The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 86, July 1982 - April, 1983 Page: 320

                                
320              Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Of course, Bible was not the only important coach at Texas. By the
time he retired in 1946, many other excellent coaches had served and
were still serving the University. One of these was Clyde Littlefield,
the track and field coach, who founded the Texas Relays. His teams
won twenty conference crowns during his twenty-six years. The great
baseball coach, Billy Disch, retired in 1940 after producing twenty-
one championships in twenty-six years, and his successor, Bibb Falk,
who spent time in the service, turned out three winners in four years.
In swimming, Julian ("Tex") Roberts amassed ten conference champ-
ionships in ten years of coaching. The only times the team lost were in
the two years Roberts served in the navy. At age seventy-seven, Dr.
Daniel Allen Penick, "the good gray doctor" and classicist, turned
out twenty-six tennis championships in thirty years of coaching, and
he worked without salary. In golf, Harvey Penick, who also served as
coach without salary, simply dominated the conference. As for basket-
ball, it never was a prominent sport in the state, but, even so, Jack
Gray took his charges to a conference championship in 1939. After
Gray returned from the navy and in the spring of Bible's retirement,
the Longhorns won another basketball championship and participated
in the national playoffs. It does not belittle the accomplishments of
these men or their teams to admit frankly, however, that in the state
of Texas, football is the king of sports.42
The Bible years were over, but the legacy of the man and his system
remained. In a fundamental sense, he poured the foundation for what
was to become a football dynasty not only in Texas but also in the na-
tion. Before Bible, winning teams at the University were rather rare,
and prominent national teams were inconceivable. After Bible, supe-
rior football teams became standard and, somewhat, commonplace.
Presently, one simply assumes that Texas will have a winning team.
To use the words of a prescient Daily Texan headline writer in 1946,
the "Bible Plan Brought UT Athletics Out of Dark Ages." The em-
pirical evidence for that assertion may be seen in the record. From
1939 to the present writing, a total of forty-three years, Texas has had
only two losing football seasons, a far cry, indeed, from the pre-Bible
years.4"
42Daily Texan (Austin), Nov. 28, 1946, Mar. 19, 1947.
43Ibid., Nov. 28, 1946.