Every so often a figure emerges in your imagination that is hard to shake. Anytime I have told a member of the Gadsden Country Club that I attended graduate school in Laramie, Wyoming their immediate response is, “well, you must know Pedro Billingsley?” “What a name,” I generally will respond. I am certain with a name such as this he would have been a character. Sadly, I never was fortunate enough to meet the person called, “Pedro.” Then the research knife begins carving up the internet onion, revealing layers of connective vegetable tissue and sweet smelling juice.
Over the course of my life I have sometimes received University of Alabama championship literature about the newest dynasty declaration, or national championship trophy acquisition, as Christmas and birthday gifts. The subject feels like quicksand to any Alabamian that has thumbed through these kind of books. I am filled with a certain pride for my alma mater, and state, that we have had such a monumental history that the Walk of Champions looks like a walk through for an authoritarian Dictators’ Museum, if there was such a thing. But I landed on “Pedro” for a story about a football player that chose the Laramie, Wyoming, frozen tundra, over the bowl-shaped-malodorous-Tuscaloosa summer practices under the watchful eye of Bear Bryant. The stench in Tuscaloosa was a direct result of the Paper mill, and Bear was already winning titles by the time “Pedro” was being recruited from Gadsden High in 1962 by the University of Alabama. But he chose the Great Plains and University of Wyoming, instead.
Why Wyo, “Pedro”? It was probably not that “Pedro” hated the smell and shitty fishing in Tuscaloosa. I can say from my own graduate days in both places that you take education as you find it. In 2003, at UA I was just happy an institution would have me at all, after the shenanigans I pulled at Sewanee: University of the South. I had been dismissed from Sewanee because first, they were unsure if they could handle someone going through a bipolar recovery. Then when I recovered they kicked me out for smoking marijuana in a dorm in the first week of my return. Needless to say I was fortunate to be receiving an education in Tuscaloosa after the predicament I got myself into earlier in my life with Sewanee administrators.
Pedro chose Laramie for reasons unknown to me. He was sought after by both the legendary coach Paul Bear Bryant, and simultaneously a now infamously legendary coach Lloyd Eaton. “Pedro” chose the latter of these, and he leaves Gadsden, Alabama for the Wyoming flatlands and the distant Snowy Range Mountains. Why? Apparently, Bear was not going to allow Pedro to play defense and Pedro loved playing defense. For love of his particular brand of football he took a presumably harder path, one that may have been the right choice for him.
I was hoping when I heard the country clubbers discussing Pedro that he was in fact of hispanic heritage, as it would have made my segue more interesting. You see in my mind, it is not enough that Pedro went on to beat Florida State in the Sun Bowl, and finish 10-1 in 1966, or that Pedro played in the NFL as a journeyman for the Oilers, Chargers, and Saints. He lived all these places and for some reason he came back to Gadsden, or Glencoe, more specifically, in order to live out his days as a plumber. He even saved a woman from dying in a fire when he heard the popping and burning vinyl of her apartment walls from his apartment. Any man that runs into a burning home is a hero in my book.
I want to speculate that Pedro is a lot like me. His bravery is about leaving a familiar town and state with future standouts like John Croyle someday filling in at Gadsden High and later for a UA national championship after Pedro left for the stomping grounds of Butch Cassidy, who spent some prison time in the Laramie Territorial Prison in the 1890s. Why Pedro? Did you get tired of the monotony of friends calling you “Pedro” when your name was really Ron?
Apparently, when Ron was a kid a yo yo salesman from South America couldn’t say his real name, so he said, “I’m just going to call you, Pedro.” Ron said. “that would be alright,” and the kids began referring to him as “Pedro.” The irony is that when he got to Laramie everyone seemed to want to call him “Gomer” for his Gadsden accent given the popularity of the Andy Griffith show in the 1960s.
Earlier I mentioned that Coach Eaton was “infamous” for something. I remembered from my own days in Laramie that aside from the lynching of a homosexual named Matthew Shepard a few years before my arrival in Laramie, that in Pedro’s day the big story on the Great Plains was the “Black Fourteen.” Instead of a bronze courtyard in the stadia march of fascist football leaders, that I admittedly admire for their grit and championship stacking, when I was at Laramie the only bronze I remember seeing was the bronze brown arm of a sculpture with a band around it with the number 14. When I saw it in the Student Union the story unraveled before me that in 1969, three years after Pedro headed for the professional ranks, fourteen African-American students wanted to protest in their upcoming game against BYU that blacks could not hold the priesthood in the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS). My research interest felt quelled when I realized that Pedro or Gomer was already long gone to sunnier environs. But then I realized my connective thread was Eaton— the coach Pedro chose over the legendary Bear.
Pedro chose Eaton because he was a defensive coach who specialized in stopping the run. In 1967, The year after Pedro left Laramie, Eaton’s team went undefeated. In 1968, they nearly defeated LSU in the Sugar Bowl. Pedro led Eaton to his peak years as a coach, and in 1969 University of Wisconsin was considering Eaton for a Big Ten conference head coaching job. It was not to be however, and in 1969 the fourteen black players marched in his office and demanded that they be allowed to wear the black armbands to play in during the next game against BYU. They were all let go from the team, and the reverberations from this incident would be felt throughout the rest of their lives. Eaton would lose his job as well in the following year. This turmoil that came with this controversy was a fact whose ripples created a butterfly effect resulting in the future hire of Pat Dye a decade later in 1980, and even later Dennis Erickson who went on to coach the “U” and lose to the Crimson Tide’s Gene Stallings in a 1992 national championship that I attended in New Orleans with my family. If you follow this circuitous logic Bear won every aspect of Pedro’s decision to go to the Laramie Plains instead of the Tuscaloosa humid and putrid bowl shaped city. Pedro undoubtedly had a harder time finding good barbecue in Laramie, as I remember my own encounter with some kind of boiled barbecue stew in Laramie at the Centennial Poker Run.
Why Wyo, Pedro? I can speculate that Pedro may have been at home with Coach Eaton. Isn’t that what makes any player choose a coach? What was homey about an authoritarian racist that is anti-protest? Gadsden was the place near Keener, Alabama where William Lewis Moore was shot a few years before Pedro left, where labor wars involving the Goodyear plant earned us the reputation of establishment “reign of terror” in the Thirties, and where John House and Sherman Dalrymple were beat within an inch of their lives for agitating for better working conditions during those same years. Gadsden and Eaton would have been on the same page about the Black 14, especially in 1969. By 1970, Carver Elementary was beating Eura Brown pee wee football in City Championships in Gadsden, and segregated sports were on their way out in Alabama.
In the “Equality State” of Wyoming, so named for the state’s liberal stance toward female suffrage, diversity is kind of a non-issue, at least I did not find myself questioning my own white privileges until the the early 2010s when I moved from Laramie to Oxford, Mississippi, so it is my speculation that the Black Fourteen were only doing what was becoming popular across the rest of the nation and exercising their right to protest for equality. Pedro can no longer speak for himself, so maybe I shouldn't speculate, but I know better than most where he is from, and where he went in his college years. So was Eaton familiar in a way that Bear was not? Who knows? Sure seems that way. Doesn’t make Billingsley any less heroic. It only makes Ron Billingsley a product of his culture, and aren’t we all?