ORANGE, Texas – One by one, the old coaches arrive at what used to be Lutcher Stark High School, squinting to identify faces they haven't seen in three decades.
They are members of Stark's 1970 football staff. They have returned for a photo shoot and to share "we knew him when" stories about an old colleague.
Wade Phillips was 23 when he arrived at Stark, fresh out of the University of Houston. Today, he is 350 miles upstate in Irving, immersed in being the Dallas Cowboys' new coach.
"He knew more football than any young man I'd ever seen," recalls Neal Morgan, Stark's head coach in 1970.
Phillips stayed only two seasons, rising from junior varsity coach to varsity defensive coordinator before heading on to two college and eight NFL stops. His Stark years rate one line near the bottom of his bio, the school incorrectly listed as Orange High.
But for Phillips and old-timers in this town of 19,000 in Texas' southeast corner, those two seasons were anything but forgettable.
For Phillips' former colleagues, returning to the old campus, which is now West Orange-Stark Middle School, brings a flood of memories, not all pleasant.
As with many Texas schools, the late 1960s and early '70s at Stark were shaped by integration.
"You've seen that movie, Remember the Titans?" says Whitt Baker, Stark's offensive line coach in 1970. "I guarantee you, that's what we had here.
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DAVE EINSEL / Special to DMN Andrew Hayes, the first black assistant football coach at Lutcher Stark High School, looks over the booster wall. Wade Phillips joined the football staff in 1970. |
"There wasn't any manual on coaching integration. Everybody had a good idea, but no one had tried them before."
Perhaps that is why, after greeting one another with smiles and handshakes, the former Stark coaches seem subdued in the school hallway and while posing for photos on the football field.
These are the halls in which frequent fights broke out between blacks and whites. This is the field where Morgan, on the first day of 1970 spring practice, found white players gathered on one side, black players on the other, suited up, staring at one another.
The 1971 Titans of Alexandria, Va., immortalized in the 2000 movie, won the state championship; the Stark Tigers of 1970 won three games.
"We had some lively times," says Richard Honeycutt, a senior offensive lineman on that team. "Obviously, I remember Wade because you bring it up in conversation, 'I knew him when.' He probably doesn't remember any of us.
"We were a pretty sad lot. To come out of college, he [Phillips] had to be thinking, 'What did I get myself into?' "
Fond memories
Actually, Phillips says he remembers Honeycutt. He also has vivid, mostly fond memories of his time in Orange. It is, after all, the town in which he was born on June 21, 1947.
His father, Bum, was in his mid-20s and playing football at Stephen F. Austin after serving in the Marines during World War II. Wade's mother, Helen, hailed from Orange and had family here, so it was the most convenient place for Wade to enter the world.
Wade and his five younger sisters spent their formative years moving to Bum's many coaching stops. Two of Bum's high school jobs, Nederland and Port Neches-Groves, were within southeast Texas' Golden Triangle of Beaumont, Port Arthur and Orange.
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DAVE EINSEL / Special to DMN Andrew Hayes (left), Dexter Bassinger (center) and Neal Morgan worked with Wade Phillips when he was an assistant football coach at Orange from 1970-72. Morgan hired Phillips as a junior varsity coach. |
Wade played quarterback and middle linebacker under Bum at Port Neches-Groves. His standout games against rival Nederland impressed one of Nederland's assistants, Morgan.
Morgan had played for Bum at Nederland. He chuckles in memory of a 1952 visit to the Phillips home, with rambunctious little Wade wearing only tight skivvies.
Morgan followed Wade's playing career at the University of Houston and his 1969 stint as an unpaid Cougars graduate assistant. Wade says Bum suggested he call Morgan, adding, "Might as well go someplace where they'll pay you."
Hard to say who made the bigger impression on Morgan – Wade, or his "movie-star-beautiful" newlywed bride, Laurie.
Wade, who will make about $3 million per season as the Cowboys' coach, often says he was better off financially in Orange than at any other time of his life.
The Phillipses had yet to have son Wesley or daughter Tracy, so Wade's $16,000-a-year salary, buttressed by Laurie's earnings as an elementary school teacher, went a long way. They lived in an apartment near the Orange town circle.
"We bought our car and everything else with cash," Wade says. "Nowadays, I've got credit cards and mortgages and all that stuff."
Integration arrives
A few Texas high schools, particularly in the Rio Grande Valley, began to integrate during the mid-1950s.
But the word "white" was not removed as a University Interscholastic League membership requirement until 1964. Full integration did not occur until the all-black Prairie View Interscholastic League merged with the UIL in 1967.
A year earlier, Andrew Hayes became the first black assistant coach at Stark, moving up from all-black Wallace Junior High.
Hayes says serving alongside whites in the military made for a smoother personal transition at Stark. Still, tension among the student body was still percolating when Morgan arrived in the spring of '70.
His first two hires were junior varsity coaches Phillips and Curley Hallman, who went on to become head coach at Southern Mississippi and LSU.
"You could tell Wade had been around the field house all of his life," recalls Hayes. "He was a very quiet person, but he demanded hard work out of his students and had a professional attitude."
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Lutcher Stark yearbook Clarence Sparks (59) played nose guard at Lutcher Stark High under Wade Phillips. Sparks says advice Phillips gave him in high school had an impact on his life. |
No one characterizes Phillips as playing a significant role in Stark's integration. Hayes says that from a football standpoint, Morgan bore most of that responsibility.
Hayes says Morgan worked hard to create racial harmony by having players eat lunch together. But, according to Honeycutt, "The first lunch after the last game, that ended."
After one season, Morgan took an assistant's job at North Texas. Longtime Stark assistant Dexter Bassinger was promoted, and players say race relations gradually improved through the 1971-72 school year.
Dwayne Joubert, a wide receiver, says he and other black players formed friendships with white teammates. But he says he was reluctant to socialize with white kids off campus because black friends would ridicule him.
"At the end of the day, I went back to the black neighborhood and they went back to the white neighborhood."
For Phillips, those years might not have been as challenging as they were for other Stark assistants. He arrived at Houston the same year, 1965, that Warren McVea became the school's first black scholarship football player.
"I just thought guys were guys, no matter what color," he says. "The best thing about football is the best guy gets to play. So when I went to Orange, it wasn't any different."
He also remembered what Bum said about fighting in World War II.
"When there's three of you in a foxhole, two of you are asleep and the other stays on guard all night, that's when you realize color doesn't matter. You're counting on each other."
Before Wade's second season at Stark, Bassinger elevated him from JV team/varsity linebackers coach to varsity defensive coordinator. Bassinger also gave Phillips latitude to tinker with schemes and personnel.
The Tigers had high hopes for 1971 until learning that several black starters would be bused to crosstown rival West Orange. Morgan says that is why he left.
In the '71 season opener, West Orange dominated Stark, 29-8.
"It was strange playing against those guys," Phillips says. "They had trained with us in the spring. A lot of them didn't want to go [to West Orange], and I didn't blame them. They had found a comfort level with us."
Impact on players
Clarence Sparks was Phillips' 175-pound nose guard.
One day during his junior year, 1970-71, Sparks joined other black Stark students in a protest.
"Kids were saying they weren't being treated fair," Sparks, 52, recalls.
They picked a period and, when the bell rang, left the school building en masse and sat in the baseball bleachers.
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Lutcher Stark yearbook Wade Phillips (top right) spent two years at Lutcher Stark in Orange and says he has fond memories of the experience. |
Sparks knew he would return to class even before the principal threatened expulsion. The seventh of 11 Sparks children, he wouldn't dare disappoint his parents or favorite coach.
Phillips often praised Sparks' quickness and tenacity, addressing the player by his nickname.
"Coach Phillips would make you feel like you're Tarzan in there," Sparks says. "He'd say, 'Cricket, I want you wherever that ball is at.' "
Sparks kept track of Phillips' post-Stark career, but not simply because his old coach became famous.
"He once told me, 'Cricket, trust me, your ability and your grades will change your environment,' " Sparks says. "That meant a lot. That kind of carried me through life."
Sparks was named all-district as a senior and received a football scholarship to the University of Hawaii. Instead of enrolling when he arrived in Hawaii, he joined the Army and traveled the world with the post's football, basketball and boxing teams.
The kid with black-rimmed glasses pictured in jersey No. 59 in Stark's 1971-72 yearbook, the Orange Peel, has worked in Orange for the last 23 years as a board operator at a chemical plant.
"You know, if you have good people in your life coming up, steering you the right way, it changes you," he says. "Some people don't believe that, but I do. I believe the things Coach Phillips told me had an impact. I would love to tell him that."
Disciplinarian
Andrew Hayes coached in Orange for 12 years, but the 1970-71 school year was his last on the football staff. The following year, Hayes became a Stark assistant principal.
Eventually, he rose to principal, then to West Orange-Stark School District's assistant superintendent. He was superintendent from 2000 to 2005, then retired after 46 years in the district.
Of course, he followed Phillips' career and was not surprised when he developed a reputation as a players' coach. In the early '70s, it was permissible for coaches and teachers to enforce discipline with a wooden paddle.
"I saw him use that wood in the field house," Hayes says. "He'd put his arm around the kid and say, 'I love you, but you broke a rule.' "
Phillips says it was the same approach his father used with him.
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DAVE EINSEL / Special to DMN The former Lutcher Stark High School building is now West Orange-Stark Middle School. |
"He'd say, 'I'm going to have to whip you, but this is the reason why.' Finally, he told me I was too big to whip. That was the happiest day of my life."
His media guide bio might not reflect it, but Phillips hasn't forgotten Lutcher Stark High. After he became the Denver Broncos' head coach in 1993, Phillips gave Bassinger and his grandkids a tour of the practice facility and introduced them to John Elway.
Then they drove to Phillips' house and visited with Laurie.
"That's probably the last time I saw him," says Bassinger, who sent Phillips a note after he got the Cowboys job. "He was always personable, just liked people. I'm sure he's still that way."
The last three decades have been better to Phillips than to Orange.
An Interstate 10 billboard reads, "Welcome to Orange, Your Last Taste of Texas." But the town lost some of its flavor after the direct hit from Hurricane Rita in 2005.
Many businesses are shuttered along the main road leading to the old Stark campus. Rita blew the press box off the stadium, once considered to have the finest grass and drainage in southeast Texas.
Some wounds require more healing time than others.
Until last summer's 35-year reunion, the Class of '71 always held separate gatherings for blacks and whites.
Sparks and Joubert long for the day when their Class of '72 will follow suit.
"Everybody on our team got along," Sparks says. "There wasn't no deal about black or white. We all pulled together in games."
Says Joubert: "There's a lot of white kids that I would like to see again."
