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Meat on the Hoof: The Hidden World of Texas Football
They raise cattle and football players in Texas. The cattle are treated better. MEAT ON THE HOOF is a startling look at big-time college football. The University of Texas Longhorns under Coach Darrell Royal have long been a major football power.
- GenresSportsFootballNonfiction
234 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1972
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
September 1, 2021
I attended a University that did not have a football program STILL doesnt my mom earned her Phd from UT and I remember vaguely the Coach Royal era ... or fading and the big football stadium while she heared her Phd.... having photographed HS football and had football coaches as track coaches I found it an ineresting read my interesting as I found out we lettered in different sprots same high school. It had Denton tude it and I liked it. Very enlightening and horrifying..... this deconstructs the Coach Royal mythos... and shows him morea as a shrewd politican.
July 16, 2009
I remember how shocking this book was when I first read it. As it turns out, it probably only touched on the edges of the corruption that pervades college sports.
December 20, 2011
A dated but nonetheless quite interesting look at Gary Shaw's playing days under legendary Texas coach Darrell "Big Daddy D" Royal and his dozens of assistants. It's got its ups and downs--the assembly of the material is somewhat haphazard, and the copy I have appears not to have been proofread very closely--but there are a handful of moments when Shaw gets at the negative aspects of the football experience in a way that's superior even to the work done by other athlete-authors such as Jerry Kramer and Dave Meggysesy. Unlike the books by Bill Bradley and Michael Oriard, which are better characterized as "timely meditations" by well-educated and self-satisfied men who have succeeded at their chosen sports, Meat on the Hoof is an ugly, gritty account of four unpleasant years at a time in the history of the UT football factory when the team's roster was enormous (pre-Title IX, with hundreds of players on scholarship, although this varied during certain years due to the implementation of SWC rules), scholarships were guaranteed (a positive development of the late 50s that was undone by reactionary NCAA "reforms" in the early 70s), and the practices had to be kept nasty, brutish, & long in order to run off "bad meat" (so as to get said "bad meat" to renounce their scholarships and leave the school in shame). The revelations about recruiting practices and the crudeness of "jock culture" are nothing new, but the spate of sports tell-alls released in the late 60s and early 70s seems to indicate that there was once a considerable market for these exposés.
November 21, 2016
A well-written expose on what it was like playing big time college football in the 1960s. Not in the same league as Friday Night Lights but similar in that both made me appalled at the culture of football surrounding these areas and what it does to the young men who play the sport. Sure, times have changed, but it's tough to argue that people feel any different about amateur athletes (or professionals for that matter).
June 8, 2021
Early memoir that refused to glorify the sport of college football. As a high school football player, I could relate to the brutally hard work and tough coaches the book described multiplied by 10 at the University of Texas.
May 9, 2025
Meat On The Hoof by Gary Shaw was at the time of publication in 1972 an explosive expose on big-time college football specifically University if Texas Longhorns when the author played from 1959 to 1964.
Shaw goes into details regarding the abuses and dehumanizations meted out by the coaching staff to players. Coach Darelle Royal — whom the University of Texas stadium is now named after — won at the expense of the health and humanity of his players.
Hours long “shit drills” were players were forced to hit helmet to helmet, forcing players to play through extremely serious injuries while refusing to allow them to even be seen by a doctor are just some of the abuses detailed — including near fatal blood clots and a hole in a players heart.
Nothing is ever enough to make the coaches even almost give a damn.
Shaw details how football supplants players identity from the time they are children, the constant indoctrination, grooming and conditioning as well as how football is wrapped up in American ideals of masculinity, patriotism, nationalism, militarism & global dominance.
At the time Shaw was in college and published his book, the United States was waging a costly, bloody, imperialistic war in Vietnam and Nixon was repeatedly referring to himself as “Americas quarterback” going so far as to name a bombing assault in Vietnam “Operation Linebacker”.
Ultimately, Meat On The Hoof details Shaw’s eventual realization that he is an entire, whole human being, not a machine or robot who plays football, not a jock that has to shove down his feelings, not a brute who has to pretend he has no softness or vulnerability and that he only wants to win, score and play the literal and figurative field.
Shaw’s self-realization leads to his first serious relationship, he ends up checking himself into the university’s mental health hospital, he eventually quits the football team, works odd end jobs then finally moves to California where he finally frees himself from the remnants of the football mentality that he had been indoctrinated with his whole life since childhood.
Once in California, he receives a grant which he uses to write Meat On The Hoof.
Football is a violent, dehumanizing, abusive, inhumane, merciless, pitiless sport.
What Meggyesy did for exposing the NFL a year after the publication of Meat On The Hoof, Shaw did in Meat on the Hoof by exposing the extremely egregious bullying & hazing rituals, punishments, abuses & literal torture embedded within the very institution of college football.
With multiple men dying every year to this day during college football training camps, it is clear this extremely inhumane mindset is still pervasive within this extremely inhumane sport.
A few excerpts from the book that highlight the insane levels of inhumanity inherent within the sport of football:
“Running through the concrete passageway, many were crying and screaming, a couple of then hitting me on the shoulders saying, “Kill them, Shaw, kill ‘em.” I had the feeling that I sometimes had when I was a kid and first waking up from a nightmare.”
“But more importantly, hazing initiated us into a world of unquestioning obedience. On command we needed to be able to demonstrate the required amount of self-denial. This hazing compounded our bewilderment and confusion. We were eighteen year old high school heroes lost in a new world and daily being stripped of dignity any past identity.”
“In the year 2200 they would have a film of American adolescence in the twentieth century: “Yes, this was apparently very typical then. Here we have forty-five boys agreeing to indulge in mutual self-torture and madness for the profit and entertainment of their elders.”
“So to be successful meant to wear pain and injury as some merit badge. I think this ability to dissociate from your own body is the key to those able to endure the most pain. And I think that the bulking up football players do is at least partly to further dissociate themselves from body feeling — to put more padding between the point of contact and the soul.”
“But who is to say what would have happened if we 250-pound puppets had broken the strings and put this imposed explosion to our own ends. Maybe for one thing, these dreary marines called coaches could no longer construct human torpedoes out of lost love.”
Highly recommend! Five stars.
Shaw goes into details regarding the abuses and dehumanizations meted out by the coaching staff to players. Coach Darelle Royal — whom the University of Texas stadium is now named after — won at the expense of the health and humanity of his players.
Hours long “shit drills” were players were forced to hit helmet to helmet, forcing players to play through extremely serious injuries while refusing to allow them to even be seen by a doctor are just some of the abuses detailed — including near fatal blood clots and a hole in a players heart.
Nothing is ever enough to make the coaches even almost give a damn.
Shaw details how football supplants players identity from the time they are children, the constant indoctrination, grooming and conditioning as well as how football is wrapped up in American ideals of masculinity, patriotism, nationalism, militarism & global dominance.
At the time Shaw was in college and published his book, the United States was waging a costly, bloody, imperialistic war in Vietnam and Nixon was repeatedly referring to himself as “Americas quarterback” going so far as to name a bombing assault in Vietnam “Operation Linebacker”.
Ultimately, Meat On The Hoof details Shaw’s eventual realization that he is an entire, whole human being, not a machine or robot who plays football, not a jock that has to shove down his feelings, not a brute who has to pretend he has no softness or vulnerability and that he only wants to win, score and play the literal and figurative field.
Shaw’s self-realization leads to his first serious relationship, he ends up checking himself into the university’s mental health hospital, he eventually quits the football team, works odd end jobs then finally moves to California where he finally frees himself from the remnants of the football mentality that he had been indoctrinated with his whole life since childhood.
Once in California, he receives a grant which he uses to write Meat On The Hoof.
Football is a violent, dehumanizing, abusive, inhumane, merciless, pitiless sport.
What Meggyesy did for exposing the NFL a year after the publication of Meat On The Hoof, Shaw did in Meat on the Hoof by exposing the extremely egregious bullying & hazing rituals, punishments, abuses & literal torture embedded within the very institution of college football.
With multiple men dying every year to this day during college football training camps, it is clear this extremely inhumane mindset is still pervasive within this extremely inhumane sport.
A few excerpts from the book that highlight the insane levels of inhumanity inherent within the sport of football:
“Running through the concrete passageway, many were crying and screaming, a couple of then hitting me on the shoulders saying, “Kill them, Shaw, kill ‘em.” I had the feeling that I sometimes had when I was a kid and first waking up from a nightmare.”
“But more importantly, hazing initiated us into a world of unquestioning obedience. On command we needed to be able to demonstrate the required amount of self-denial. This hazing compounded our bewilderment and confusion. We were eighteen year old high school heroes lost in a new world and daily being stripped of dignity any past identity.”
“In the year 2200 they would have a film of American adolescence in the twentieth century: “Yes, this was apparently very typical then. Here we have forty-five boys agreeing to indulge in mutual self-torture and madness for the profit and entertainment of their elders.”
“So to be successful meant to wear pain and injury as some merit badge. I think this ability to dissociate from your own body is the key to those able to endure the most pain. And I think that the bulking up football players do is at least partly to further dissociate themselves from body feeling — to put more padding between the point of contact and the soul.”
“But who is to say what would have happened if we 250-pound puppets had broken the strings and put this imposed explosion to our own ends. Maybe for one thing, these dreary marines called coaches could no longer construct human torpedoes out of lost love.”
Highly recommend! Five stars.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 27, 2020
Read in 1975. Football machismo.
December 9, 2016
Very interesting, what I presume to be an early expose of the dark underbelly of college football. The author seems like a good, sensible guy, and much of what he recounts is pretty chilling. We have almost certainly come a long way in the 50 years since his experience, but I'd love to learn more. Specifically, I'd like to learn if there are rules (probably) that prohibit the things he experienced - which of those things, etc. - and how well they work. I'd like to learn more about access to independent medical advice, about limits to the kinds of "shit drills" that the Texas coaches put their young men through, etc. Oh yeah, F Darrel Royal.
January 13, 2010
If you play football it's a great book to read. It graphically shows how coaches treat their players.
March 7, 2011
Read this when I was about 18, and it certainly shocked me.
August 15, 2015
A disturbing look at life as a college football player in the 60's. Gary Shaw was a deeply disturbed individual who died homeless in Dallas. . . .
September 29, 2016
One of my favorites
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December 31, 2010stay away from Texas football
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews