Texans You Should Know is a series highlighting overlooked figures and events from Texas history.

Every summer, as high school football teams practice for the coming season, I think back to my time as a player, when the calm of a sultry mid-August morning in 1968 would be shattered by a single note from a coach’s whistle. It was often followed by an admonition: “Burnin’ daylight, men. We got a lotta things to do and a short time to do ’em in.”

The voice belonged to Eddie Joseph, and like more than a thousand other head coaches in Texas that summer, he and his staff were initiating two-a-day football practices. Joseph had arrived the summer before in Wharton, a riverside town of around seven thousand an hour’s drive southwest of downtown Houston. With little time to organize his players

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