New book goes deep into the heart of ACU football

By GRANT BOONE
Voice of the Wildcats

Officially, Lance Fleming ('92) started writing his opus on the Abilene Christian University football program in December 2016. The completed work, entitled Wildcat Football: Three Cheers for the Purple and White and published by ACU Press, will be released this week to coincide with the university's Homecoming festivities.

But for all intents and purposes, the book project began in the early chapters of Fleming's own life as he watched ACU football coaches gather on autumn mornings from the 1970s through the 1990s at the barbecue restaurants owned and operated by his father, Danny Fleming, to sip coffee while ideas for that week's game plan began to percolate.

"Those guys – Wally Bullington ('53), Ted Sitton ('54), Don Smith ('53), Jerry Wilson ('71), Mark Wilson ('84), Dr. Bob Strader ('76) and Jack Kiser ('71) among many others – were and are such a big part of my life," Fleming recalls. "They were my introduction to ACU football, soaking up their stories and strategy but also seeing how committed they were to being men of God and leading that program with integrity. They were my heroes who later became my friends."
Though he comes from a Baptist family – some of whom attended and graduated from Hardin-Simmons University – football was the tie that bound Fleming to ACU, which is why he enrolled at the latter, not the former, as a freshman in 1987. As a journalism major and eventually co-sports editor and editorial page editor of The Optimist, his perspective of Wildcat football literally changed, from the bleachers up to the press box. That continued as he began his career as a sportswriter, first for the Abilene Reporter-News, then for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. In 1998, he returned to his alma mater as sports information director, the role in which he remains within his current title as associate director of athletics for media relations. As such, he has been responsible for writing the last 20 years of ACU football history in the form of media guides, player bios, previews, recaps, box scores and countless other stories, press releases, tweets and posts.

Compressing a 60-minute game into a 600-word, on-deadline summary is difficult enough. Trying to squeeze a century of football at ACU into a couple hundred pages is an entirely different and daunting challenge. This is a program, after all, that has produced a pair of national championships, all-time record setters and one player after another who went from small-time college football to the bright lights of the NFL.

"I didn't want to write a year-by-year chronology of ACU football," Fleming says, "though it all flows in a chronological order. What I settled on was a series of feature stories centering on the key people and events in the history of the program. It seemed like I would never get to the end, but I loved it."

Fleming is one of only four sports information directors in the history of ACU Athletics, an astoundingly low number in a high-turnover profession. He called upon the originator of that role at ACU, Dr. Charlie Marler ('55), to kick the book off with two chapters chronicling the early years of Wildcat football.

"He had been doing some research," Fleming recalls, "and was sending me these great nuggets about certain players on some of those teams from 1919 (the first year of the program) all the way through the 1930s. I think what he wrote gives some great insight into early players and teams that not a lot of people know about."

From there, Fleming tackles the character more people associate with ACU football than any other: former player, head coach and director of athletics Bullington.

"That was the first chapter I wrote," says Fleming, "which is fitting, I guess, since you can't write the history of ACU Athletics, much less ACU football, without thinking first about Wally. I was really happy to be able to get this written before he passed away (in July of this year). He read the entire thing and passed along some 'coaching tips' – never critical but things he thought needed to be changed or written better. He was usually right."

Given how Bullington and so many coaches before and after him emphasized a picture bigger than just the game, it is also fitting that Fleming focused less on numbers – though the ones ACU players have put up through the years are eye-popping – and more on the names of those whose fingerprints have left indelible marks on Wildcat football. Other Wildcat sportswriters join Fleming in reminiscing on the book's pages.

"I remember sitting with (former ACU players and coaches) Jack Kiser and Jerry Wilson in early 2017," Fleming remembers. "Jerry was in the throes of the dementia that would take his life a couple of months later, but his memories of those great days of the 1970s were still just as vivid as when he was helping make them. We lost legendary quarterback Jim Lindsey ('71) 20 years ago, but Jack still couldn't talk about him without crying. I could hear that same emotion over the phone from quarterback John Mayes ('81) when he spoke of losing teammates Chuck Sitton ('78) and Kelly Kent ('80) in separate tragedies nearly 40 years ago. And I spent more than an hour on the phone one night with (ACU's all-time leader in touchdowns and member of the College Football Hall of Fame) Wilbert Montgomery ('77), who told me about growing up in segregated Mississippi and how distrusting he was of white people when he came to Abilene, only to learn how much the ACU community cared about him off the field. He said that changed the course of his life forever."

Montgomery went on to lead the Philadelphia Eagles to the Super Bowl in 1981, retiring as their all-time leading rusher, and then help two NFL teams win championships in two decades as an assistant coach.

Next year will mark the 98th anniversary of the first football season at ACU. Three Cheers for the Purple and White encompasses that entire century. And just as he was by position for that undefeated team in 1950, the book's center is Bullington.

"I spoke to him about three days before he passed away," Fleming says, "and he said he looked forward to reading the book. As I wrote in the author's note, which we added the day after he passed, he didn't need to read it; he had lived it."

Wildcat Football: Three Cheers for the Purple and White can be purchased at The Campus Store in McGlothlin Campus Center, and online at acupressbooks.com.