Houston Texans<\/a> (2002-present) are still trying to reach their first AFC title game.<\/p>\nAdams and Phillips, Bud and Bum, died three days apart in 2013, both at the age of 90.<\/p>\n
\u201cBud Adams did everything I asked him to\u00a0\u2014 believe me, the Oilers have been fair to me,\u201d the folksy Phillips told reporters while cleaning out his office following his firing. \u201cBud gave me the football to run with\u00a0\u2014 I guess I just didn\u2019t run far enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
O.A. \u201cBum\u201d Phillips Jr., born in 1923 in Orange, served in World War II and played collegiately at Lamar in Beaumont and Stephen F. Austin State in Nacogdoches. His first coaching job was at Nederland High near Beaumont in the early to mid-1950s, and he would routinely drive from Nederland to College Station to learn football under then-Texas A&M head coach Paul \u201cBear\u201d Bryant.<\/p>\n
While at Nederland, too, Phillips pondered means to simplify the naming of defensive alignments, and helped develop the \u201ctechnique\u201d numbering system. For instance, \u201c2-technique\u201d means lining up directly across from an offensive guard.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt\u2019s still being used today,\u201d Howard said of the numbering structure. \u201cBum was a lot smarter than people think, and he was also a really good motivator and a good leader. He did it in such a way that his players really liked him, and they didn\u2019t feel belittled or beaten up\u00a0\u2014 they felt empowered.\u201d<\/p>\n
Phillips spent a year on Bryant\u2019s staff at A&M in 1957, when running back John David Crow won the Heisman Trophy, but did not follow Bryant to Alabama when the budding college icon exited College Station for Tuscaloosa, Ala., that same year.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you get a chance to learn from Bear Bryant, you\u2019re learning from the best,\u201d Howard said. \u201cNot many coaches turned down Bear Bryant, but Bum was committed to Texas, this was his home. Money wasn\u2019t important to him\u00a0\u2014 his home state was what was important to him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Out of 13 different coaching jobs in football, Phillips only left the state on three occasions: as the San Diego Chargers\u2019 defensive coordinator from 1967-71, as an Oklahoma State assistant in 1973 and as the New Orleans Saints\u2019 head coach from 1981-85.<\/p>\n
Howard was not an Oilers fan in the traditional sense of many youngsters in the Houston area. He was 12 years old when his family moved to Huntsville in 1976 from Big Spring, 80 miles northeast of Odessa.<\/p>\n
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He grew up a Dallas Cowboys fan in West Texas, but soon learned Huntsville had a special fondness for the Oilers, based on the town being about an 80-minute drive from the Astrodome, and the Oilers holding training camp on the Sam Houston State campus from 1974-76.<\/p>\n
For its part \u201cLuv Ya Bum\u201d is the equivalent of an 86-minute joyride on the Texas Cyclone at Astroworld\u00a0\u2014 like the Oilers both long gone\u00a0\u2014 for longtime Houstonians still enamored by Houston\u2019s first NFL team, including interviews with the city\u2019s most celebrated backfield of running back Earl Campbell and quarterback Dan Pastorini.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know if Earl is in a class by himself, but I do know when that class gets together, it sure don\u2019t take long to call the roll,\u201d Phillips famously said of Campbell, a Tyler native and the 1977 Heisman Trophy winner at the University of Texas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Pastorini described Phillips as \u201clike playing for your dad \u2026 a nice dad.\u201d<\/p>\n
Movie critic Joey Magidson described \u201cLuv Ya Bum,\u201d narrated by Houstonian Dennis Quaid, as \u201cthe rare doc that leaves you with a good feeling\u201d and \u201cgood for the soul.\u201d<\/p>\n
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One of the documentary\u2019s swerves is the recollection of a long-forgotten disco tune called \u201cThe Super Bowl Itch\u201d by then-Oilers receiver Kenny Burrough, who memorably wore the number \u201c00.\u201d<\/p>\n
Less memorable and long before the Chicago Bears\u2019 \u201cSuper Bowl Shuffle\u201d of 1985, the \u201cItch\u201d ditty included the lyrics, \u201cDante will call the plays; Campbell will run the maze; Give it to Double-O; hang on and watch me go \u2026 I\u2019ve got the Super Bowl Itch.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo bad it was good,\u201d a grinning Howard said of the \u201cItch,\u201d adding of the many long-tucked-away tapes in Houston television stations: \u201cWe dug and dug and dug and had so much archival footage \u2026 just like any other documentary it could have been five hours long, but we condensed it to an hour-and-a-half.\u201d<\/p>\n
Howard, who attended both Texas A&M and Sam Houston State, made his money in waste services and financial management, and this decade began putting his dollars into entertainment with the founding of Lucky Number 8 Productions in Houston in 2022.<\/p>\n
Howard\u2019s swim into storytelling has resulted in \u201cLuv Ya Bum\u201d and the upcoming thriller \u201cEleven Days,\u201d based on the 1974 prison siege in Huntsville led by drug kingpin Federico Carrasco, among other releases.<\/p>\n
Howard, who in 2020 bought and restored Huntsville\u2019s historic Cafe Texan (which now includes a museum) on the downtown square, also has plans for a multipart documentary on the great cattle drives of Texas during the late 1800s.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis place is just full of great stories,\u201d Howard said of the Lone Star State. \u201cWe\u2019re bringing in college students to help, too. They\u2019re learning how to edit \u2026 and put a film together. Lucky Number 8 built an editing room and studio here (in Huntsville). There are a lot of great stories to tell.\u201d<\/p>\n
Few will stir emotions like \u201cLuv Ya Bum,\u201d however, for NFL fans who in the late 1970s figured the Oilers would finally scratch their itch for a Super Bowl victory\u00a0\u2014 or at least a Super Bowl showing.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to do,\u201d then-Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw said in the documentary of playing in and winning a Super Bowl. \u201cYou have to get the breaks, and you get good calls and you get bad calls. \u2026 We got \u2019em, and Bum didn\u2019t get \u2019em.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vance Howard at “Luv Ya, Bum!” Premiere at Paramount Theatre during the SXSW Conference & Festivals on March…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":409801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-409800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/409801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}