In the annals of Texas Tech football, the 1967 team might go underappreciated.
That year’s edition of the Red Raiders beat Texas in Austin and then-powerful Arkansas in Little Rock, the first Tech football team to take down both in the same season. Beating Texas earned Tech the No. 10 spot in The Associated Press poll at a time when only 10 teams were ranked. Tech finished a solo second place in the Southwest Conference, a loss to Texas A&M in the conference opener ultimately costing the Red Raiders a spot in the Cotton Bowl.
They finished third in the nation in rushing offense, thanks in no small part to an interior line with Phil Tucker and Don King at guard and Jerry Turner at center. All three would eventually make the Texas Tech Athletics Hall of Fame.
Tucker, a unanimous all-Southwest Conference choice that season and an all-American by the Newspaper Enterprise Association, died Thursday at age 79.
“He was just special,” King said. “He was easy to talk to. He had a great laugh. I can remember in ball games, us just enjoying the minute, and we took a lot of pride in what we were doing. He and Jerry and I right there in the middle, we took a lot of pride in what we were doing, and he probably was the head of the spear, he and Jerry.”
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Tucker, who spent the past few years in San Angelo, had been dealing with the effects of diabetes, his son, Chad, said. He’d been hospitalized or receiving skilled-nursing care since August.
“The years on the gridiron had definitely taken it’s toll on his hips and his knees and his wrist and his shoulders,” Chad Tucker said, “but he did maintain. He was with it for the most part. He and I talked college football all the time. He loved that aspect. He kept up with college football up to the point … he did need me to explain to him the Pac-12 no longer being (intact).”
Tucker started at guard on Tech’s 8-3 Gator Bowl team in 1965 and at tackle on the 1966 team that shocked No. 6 Arkansas in college football’s upset of the decade. The graduation of senior starter Ronnie Pack prompted Tucker’s return to guard for 1967, when the Red Raiders finished 6-4. He was listed that season at 6-foot-1 and 232 pounds.
Teammates agree Tucker was deceptively fast. On top of that, Turner said, he was a fierce competitor, tough and packaged it with an entertaining personality.
“Tech was very lucky to get somebody of Tucker’s talent back in the early ’60s,” Turner said. “He certainly could have gone anywhere he wanted to go. Being from Tulia, it was perhaps just preordained that he would come to Texas Tech.”
Tucker was all-SWC and honorable mention all-America as a tackle his junior year. The spring before his senior year, he embraced moving back to guard to enhance his pro prospects.
“Because of my height, my best chance would be at guard,” he said. “The pros won’t even look at a tackle, it seems, unless he’s tall as the roof.”
He was just fine for the Red Raiders, though. Offensive coordinator and offensive line coach John Conley, for whom Tucker would name one of his sons, designed an attack catering to his interior linemen’s strengths.
“We had a quick line,” Turner said, “and coach Conley had these blocking schemes of trapping and double-teaming and pulling, and we were uniquely able to do that because of the talent we had in people like King and Tucker.”
In conjunction with the Red Raiders’ 1,000th game in 2015, the A-J named Tucker to the first unit and King and Turner to the second on the all-time Tech team.
One of the famous moments in the Tech football history was quarterback John Scovell’s 175-yard rushing performance in the Red Raiders’ 1967 victory at Texas. Scovell and Tucker arrived at Tech the same year.
“He was an offensive tackle and when we got to the huddle he acted like the quarterback,” Scovell said. “He always wanted me to run certain plays, but for some reason or another, I don’t know why, it always involved him.
“But he was a good one. They don’t make them any better. He was wonderful.”
After a year at Edmonton in the Canadian Football League, Tucker turned to coaching, first as an assistant at Plainview and Hereford and then as Idalou head coach in 1974 and 1975. He moved to Brownfield and worked in private business until 1993 when he returned to coaching, making stops as an assistant at Mansfield, Whitesboro, Lewisville, Skidmore-Tynan and Cameron Yoe. He retired in 2010.
A memorial service for Tucker is scheduled for 11 a.m. Saturday at the Kent Hance Chapel, 17th Street and University Avenue, on the Tech campus.
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