Coach Fry And Coach Darrell Royal

[SUMG]

According to today's DMN......two Texas coaching legends.....Darrell Royal and our own great Hayden Fry, will be on the field for the coin flip at tonight's Texas-Iowa Alamo Bowl game. (Both were, of course, coaches at those two respective schools).

Anyway, back in 1994, Coach Royal was in Denton at a car dealership (it was an advertised event, to draw a crowd). Anyway, PLummMeanGreen and I, went out to meet Coach Royal. We both told him that we were Longhorn fans growing up, but switched our allegiance to North Texas, when we became students there.

Well, we got to talking to Coach Royal about the first game we had with UT, back in '76. (Coach Royal liked Hayden and scheduled us back then....when a lot of other big schools wouldn't give us the time of day.)

Anyway, that first UT game was a BIG DEAL back then. We took 15,000 fans to that game, which we lost 17-14.

We thanked Coach Royal for scheduling us, and he told us this story: "When Hayden called and asked how much the guarantee was going to be for North Texas in that game, I told him.....hey, you're half the game aren't you? So, we'll give you half the gate."

That was incredibly generous.

Two great coaches.....two great men.

Edited December 30, 2006 by SUMG

[SCREAMING EAGLE-66]

--I agree..

---That was extremely generous of Royal.... Personally I think that the visiting team should should always be entitled to no less than 10% of the gate and maybe even 20%... That would be a lot more than we currently have been receiving from UT and OU.

--- It could be good for fans also because they would want to schedule games that would fill the stadiums or at least close to it and would slow down some of these across-country games that are sure to be blow-outs and have fans grumbling.