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This guy was 'get an ambulance' tough
Published: 1/13/2012 9:38 AM
Last Modified: 1/13/2012 9:38 AM

Many football players are under the pretense that they are tough. Former Oklahoma State football coach (and former Texas A&M player) Jim Stanley could have put them all to shame.

First, a story:

After Stanley's death Thursday, there was some debate in regard to whether Stanley was one of Paul "Bear" Bryant's "Junction Boys" at A&M. Bryant infamously took his football team to Junction, Texas, for a grueling 10-day football camp in 1954. Practices basically lasted all day and players were denied water breaks even though the temperature topped 100 degrees every day of the camp.

Bryant's goal was to toughen up his players. By the end of the camp, many had quit the team and Bryant was left with a small core of "survivors."

Officially, Stanley is not a Junction Boy. He sort of denied being a Junction Boy during a 2011 radio interview.

But, unofficially, it sounds like he was a Junction Boy and he apparently had his own reasons (it's a long story) for saying he wasn't.

Stanley once told one of his former OSU players that he was a freshman when he made the trip to Junction, Texas. He also told this story:

Supposedly, Bryant had a couple of hooligans stationed near the practice field. Bryant would sometimes send a player who displeased him to the hooligans and they would thump on the player until he returned to a practice that didn't seem as brutal as the alternative.

Stanley said this happened to him once. But his story had a different ending. Stanley returned to the practice field and said "Coach, you better call an ambulance for those two guys."

Anyone got any questions about Stanley's toughness?

I can't swear the story is true. But Stanley told it to someone he trusted many years after the fact. For the sake of perpetuating an urban legend, I'm going to prefer to believe it.


Reader Comments 1 Total
JCD1978 (last year)
Jimmie, you could probably interview Gene Stallings to get the real story on Jim Stanley's version.
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Tulsa World sports writer Jimmie Tramel is a former class president at Locust Grove High School. He graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern State University with a journalism degree and, while attending college, was sports editor of the Pryor Daily Times. He joined the Tulsa World on Oct. 17, 1989, the same day an earthquake struck the World Series. He is the OSU basketball beat writer and a columnist and feature writer during football season. In 2007, he wrote a book about Oklahoma State football with former Cowboy coach Pat Jones.

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