tracks that I belonged somewhere else, before I had said a single word to anyone. I was a stranger who arrived already sorted. I made the two hour drive back to Seagoville more times than I will admit, just to remember what it felt like to breathe normally.
Filling In on the Bulldogs
One week, Jim had to leave town, and the Bulldogs fell into my lap. Press box, postgame interviews, the whole production, capped off by the familiar late night ritual of writing, developing, and pasting until the ink was practically part of my bloodstream. That was the week I really met Monte Jack Driskell.
Crockett’s Black community, tucked across those same tracks that had already boxed me out, was absolutely loaded with football talent, and Monte Jack had built a squad that ran downhill and rarely apologized for it. His quarterback was his own son, Jamie, a kid who looked like he weighed about as much as the play sheet he was reading off of. Jamie mostly threw the ball to his tight end and otherwise let the running game do the talking. My first instinct, the instinct of a know-it-all sportswriter, was suspicion. Nepotism at quarterback is a story as old as high school football itself.
I was wrong, and the more I watched him, the more obvious it became. Jamie was tough. He was smart. He read the game the way a good tennis player reads an opponent’s next shot, which made sense, since tennis was his other sport, and mine too. We had that in common before we ever said much to each other.
The Pickem Title and the Cricket Incident
Every week the Courier ran a Pickem contest, county officials publicly guessing the winners of the local games, and by playoff time I was locked in a battle for the title with Crockett’s own city manager. We both privately believed Montgomery would knock off the Bulldogs in the bidistrict round. He did not have the nerve to say so in print. I did. I picked against the hometown team, Montgomery won, and I took the Pickem crown.
A week later I was sitting in the front row at a Crockett basketball game when Monte Jack’s wife walked past me and called me a cricket. I stood there confused for a solid minute before it clicked. She said hypocrite, not cricket. I laughed. I had spent sixteen months in that town feeling like an outsider in nearly every direction, and there I was catching grief for being honest. Go figure.
Monte Jack himself never treated me that way. He was direct, down to earth, and he laughed with me more than once, which is more than I can say for half the coaches I covered that year.
All County, All State, and All Kinds of Wrong
When the Courier sat down to build the All County team, Jim assumed Sterling Davidson would be the county’s top quarterback. Sterling looked the part. He was the kind of player recruiters drive across three counties to watch. Jamie looked like he belonged on a tennis court, not in a state championship conversation.
I picked Jamie anyway. He was the better quarterback, and a year later he proved it by leading the Bulldogs all the way to the state title game. I would like to say I saw that coming. I did not. I just saw a kid who was tougher and smarter than his frame let on, and I trusted what I saw over what I was supposed to see.
That same season taught me something uglier about high school football in Texas. Grapeland’s head coach, Davey DuBose, called me after his son Clint was named to the All State team over a Sandies teammate named Fred Lewis, who was, without question, the better player by a mile and a half. Coach DuBose knew exactly what I knew. I never forgot that phone call, or how quietly that kind of thing happens in small town football.
A Legend Then, a Legend Now
I have spent the years since 1989 teaching baseball across three continents. I built the Therwil Flyers into three-time Swiss League champions. I transformed the fifth-place Zurich Challengers into Swiss champions in two seasons. I knocked off the 1994 European Baseball Championship B Pool champion with a 14 year old pitcher on the mound, which is the kind of sentence that sounds made up until you were there for it. I do not hand out the word great casually. But I will this time.
Monte Jack Driskell was great. Not good. Great, in the full and specific sense of the word, the way a small East Texas town produces one or two coaches a generation who are simply operating on a different level than everyone around them. He was already a legend when I met him in 1989. He only grew larger from there, and he passed away last year having earned every bit of that reputation.
I hated living in Crockett. I was young and there was nothing to do in Crockett but fish. Sure, I coached a group of 13-14 year-olds, but there was a reason I left East Texas after 16 months. I missed the big city. But I left with something I did not expect. I left having watched a skinny kid with a tennis backhand grow into a coach in his own right, and a father who never once treated the city boy from Dallas like he did not belong in the press box.
Jim Brannan and Bassett Keller taught me the newspaper business. Monte Jack Driskell taught me what a great coach actually looks like, long before I ever stood in a dugout in Switzerland trying to figure it out for myself. That is a debt I have never stopped carrying, and one I am glad to finally put in print.
