EDITOR’S NOTE: Enjoy this look back at one of this year’s Odessa Athletics Hall of Fame honorees. This year’s banquet is scheduled Nov. 3 at the Odessa Marriott. Other honorees include track star Kerry Evans, OC rodeo great Jim Watkins, the 1989 Permian High School state and national champion Permian Panthers and Coach Gary Gaines, gridiron great Glen Halsell and football star Lloyd Hill.
When nominations opened for the inaugural Odessa Athletic Hall of Fame in 2021, Byron Taylor submitted the 1946 Odessa High School football team to be inducted.
Taylor’s father Glen “Jug” Taylor was co-captain of the 1946 Odessa High School football team with Harvey “Pug” Gabrel. That team completed a perfect 14-0 season and defeated San Antonio Jefferson, 21-14, in Austin at Memorial Stadium, in front of a crowd of more than 38,000, for the city’s first-ever state championship.
The Bronchos weren’t selected in 2021 and it left Byron Taylor heartbroken.
“I tried every way to get this team inducted last year,” Taylor said. “They didn’t make it.”
When the nominations for the 2022 Odessa Athletics Hall of Fame started, Taylor submitted the 1946 Odessa High School football team again.
This time Taylor received a phone call from CBS7 news anchor Jay Hendricks, who will also serve as master of ceremonies for the Odessa Athletics Hall of Fame banquet, and he asked Taylor if he would give an induction speech for the 1946 Odessa High School football team.
“When Jay called and said the ’46 team was going to be inducted, I got emotional,” Taylor said as he fought back tears. “They really deserve it.”
Over the years, the crowd that watched Odessa High win its first and only state football championship and the rosters for the Bronchos and San Antonio Jefferson have gotten smaller.
Taylor said during a phone call there are no surviving members from the state championship 1946 team. Taylor explained that College Football Hall of Famer Hayden Fry, who died in 2019, was the last surviving member of the ‘46 team.
Fry coached at SMU and North Texas before his 20-year run at the University of Iowa, where he won multiple championships, Big Ten titles and reached the Rose Bowl on three occasions. Fry saw 28 of his assistants become head coaches, including Bob Stoops, Bill Snyder, Bo Pelini and Bret Bielema.
“We should never forget that team,” Taylor said. “There are very few people that remember these guys. I don’t want Odessa to forget how great this team was and that they brought the first state championship title to Odessa.”
The Odessa American interviewed the four surviving members of that team – Fry, Charles Perry, Billy Moorman and Harold Dozier – in 2016. An excerpt from that article exemplifies why Taylor wanted the 1946 Odessa High School football team inducted.
The excerpt reads: “I’d just like the guys to be remembered,” Perry said in his home in Odessa early this fall (in 2016). For good reason. “We had a great team,” Fry said on the phone (in 2016). “We were like a family together.”
In that article, Fry also said “The ’46 team was really special. The people on the team and the coaches, and the support we had from the teachers and the principal and the superintendent – they were all outstanding people. It was exceptional – I’m not bragging – back in those days in as small a town as Odessa was, to be the state champions in the state of Texas.”
Taylor explained to the Odessa American about the caliber of player the 1946 Odessa High School football team possessed. Taylor said 10 of the 11 starters from that team went on to play Division I college football and earned a degree.
Jug Taylor joined Fry at Baylor, while Byron Townsend played for the Texas Longhorns. Townsend was drafted in the ninth round of the 1952 NFL Draft by the Los Angeles Rams.
Townsend was all-Southwest Conference fullback in 1950 when he scored a school-record 14 touchdowns. That record would later be broken by National Football League Hall of Famer Earl Campbell. Townsend was inducted in the University of Texas Hall of Honor in 1998. Townsend died in 2013. Jug Taylor and Gabrel both died in 2008.
The Bronchos were led by head coach Joe Coleman, who, according to a previous Odessa American article, that 1946 was his first year back on the OHS sideline since he left after the 1941 season to serve in the Navy during the war. Coleman’s legacy lives on as Odessa High’s practice field is named after the state championship winning coach. Coleman died in 1979 at the age of 66.
Byron Taylor said many didn’t want Coleman to return as head coach, but all the players wanted him to be at the helm.
“Joe Coleman was a disciplinarian,” Taylor said. “They went to Lubbock for a couple weeks for two-a-days before the season started. They would get up in the morning and practice in full pads and then they would have lunch and then they would have a rest time and then they would put the pads back on at 3 o’clock in the afternoon until 6 o’clock.”
Odessa High averaged 30.7 points per game and outscored its opponents 430-72. According to TexasBob.com, the Bronchos collected shutouts against Lubbock, El Paso, Big Spring, San Angelo, Lamesa, Ysleta and Wichita Falls.
Byron Taylor said Odessa High limited All-American Kyle Rote to 17 rushing yards during the state championship game. Jug Taylor batted down Rote’s final pass as time expired.
Taylor said his father never had to brag about winning a state championship. Taylor played football for John Wilkins at Permian in the late 1970s. Taylor said his record while at Permian was 33-3, however, he never won a state championship.
Despite never hoisting a state championship crown himself, Taylor said he will forever be proud that his father helped bring the first state football championship to Odessa.
“Everybody that walked through this town that played on that team was a celebrity,” Taylor said. “My dad was my hero.”
GET YOUR TICKETS
Don’t miss the Odessa Athletics Hall of Fame banquet scheduled at 7 p.m. Nov. 3 at the Odessa Marriott. The deadline to get a ticket is 5 p.m. Oct. 28.
- Call 432-333-7612 or visit tinyurl.com/ycx2wr7y
