Texas Reads>> archiveGlenn Dromgoole

7.16.2017   Author tells story of ’68 football champions

Veteran sports journalist and broadcaster Al Pickett is the author of Mighty, Mighty Matadors: Estacado High School, Integration, and a Championship Season (Texas A&M University Press, $24.95 hardcover), about the 1968 state football AAA champions coached by Jimmie Keeling. It’s Pickett’s fifth book, all having to do with sports.

Mighty, Mighty Matadors is, of course, a sports story, but it’s also a story about a very turbulent era in American history and how a group of high school kids and their coaches came together to put their own imprint on race relations in their community. Estacado opened in 1967 as Lubbock’s first fully-integrated high school. When 31-year-old Jimmie Keeling was hired to coach the football team, the superintendent told him, “You do realize that you are the most important person for this to be successful?”

The first year the Matadors played a junior varsity schedule. The next season — their first in varsity competition — they overpowered their opponents, winning by huge margins in most of their games and going on to shut out perennial AAA power Refugio in the state championship game. The players and coaches from that team have remained close in the ensuing fifty years, coming together often for reunions and funerals.

Keeling, who coached high school football for thirty-five years and college (Hardin-Simmons University) for twenty-one, looks back on that special year as “the best of times.”

“I absolutely know,” he says, “that God placed me at this particular place at this specific time in history. I also believe God placed each of the individual players at this place at this time.”

Doctor’s first year: Dr. Sandip Mathur has published a lively account of his first year practicing medicine in rural West Texas — Cowboys and Indian ($16.99 paperback, available online).

It’s hard to classify Mathur’s book. It is, in essence, a true account of that year more than twenty years ago. But Mathur notes in the prologue, “I have deliberately distorted events and places and names to protect identities. The characters are remixed and recreated so as to provide individual privacy, while sharing the overall experience.” Anyway, whether it is fiction or non-fiction or a little bit of both, it is a fast-paced tale of his first year in “Hotspur,” the name he gives the town in his book. Actually, it was Coleman, and he ended up practicing there for six years before making the move to Abilene.

The best scenes in the book are probably the ones from the emergency room at the rural hospital where Mathur dealt with life and death situations beginning on his very first day in the community. The book is filled with drama, humor, and cultural insights as the India-born doctor and his family adjust to life in cowboy country.

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Glenn Dromgoole’s latest book is West Texas StoriesContact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Read his past Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life here.