The Pain of Losing

For most of last week the toughest athlete on the Texas A.&M. campus felt terrible. His team had frittered away two football games in a row; instead of finishing the season No. 1 in the country, the Aggies had fallen to tenth, and third in their own Southwest Conference. And Halfback John David Crow figured that it was all his fault. "When we got beat," said Crow, "I felt like I'd let everybody down."

John Crow was too modest. At week's end he was on every All-America team worthy of the name (see box), and in an overwhelming vote by sportswriters, he won the Heisman Trophy as outstanding college football player of 1957. Chicago's professional Cardinals, entitled to first-draft choice because they have the worst record in the league, brightened their 1958 prospects by choosing Crow to team up with Rice's Quarterback King Hill* in the rejuvenation of the Cardinals' backfield.

Purpose & Power. Crow's neatly proportioned (6 ft. 2 in., 214 lbs.) frame surrounds awesome talent. His choppy, hustling stride sheds tacklers; he is a vicious blocker and a shrewd, swift safety man. On offense or defense, his specialty is hitting opponents with skill, purpose and power. Last year, when Tackle Bobby Lockett teamed up with End John Tracey to bring down Texas Christian's great Halfback Jim Swink, Crow came up to "secure" the tackle, as the football euphemism goes. He knocked both Swink and Tracey goggle-eyed, and Tackle Lockett was belted right out of the game. Says he: "I felt like Crow had pushed my neck clean through my shoulders."

Simply snagging Crow for the Aggie team was a triumph for Coach Paul ("Bear") Bryant. John Crow had been tripping over college scouts ever since he made the first team at Louisiana's Springhill High School; he had offers of scholarships from Notre Dame to Oklahoma. There was so much activity around the Crow home that N.C.A.A. investigators kept snooping for under-the-table payoffs long after Coach Bryant's bird dogs had carried John David off.

Mother's Money. But if bagging Crow was a triumph, losing him seems a tragedy. Bear Bryant, for one, is not even going to stay on at College Station, Texas to find out what football might be like without everybody's All-American. Bear is chucking a contract that has seven $15,000 years to run, and he is hotfooting it for his alma mater, Alabama U. The once mighty Alabamans have been having woeful times on the football field. "Say you heard your mother call," explains Bear Bryant solemnly. "If you thought she wanted you to do the chores, you might not answer. But if you thought she needed you, you'd be in a hurry. I feel the same way about this."

As Coach Bryant tells it, he would have felt the same way even if the Aggies had matched Alabama's price with a $2,500 raise, and even if Aggie alumni had shown some fresh enthusiasm for the kind of frantic Crow-hunting recruitment program that Alabama grads are organizing.

* The bonus choice, given to one team a year in an order determined by lot, came to the Cardinals by fortunate coincidence at a time when their quarterbacks were in desperately short supply. So they picked Hill for their bonus, knowing that they could also draft Crow, an asset for any team, however rich in halfbacks.

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