Dickerson was a great help to our recruiting back in the 80s. 1) He was miserable every minute he was at SMU and said as much on multiple occasions. 2) SMU was the only undefeated team in the country yet could not muster enough support to be ranked #1. Their Cotton Bowl game against Pitt shows the number of tickets sold, but the actual attendance was closer to 20,000 than the 80,000 capacity. 3) Dickerson may well have been the best RB in the country, but SMU couldn't pull enough weight for him to win the Hype$man. I had a letter that I sent to recruits. My secretary referred to it as "the Dickerson letter" in which I was quick to point these facts out to recruits, including one to Edwin Simmons. Bubba, you might be interested to know a Barry comment about Simmons - "Y'all can have him, or we'll get him, but neither of us will hand him over to SMU". Seems there was a more descriptive word or two in front of SMU, but I can't remember what. Dickerson was and still is a classless turd, but a classless turd with a ton of talent.
Most fun I ever had watching him was at Texas Stadium; SMU had the ball on about their own 30 yard line, right in front of the SMU band which blared "She'll be Coming Around the Mountain" on every snap of the ball. Bill Began (pardon the profanity) was the referee. When the ball was snapped, it was a pitch to Dickerson running right. Either Sendlien or Holle went untouched and pounded Dickerson for a loss with a vicious but legal tackle. Began threw a flag for unsportsmanlike conduct. Seems he blew the play dead at the snap, but because of the SMU band was so loud, none of the players stopped. SMU got an undeserved first down; Began never officiated the SWC after that year; Dickerson wanted no part of the Texas defense after that, but I was so angry, I separated the zipper on my Wranglers. That was also the game of the infamous fumble recovery by Rodney Tate. Damn I miss having a team with quality S&C. Tate was 195 and benched 325. He dropped the ball on the SMU 2 yardline, came out of the endzone, dove on the pile and came out with the ball.
As a pro, here in SoCal, the guy always rubbed me the wrong way. From what I saw, Dickerson was all about Dickerson, and no one else. Perhaps unfair but he seemed like a poster child for not being a team player.
huisache, Can we go ahead and put you down on West Mall as not only not having sent Craig a check, but you didn't vote for him?
The best part of that era was that Texas fans could get pretty good seats at Texas Stadium. The Pony Express was a bit hobbled by a great Texas “D”. Yet as I remember, Dickerson did riip one long one.
Only after Frontier (with HIC in the cockpit) started flying into SNA. Hey, I’m in the flight path… (Not really.) Actually — and you might be aware — Soros (yes, that Soros) fought very hard to replace the Marine Corps Air Station in El Toro with an international airport in the 90s. Fortunately he failed due primarily to the efforts of the powerful Irvine Company. Had that airport been converted, those planes would have flown directly over our house. When I first moved in, in 1992, we used to have fighters gun their engines right over our house on final approach, maybe 15 miles from the runway. It was actually pretty cool, but awfully noisy at 11 PM. There were a few C5As that were so close you thought you could touch them. Fortunately, that’s now ancient history.
LOL. We have a special procedure there for noise abatement. I didn't know that, but he's evil, so nothing would surprise me.
I’m so used to the “rocket ship” take off maneuver from John Wayne that I no longer even notice it. But for those not familiar, sharply throttling back the power just after gaining altitude can be disconcerting to say the least. Gotta say that the Southwest flight attendants can be pretty funny. One morning, whispering, one was suggesting that we should whisper in the cabin so as not to upset the rich homeowners below in Newport Beach, just waking up.
One thing to experience it in a 73; totally different in a 75. I swear one morning a near tail strike followed by a sinking feeling
After all Craig James did for SMU, he called a mutual friend to ask him if he would get me to give his mother a job. I resisted the urge to tell him that SMU had just bought a house for a RBs mother and gotten her a good job at the Corsicana fruit cake factory, but they couldn't help their "all world RB" get his mother a job?
Some friends at SMU told me he got pissed when 35 players were driving Nissan Z cars from Warren Bankston (Warren never went to SMU or any college that I know of) and he was expected to drive a crummy TransAm. Like I said, Dickerson hated every minute at SMU and let people know about it. He thinks he "repaid" the Aggies by making sure his cousin went to A&M rather than Texas.
He was so fast, and had great field vision. He’s one of those rare running backs who ran almost straight upright yet didn’t get regularly smashed by tacklers and injured.
OK somebody has to be fair about this... the roads in Dallas were iced over the night before and that morning. The weather was freezing cold, but the biggest reason the crowd was small was nobody wanted to play demolition derby. At the time I lived in an apartment in north Dallas near the original Dallas Cowboys practice facility. I got a call at midnight the night before the game, a guy wanted to give his tix to me (he was a WVa alum, high school teammate of Jim Kelly (U Miami). I had to decline because there was no way I could get to his apt about 2 miles away. The roads were a sheet of ice. Not as bad road conditions as ND-Houston in 78/9, but close
You may be referring to '79? I was there in '81. Favorite play for me was watching (with binocs) Dickerson zipping towards what may have been the only hole available to him all day. Then I see a big paw swipe the ball out of his hand. We recover. Watching him walk to the sideline was like watching a kid with no life in him at all. He gave up after that Think it was Sims that swiped the ball from dickerson but can't recall. Age is catching up to me
Wasn't 79 for sure. Might have been 81 or 83. I remember talking to the three musketeers after the game (McIvor, Luck, & Leiding). Also asked Rodney Tate how he got the fumble back, & he said he knew if he didn't, he would be hitchhiking back to Tulsa rather than riding home to Austin.
Couldn't have been 81, we beat SMEW on 3 field goals. 9-7. ...Tate was gone in 83. He did score a TD in 79 from what I saw. You may be getting old, Sabre. Welcome to the club. They say that memory is the second thing to go. I don't recall what the first to go was...
