Crystal Wise
If only mankind were in on what fate already knew, the moment in the fall of 1973 would have certainly been even more enjoyable for football fans.
On one sideline at Farrington Field was Mike Renfro — soon-to-be TCU Horned Frog — and his Arlington Heights football teammates. Across the field were the Tyler John Tyler Lions with not one — the one was plenty enough — but three Campbells, all brothers. On the line was advancement in the Class 4A state playoffs.
Earl Campbell’s team won that day on the way to the state title, but the other guy left an impression.
“They had this little white guy,” says Campbell, who went on to Heisman Trophy glory at Texas, recalling Renfro with the most endearing of terms of endearment, “and he was beating the hell out of us. That guy was catching everything. He was this white guy, and he was fast. Our guys could not hold him down.
“That guy was Mike Renfro. The same thing I saw in high school — though we beat them every game in the Southwest Conference — this little white guy Mike Renfro was catching everything. He was a bad little booger.”
What no one knew at the time — no one thought to seek out a clairvoyant and her crystal ball — was that together those two would enjoy some of the finest moments of their pro careers as teammates with the “Luv Ya Blue” Houston Oilers of the National Football League.
Campbell was a Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee long ago, his legacy as one of the NFL’s baddest boogers as safe as the bullion depository in Kentucky. Today, Renfro, the product of a good Fort Worth family, is finally getting his just due, membership in the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in Waco.
“He’s like all of us athletes,” Campbell continues. “We went farther than any of us thought we would go when we played against each other. I never dreamt that I … I wanted to go and be a pro athlete, but back then in high school, we were just having fun.
“I think this is an unbelievable success for Mike. I’m so happy for him and that his family is able to enjoy it. Mike Renfro is one of the great ones from the state of Texas.”
The TSHOF Class of 2022 doesn’t lack heavyweights. Joining Renfro for the banquet on March 12 will be Olympic gold medalists Bob Beamon and Carly Patterson, NBA stars Chris Bosh and Tony Parker, Heisman Trophy quarterback Robert Griffin III, and Baylor basketball legend Suzie Snider Eppers.
Also being called to the podium will be three-time Olympian Stacy Sykora, whose formative years on her rise to the top of international volleyball competition all took place in schools in the city of Burleson, founded, by mere coincidence, by Rev. Henry C. Renfro. (No relation to our Renfros here.)
Crystal Wise
Mike Renfro ran across a number of interesting people along the way — or a result of — his 10-year NFL career, including the very complicated Charlie Sheen, who co-starred in “The Big Bounce,” a movie in which Renfro and several of his former Cowboys teammates were extras. That movie also featured Owen Wilson and Morgan Freeman. In the foreground is a football signed by his Cowboys teammates.
Careers can hardly be adequately captured in a summarizing hall-of-fame bio, but Renfro’s goes like this.
Before his days playing under the spotlight of NFL Sunday afternoons, Renfro starred at Heights and TCU playing under Merlin Priddy, and Jim Shofner and F.A. Dry with the Horned Frogs. The Horned Frogs as a college destination were not even in the picture until the hiring of Shofner — a teammate of Renfro’s dad in Cleveland — and Renfro’s uncle, Dean Renfro, as wide receivers coach. TCU didn’t win much, or at all, in those days, but when you’re behind in games, you throw a bunch to try to catch up quickly. That was good for wide receivers, such as Renfro, who caught 162 passes for 2,739 yards and 17 touchdowns over four seasons. Three times Renfro was an All-SWC first-team performer at TCU and a second-team All-American. He finished his career with the third-most receiving yards in SWC history and left TCU with the most receiving touchdowns, yards, and receptions in program history.
Renfro began a good 10-year NFL career as a fourth-round pick of the Houston Oilers. He played for Bum Phillips for three seasons before Ed Biles took over, followed by Hugh Campbell. It was Hugh Campbell in 1984 who broke the news to him that a trade back home to the Cowboys had been hatched. (The Cowboys also received the draft pick that would be used to select Herschel Walker in 1985.)
Over his pro career, including four seasons with the Cowboys, Renfro, 66, caught more than 320 passes for just better than 4,700 yards. His pro quarterbacks were good ones: Dan Pastorini, and Ken Stabler and Archie Manning — both at the tail end of their careers — and, for just a brief spell, Warren Moon. With the Cowboys, he was paired with Danny White for the better part of his four years playing in the iconic stadium with a hole in its roof in Irving.
“He was smart and never complained,” says White. “He wasn’t a guy who always wanted the ball more. I loved playing with him. I don’t know how many times he got a first down on third- or fourth-and-long.”
Renfro was also at the center of one of the most infamous calls in NFL history against the Pittsburgh Steelers, in their day the Hecatoncheires of the NFL, monstrous giants with 50 heads and 100 arms, and all. It’s probably the one play most remember about his NFL career, an unfortunate footnote to a good NFL career, and, he adds, “it doesn’t even count in the record books.”
Looking back on the tale, we can all, without any reservation, describe the call as arrant nonsense, but we can get to all that in a bit.
First things being first, football and the NFL were family business growing up for Renfro, today in the business of breeding thoroughbred race horses with CJ Thoroughbreds. He was the son of Ray Renfro, who starred at University of North Texas before taking off north for the southern shores of Lake Erie and a career with the Cleveland Browns. A coaching career followed for the father, as well as his own induction into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, in 1995.
Joining his father in the Hall makes this all the more special, says Renfro, the product of Ray’s love and lessons on and away from the field.
Renfro notes that during his career, from Monnig Middle School to competing with and against the best in the world in the NFL, he was one of the few who worked for coaching legend Tom Landry twice.
Renfro, a Fort Worth native and graduate of both Arlington Heights and TCU, was a water boy on the Dallas Cowboys’ 1971 Super Bowl VI championship team and accepted another tour of employment in 1984 as a starting wide receiver.
Not many make that kind of journey.
“That was pretty cool to come back and work for him again,” Renfro says by phone one day in February.
Both jobs, he recalls, were important.
“I could kind of outrun everybody in the neighborhood early,” Renfro says in jest, but a fact, nonetheless, the good Lord blessing him with as good a set of hands as feet. “And I had a little passion for the game. It was fun. In football season we would always go up to Cleveland. I remember Dad, obviously, playing with Jimmy Brown. I’d bust into the locker room after a game at age 9 or 10 and run right past Dad’s locker and go sit next to Jimmy Brown.”
As a ball boy and later water boy, he got to hang with some of the more extraordinary characters in NFL history as he was literally learning to read and write. “[Roger] Staubach and [Bob] Lilly, and Walt Garrison, Lee Roy Jordan, and all the greats.”
“Being around the game at that level, my dad coaching [Paul] Warfield early, Charley Taylor with the Washington Redskins, Bobby Hayes with the Cowboys. He’s coaching all those guys in the daytime, and when he comes home for dinner, he gives me the same coaching. I guess being able to run and catch the ball and having that guy coaching you who’s coaching hall of famers … I had a little advantage, I guess you’d say, on that end of it.”
Renfro was drafted in the fourth round in the 1978 NFL draft, 97 picks after Campbell, who went No. 1 overall. The draft featured a good class of receivers, including Wes Chandler, James Lofton, John Jefferson, and Ozzie Newsome, a tight end. Jimmy Cefalo and Don Bass were also among those selected before Renfro. So, too, were Ron Smith, Danny Fulton, Carlos Pennywell, Terry LeCount, and Jimmy Childs. (If you remember any of those latter guys, you need to get to trivia night at your local tavern.)
“I’m like most [athletes], I thought was going to get drafted earlier than I did,” Renfro says. “It was a great wide receiver class. James Lofton, John Jefferson, Wes Chandler, Ozzie Newsome. They all went in the first round. I thought I’d be next. A couple of rounds went by before I got drafted. That gave me some motivation.”
Renfro and Campbell were both starters on opening weekend in 1978, the wide receiver laying a key block downfield on the future Pro Football Hall of Famer’s first career touchdown.
“I was running down the sideline, and I had no idea who was in front of me,” says Campbell. “I looked up; it was No. 82. People don’t realize that. I scored the touchdown, but he scored the winning block.”
Renfro had one catch for 3 yards in his pro debut. Renfro caught his first TD pass in Week 6, a 58-yard reception from Pastorini.
Those were some fun Oilers teams to watch, with Bum Phillips astride the Houston sideline with his trademark cowboy hat firmly affixed on his cowboy-boot-wearing body. The next year was Renfro’s — and Campbell’s — best chance to advance to the Super Bowl.
In the way in the AFC Championship Game were the Steelers, heavily favored to win this game while vying for their fourth Super Bowl victory of the 1970s. It was a cold day at Three Rivers Stadium, plows having done their work by shoving aside snow to clear the 100-yard field. The wind chill was 3 degrees at kickoff.
Down 17-10 early in the fourth quarter and driving, Pastorini found Renfro deep in the end zone. No one was surprised when Renfro caught the ball, but that he could get the necessary two feet in bounds seemed next to impossible.
But he did it.
“I knew I caught the ball,” Renfro says. “I knew it was very close. When I jumped up and looked at the referee’s eyes, he looked like he had seen a ghost, and he froze and didn’t make a call immediately. We started throwing up our hands for a touchdown call, and the Steelers were going, no, he didn’t catch it. A few pints of whiskey came out of the stands. The referees huddled for a few minutes.”
Supporters of instant replay review of plays in the NFL would go on to use this play as the case in point of why it was needed. The TV replays clearly showed Renfro made the catch, but in those days, game officials had no access to video replay. The referees huddled for a couple of minutes, trying to decide on a call or discussing how to break the news to the aggrieved party.
“I think the decision was if they wanted to get out of that stadium alive, they better make this a no-catch call,” Renfro says. “And that’s what they did.”
Instead of a touchdown, the Oilers had to kick a field goal, their final points in a 27-13 loss. Who knows what a touchdown and tie game at that point might have meant to the momentum of the game.
Says Campbell: “There’s no doubt in my mind Mike Renfro caught the pass. Pittsburgh had so much better athletes than we did. They were the hottest thing in the ’70s and ’80s. They got all the breaks. It was a great football game; there’s no excuses to be made. Those are the breaks you get in sports. You don’t always get them. When you do you get them, everybody is happy. And when you don’t, everybody is sad. But there is no doubt in our minds that Mike Renfro caught that pass.”
Breaks might be good or bad, unforeseen or heartbreaking, but Oilers fans were angrier than a roused rattlesnake den. Stoicism in the face of anger is not a known response of fanatics of any kind, football or otherwise. To wit, one of the faithful Blue sued the official who missed the call.
This is America after all — land of the free, home of the litigious.
Everybody in the media obviously wanted a piece of Renfro for his thoughts. Would he raise hell? Issue a fatwa? Hire the Texas Hammer?
“Typical me, I loaded up with some buddies, and we went to Mexico for two weeks,” Renfro says. “Might have drunk a little tequila and came home. There weren’t as many people who wanted to talk by then. It was yesterday’s news by then.”
