Dec. 3, 2002, 12:34AM

Legacy of tenure at A&M is reform

By RICHARD JUSTICE
Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle

R.C. Slocum's legacy at Texas A&M will be twofold. First, he cleaned up one of the country's most corrupt programs and proved a big-time college football team could win without selling its soul. Second, he positioned the Aggies to win big again.

One of his standard stump speeches in recent years has been recalling an early conversation with an influential Aggie who said he understood cheating was part of the business and that a few rules had to be broken.

Slocum disagreed, telling the guy he believed it was possible to win while playing within the rules.

Two years later, the Aggies won the first of Slocum's four conference championships.

"I wouldn't trade winning another game or two for my reputation as a person," he said in an interview last season. "I've said from day one I'm going to do things the way I think they should be done. There were those who said, `If you don't cheat, you're pretty naive. You can't win that way.' Well, we're going to find out. That's the way we're going to do it. I can walk away and look myself in the mirror and say, `We did it the right way.' "

As exit lines go, that's not a bad one.

Slocum was fired Monday after 14 seasons on the job. He won more games (123) than any Aggies coach ever. He won 100 games faster than any other active coach, never had a losing record, went to nine bowls and was 71-12-1 at Kyle Field.

In the 1990s, he won more games than any other coach, including Darrell Royal, ever won in this state in a single decade.

And by all accounts, Slocum did it the right way.

"He's an excellent coach, one of the top coaches in America," Texans general manager Charley Casserly said. "He has always been a straight shooter. He's had his players as prepared to play at the next level as anybody in the country. Sometimes you can be in a place too long, and I think that's what happened to R.C. He's the same coach he was when he was winning championships."

Slocum told friends over and over in recent years that the younger generation of A&M graduates eventually would get him fired. He may have been joking the first time he said it, but in recent years, the words spilled out laced with bitterness.

Slocum believe the young Aggies did not get it. They did not remember the program he had inherited. They did not appreciate all he had accomplished. They came of age at a time when the Aggies were regularly beating Texas and believed it should always be so.

No, he never won a national championship. Yes, the program had slipped in recent seasons. Since winning the Big 12 title in 1998, the Aggies were 8-4, 7-5, 8-4 and 6-6. They haven't had a Top 10 finish since 1994.

In Slocum's last three seasons, the Aggies lost to Texas by an average of 23 points.

So, clearly, something was wrong. Slocum understood that but believed his critics hadn't taken the time to examine the program. Didn't they understand the advantages Mack Brown, Bob Stoops and others had?

If one part of his legacy is ushering the Aggies out of the Jackie Sherrill era, the other part is positioning them to re-emerge as a powerhouse.

Slocum finally convinced his bosses that A&M had fallen far behind Texas and Oklahoma in facilities and that recruiting was suffering because of it.

When a group of influential Aggies drove to Austin a couple of years ago to inspect Longhorn headquarters, they were stunned at what they saw.

"Well," John David Crow told Slocum later, "I don't see how you ever get a player."

Thus began the fund-raising campaign that will result in the opening next year of a $20 million complex including a weight room, locker room and academic center.

Already, the complex has paid dividends with the Aggies seemingly on the verge of one of the country's top recruiting classes.

"Clearly, A&M fell behind the times in facilities," Casserly said. "I'm sure that hurt their recruiting. I would think the new facilities can only help."

Before the 2001 season, Slocum told a reporter he'd never been more happy in his life. He was happy in his new marriage, he had accomplished more professionally than a poor kid from Orange ever dreamed possible and he finally could separate the important from the irrelevant.

It now seems he was stretching the truth and that these last two years were anything but happy.

He was increasingly thin-skinned. Popular with reporters because of his folksy nature and stand-up personality, he'd become defensive about even seemingly insignificant matters.

Some friends saw him as obsessed with Brown and the Longhorns. They also say he took every critical article or comment personally. He told reporters he paid no attention to Internet gossip, but he always seemed to know what was being said.

"Unfortunately, you have in every program a vocal group of people, with the Internet and radio call-in shows, they can create a lot of noise," he said last week. "It's part of the game."

He probably knew his days were numbered last summer when the new A&M president, Robert Gates, abruptly pushed aside athletic director Wally Groff, one of Slocum's strongest supporters.

He seemed to be feeling the heat when he abruptly demoted offensive coordinator Dino Babers after a loss to Virginia Tech. Instead of accepting responsibility for a loss, he seemed to be looking for a scapegoat.

He found another by benching senior quarterback Mark Farris and giving sophomore Dustin Long and later freshman Reggie McNeal a shot.

None of it worked. Once a great running team, the Aggies dared to throw the ball like the St. Louis Rams and failed miserably.

Still, Slocum's tenure was mostly positive. He won games, he ran a clean program and even the Aggies who criticized him seemed to see his basic decency.

Texans cornerback Aaron Glenn remembered the time he told Slocum that he and a friend were going to see a movie after practice.

Slocum motioned to an A&M staffer and said: "That guy's wife has been bothering him for three weeks to take her to the movies. Now, he might be one of the guys at the movies. So don't y'all go in there acting up or clowning around. He probably doesn't have the opportunity to do too many fun things, so you better respect that."

Glenn smiles as he remembers that story.

"That was his whole message -- respect people," he said. "And so much of what he said about things like that, when you look back on it, he was right."

Slocum attended McNeese State and began his coaching career began as a high school coach in Lake Charles, La., in 1968.

He joined Emory Bellard's Kansas State staff as a $125-a-month graduate assistant in 1970 and moved with him to Texas A&M two years later. In 15 seasons as an Aggie assistant, he held almost every job on the staff before succeeding Jackie Sherrill in 1989.

In the end, Slocum's finest moment came when Sirr Parker raced into the end zone with the game-winning touchdown in the 1998 Big 12 Championship Game against Kansas State in St. Louis.

At the time, the Aggies seemed to have established themselves as the Big 12's best team. Slocum was widely recognized as both a terrific coach and a guy not afraid to poke fun at himself.

It was about that time that he joked about going to practice with his ears bandaged. One of his assistant coaches asked what happened, and he said, "I was ironing a shirt when the phone rang, and I answered with the iron."

"That explains one ear," he assistant said, "but what about the other?"

"Well," he said, "I had to call the doctor."

Another time, he was playing golf in Lufkin when he hit a drive through a plate-glass window in a home. He teed another ball up and ripped another shot through the same window.

He then knocked on the door and sheepishly offered to pay for the damage.

The owner was the elderly widow of a former A&M student, and that day she struck up a friendship with Slocum that resulted in a seven-figure donation to the school.

"I think the only stipulation to the gift was that I never play golf on her course again," he said.

Those punch lines came before Brown arrived in Austin, before Stoops got to Norman and before new bosses arrived in College Station. Within two years of seemingly being on top of the world, he was struggling to hang on.

By then, he'd fallen in love with A&M, with its tradition and with the community around it. He was the head coach of the Aggies, but he also had an Everyman quality that Aggies appreciated.

He would be leading an upset of Texas one day and eating at Burger King or pounding out a five-mile run on the dusty roads outside of town the next.

"I've had chances to go elsewhere, to the NFL," he said last season. "But we put so much into it here. It's something that I've put a lot of my life into and I'm as enthusiastic as I've ever been to getting it over the top. I don't know if I could see myself coaching anywhere else."

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