The Right Man for the Job: Manhood, Race, and Oklahoma Football in the Mid-1960s

Abstract

In the fall of 1965 the football team at the University of Oklahoma experienced one of the worst seasons in its storied history. As the losses mounted, school officials found themselves embroiled in controversy and the recipients of an intense outpouring of communication from the team's legions of supporters. Advice, most of it unsolicited, flooded into the university from around the country, but especially from Oklahoma and Texas. Disappointed fans focused their frustrations on head coach Gomer Thomas Jones, and following his resignation at the end of the season, they offered their opinions regarding the type of man who could restore the Oklahoma football program to the position of national prominence it enjoyed just a few years earlier. Read today, these letters, memos, postcards, telegrams, and newspaper clippings provide a fascinating perspective on the prominent role a highly commercialized spectator sport played in the life of a major state university during the mid-1960s. They also move beyond sport to highlight basic cultural attitudes regarding manhood and race dominant in the Great Plains and in Middle America during this period. As they searched for a new coach, Oklahoma fans demonstrated a strong affinity for traditional constructions of masculine leadership and race relations. Confronting a period of rapid change, with federal mandates demanding a reconstruction of the racial order, they simultaneously grappled with updating those models to meet the new realities of life at the height of the Cold War.