Jerry Ball Makes Texas High School Hall of Fame

[Stallion]

Keith Whitmire @Keith_Whitmire
· Dec 12
My old McGinnis 4 floormate Jerry Ball got elected to the Texas High School Football Hall of Fame. Congrats, JB!


I still remember watching him play RB for Galveston Ball in state title game

[ALEX LIFESON]

The great #34!

[DanFreibergerForHeisman]

Keith Whitmire @Keith_Whitmire
· Dec 12
My old McGinnis 4 floormate Jerry Ball got elected to the Texas High School Football Hall of Fame. Congrats, JB!


I still remember watching him play RB for Galveston Ball in state title game

Beaumont West Brook.

Great news for Ball. He was an absolute force for us.

[Stallion]

right

[Terry Webster]

Boy, remember seeing him clog the middle. he was terrific.

[Treadway21]

Saw him dunk in a pick up game in dedman. Loved watching him play.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[SoCal_Pony]

Congrats to a great Mustang!!!

[well travelled pony]

Keith Whitmire @Keith_Whitmire
· Dec 12
My old McGinnis 4 floormate Jerry Ball got elected to the Texas High School Football Hall of Fame. Congrats, JB!


I still remember watching him play RB for Galveston Ball in state title game

McGinnis. Our freshman year in that hall was great, except for crazy David Stanley. Jerry was such a great guy. I was also amazed at his size. While this may sound weird, his thighs were like two giant tree trunks, but he was so explosive. A true SMU great!

Go Ponies!

[smusic 00]

McGinnis 2 here. Had a couple WRs next door to me who were always making 'extracurricular' noise.

[SMUer]

You mean they found another wide-receiver to play with?

[ponyscott]

Great for him!

[mr. pony]

Thunder Ball
SMU’s Jerry Ball Was A Force In The Trenches
By Rick Atkinson, cusa-fans.com

SUGAR LAND, Tex. – Jerry Ball has a seven-foot tall mustang sculpture on his front lawn. My guess is nobody messes with it.

A three-time All-Southwest Conference nose guard for SMU and All-Pro NFL standout, Ball has never had much problem defending his turf.

Ball arrived at SMU in 1983 from Beaumont, Tex., a 6-1, 232-pound fullback. He was quickly moved to nose guard and went Transformer on folks, growing to 300 pounds of run-stopping mayhem by the time he left The Hilltop.

During a 13-year pro career with the Detroit Lions, Cleveland Browns, Oakland Raiders and Minnesota Vikings, he - and his reputation - only grew.

Double- and triple-teamed, Ball plugged the middle like a titanium fire hydrant. He also rumbled sideline-to-sideline with ease.

Ball was a Playboy All-American in ’86, his senior year at SMU. He led the Mustangs in tackles in ’84, the year SMU shared the SWC title with Houston and beat Notre Dame in the Aloha Bowl. It was the Mustangs’ fourth straight 10-plus-win season and third straight bowl appearance.

“We just had a great group of guys,” Ball said last week from his home in Sugar Land, southwest of Houston. “We were always together.”

Ball and his wife of 23 years, Michelle, have three daughters, Haley, 13, Lindsey, 19 and Faren, 22. “[Michelle] was there at SMU, with me as my wife,” Ball said. “And I’ll tell you, it was a lot of good days. A lot of good days at SMU.”

Jerry Ball and daughter Haley with the family Mustang.

‘Bumpy Roads’

Beaumont Westbrook was a new high school in 1982, Ball’s senior year. New, as in court-ordered integration new, formed by the merger of a predominantly black school and predominantly white school.

“We had a somewhat Remember the Titans-type story,” Ball said. “[We had] bumpy roads. But the kids, we figured out how to come together. We brought the community together and went on and won the 5A [state] championship in the first year.”

Nicknamed “Ice Box,” Ball played fullback, linebacker and defensive tackle for Westbrook. And the scholarship offers poured in. (Not from Texas A&M, though. An Aggie assistant coach thought Ball was too cocky.)

Ball knew of local heroes Jerry LeVias (1966-68) and Louie Kelcher (1972-74) who’d gone on to All-America glory at SMU. And All-SWC running back Alvin Maxson (1971-73) was also a Beaumont Mustang.

But the biggest impact on Ball in ‘82 was SMU’s Pony Express: Eric Dickerson, Craig James and Lance McIlhenny. In a nationally-televised game between SMU and Texas A&M that year, the Mustangs smashed the Aggies, 47-9, en route to the SWC title and a No. 2 final national ranking.

Ball was watching.

“I remember they had pitched ‘Dick’ a ball,” he said, “and he went about 60 yards and I was like, ‘Yeah, I like that.’ And I loved the uniforms, you know?”

SMU assistant Kenith Pope, who’d coached LeVias at Beaumont Hebert, recruited Ball.

Ball visited just two schools: SMU and Houston. “Once I went to SMU,” Ball said, “it just solidified that’s where I wanted to be.”

Shortly after arriving on campus, Pope told Ball he’d play sooner at nose guard and Ball jumped at the chance. As an added bonus, he could eat whatever he wanted. “You mean I can eat two of those?” Ball would say. “OK, give me three.”

Ball started out No.6 on the depth chart and by the first game he was backing up All-SWC senior Michael Carter. Carter taught him well.

“When we transitioned from Michael Carter to Jerry Ball [in ‘84] we definitely didn’t lose anything,” said SMU All-SWC linebacker Anthony Beverley, by phone. “And we may have a gained a little something.”


Jerry Ball
photo credit: SMU Athletics

Good Times

In SMU’s 27-20 Aloha Bowl win over Notre Dame, Ball made a play that followed him to the NFL: after hitting Irish quarterback Steve Beurerlein as he dumped off a screen pass, Ball turned and chased down the receiver about 25 yards downfield.

“For me, it was like, [shoot] he wasn’t down,” Ball said. “Why would you stop running until he’s down?”

Ball and SMU running back Jeff Atkins were co-MVPs of the game.

Ball said bowls then were more about match-ups on the field and less about money. Bowl committees now, he said, are more concerned with how well a team’s fan base travels.

“So even if SMU is a very competitive team,” Ball said, “you still have these other factors these bowl committees are making their decisions on.”

“You’ve got to deal on both sides,” he said. “There are some things that we are going to have to do as a school to make sure we get as many alums involved. Will it be like the old days? Only if our passion is the same.”

Another highlight for the “too cocky” Ball was when SMU beat Texas A&M in ’84 and Ball tackled everything in sight. Afterward, Aggie players told Ball that A&M coach Jackie Sherrill had gone off on his cocky-sensitive assistant with a profanity-laced post-game tirade.

Bevo Burned

SMU shellacked Texas, 44-14, at Texas Stadium in ’85. Ball was sick, but played. That game, he said, provided validation for SMU. “That we are who we are. Ya’ll should be concerned.”

Don King was the Mustangs’ quarterback during most of Ball’s tenure. “You never heard him rattled in the cage,” Ball said. “Whether he had thrown a touchdown or a bad pass, [he was the] same guy. That gave that team a lot of stability.”

King threw for a combined 2,984 yards over two years and was All-SWC in ‘84.

Ball said SMU coach Bobby Collins’ pre-game speeches consisted of the same “bullet points” each week: everybody runs to the ball, hustle to the line, huddle up, get your man.

“We’d be dressing,” Ball said. “He’s talking to the whole locker room.”

“There was one that I used to wait on him to say - all the time: ‘If the ball player is up and wiggling, strike his [deleted].’”

“Depending on who we were playing, it was strike ‘his ass’ or strike ‘him.’ If it was one of those games, like UT, [it was] strike ‘his [deleted]!’”

“He’s was probably one of the better administrators as a coach,” Ball said of Collins. “He and [former Vikings coach] Denny Green are probably the most organized coaches I’ve ever played for.”

Desert Downer

A tough SMU memory for Ball is the trip to Tucson, Ariz., in ’85 where the Mustangs lost to Arizona in a stadium strewn with Monopoly money, a nod to SMU being on probation for paying players. (Those continued payments resulted in the NCAA death penalty for SMU in ’87.)

“That stuck out forever [for me] because I had never seen that,” Ball said. “I was mad more than anything. That’s probably one of the worst things that I remember … because I felt that [scandal] was much bigger than us.”

Ball said he still gets calls from media on major death penalty anniversaries.

“It happened,” he said, “but we have to control what we do and not let the media or anyone make us feel like we owe them any more explanation. When you killed the program, just like if someone had committed a crime and he goes to jail, we say, ‘You’ve done the time? OK, well that’s over.’ So, we paid that price.”

“I’m not going to apologize to you for that. And, really, I feel that it became an issue because we were kicking the big schools’ asses.”

“The local media and schools did more damage against us than the NCAA.”

“Now, am I saying we were all right? Probably not. But I don’t feel that we were any different than other universities. Because, remember: we were recruited by the other universities. So, trust me.”

Ball said SMU administrators handled the penalty badly. “They made us go duck our head in the sand,” he said. “And I was like, I’m not ducking mine. What are you talking about? … [The University of] Texas hasn’t crossed the line? Come on. We’ve heard about oil wells and Earl Campbell. Who hasn’t heard that one?”

Ball said lots of memorabilia from those pre-DP years was stashed away in shame. “Right after the death penalty they chose to kind of just box everything up and [say] ‘We’re going to move that out of the way.’ A lot of it got lost.”

Fourth-year SMU AD Steve Orsini, Ball said, has done a good job of fixing some of that by recognizing achievements from that era and making the players feel welcome.

Pro Days

Ball was a third-round pick by Detroit in the ’87 NFL draft and started every game as a rookie. He played in three Pro Bowls in six years with the Lions, and was voted to a fourth, but injured.

In ’91, Ball was All-Pro and Detroit won a franchise-record 12 games, advancing to the NFC championship game.

The ’98 Minnesota Vikings, Ball said, were probably the best team he ever played on. “That was,” he said, “and always will be, a special team to me because I felt we were the best in the league.”

Those 16-1 Vikes fell to underdog Atlanta in the NFC Championship game on Morten Andersen’s 38-yard field goal in overtime. Minnesota’s Gary Anderson, who hadn’t missed a field goal all year, was inches wide on a 38-yard attempt late in regulation that would have iced it for the Vikings.

“When it comes time to make the one that will get us to the Super Bowl, that’s the one he misses,” Ball said. “Hell, we were beating teams by 20-24 points and … we didn’t need those points.”

Ball’s Bullets

Though his specialty was run-stopping, Ball also collected 32 sacks as a pro.

Toward the end of his career, Ball had his own pre-game “bullet points” for teammates: “Every man, get his man. Every good man, get two.”

Ball said too much emphasis is often placed on pass rushing and sacks.

“I heard the defensive linemen at SMU call themselves ‘rush men,’” he said. “Well, this is the fact: you can never rush the quarterback unless you put him in a position where he has to throw. So if you don’t stop the run, you’re not a ‘rush man,’ you’re just a lineman running out of the way.”

Ball doesn’t believe today’s SMU player really “gets” Mustang tradition because “they’re having people tell them how to feel about something they didn’t know. They didn’t even grow up seeing it.”

“In order for them to really ‘get’ it,” he said, “they’re going to have to create it,” he said.

“I would just tell the guys that they have a chance to build their own tradition by all coming together with the will to be a team. Accept that the guy next to you is rooting for you, even though he might be correcting you – coach or player.”

“When men can humble themselves and play as a team, that’s when special things happen. That’s when that special bond comes.”

­­­­­A final note on the ’85 Texas rout:

“This guard from Texas pancake-[blocked] me,” Ball said, “and I guess that was some big feat because I would always hear about getting pancaked in the Texas game.”

Ball’s reply? “Is that the game we kicked ya’ll’s [deleted] 40-something to whatever? Oh, yeah. I must have been eating pancakes by the third quarter.”

Cocky? Go ask Jackie Sherrill.

Notes:

*SMU lost to Alabama in the ’83 Sun Bowl, 28-7.

*Jerry Ball owns Golden Triangle Material and Service, a pipe valve fitting supply company in Beaumont. He graduated SMU with a degree in psychology.

*Gerry York (SMU ’58) of SMU’s Heritage Hall and Ronnie Perry (SMU ’69) contributed to this report.

[PK]

^^Love the story. We need some more Jerry Ball players. Go Mustangs.

[mrydel]

Unless I missed it, I saw no mention of his appearances on Home Improvement with Tim the toolman Taylor.

[Digetydog]

Boy, remember seeing him clog the middle. he was terrific.

My Freshman year, he appeared to be living in the lobby of McElvany (all girls at the time) 24/7. He was one big dude.