THERE'S A SAYING in Aggieland for those who aren't true believers: Highway 6 runs both ways. As in, if you don't like it here, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
But for R.C. Slocum, all roads have always led to Texas A&M.
He arrived in 1972 as a 27-year-old receivers coach, and this Jan. 2, at 80, he officially retired. During those 53 years, he left a giant maroon thumbprint on football in Texas. Slocum accelerated integration in College Station as a young assistant in the 1970s, created some of the most fearsome defenses of the 1980s, became one of the country's winningest head coaches of the 1990s, and twice served as interim athletic director in the past five years.
The former shoeshine boy from the projects of Orange, Texas, grew up idolizing Southwest Conference icons like Darrell Royal and Frank Broyles, perfect fits at Texas and Arkansas. Then he became one of them. When you think of Texas A&M, you think of R.C. Slocum, as easy a pairing as chicken-fried steak and cream gravy.
As head coach, Slocum never had a losing season, going 123-47-2 and had the sixth-best winning percentage nationally (.721) when he was fired in 2002. Twenty-three years later, two of his former players, the Detroit Lions' Dan Campbell and the New York Jets' Aaron Glenn, are NFL head coaches, and a third, Dennis Allen, is the defensive coordinator of the Chicago Bears after being a head coach twice.
There's not much that can slow Slocum down: He was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2021, went through chemotherapy and beat it, then served as the Aggies' interim athletic director in 2022. His unique affability and Texas charm allowed him to adapt to working for 17 presidents, five athletic directors, three head coaches, two coordinators and, he jokes, "thousands of alumni coaches."
"There's not many that could handle it," former Texas A&M coach Jackie Sherrill said. "He helped build it. He was part of it, he still is, and he will always be."
The ultimate Aggie could never bring himself to leave for another job. Slocum was only 58 when he was fired -- but couldn't switch colors.
Leashes are shorter for coaches these days, with only five active FBS coaches serving longer than Slocum's 14-year coaching career. Administrators are essentially CEOs, and college sports are more transactional than ever. You don't have to look any further than College Station: In the three major sports, the Aggies have a football coach going into his second season, a baseball coach in his first season, and a new men's basketball coach coming after Buzz Williams' departure for Maryland. There aren't many lifers left in college sports.
Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione, who has known Slocum for more than 30 years, calls him the ultimate "program guy," noting that it's remarkable that Slocum has worked in the administration for the past two decades.
"R.C. is really one of a kind in that sense," Castiglione said. "Especially in our world going forward, people like that are few and far between."
But Slocum came up at a time when most of the state's ball coaches were affable characters who were more like your neighbors than a titan in a distant gated mansion, who'd drink beer together the night before a game. He was part of a group of coaching legends including Royal, Texas Tech's Spike Dykes, Houston's Jack Pardee and Slocum's mentor Emory Bellard, who would meet at Louie Mueller Barbecue, a legendary joint in Taylor, Texas, sit in a back room and tell stories. He's a giant in his own right, still walking among us.
"He's Texas royalty," Spike's son, TCU coach Sonny Dykes said. "He's the last one of those guys."
IN 1971, RICHARD Copeland "R.C." Slocum, then a 27-year-old assistant in his second year in college coaching at Kansas State, was in Orange visiting family for Christmas when he heard that Texas A&M was hiring Emory Bellard, Royal's offensive coordinator, as its new head coach.
Slocum made an impromptu 200-mile trip to College Station to sell himself to Bellard as a candidate, with one problem: He didn't know him, and he didn't have an appointment. So he just waited on a couch outside the coach's office for a chance, and after more than six hours, Bellard finally listened.
Afterward, he made the 3 ½-hour drive back to Orange, the place where he had grown up in the largest federal housing project ever built in the United States at the time, a giant complex called Riverside that was used to house workers building ships in World War II on the Gulf Coast. It was in Orange where Homer Stark, a businessman and Aggie from the most prominent family in town, had taken a shine to the kid from the projects and invited him to his first Aggie Bonfire and the game against Texas in 1961. The Aggies lost, 25-0, their fifth straight loss to the Longhorns, and finished 4-5-1. But it didn't matter. Slocum had fallen under the spell.
"From that time on, I was hooked," Slocum said. "I was an A&M guy from day one."
In Riverside, Slocum had grown up selling copies of the local newspaper, the Orange Leader, and shining shoes at a barber shop. He scraped up pennies to help with bills and developed a sense of empathy from a life of struggle.
"My dad worried about trying to buy bread and pay the rent," Slocum said. "I had an understanding of the homes that I went into and the young men that I was talking to. In many cases, I could see similarities in the way I came up. Many of them were African-Americans, but I could put myself in that picture. Similar backgrounds, good people, and they were doing the best they could do with what they had. I wasn't some fancy coach. I spent more time where they were."
That was how Slocum had developed a strong bond with players like Bubba Bean, a high school All-American who, in 1971, had just set the Texas state rushing record with 79 career TDs, running for 5,532 career yards in nearby Kirbyville, Texas. Slocum had been recruiting Bean to Kansas State since his sophomore season and had a chance, because Texas schools were hesitant to recruit Black athletes at the time.
When Bellard called to offer Slocum the job, Bean, now a senior, just happened to be visiting Slocum at his brother's trailer in Orange, and Slocum immediately flipped from selling K-State to selling A&M. In a matter of minutes, Slocum had made two huge leaps. He was an Aggie, and so was Bean, a breakthrough for a program that had only one winning season since 1957 and had only one Black scholarship player on its roster, Jerry Honore.
Honore, who signed with the Aggies in 1970 and was in College Station when Slocum arrived, also happened to have a little history with the new guy. Honore was living in Lake Charles, Louisiana, when the Civil Rights Act was enacted, and he was bused to a newly integrated school. In one game, Honore's coach, a white man, grabbed an offensive lineman and yelled at him to "block the goddamn n-----."
Honore was floored and had to go sit on the bench. Then he saw one of the assistants, a 23-year-old in his first coaching job out of college at nearby McNeese State, brazenly confront his head coach about the slur. Then he came to Honore, imploring him not to let the coach make him quit. Honore went back in the game, blocked a punt, and Lake Charles pulled out the win.
"That was the moment," Honore said of the young assistant, "when R.C. Slocum became my coach."
Reunited in College Station, Honore became a key ally in helping Bellard and Slocum change A&M's fortunes, with Slocum asking Honore to hit the road with him.
"I asked Emory how many Black players we could sign, and he said, 'You find the best people, and I'll take care of the rest," Slocum said. He didn't waste any time. Slocum and Honore visited future stars like Bean, Carl Roaches, Skip Walker, Pat Thomas and Jackie Williams, five of the eight Black players Bellard signed in his first class, all of whom graduated and went on to play pro football.
"I can remember seeing UT's coach, Arkansas's coach and LSU's coach all out on the front porch waiting their turn for my mom to let them come in," Bean said. "R.C. just walked in the back door. He and my mom were just that close. If R.C. had gone to Timbuktu and I'd got an offer to go to Timbuktu, that's where I was gonna go."
In 1975, behind Bean, a fourth-year starter who set the school record for rushing yards, A&M had its second 10-win season in school history behind their 1939 national title team. Bean rushed for 126 yards in just the Aggies' second win over Texas in 20 years and became the only Aggie ever to land on the cover of a national edition of Sports Illustrated.
When Slocum arrived, Texas A&M had about 14,000 students -- only 1,700 of them women -- and averaged about 29,000 fans per game at Kyle Field for every game except Texas. It was a tough job. It still is, despite the seemingly unlimited resources, an enrollment of more than 79,000 and the largest stadium in the SEC, which seats 102,733. But Slocum was the Aggies' true believer, and his steady demeanor, devotion and charm helped transform Texas A&M into what it is today, starting with that call from Bellard and a cookout with Bean.
"He could have run for governor and had a pretty damn good chance. The story of his upbringing and recruiting to where he is today is amazing," said former A&M head coach Kevin Sumlin, Slocum's former offensive coordinator who he hired from Purdue, Sumlin's alma mater. "When you sat in homes with him, parents appreciated that kind of work ethic. He could communicate with anybody, white, Black, it doesn't matter. That's why they sent their kids there. They trusted R.C. just like I did to come down here."
Beginning with breaking down barriers to integration, Slocum always focused on moving the Aggies forward. In the early 1990s, Slocum -- not a president or chancellor -- met with SEC commissioner Roy Kramer to first broach the idea of the Aggies joining the conference. When A&M needed a new football complex, he got his friend H.R. "Bum" Bright, the former owner of the Dallas Cowboys, to hand over a check for $5 million to get the project started in 2000.
"He's been a blueprint guy," said Phil Bennett, a 50-year coaching veteran who was recruited, coached and mentored by Slocum. "If there's ever been a guy in the history of Texas A&M that's been larger in athletics, and football in particular, I don't know who it is."
Even DeLoss Dodds, the legendary Texas athletic director who built the Longhorns' athletic department into a behemoth from 1981 to 2013 and enjoyed tormenting the Aggies at every turn, can appreciate his old friend's legacy, offering the highest praise someone in burnt orange could offer.
"R.C. is for A&M what Coach Royal was to Texas," Dodds said.
AFTER ONLY ONE year as an offensive assistant under Bellard, Slocum moved to the defensive side of the ball, where he earned a reputation as one of the brightest young assistants in the country. Bennett said he had been devastated when Slocum took other jobs early on: once for Lou Holtz at Arkansas and once for Steve Sloan at Ole Miss.
"The other coaches nicknamed him 'Boomerang' because he backed out of both of them," Bennett said. "And what a smart move it was for him."
But finally, for the only time in those 53 years, Slocum took the proverbial Highway 6 exit, heading to -- of all places -- Los Angeles, where USC's John Robinson had picked him to be his defensive coordinator in 1981 for a national title contender. The Trojans fielded the Pac-10's best defense and beat No. 2 Oklahoma 28-24, handing Barry Switzer just his 10th loss over the past nine seasons.
But when the Aggies decided to lure Pitt's Jackie Sherrill with the biggest contract in college football history in 1982, Sherrill said he was immediately urged by Aggie boosters to bring Slocum home.
"I called him, and I don't think the phone call lasted more than one minute," Sherrill said. "He said, 'I'm on my way.'"
The Aggies won three Southwest Conference titles and beat Texas in five straight seasons. Sherrill, like Bellard, had jolted the program from its slumber. But Sherrill resigned in Dec. 1988 amid an NCAA investigation into improper benefits for players and Slocum took over, hoping to steady the program.
Instead, he turned it into a machine that chewed up the Southwest Conference. Under Slocum, A&M didn't lose a conference game between 1991 and 1994, going 42-5-1 overall and 28-0-1 in the league. And he did it while maintaining one of the best reputations in the business.
"I just can't imagine anybody, any coach or anybody that loves football, not just being crazy about R.C. Slocum," said Archie Manning, who became friends with Slocum when Peyton visited A&M on a recruiting trip. "He is such dadgum good company. He's solid gold."
Slocum's humble curiosity allowed him to build a network with impressive reach. Those relationships helped Slocum forge the Aggies' identity.
"Lemme tell you, I've never heard another coach ever say anything negative about R.C. Slocum," Switzer said, before laughing and saying he didn't get the same grace in Texas. "A lot of 'em I looked at, I didn't consider my friend, but R.C. was a friend. His record speaks for itself. S---, I didn't want to have to go coach against him."
Slocum comes off as down-to-earth, but he built his identity by seeking out the best brains in the business. He sought out Wade Phillips and studied the nuances of Phillips' attacking 3-4 defense. He visited Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick in New York to watch how they deployed Lawrence Taylor. He sought out Bill Walsh to find out what he could do that would make his innovative offenses most uncomfortable. Then he merged it all together with the knowledge of spacing, speed and matchups he learned from Bellard's wishbone attack to form what became known as the "Wrecking Crew," one of the most aggressive, fast and feared units in the country.
Slocum's defense became known as Heisman killers. Between 1986 and 1990, the Aggies faced five Heisman Trophy winners, going 4-1 against them, including torching Ty Detmer in a 65-14 win in the 1990 Holiday Bowl, holding BYU to minus-12 yards rushing and 185 yards of offense, as Detmer left the game in the third quarter with two separated shoulders after going 11 of 23 passing for 120 yards.
He did it by putting speed all over the field, taking players like Johnny Holland, a quarterback recruit, and turning them into All-American linebackers. Against No. 8 Houston, which set 26 NCAA records and averaged 624.9 yards per game behind Andre Ware in 1989, Slocum played one nose tackle, with 10 linebackers and defensive backs on the field, an early example of modern hybrid defenses. The Aggies won, 17-13 as they sacked Ware six times and forced three interceptions.
"He was certainly the best that I went up against as a defensive coach," said John Jenkins, the mad scientist who was the Cougars' coach.
The defense fed off the raucous Kyle Field crowds, who in turn fed off the defense's aggression. Playing at Texas A&M became one of the toughest road trips in the country, with the Aggies losing only 11 home games over Slocum's 14 seasons.
Slocum understood that A&M -- with its rural roots as an agriculture school and its unique traditions -- wasn't for everyone. He sold the program over the player and didn't cede anybody to Texas, but he could tell when a mom at the country club in Dallas wasn't going to send her son to wear maroon.
"He got the place," said Dykes. "He really understood what it was like to be an Aggie. He appealed to those people."
Campbell jokes about knowing where he belonged when a recruiter from Texas, where he hoped to play, mistook a black goat for a deer at his dad's ranch, before Slocum pulled up in his truck.
"When he got out, he's like, 'Man, you guys got these Spanish goats out here! Those are pretty,' Campbell said. "That was a big deal to my dad."
Texas had to step up its game. When Mack Brown arrived, the two coaches became friendly rivals, like Broyles and Royal had been. Slocum even had a longhorn steer named Mack Brown on his ranch.
"I love R.C.," Brown said. "He's the ultimate football coach. He could coach in high school, middle school or the NFL. He loves the state of Texas. He's definitely on the Mount Rushmore [of Texas football] when you think about what he has done for high school coaches in the state. I would think that nobody knows more and cares more about Texas A&M football and high school football in the state of Texas than R.C. Slocum."
Even one of Brown's biggest stars, Colt McCoy, whose dad was a high school coach, agrees.
McCoy, who set 47 school records for the Longhorns and spent 14 years in the NFL, was speaking in February at a panel on the history of football at Schreiner University in Kerrville, Texas, when he let the orange-clad crowd in on a little secret.
"My dad sent me to a Texas A&M football camp. This doesn't leave this room, OK?" McCoy said to laughs from the crowd. "He loved R.C. Slocum. Coach Slocum was a great man. Had R.C. Slocum been the coach at A&M when it was time for me to go to college, I don't know what would've happened."
NO AGGIE COACH since Bear Bryant left for Alabama in 1957 has gone out on his own terms. And even Slocum was no different. A&M is all about tradition, after all.
In 2002, the Aggies went 6-6, losing five of them by a total of 29 points. They stunned No. 1 Oklahoma, 30-26, in November, but the rumors had long been swirling that Slocum's time was up. Four days before the season finale against No. 10 Texas, freshman defensive lineman Brandon Fails collapsed and died in his dorm from a blood clot that traveled to his lungs. The Aggies were crushed. And then they lost to Texas, 50-20, and Slocum was fired after going 21-15 over his final three seasons.
The move stunned his peers, even those who contributed to his dismissal.
"He's always been one of my favorites," former Texas Tech coach Mike Leach, who was 2-1 against Slocum, told ESPN in 2022. "It was unnerving to play against him because he's a coaching legend. Before games, you're kind of excited to go shake R.C.'s hand. 'We got to meet R.C. Slocum!' Who in the world fires R.C. Slocum?"
Slocum doesn't dwell on the what-ifs. He never was able to break through and win a national title, but that's a rarity at schools that weren't born blue-bloods. Frank Beamer got close at Virginia Tech. Tom Osborne, who already had won two as an assistant at Nebraska, didn't win his first as a head coach until his 22nd season, when he was 57. Don James was 58 when he won one at Washington. Bobby Bowden won his first at Florida State at 63. And of Slocum's successors, only Kevin Sumlin had a better record over his worst three seasons, going 23-16 to Slocum's 21-15. (Franchione went 16-19; Mike Sherman, 19-19; Jimbo Fisher, 20-17.)
"Back during that time, there were a handful of these legendary coaches, man," Campbell said. "Bobby Bowden, Tom Osborne... R.C. Slocum was in that. I got it for years in the league: 'R.C. Slocum, what a coach.' I was fortunate to be able to play for him. The farther removed from him I was and certainly once I got into coaching, I felt like my eyes were open to really what he really was about."
Bennett said he was surprised at how poor A&M's facilities were when he left LSU in 1995 to work for Slocum. Sumlin said Oklahoma, where he coached after the staff was fired, was far ahead of the Aggies.
Campbell sometimes wonders if, with the same level of investment that the Longhorns and Sooners had, or even close to the resources the Aggies have now, Slocum could have achieved the same success as his contemporaries.
"What if we'd have done the same thing with R.C.?" Campbell said. "He always had teams in position to have success and win championships. How do you know we're not going to win the big one?"
SLOCUM ALWAYS KEPT his perspective. His son, John Harvey, was born with a heart defect and didn't know how long he was going to live until doctors fixed it with surgery in 1999, when he was in his 20s.
Slocum was leading the Aggies in Nov. 1999 when the student-built bonfire, the 55-foot-tall rows of giant logs arranged like a tiered cake built annually before the Texas game, collapsed and killed 12 students. Slocum cancelled practice, sent his players out to pull logs off the pile and help with search and rescue efforts. Then, he led the Aggies to an upset of No. 7 Texas days later.
"I thought R.C. handled that situation better than anybody possibly could," Brown told ESPN in 2021. "We were ahead 16-0 at halftime, [and] they came back and beat us 21-16 right at the end. I'm not sure that it wasn't best for them to have won that game."
It's one of the most important victories to Aggies in school history. But football was never the most important thing for Slocum.
"A guy wrote me a letter one time saying he stayed up all night after we lost to Texas in the last five seconds," Slocum told ESPN when he was on the hot seat in 2002. "I wrote him back and said, 'You know what? Be thankful you don't have any real problems to deal with.'"
When Slocum was fired, he was disappointed, but not distraught. And he got some unlikely advice from George H.W. Bush, the 41st president who selected Texas A&M for his presidential library. Slocum and Bush became close friends, with Slocum even taking Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, to a restaurant in College Station once for some Tex-Mex.
"I know you're really disappointed and I don't blame you," Bush told him. "I spent my whole adult life trying to get myself prepared to be the president and they booted my butt out. I just hope you'll take the high road and move on with your life."
Slocum had opportunities: Former Texas governor Mark White and Baylor booster Drayton McLane, the former Houston Astros owner, contacted him on behalf of Baylor the morning after he was fired, saying money was no object. Houston would've offered him whatever he wanted. The Arizona Cardinals offered the head-coaching job. There were more over the next few years, but he turned them all down.
The Aggies didn't fire him, he'd say; just one or two people did.
"I already thought I was a good coach," Slocum said. "I got these other people calling me about moving, but I've had 30 years of players and friends and alumni. And for all those years, if I wasn't doing something in football, I was doing it with Aggies."
Former Tennessee coach Phil Fulmer says that perspective changed his life. After Fulmer, who won a national title with the Vols, was forced out in 2008, he showed up at the national coaching convention determined to get another job. Slocum grabbed him in the hall and took him to the hotel restaurant.
Slocum handed the server a dollar and asked for a roll of pennies as a befuddled Fulmer tried to comprehend what was happening.
"He lays the pennies out there and says, 'How old are you?' And I said, well, I'm 58. So he took 58 pennies off the table. He said, let's say you live till you're 85, a good long age. He took 15 more pennies off the table and said, maybe those last five years won't be very good. So he took five more pennies off the table and I'm looking at those pennies, and that's not a lot of pennies left."
He told Fulmer it's important to count your pennies, but it's more important to make your pennies count.
"It hit me right between the eyes. At the time I had six grandchildren -- nine now -- and he said, if you want to chase that crazy sport around, you go ahead, but I'm going to enjoy my pennies and that's it for me."
Last fall, when Texas returned to College Station for the longstanding rivals' first meeting since 2011, Slocum waded through the throngs at Aggie Park, the tailgating spot across the street from Kyle Field, the kind of scene that wouldn't have been imaginable in 1972. It was packed with fans, but wherever Slocum went, the seas parted.
Eyes got wide. Didn't matter the color they were wearing. That's R.C. Slocum, fans whispered as they elbowed their friends. Several thanked him for his years of service to Texas A&M. But Slocum didn't discriminate. He sought out Longhorn fans, welcoming them back and telling them how excited he was for the return of the rivalry.
Slocum was a fitting ambassador. Nobody ever coached in more A&M-Texas games than Slocum: 30 in all. On his way to the field to take in the pregame scene, he walked through the Bright football complex, the one he helped get built but never worked in.
"When they needed help, R.C. was there to do it," Dodds said. "And he probably was underappreciated."
But after his cancer scare, there was a new realization: Slocum had always shown up. But just because he's always been around doesn't mean he always will be.
In 2023, Aggie booster Wayne Roberts donated $7.5 million toward the renovation of the football center, with one stipulation: He didn't want his name on the building. He wanted R.C.'s. The building was renamed the Bright-Slocum Center. It was the perfect setting for his final home game as an official Texas A&M employee after more than a half-century.
He walked out of the building bearing his name, leaving the entire program better than he found it.
"As you go through your life, you try to leave good tracks," he said.
Now he can get back to living. In December, he was honored at a benefit in Houston. His two sons, John Harvey and Shawn, were there. So was his wife Nel, her son, and all of the granddaughters and their spouses.
"They all had Aggie rings on," Slocum said. "We got a picture with all of 'em doing a Gig 'Em. That night it went through my mind, boy, you made the right decision. A&M has been good to me. It's been good to our family. I'm still spending the pennies of my life. I'm in overtime right now. I think I've already gone through the fourth quarter, but I'm still playing."