Texas did KU 2 favors

By Bill Mayer     Nov 15, 2008

Kansas won the first football games it played against Texas, 1901 and 1938, but there’s a 0-6 drought for the 1996-present stretch. Yet the Longhorn program did KU a massive favor by spawning two of the most colorful and successful operators in local history – Don Fambrough and Jack Mitchell, one a native Texan, the other a Kansas kid.

Don was an all-state fullback-linebacker for Longview (Texas) High School and was grabbed by Texas. He played on the UT freshman football team in 1941, then was a sophomore blocking back on D.X. Bible’s 1942 single-wing team that won Texas’s first Southwest Conference title in 12 years. Texas trimmed Georgia Tech in the Cotton Bowl to finish 9-2, and Fambrough entered the Army Air Corps.

He and Kansan Ray Evans met while they starred on the famed Second Air Force team during the war, and Ray convinced the Longview War Horse to follow him back to Kansas for the ’46 season. Don became a legend as a KU player, coach, university ambassador and nonpareil story-teller.

In ’46 and ’47 as a KU guard and linebacker, Fambrough was all-conference and judged by many as the best lineman in the Midwest. He turned 86 in October and says bypassing postwar Texas for Lawrence was the best thing he and his late beloved wife, Del, ever did.

The spirited Jack Mitchell was recruited out of Arkansas City by Texas and also played frosh ball in Austin prior to wartime service. Oklahoma looked better to him later, and he played under Jim Tatum and Bud Wilkinson in the 1946-48 period, all-league in 1947 and ’48 and All-American in 1948.

During the ’48 OU-Texas game, quarterback Mitchell carried the ball and was supposed to hang on to it. After being tackled hard several times, he started to pitch the ball to a halfback trailer to lessen the pain and suffering. Coach Wilkinson quickly saw merit in this caper.

The mercurial Mitchell originally made the team as a halfback, but Bud made him a brilliant All-American split T quarterback. (Jack in 1960 converted John Hadl from halfback to All-America quarterback at Kansas.)

A tremendous all-around athlete, Mitchell still holds the NCAA record for punt returns: highest average gain per return for a career, 23.6 yards, 39 returns for 922 yards. Jack was MVP for the ’49 Sugar Bowl victory over North Carolina. He head-coached at Wichita U., Arkansas and Kansas and remains the last guy to leave here (in 1966) with a winning record, 44-42-5.

Gotta love a Longhorn program that gave us Don and Jack.

My third most-favorite Texas star was Blonde Bobby Layne, the high-living quarterback-kicker and baseball star (1944-47), all-conference four years, All-American in 1947. Always up to something intriguing – the originator of The Curse of Bobby Layne against the Detroit Lions.

As a Detroit star, Layne, with high school pal Doak Walker, led the Lions to three NFL titles in the 1950-58 period. Bobby got hurt in 1958, and the Lions, figuring he was washed up, traded him to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Layne publicly hexed the Lions in 1958, declaring they would not win another title for at least 50 years. It’s been 50 years of frustration, and the sputtering Lions continue toothless and clawless.

Bobby’s wild and loose lifestyle likely figured heavily in his death in 1986 at age 59.

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