Capital City Sports Report

The Die-Hard Fan’s Guide to Longhorn Football

If anyone knows anything about delivering information to die hard University of Texas football fans, it’s Orangebloods.com founder and owner Geoff Ketchum. For a decade Ketchum’s web site has provided year-round coverage of anything and everything Longhorn football. This football season Ketchum has added to his repertoire with the release of his new book, “The Die-Hard Fan’s Guide to Longhorn Football.” CCSR  caught up with the recruiting guru-radio personality to find out about his newest endeavor and what he hopes Longhorn fans will get out of his new book.

Johnny “Lam” Jones. For  Longhorn fans in their 20s, the name may ring a bell and that’s about it. For those older, the name may jog a few specific memories. For some, it may be that of a kid from Lampasas who ran track and won a gold medal at the 1976 Summer Olympics before playing football and running track at Texas. For others, Jones may be remembered as part of the identity crisis  caused by his presence along with that of two other Johnny Jones on the roster-better known as Ham and Jam.

Actually, Jones is all that and much more. And it’s all captured in Geoff Ketchum’s new book, “The Die-Hard Fan’s Guide to Longhorn Football,” which went on sale in August.

This book will likely be on the Christmas wish lists for many Longhorn fans, but as the title suggests, it is tailored for those fans that are well versed in the recent past and maybe the not-so-recent past, and just want to know more.

“I really tried to find some elements that even the biggest Longhorn fans wouldn’t know. I also wanted to try and tackle the big moments, at least for me, in UT history and tell them in a way that hasn’t been told,” Ketchum said.

As owner of Orangebloods.com since the late 1990s, Ketchum has a great deal of personal experience and knowledge when it comes to the modern-day Longhorn football program. This is reflected in the book with more than half of the pages detailing stories from 1996 to the present.

Despite this somewhat narrowed view, Ketchum did step outside his realm of first-hand knowledge to provide some interesting accounts of UT football, including a journey all the way back to the Texas program’s early beginnings.

The Guide includes a chapter full of stories from those early seasons as found in the Statesman archives. To read about how it all started and how the Longhorns fared in those early seasons is compelling, but to see how the Statesman writers actually described the players, the action, and the sport itself is interesting, sometimes comical, and worth the read.

Ketchum knew he couldn’t pen a book without including a few tales on the great Darrell Royal. In The Guide he devotes a pair of chapters to the coaching legend, which include two interesting interviews-one with Royal himself, as well as a one-on-one with Emory Bellard, a Royal assistant who is considered the father of the Wishbone formation. Bellard, who lives outside of Austin today, talks about how the unique formation came about, why it resulted in so much success, and how it ultimately ended up in offensive playbooks across the nation.

Following the chapters on Royal is the chapter on Jones. While The Guide does flow from the early days all the way up until the days of VY, it is not designed to be a chronological read where a reader moves from one chapter to the next.

“I want anyone to be able to pick it up wherever it is, on the coffee table, in the bathroom or wherever, and pick a chapter and read it,” Ketchum said. “You don’t have to read it from cover to cover. That’s not the way it was intended. I wanted every chapter to have a completely different feel. There’s something in there for everybody.”

With that in mind, if there’s a chapter to read first, it’s the one on Jones. The story has been told before, but never in its entirety and never with this much detail. Ketchum captures the essence of Jones and his story from those humble beginnings in Lampasas, through the Olympics and time at Texas, on through his lackluster career in the NFL. He polishes off the chapter detailing Jones’ discovery and subsequent battle with cancer.

After the story on Jones (Chapter 4), Ketchum skips forward to the 1990s, specifically 1996 and the Big 12 Championship. It’s actually the story as seen from the eyes of Texas quarterback James Brown.

“I think it was the single defining game in the modern era of UT football,” Ketchum said. “With that chapter, I got out of the way and let James tell the story.”

Brown offers an insightful look on the events preceding the first-ever Big 12 title game including his “confident” comments, as well as never-before-seen details of what transpired during the heat of the battle.

Following a chapter on Ricky Williams, titled “A Peculiar Kind of King,” Ketchum writes about the topic he knows best, recruiting. Chapter 7 is titled, “The Perfect Storm,” and provides a breakdown of each player from the 2002 recruiting class. Each player description includes “the hype” of why the player was on the UT radar in the first place, the description of the player as written by Ketchum during the actual recruiting process, and finally what happened with the player post-Texas. This last piece of info is interesting for those lesser known players who either never played at Texas, or saw very limited playing time.

The Guide concludes with a chapter on the 2005 national championship run and another full of Vincent Young stories. Ketchum said he included the Young stories because he’s been asked countless times about Young and he thought it was time to turn the tables and get those who know Young best to tell some of their own stories.

“The best thing is everybody has a Vince story,” he said. “I asked them to tell me the first thing that comes to mind. You get stories like Tim Crowder talking about the time in the locker room at Missouri. They were up by five touchdowns at halftime and Vince was emotional. You really discover in this chapter that Vince has a real emotional side.”

In addition to offering fresh, new stories in the chapters, Ketchum also includes a variety of informative tidbits sprinkled throughout the book. The most interesting is the description of how Bevo arrived at his name. Surprisingly, according to Ketchum, the conventional wisdom that the Aggies named Bevo is completely wrong.

That type of information, plus the chapter on Jones make “The Die-Hard Fan’s Guide to Longhorn Football” a good book to add to your Christmas wish list.

Posted in NCAA Football