All You Direct - Book Reviews

By Jim Dent

A football team without a football sounds way too implausible to be true. They used a Clabber Girl can? Really? But, OK, it was the Depression, and it was at the Masonic Home for orphans in Fort Worth, where the kids went shoeless for six months out of the year, where the football practice area was so sorry “even the goats and sheep had turned up their noses,” where the girls were basically incarcerated in dormitories whose windows wouldn’t open lest they sneak out to kiss the boys and where, at the tail end of the 1920s, coach Rusty Russell arrived to teach his orphans a thing or two about life and the game.

This is the sepia-steeped story that longtime Dallas-Fort Worth journalist Jim (”The Junction Boys”) Dent tells in “Twelve Mighty Orphans: The Inspiring True Story of the Mighty Mites Who Ruled Texas Football,” which self-consciously seeks to be the “Seabiscuit” of high school sports. And like the iconic racehorse, the adventures of the Mighty Mites (officially dubbed the Masons, though almost no one called them that) were a tailor-made fable for the Depression era: Under the guidance of Russell, underweight, terminally hard-luck kids named Dinky, Pinky, Pee Wee, Trash Can and Possum fought their way into playing vastly bigger and wealthier schools. They played a visionary passing game decades ahead of its time, made it to the state semifinals several times and the finals once — and captivated fans across Texas and the nation who sent laudatory telegrams to the teams by the sackful. “They were Seabiscuit and Cinderella Man rolled into one little football team,” Dent writes, possibly putting too fine a point on an obvious comparison.

The Masonic Home was a tough place. Dent writes that one dean beat the boys especially savagely and, during an ill-fated swimming outing to a swollen Trinity River, the boys repaid him by not jumping in to save him as he drowned. One boy had a glass eye, which popped out during a Golden Gloves match. (He popped it back in.) Hardy Brown, whom Russell later called “the greatest player I ever coached,” at the age of 4 saw his bootlegger father blown away as they walked home from a fishing expedition. Brown went on to the pros, where he was remembered as “the meanest man ever to play football,” and Dent makes a convincing case that Brown was never comfortable outside the home’s grounds. No doubt the trauma of seeing his father murdered and his mother run for her life in the moments after, forever abandoning her children, made for psychic trauma that could never possibly heal: Brown later turned into a hard drinker, told a former teammate “I hate everybody in the world,” developed dementia and died in an institution in 1991.

Not to say that all the lives of Russell’s players ended so tragically. One, Abner McCall, became president of Baylor University and spoke at Russell’s funeral in 1983. Another, Miller Mosley, class valedictorian in 1938, collaborated with Albert Einstein and worked on the Manhattan Project.

All of this is a valuable coda to the meat of the tale: the development of the characters at the school and on the gridiron. And it’s in recounting those historic games and the atmosphere around them that Dent really shines: The 1940 game against Amarillo played in the aftermath of an ice storm, with the spread 20 points against the Mites. Ramshackle bleachers collapsing under the weight of too many fans. Drunken Fort Worth fat cats chomping cigars and making bets. The orphans refusing to wear the equipment donated to them by wealthy Highland Park, saying they didn’t want handouts. A mysterious case of possible food poisoning felling the team before the championship game in Corsicana.

Great stuff, and there’s no question “Twelve Mighty Orphans” has drama in droves. What it doesn’t have is adequate sourcing. Dent details a conversation — with direct quotes between Russell and an unidentified orphan when the coach first arrives in the summer of 1927. Because the kid isn’t identified and Dent never interviewed Russell, it’s reasonable to ask where the direct, 80-year-old quotes come from — a story retold by Russell’s grandson, maybe? Dent doesn’t say. Likewise, if Hardy Brown is quoted as saying something in a huddle during a big game, and we know Brown died before Dent could interview him, it’s only fair to ask for a source, whether it’s clues in an author’s note or in the book copy itself. I hate to sound like an old journalism teacher, but doesn’t the contract with the reader still demand such things?

Yes, Dent mentions an NFL Films interview with Hardy Brown, credits living players and relatives he interviewed and tips his hat to the folks at the Fort Worth Public Library and the Childress County Courthouse, the county in which Hardy Brown’s father was murdered. But amazing tales need scrupulous sourcing. I have no reason to believe “Twelve Mighty Orphans” isn’t accurate down to its last syllable, but I just don’t know.