Marcus Dupree: The Best That Never Was

Chris Whaley

Someone had to say it.

Seriously though, I appreciate the historical perspective. Crazy to think we had a bush-hider on staff back in the day.

With respect to his recruitment, Akers said what he needed to say in as polite a way as possible.

He looked stiff as a board in his NFL comeback film. I couldn’t stop thinking how modern medicine could have helped him when I was watching him run upright into an NFL LOS.

No it didn’t need to be said. Chris Whaley is Robert Strait 2.0.

 Marcus DuPree was an unbelievable talent who was blessed with incredible size and speed. His performance in the Fiesta Bowl versus Arizona State was incredible when you consider he only played about half the game due to his poor conditioning.

The Courting Of Marcus Dupree is a must read.
 
Dupree was a freak of nature. Just nothing like him.

Good documentary showing what an ass Switzer was and still is. That was Dupree’s first mistake. He reminded me of Earl on that run.

I watched it. Showed Switzer to be the slimeball he’s always been. The small town kid was homesick and Switzer admits he was the best player the day he showed up, so he rode him extra hard so the other players wouldn’t feel like he was getting special treatment. Basically drove him away to show who was in charge.

Looks to me like this treatment sent him back home to Miss. more than he should have been going back. Though his Momma seems to have wanted him to go back every time, every time he was there he fell into the clutches of a scumbag (“Rev” Fairley?) who eventually convinced him not to go back to OU and then sold him to a USFL team and controlled all his money (the documentary just hints at the deception and betrayal involved and at that fact that much of the money seems to have disappeared, but it’s there between the lines, I’m assuming they soft-pedalled it to make sure Fairley would participate). Then he was seriously injured when he should have still been in college.

This should be required watching for every big-time recruit from here on out.

I didn’t see the show tonight, but The Courting of Marcus Dupree is a great book. Get it and read it.
  Then get North Toward Home and read it.

There was really very little tape on guys out of state back then, so when you finally saw what Marcus was doing at the high school level it was just mind blowing.

The day we got the tape, we also had an interview with the new A&M coach (Jackie Sherrill). The Texas basketball team was in free fall after losing Mike Wacker just about 10 days earlier and they had gotten into a fight with Arkansas at Barnhill Arena in Fayetteville.

Darrell Walker had sucker punched the Horns guard Ray Harper (it was caught on tape) and all hell broke loose. Abe Lemons and Eddie Sutton almost came to blows at halfcourt, and the Texas team needed a police escort off the court.

Lots of great video that day.

Watching that video of the ’83 defense just about makes me want to cry, for a lot of reasons.

“This should be required watching for every big-time recruit from here on out.”

True. Convincing them that this can happened to them is the key.

Peavy is lucky to be walking after that hit.

Also forgot to comment that I did not know they had bought a double wide for his mom. I knew something sleazy was going on (it was switzer and a big-time recruit, what else was going to happen?) but he has to be one of the few recruits purchased with a double wide. And all we had to offer was a pair of boots.

Our offer of a pair of boots was Marcus asking to try a pair on and then walking out of the store. The coach with him either had to pay for the boots or let the store owner call the police.
 
He paid.

We self-reported and the NCAA gave us some sort of non-punititve slap.
 
Marcus wasn’t a bad guy, but to say he learned to play the game would be an understatement.

1983 was my first TX-OU game. Edwin Simmons(and Peavey) stole the show that day. What a great memory.

I seem to recall something from the book about Selmon getting off a plane in Mississippi with a suitcase full of cash.

And then there was the story, which I think involved Dupree (and not Darrell Shepard), about the uncle who ran a gas station but had no gas in his USTs. A call was made, and uncle was selling gas.

I think this game also took out Edwin Simmons and basically ruined his career. He played again, after several surgeries, but was never the same.

He had an interesting recruitment. He committed to Texas early, but was just using Texas as a stalking horse to gin up the offers from the competitors (MSU, Southern Miss, OU, and UCLA). Basically, the argument for him coming to Texas was that we were a national program that ran the “I” (to showcase him for the NFL, like Herschel Walker) and needed a RB. He was supposedly committed to Texas for a few months, but would refuse to meet with Tommy Reaux, the Longhorn assistant recruiting him.

UCLA was ready to give him stuff, but he seemed to feel that he liked visiting LA, but didn’t want to move there. He liked MSU, but they ran the wishbone, which he figured would not be ideal for his career (yes, so did OU, but Switzer was promising him they would change). Southern Miss was a player, too. Their advantage was that they were willing to pay to play, and their disadvantage was that they were small time. Sherrill made a great late play for him, and if he had started at TAMU a year earlier, might have snagged him.

I don’t really feel sorry for how things turned out for him at OU. He sold himself, and when you do that, well, you have ceded control and responsibility to your owners. Its Dupree’s fault he didn’t strike a better deal with stronger guarantees. Another option would have been to make a choice where he was beholden to nobody.

If I’m a big-time college prospect, I’m staying away from my preacher. Even, if he’s my dad.

Simmons was hurt the following week during the Arkansas game. According to the “Rev” Fairly, the request for the double-wide was made directly to Switzer. Keep in mind that was just to get him to come back for his soph year; no real mention of what it took to get him on campus in the first place.

Anyone notice when they flashed a newspaper headline about his comeback with the Rams the story beneath the headlines mentioned Marcus had just spent a week in jail for failure to pay ~$30,000 in child support.

Without a doubt the best freshman RB that I have ever seen. Nobody is really even close to tell the truth. That ‘83 defense was all kinds of nasty, though. Knocked out two of the best college RBs ever. Marcus comes here and doesn’t have to face that D and who knows how it all turns out?

Barton:

 I believe we would have eventually faced the same problems that OU did — Marcus was a small town kid who really didn’t want to be that far away from home — and he had relatives and friends who wanted him to be closer to home as well, where the gravy train was easier to get on board.

You notice that the doublewide story didn’t come from Marcus himself (who has no reason to protect anybody, yet still says nothing happened in his recruitment by OU), but from the “Reverend” who ended up stealing his money. Surely if this were about UT, you’d be considering the source. This is the first anybody’s heard of the doublewide.

The only thing Marcus talks about OU doing is the well-documented visit from Billy Sims. I’m thinking some of you missed the part where his “people” were upset because they thought other people were getting things, but Marcus wasn’t.

Why would we think OU was paying him? Because his friends said he was paid. Because other OU players were paid (Bosworth wrote about getting cash and a Corvette).

Why wouldn’t Dupree admit he was paid? Because it’s embarrassing in a story about wasted talent to admit to selling your future?

I’ve heard about this hit for a long time now, but that was the first time I’ve seen it.

Damn that was an ugly, ugly collision. No wonder Dupree had no idea where he was.

Stuckinmn is exactly right, those guys are lucky they can still walk.

Given what we now know about brain injuries, I have a feeling the only reason Dupree is still alive is because he left the team. Can you imagine if he would have stayed and played the next week? After all, at that time getting “dinged” certainly wouldn’t keep you out of a game.

Hell TCU’s coach still wants to play kids with concussions.

Only one school got put on probation out of the recruitment of Marcus Dupree.

Look it up.

“Only one school got put on probation out of the recruitment of Marcus Dupree.”

Are you saying that Marcus was not illegally compensated by OU or you saying that Marcus did not admit it?

Didn’t see the show, but the two greatest hits I’ve seen a Longhorn make were the Peavy hit on Dupree and Jeff Leiding’s tackle on a kick-off return his freshman year. Both took your breath away.

A friend of mine picked Dupree up in his plane for his recruiting visit to Austin (back when it was legal to do) and said that Dupree smelled so bad you literally couldn’t sit next to him.

The show said there were rumors that Earl Campbell visited him and flew him to Texas, but all that was confirmed was that Billy “Boomer” Sims visited his school. Did Earl actually visit and was this legal at the time?

Also add multiple Ricky Churchman hits.

Only one of the coaches recruiting Dupree has been indicted in criminal and securities court. Look it up.

Roach,

To take it one step further, that helmet Peavey was wearing is no where the equal of today’s and while not exactly a suspension helmet I would love to have seen one of those pressure devices they use on Mythbusters inside a similar helmets involved in a similar collision.

I really enjoy this 30 for 30 series. We don’t normally see athletes in the “real people” setting, and these films allow that to a degree. And when you pull back the curtain it can be pretty sad.

I can’t really describe what I felt watching dupree digging through his old trophies and later watching his old film, but it was heavy. The ricky williams episode was hard to watch at times, and I couldn’t finish the Len Bias episode because it was so darn tragic.

What has been your favorite so far? I liked the Allen Iverson one a lot, and the Two Escobars was also very emotional and interesting as hell, because I wasn’t aware that the drug lords were so involved in the pro sports teams down there. Also, the goalie’s “scorpion kick” save was out of this world.

“With respect to his recruitment, Akers said what he needed to say in as polite a way as possible.”

Yeah, that’s an understatement from what I remember. At the time, when Texas lost Dupree’s commit, it was nowhere near the shock Akers portrayed it to be in the 30 for 30 piece. I remember that everybody kind of saw his decommit coming, and when he went to OU, it wasn’t any big surprise. There were cries that Texas’s staff was incompetent because they didn’t know “how to play the recruiting game the way it needs to be played now.” A lot of folks said we couldn’t compete unless we started buying doublewides (it was nice that the documentary did include that one) for recruit’s mothers and stuffing envelopes in lockers. So I’m sure the Texas staff didn’t expend any tears when it blew up in Switzer’s face, and eventually there was a lot of feeling that Texas had dodged a bullet.

In fact, I had a big issue with how the 30 for 30 portrayed Dupree as a victim of the system. He was only a victim in the sense that he was a 17/18 year old kid who had bad advice from his inner circle. He was openly and blatantly auctioning off his services to the highest bidder. Other than an innuendo here and there, the documentary clearly skirted around the pure openness with which he sought to get paid . It was shocking at the time.

The OU staff didn’t shed any tears two years later when they won the national title without Dupree, too.

I read “Bootlegger’s Boy”. Switzer didn’t shed tears either when that girl was raped by his players, when his QB was arrested, and when one of his players shot another. None of it, he explained, was his fault.

i still remember going to the Astrodome to see the 1983 OU game on the jumbottron. It wasn’t on network TV for some reason. Strange. Street Agent, do you recall why that was?

Taylor. Do you really want to get into a pissing contest about rogue players and felony arrests?

I’ll see your 2+ decades ago and raise you 2+ years ago.

Look, I know you Sooners like to live in the cocoon of your shitty-ass state and shitty-ass school, and pretend that you won your games through superior toughness and ability. You ignore the truth of your program, admitted in autobiographies by former players Rentzel, Bosworth, and Thompson, that your program was built on buying players and submitting the university mission to the football program. That’s fine. You can do that. But this is a Texas blog, and we’re not obligated to play along.

You can counter our observations of your felonies with fingerpointing at our misdemeanors, and crow to your buddies that we’re all the same. Fine. We know the truth and don’t have to pretend to agree.

I didn’t know any Longhorns were going around raping and shooting people 2 years ago.

Fuck yes, DWI and simple assault are exactly the same as rape and shooting someone! BOOMER SOONER!

Or something.

I applaud your success in changing the conversation.

Street Agent, the only lecturing we will take from an Okie about cheating is regarding how you have refined it over the years.

Evidently you have moved from cash only to a more refined “in-kind” Lexus convertible type deal.

Maybe you fuckers can hold a seminar on it.

Son, you changed the conversation by claiming a bullshit moral equivalence.

The scumbag preacher, the long absentee father who suddenly kindles an interest in his son right around the time that son starts running a 4.3 40, and the mother’s uncle who shows up out of nowhere are so time-honored as recruiting cliches in some communities that it’s pretty much predictable how it will all go down.
 
Usually you get 1 out of 3. Marcus had 2 out of 3.
 
Dupree wasn’t a bad guy, but very simple. The leeches latched on early, mama didn’t do her job to ward them off when she was cut her own piece of the pie, and he was methodically auctioned off and manipulated.
 
Anyone else catch the snippet where they mentioned coaches on the OU staff were acting as agent runners to the NFL when he was a freshman? Hello, John Blake. 25 years later, he was running the same playbook.

scipio. Blake was actually a player for Barry in 82. He came back as a grad assistant in 85.

Scotty Hill might be closer to the truth on that one.

I’m aware. I’m speaking to the model. That’s what Blake learned at OU and practiced later with the Sooners and at UNC.

“Dupree wasn’t a bad guy, but very simple. The leeches latched on early, mama didn’t do her job to ward them off when she was cut her own piece of the pie, and he was methodically auctioned off and manipulated.”

That’s certainly not how it looked from where I was at the time. He looked like a knowing, willing, and at times, active participant. To put it in the best light, at the time it felt like he knew he had a commodity that people wanted, so, in his eyes it was only fair they should pay for it, and pay handsomely.

“ESPN will rebroadcast "The Best That Never Was," Thursday, Nov 11 at 10:30pm on ESPN 2, Sunday Nov 28 at 8pm on ESPN, Sunday Dec 5 at 8pm on ESPN Classic and Saturday Dec 25 at 8am.”

I think I’ll save this one for Christmas morning.

Speaking of Blake, his Wikipedia page is good for a few laughs.

The Sooners are dirty and smug about it. None more so that Switzer.

Are Sooners ashamed that they’ve named buildings after a cheater like Switzer.

Oh, probably about as ashamed as we are for kicking their ass and setting them up in that shithole.

Nero: Regretably, I haven’t seen all of the 30-30 episodes . . . My favorite was on the Yugoslavian basketball players (the death of Drazen Petrovoc).

My favorite comment in the whole program was Fred Akers’ “Oh yeah, the uncle. There’s always an uncle.” . . . I thought the rapid integration of the town, brought together by a black superstar, was interesting and something positive out of an often sordid, usually said affair . . . . I can’t figure if DuPree was actually being paid and insisted that issue be deleted if he was to cooperate with the project — or if his “handlers” took all the money; I lean toward the latter.

A lot of surprises: I thought there’d be an uplifting moment at the finish, and there wasn’t. I thought Marcus’ brother surely had died, but he’s alive, married and doing well. Highly commendable movie, though I felt the director spent too much time on football and Marcus’ youth and not enough on his coping over the last 20 years.

Both players had their heads down — a recipe for tragedy. Was it sheer luck that neither came away with spinal cord damage?

I finally finished watching it last night. Really sad story- between Switzer and the reverend that poor kid put his future in the hands of 2 truly awful people.

I had to chuckle when he was sifting through his awards and found the one for “Freshman Athlete and Scholar of the Year” at OU. You could sum up the entire OU program with that scene.

I thought the actor playing Switzer was a little over the top.

The last fifteen minutes or so were brutal. When he’s sifting around that cluttered trailer, when he’s standing in the concrete “bleachers” looking out toward his old football field at nothing in particular…

The section discussing his recruitment, with all the closeups of Barry and his boys, pissed me off. The last part, about what Dupree left unfinished, was just depressing.

Watching OU’s obsession with Texas through its coaching staff was again revealing.

Asst. Scott Hill taking as many shots as he could — for instance when talking about Earl Supposedly flying to Philadlephia to bring Marcus back for his recruiting trip, that Billy Sims brought Marcus back to Norman, “and our plane was faster.”

Then when talking about Marcus in 1982 getting out of the Wishbone and switching to the I, that “Barry Switzer helped author the wishbone.”

Made me spit up in my mouth .

srr50 — One of the assistant coaches said that, right? Helped author? My understanding of it was that DKR shared his scheme with an OU assistant and colleague. It was a guy who was worried about his job, and Royal opened up the playbook, so to speak, in order to help the guy fix things on offense and keep his job at OU. So much for good will.

DKR got a call from Chuck Fairbanks, who was trying to save his job at OU. Royal instructed Emory Bellard to give an offensive assistant a call at OU and help him out with transferring to the Wishbone.

The assistant Bellard called was Barry Switzer.

“Then when talking about Marcus in 1982 getting out of the Wishbone and switching to the I, that "Barry Switzer helped author the wishbone."

Made me spit up in my mouth."

srr50—

That was one of the things that stuck with me. It elicited an instinctive “Are you fucking kidding me”

Anyone know the story on Lucious Selmon’s employment at ou? Was it as simple as being Lee Roy’s dad and being given a job during Lee Roy’s recruitment? Or did he already have skins on the wall?

Lucious came off as somewhat likable, but Hill was an obvious asshole. We all know about scum-of-the-earth Switzer.

What an unbelievable story, the guy was incredible. I do feel sorry for what happened to him and what OU did to him, but it’s a little tough when he could be so disrespectful at times.

My favorite line in the film. The 1983 Cotton Bowl, Dupree goes up against the Texas D and it ends up being the last game he ever plays in an OU uniform…

"It was just a disaster. OU doesn’t play well, the line doesn’t block well. They are keying on Marcus, and they just… they just beat him up."

I’m sad the way it ended for him, but damn that’s how you play football.

Anyone know the story on Lucious Selmon’s employment at ou? Was it as simple as being Lee Roy’s dad and being given a job during Lee Roy’s recruitment? Or did he already have skins on the wall?

Lucious and Lee Roy are brothers — in fact their was a 3rd Selmon who played at OU — Dewey.

Lucious was the oldest, and while he was a good HS player he was a bit undersized. Larry Lacewell took a look at his younger brothers however, and decided giving Lucious a schollie was a good idea.

IIRC they all were on the OU squad in 1974.

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That’s how you hog “column inches”. Old sportswriters’ trick for old sportswriters.